One smell from a stove can drop you back into a kitchen you haven’t stood in for ten years. Cook the old recipes.

Smell bypasses everything and lands you in a room you had forgotten entirely. Cooking an old recipe is therefore not just food, it is the closest available thing to being in that kitchen again, with whoever used to stand in it. The recipe is the method for producing the memory, which is a strange and genuinely useful fact.

Get one family recipe written down properly while someone can still tell you the parts that are not in the instructions. Cook it badly the first time. Keep cooking it until it smells right.