The best question is not "can I have your recipes." It is "can you show me how you make the apple cake." One is a request for admin and gets put off. The other is an afternoon, and the recipe comes out of it along with everything that is not written on the card.
What follows is what to ask once you are standing there, because the measurements are the easy part and the things worth keeping are the ones you have to ask for specifically.
Open-ended requests go unanswered. "Send me any family recipes" is a task; "how do you make the apple cake" is a conversation.
So pick the dish you associate with her, and start there. Once you are in it, the other recipes surface on their own — the dish she used to make, the one her mother made, the thing she only does at Easter. Three or four usually come out of one afternoon about one cake.
These are the ones that close the gap between what she does and what the card says.
"How do you know when it's done?" The single most useful question. The answer is almost never a time. It is golden at the edges, pulling away from the side of the tin, smells nutty, sounds different. Doneness cues outlast temperatures, because every oven lies a little.
"What does 'a handful' actually look like?" Have a measuring cup out and catch it on the way past. This is the one thing that genuinely has to happen in person.
"What do you do that isn't in the recipe?" There is always something. The swirl of the pan, the pinch of sugar that "isn't really in it," resting the batter while she makes tea. She stopped noticing these decades ago, which is exactly why they are missing from the card.
"What have you changed?" Most old recipes have been quietly revised. Less sugar than it used to have, a different tin, butter instead of margarine. Both versions are worth writing down.
"What's in it that you can't get any more?" Discontinued products and old brand names explain a lot of recipes that no longer quite work.
These take no extra time and are the part nobody can reconstruct later.
"Where did this come from?" Her mother, a neighbour, the back of a packet in 1961. If she does not know, write that down too — "nobody is sure" is itself part of the history.
"When do you make it?" A dish tied to a day is a dish that survives, because the day keeps summoning it.
"Who did you make this for?" Often the better question, and it opens up the ones about people rather than food.
"What did you eat growing up that nobody makes now?" Save this one for when the conversation is warm. It is the question that surfaces recipes genuinely about to be lost, because they are not written anywhere and nobody has made them in forty years.
Ask first, then record. Almost everybody says yes, and almost everybody forgets the phone is there within five minutes.
A voice recording catches what notes flatten: the asides, the corrections, the way she describes things. You can transcribe the measurements later. You cannot reconstruct the phrasing.
A voice memo becomes a recipe, so you can talk rather than type.
Tradish takes a voice memo as a way in: you talk, and it comes back as a structured recipe you can tidy up. Which means during the afternoon itself you can be present and talking rather than writing, and sort the ingredients out afterwards.
Tradish is launching on iOS and Android soon. Record a recipe by talking, scan the card it came from, and keep the story with both. Join the waitlist for early access and our best launch price.
If there are cards, photograph them before you leave, even the ones you are not asking about today.
A recipe scanner reads a card into a recipe and keeps the photograph of the original attached, so the handwriting travels with it. Cards have a way of not surviving house moves, and a photograph taken on an ordinary afternoon is worth a great deal later.
Photograph the box too, and her kitchen, honestly. Those turn out to matter.
The gap between the conversation and writing it down is where things get lost. A week later you have the measurements and have forgotten which one she said was her mother's.
So while it is fresh: the recipe, and two or three sentences underneath about where it came from and when it appears. In Tradish that goes in the From section on the recipe itself rather than in a separate document, which matters because separate documents get lost and recipes get cooked.
Then send it to her. Partly so she can correct it — she will — and partly because people like seeing their cooking written down properly.
Start with one specific dish rather than her cooking in general. Ask how she knows when it is done, where the recipe came from, what she has changed over the years, and what used to be in it that is not any more.
Cook it with them and measure on the way past. When a handful goes in, catch it in a cup first. Ask what "until it looks right" looks like, and write down the colour, the smell or the sound she is waiting for.
Ask first, then yes. A voice recording catches the asides and the way she says things, which written notes flatten. It is also much easier than trying to write while cooking.
Write down that it is unknown rather than leaving it blank. "Nobody is sure where this came from" is itself a piece of the history, and it stops someone later assuming it was never asked.
When the dish appears, who it was made for, what was served alongside it, and what she ate growing up that nobody makes now. The last one surfaces recipes that are genuinely about to be lost.
Ask to be shown one dish. Measure the handfuls on the way past, ask how she knows it is done, and ask where it came from and when she makes it. Record it if she is happy for you to.
Then write it up that week, send it to her, and ask about the next one.
Tradish is launching on iOS and Android soon. Join the waitlist to be first to know when we launch.
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