The house smells of chicken stock, a smell so familiar I always detect chopped parsley at the same time, even when it’s not present. I walk to the hob to inhale a deeper draught but find only a small saucepan containing a chicken leg and some wings.
My mother used to make huge pots of chicken soup and the sight of this, a shrunken version, is painful. My dad is in hospital andmy mum is making this just for him. My family aren’t given to displays of affection (we’re Northern Irish – tough and no-nonsense) but in this pan I see a care that speaks more loudly than any declaration of love.
This prompts me, over the next few days, to go through my mum’s recipe collections. The notebooks written in her hand and stuffed with pages torn out of magazines interest me most. Many are scribbled on, most are stained; I can see splatters I made myself (with chocolate-cake batter), and the place where she changed the amount of sour cream in the beef stroganoff. Some are written on the back of envelopes, some on pages from a spiral jotter.
Together with worn books of recipes published by charities and the Women’s Institute, these are the books from which I first learnt to cook. My granny’s recipe for wheaten bread, carefully stuck into one book, is the only thing I ever saw her commit to paper. I watched my grandmother carefully write it, as if she was doing calligraphy. Loved and used recipes, handwritten or ripped from soup cans, are evidence of attention and care.
Now that our lives are digital (a quick Google delivers more recipes for chicken soup than you could cook in a lifetime), what happens to the handwritten recipe, or the one surreptitiously torn from a magazine in thedentist’s waiting room?
When I asked this question on Twitter, more than 700 people got in touch, many saying that their handwritten collection – whether kept in notebooks, files or tins – was the possession they would save in a fire.
Frances (Franky) Shanahan, a copywriter living in Bristol, doesn’t just have recipes from her mother and grandmother but menus too, written in the back of her mum’s notebook, of all the dinner parties she gave. 'There are recipes I still use but the book is a record of a time as well. My mum’s dinner parties seemed unspeakably exotic. I remember lying on the landing wrapped in my duvet listening to them. Many of these represent the period before my parents divorced so are a record of a special time,’ Franky explains.
'I can also see how my mum’s cooking changed as my parents became better off – the vegetable stews gave way to chicken. But the notebook itself is as important as what the words communicate. It was always in the kitchen. A time and a person are in these pages.’
Franky’s mother, Pippa, now in her early 60s, is bemused that her old recipe book is so treasured. Held together with Sellotape, it was going to be thrown out after she transferred the recipes to a new notebook, but Franky rescued it.
'We share recipes, my mother, Frances and I,’ Pippa explains. 'It’s a way we communicate. I will pop handwritten recipes in the post to Frances every so often and, years ago, when I had to pay my mum back for a loan she’d given me, I sent a cheque every month with the gift of a recipe in the envelope too.’
Franky blogs about food, recording the family meals she cooks. 'My children will be able to read this one day, but I’m still putting together handwritten collections of recipes for each of them for when they leave home.’
A collection of handwritten recipes is what Elise Kornahrens, a social worker who lives in Edinburgh, and her sisters received from their mother when they were in their 20s. 'We could have found some of the recipes in books, but to have them in a notebook and in mum’s hand is special,’ Elise explains. Her mother, Arabella, realised her daughters needed their own collections after they left home, when 'they were always phoning to check on quantities for particular dishes’.
For Texan-born Arabella, her recipe notebooks are more than sets of instructions. 'Living in Scotland I am displaced, in a way,’ she says. 'Myparents died as I started having children and so I’ve preserved my culture and passed it on through recipes. If you have these written in the hand of a loved one they’re even more precious.’
Elise is quite possessive of therecipes. The family recipes for Texas chilli and 'never-fail’ brownies('from my grandma’s neighbour’) are guarded. 'But when friends get married I write out the brownie recipe and give it as a wedding gift,’ she says.
Recipes from her mother and grandmothers rescued Helen Redfern, in Huntingdon, from a period of depression after her son was born. 'I basically baked my way out of it using their recipes. I felt I had something to show for the day if I’d baked a cake. The recipes aren’t just instructions, though – there are also doodles, notes on adjustments, even shopping lists.’
Helen has already started putting together a notebook for her 14-year-old son. 'I wanted to do something more meaningful than just putting recipes on a blog. And I wanted there to be detail, the extras that are part of the collections handed down to me. When my grandma dies I won’t just have her dishes, I’ll have her handwriting, something that’s specific to her. The recipes don’t have to be amazing, they just have to be significant. I recently made ginger biscuits with my son for the first time. My mum cut the recipe from a cereal box; she made them, I make them and my son is making them. That means a lot.’
Recipe collections are records of lives, of specific times and people, even of aspirations, enriched by the extra scribbles and stains they acquire through use. I’ve just bought a notebook to fill for my son who’ll be leaving home in September. 'I won’t need that, Mum,’ he laughed when I told him.'I have your cookbooks.’ But I can tailor this collection for him, putting inhis favourite dishes – such as mymum’s chicken soup – plus extra instructions and tips. He might not 'need’ it, but I want to be sure he has it. And I hope it gets stained. 
READ MORE ABOUT:
- Children,
- Baking,
- Mother's day,
- Bread,
- Soup,
- Mother's Day,
- Cake,
- Chocolate,
- Chicken
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