Cooking a dish from your grandparents’ country is creative. So is changing it to fit your own kitchen.

Tradition is not a museum piece, it is a set of solutions people worked out with what they had. Making the dish as it was made is an act of learning, and adapting it to your own kitchen continues exactly what the original cooks were doing. Every traditional recipe is already a record of substitutions somebody made.

Cook one dish this month the way it is supposed to be made, and ask whoever in your family knows it. Then cook it again with one deliberate change of your own. Write both versions down somewhere, because that is how a recipe stays alive instead of becoming a rumour.