A family recipe can preserve a migration nobody at the table remembers making.

A dish that gets made every year often carries a route. Ingredients chosen because they were what was available somewhere else, a technique brought from a kitchen nobody at the table has seen, a substitution made during a hard period and never reversed. The recipe is a record of a journey, held in the form of a meal.

Ask the oldest person who makes it where it came from, and write down what they say alongside the method. Recipes survive without their stories very easily, and the story is usually the part that turns a set of instructions into something worth keeping.