How to ask your mom for the recipe

A free guide from Table Stories Studio

Every family has a dish that exists in exactly one place: somebody's hands.

It's not written down. It was never written down. The recipe is "some of this," a pan that has been seasoned by forty years of dinners, and a cook who can tell it's done by the sound. When we started Table Stories — printing family recipes on the backs of shirts — we learned quickly that the hardest part isn't the printing. It's the asking.

So here is how to ask, while asking is still easy.

1. Don't ask for the recipe. Ask to cook.

"Send me the recipe" gets you a shrug, because there isn't one. "Can I cook it with you on Sunday?" gets you the dish. Bring a notebook, a phone for photos, and no opinions about how anything should be done. You are there to watch, stir when told, and write.

2. Measure the handfuls

At some point she will add "a little" of something. That is your moment. Have a set of measuring spoons and a small kitchen scale on the counter — not to correct her, just to translate. Weigh the handful once, together, and write down both versions: a handful (about 60 g). Her language stays in the recipe. The numbers ride alongside it, so your grandchildren can cook in either dialect.

3. Record the cues, not just the steps

Written recipes fail at the sensory parts. Ask: What does it look like when it's ready? What does it sound like? What should it smell like before it's done? Write those down verbatim, in her words. "Until it looks like the river in August" is a better instruction than it sounds — it is exactly how she knows.

4. Ask about the pan, the failures, and the substitutions

Which pan? (There is always a pan. It matters more than the ingredients.)
What did her mother do differently?
What goes wrong, and how do you rescue it?
What do you use when you can't get the real thing?

The answers are the difference between an ingredient list and a recipe. They're also the best stories you'll hear all year.

5. Write it up the same day, then cook it alone

Memory edits fast. Type it up that evening — ingredients with both measures, the steps in order, her cues quoted — and cook it solo within the week. Your questions will find you in your own kitchen, and you can still call and ask them. Then cook it for her, and let her correct your version. That correction is part of the recipe now too.

The one-page capture sheet

Dish name · whose dish it is · where they're from · the year it entered your family
Ingredients — her measures, and the weighed ones beside them
The steps, in the order her hands do them
Her cues: looks like / sounds like / smells like
The pan. The substitutions. The rescues.
One thing she said that you never want to forget.

That's the whole practice: one dish, one afternoon, one page. Do it for the dish you'd miss most first.

If your family has a dish like this — one that lives in somebody's hands — we'd love to hear about it. The studio keeps a shelf of kitchen versions shared by other families, and a few of them become shirts, recipe and all, on the back.

Sharing a dish is just sharing. Nothing you send is published or made into a product without your separate permission, and please only share material you have permission to send.

Share a dish

We measure memories in meals. Go and measure one of yours.

— Evelin, Table Stories Studio