This is a thread about making a cookbook of family recipes.

It starts maybe 3 months ago, when Sarah and I had come to stay at my parents' place (originally our intention was to stay for a week; the day we arrived, we were furloughed and the country went into lockdown, so we ended up sort of stranded at my childhood home).

One afternoon, I decided to make strawberry ice cream with my nieces, who were also isolating with us. Strawberry ice cream is my favorite, specifically because we made it in an old-school wooden churn when I was growing up, and I liked sitting with the churn as its motor spun

and getting to be the first person to sample the ice cream when it was done. It was always sort of slushy/soupy, and chunky with fresh berries, and totally awesome. I wanted to share that experience with my nieces, so I asked mom if she knew what recipe she used to use for this.

She dug out a few cookbooks, found a handful of similar-but-different recipes, and sighed. "I don't know which is right. Sometime I should go through and organize this all better".

It was the sort of "sometime" you say when you never actually intend to do it.

So, "Give them to me," I said. "I'll help organize all this stuff."

After a day or so of light editing, she handed me a box of probably about two hundred recipes that she'd picked from her shelves. She explained none of them to me; all I knew was that the box contained stuff she thinks is important.

I've started going through them, my goal being to rewrite, photograph, and organize the recipes into a cookbook that I can give her at some point. No idea how long this might take.

Last week, I called asking her some questions about them. Making these into a book means I'm archiving them, and I wanted to better understand why she had given me the ones she'd selected.

For example, there is a Pimento Cheese recipe, but it's clearly a printed screen grab from Facebook. It's not a handwritten, heirloom-y thing. So I asked her what was up with it.

"I really loved my mom's pimento cheese," she explained. "I don't know how to make it. I only remember a few things she used to do. So, when I see recipes go by on Facebook or elsewhere, and they seem like they involve something that my mom used to do, I'll save them."

This, to someone interested in archiving meaningful family recipes, is terrifying. This recipe she had included was not one she had tested. She simply gave it to me because she misses her mom's pimento cheese, and wondered if this one might offer clues about how to recreate it.

The issue of the pimento cheese underscores a few critical things to me. My first rule for myself here is "Don't fuck things up by being an egotistical douche". I could, e.g., turn my nose up at her recollection of her mom using a giant block of government cheese

("I remember her grinding this big block of cheese up using a grinder on our countertop"), but this would be SO shitty of me. This pimento cheese has dozens of little elements to it that are important to her, and I can't try to "improve" on it using my own understanding of food.

I had this very insightful conversation the other day with one of my favorite people, @mfrederickson, where we were talking about nostalgia. We were specifically talking about replicating memories. Trying to exactly clone the pimento cheese recipe from my mom's childhood

has a very high risk of failure. But, @mfrederickson pointed out, there is a distinction to be made between replicating a memory and just assisting one's access to a memory.

Like, maybe the simple existence of a pimento cheese recipe in this book will allow my mom to access her memories of being at her mom's side as a child, helping her with a countertop grinder.

This, again, is helpful to understand, but also scary, because it seems easy to screw up. I don't want to include a recipe that makes a promise but ultimately disappoints.

Really, the task here is being a custodian of memories, not a chef or a writer or a photographer.

That's the thing that really fascinates me about this.

So my intent is to start stepping through each recipe in this big box, re-writing them all and photographing them, trying to add information where it is useful but not adulterating it from its original intent.

Last night I started with this recipe, my dad's mom's recipe for "Sweet & Sour Chicken". This is her handwriting, so even that is precious (which is why I photographed the recipe card).

According to my mom, when she and my dad got married, she asked my dad what some of his favorite things to eat were. He mentioned a few things his mom made when he was growing up. This dish, of course, being one of them.

So, ostensibly, my mom asked my grandmother ("Gram") for some recipes, and my grandmother offered her this (and some others).

Now, this recipe is incomplete. On the back of the card, her instructions for preparing and serving the chicken are simply "Fry chicken, serve with fried rice".

This is where things can go haywire. My Gram was from Philly, my mom from Kentucky; they almost assuredly fried chicken in different ways. Also, I am exactly 0% Asian. So, like, where did Gram get this recipe? The "sauce" involves vinegar, sugar, and ketchup. It is weird as hell.

I could tinker with the sauce, but then I'm violating my dad's memory in two ways: his original memories of how his mom made this dish, and his second set of memories of how it tasted as my mom interpreted it.

But, the preparation/frying of the chicken itself needs elaboration. And here's where it gets interesting; I am fortunate in that I have learned from some very good chefs how to fry chicken reasonably well. But, like, did my grandmother cook that way?

How critical is the texture of the chicken to my dad's memories of this dish, and the ease with which this dish helps him access memories of his mom? What bits are important?

This is what I made. For me, the very weird flavor of pineapple, white vinegar, and ketchup are very distinctive; I can remember eating this as a high-schooler. At the risk of sounding like an ass, I can remember not liking it then (and I don't really like it now).

When I was a kid, my mom would serve this dish with a can of La Choy Chow Mein noodles, and I basically considered this dish a vehicle for those. I would douse it in those floury, crunchy things. I like the texture of them.

So, like, that's what's interesting to me about this. I could screw around with this recipe and try to make it taste like what the "Now Me" might enjoy, but then I'm not only decoupling it from my memories of being a teenager...

...but from my mom's and dad's and sisters' memories that this dish allows them to access.

Anyway, I find this all really interesting to think about, so I might ramble about it more, but I'll do it on this thread in case you find this super-inane and want an easy way to scroll past it.

Some family recipes I made this week; my all-time favorite family recipe ever, "Gram's Broiled Ribs" (she bastes them in what Sarah now refers to as "Gram's Holy Trinity", namely sugar, vinegar, and ketchup. The result is ribs coated in this sweet, tangy, sticky candy shell)

Those ribs go well with "Gram's Potato Salad" (which are made with Russet rather than waxy potatoes, so they're sort of creamy despite the omission of anything mayonnaise-y.)

"Seasoned Oyster Crackers" are shaken in a bag with Hidden Valley powdered ranch seasoning, dill, and some oil. They are annoyingly addictive.

"Susie's Ginger Snaps". My mom is a speech therapist and deaf education teacher, Susie was one of her friends at work. I think these cookies were likely involved in a school bake sale at some point.

"Pickles and Onions" are salted, drained, then stored in what I now understand is a simple syrup made with vinegar instead of water, and some celery seed.

"Gram's Frittata" has a layer of tomato sauce gently spooned on top of it before baking, which sort of caramelizes as it cooks.