A few years ago my maternal grandmother took on the task of making a family cookbook for all the children and grandchildren. She had them bound at Kinkos and everything!

It was fantastic because she had to learn how to use Word first. It's not perfectly spell-checked or indexed but her hand-written corrections make it even more special. She loves to hear about when we use it and to give more advice on how to make the dishes perfectly :)

Sadly my family is going thru the exact same issue. It's great to have items like my great great grandmothers pasta rolling pin but I would much rather use it with my Nan than be forced to inherit it...That being said, keeping the recipes alive is just another way to remember and give thanks to the family members who created them in the first place. To see a collection of my Nan's recipes visit:

www.paultuorto.com/giustogusto

I'm currently on day 3 of a week-long recipe series sharing some of my Nan's favorite and most loved dishes.

ebarrett3: My mother did the same thing for all her kids. I love having all the recipes from my childhood.

I keep my loose recipes in a binder or recorded in a very stained and well-creased notebook. It's much easier to keep recipes indexed on a computer but I like having the handwritten cards with all the adjustments, corrections and spills on them.

Many years ago, my mother copied all her "special" recipes onto cards and gave my sister and I each a set of them in a nice recipe book. Some of them are more cherished then others (it wouldn't be Christmas without "Pink Stuff"), but it's nice to have them all.

One of the important things I've learned from old family recipes is to be specific - "a can of tomatoes" really doesn't help much. A big can? A little can? Now, when I type up recipes, I never say "a package of cream cheese" - instead, I use "8 ounces of cream cheese".

My dad, for Xmas a few years ago handwrote me a book of his mom's and his grandmother's recipes. Needless to say, my sisters are STILL jealous and it's the best gift I've ever gotten in my whole life.

I tried to get the recipe my grandma uses for spatzle, but unfortunately it's one of those that is not written down. The answer I got was "a few eggs some flour, water and salt". The ones she makes are much larger than the typical ones you see that get pushed through a colander. She puts the dough on a cutting board and scrapes chunks off into boiling water, and I've never been able to replicate the same texture.

I grew up having never known my grandparents, and in recent years have lost both my parents. Somehow the recipes that were written down have so much meaning.
I have several recipes from my grandmother that include directions such as "put in a slow oven" or "use Ida's springform pan". I think a slow oven means at a lowish temperature, (but how low?) and as far as how big Ida's springform pan was, I've guessed at about 9 inches.

These yellowing index cards are a treasured link to my past. My mother was a fantastic cook, and would often give verbal directions much like TinaMarie posted..."use a can of tomatoes" . Unfortunately, my mother died very suddenly, and the plans of one day writing down all her recipes never came to fruition. (So those of you who are thinking of doing this--start now!!!) However, she made a dish she referred to as "potted steak" It was some sort of cut of beef made in the oven with tomatoes & vegetables. It was not brisket. Would anyone have a recipe that resembles this? Thanks

A few years ago my sister wanted to make the almond Danish my mother always made for Christmas morning. It took both of us looking through several collections of clippings to find a likely candidate, and then we had to look carefully at the recipe to make sure it was the right one.

To say nothing of the tears that happened when things didn't go right at first... but then she figured it out and they were delicious. Maybe I'll try it this year.

@Rpoole11 I get the same answer when trying to get my grandma's recipe for the noodles she makes for chicken/turkey noodle soup. It's because she doesn't know what the measurements are, and it's all feel based for her; If it's too wet, she'll add more flour. Too dry, add more water.

The best thing to get the texture down is to make them with her so you can get a feel for the texture yourself.

sometimes in my family, its not just the receipe, but it's the story behind it or how it's be changed over the years. We have a sourcream cut out cookie recipe that is literally devoured whenever it shows up to family events - and has been handed down for over 130 years.

And then there's the stuffing/dressing recipe of my Grandmother's that is wonderful and supposedly not to be trifled with. And yet the secret ingredient she started adding a few years ago - a box of stove-top!!! Turns out Grandma was running short on year and pulled a box out of the cupboard to try and "fluff" it up. She got such rave reviews that year that she's done it ever since not telling a soul until she was caught this year!

A couple of Thanksgivings ago, I brought some parsley bread to share. It went over really well, and my dad noted that I should try my hand at my Great-Grandma Violet's Swedish rye bread. When I asked about the recipe, my mom showed me the source: a bound cookbook put out in 1957 by the ladies' aid society Great-Grandma led at a local Lutheran church. My mother had received it as a gift when she and my dad got married.

As my older sister and I poured over it, it turned out to be a vertiable treasure trove of recipes. While sadly none of the Swedish rye recipes were attributed to her, there were more than enough baked goods and cookie recipes of hers to make up for it. A couple of them were even attributed to my Great-Great-Grandma Hilda. I barely knew my great-grandmother - she died when I was 8 - so finding this cookbook was in a way the closest I've felt to her in ages. Plus, it got the rest of my family to remember holiday meals of the past - Dad remembered the fruit suppa he loved (and my sister remembered it looking...well, not the most appetizing), and my mom remembered suet pudding served en flambe, served during the early years of their marriage.

My aunts held on to my grandparent's recipes, which were all in Hungarian, even though their Hungarian was spotty. Years later, a cousin who spoke almost no Hungarian (but remembered my grandmother's and grandfather's food) had all the recipes translated. They were filled instructions like "use the small blue bowl, and add two bowlfuls of" X (flour, chopped onions, etc). The blue bowl, of course, was long gone. My grandfather was a baker and pastry chef, which of course makes this worse. I have these fantasies of what his Dobes Torte must have been like...

When my grandmother died I was the only one interested in the beat up old shoebox filled with stained recipe clippings. Most of them were well, used, handwritten (some by my great and even great-great grandmothers) and WAY too fragile to handle much, so I copied them out onto index cards for my own use and made a scrapbook of the recipes mounted like photos on acid-free paper in uv protective sleeves. I inserted pictures of the recipe’s authors where I could, and even had to have a few translated. It wound up looking really beautiful. I’m a genealogist, and I love having a family ‘food tree’ as well as one with dates and names.

I inherited handwritten copies of my husband's grandmother's special recipes because I'm the only one on his side of the family who really cooks! It was such an honor to be the one to receive them ...

About 10 years ago, I realized that very few of our favorite family recipes were written down, so I sat with several of my older relatives after Thanksgiving dinner to talk about their famous dishes. Getting instructions straight from the horses mouths was invaluable, especially in the case of my aunt's banana cake, which NO ONE was ever able to replicate. But now it's MY secret, moo-hoo-hoo...

I came home for Thanksgiving in 2007 for the first time since moving away in 1998. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Mom recruited me to help her with the assembly of pierogi for our family's Christmas Eve Wigilia. We made them together again when I came home for Thanksgiving 2008. Mom died in September. I see our two years of pierogi making as a priceless gift and felt it was my obligation to make the pierogi. As sad as it was to not have Mom with me on the Friday after Thanksgiving, I put on her apron, I stood in her kitchen and I followed the worn copy of my family recipe with hopes that my pierogi would taste "just like Mom's". Unfortunately, I was never in the kitchen with Mom when it was time to make the dough and fillings and the recipe was filled with vague instructions and amounts of ingredients. The first batches were disappointing at best, Mom's spotless kitchen was a mess, and I was in tears. Fortunately Mom left me another priceless gift- a batch of her pierogi in the freezer. I sacrificed a few to figure out what I needed to fix, I tried again a few weeks later, and when the pierogi were served on Christmas Eve, my family paid me the highest compliment when they couldn't taste the difference between the pierogi I made and the last of Mom's pierogi.

Lesson Learned-
Make the time to learn your family recipes by example from your relatives when possible. Not only will you be guaranteeing that your recipes will live on, as cliched as it sounds, you will be creating invaluable memories. I only wish I had recorded my cooking lessons with Mom.

I have my grandmother's cookbook, but many of her best are even older family recipes. For instance, the Jeff Davis pie is who knows how old and we have never been able to get it just right. Gram is 95 now, and she's just like "oh, you know just throw in some eggs and sugar and bake it"... But it's awesome to have, even if it is full of some 1950's horror food.

I've been working on something I call The Recipe Box Project on my blog for a while where I've been going through the recipes my mother kept in a Land O' Lake box. Unfortunately, some of them are so cryptic, I'll have to figure out what the instructions or lack thereof mean, as I can't ask my mom about them anymore. My hope is to pull together something to give to my siblings and their kids.

The second best project I've ever done was to take some of these recipes and put them into a cookbook for my brother for a wedding gift. Really, how complicated is it to make "Hamburger Macaroni," but there's a card in the box for that! The fact that we had it almost every week when it was Boy Scout meeting night for my brothers is a memory that doesn't fade - especially for my father, as he pointed out.