A sauce recipe handed down three generations is a family tree you can taste.

Food carries a family’s history in a usable form. A sauce that has come through three sets of hands has picked up each of them: the ingredient somebody swapped for what they could afford, the step somebody dropped because they were busy, the amount nobody ever writes down. Making it puts you in contact with people you never met, which is stranger than it sounds.

Learn one of your family’s dishes from whoever still makes it, and write that version down with the name of the person you got it from. Ask what they changed. Then cook it once for somebody who is not family.