About
The Box
My uncle handed me a box of recipes. Where he found it, I genuinely could not tell you. It was my grandmother's. It has her recipes and recipes from two of my great-grandmothers.
It is meant for my mom. I promised I would scan everything before passing it along, because paper burns and floods, and gets tossed out by well meaning people cleaning a house. Then I decided scanning wasn't enough.
So I'm doing one better. I'm typing every one of them up and putting them somewhere they can't be lost again.
Mom still gets the box. She just has to share it with the internet now.
You have one of these somewhere. A tin, a binder, a folded card in handwriting you would recognize instantly. That matters later on this page.
What's In It
Recipe cards in handwriting I recognize instantly. Cookbooks from an era when "salad" could legally mean lime gelatin, shredded carrots, and a hard no from everyone at the table. Directions that reference a "medium oven" with total confidence and leave the rest to me.
Mostly Southern heirloom recipes, though not all of it.
My grandmother's and great grandmother's recipes are irreplaceable. They are gone, and their cards are the last thing they wrote that still works. My mom and dad's more modern dishes go in too, because family history doesn't just stop.
I'm publishing the treasures and the disasters. There will be gelatin salads. I'm not editing them out, partly because that would be lying and mostly because the gelatin salads are the funniest part.
Three Kinds of Recipes, For Now
Every heirloom recipe was somebody's brand new idea once. My great-grandmother didn't inherit the gelatin salad. She chose that, on purpose, and then wrote it down.
A recipe box that only accepts old cards isn't a collection. It's kind of like a museum with a gift shop.
So this site has three categories, and they never mix. "Heirloom Recipes" are the family cards from my grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and sometimes my parents, typed up exactly as written, medium ovens and all. "Vintage Recipes" come from old newspapers and cookbooks that belonged to other families. They're not mine and not my family's, but somebody thought they were worth keeping, and I agree. "My Recipes" are mine, things I made up, expanded upon, wrote down, and liked enough to keep.
You'll always know which one you're reading. That's not a formality. It's the entire point of a site about provenance.
Fair warning about that last category, given the section below: expect a lot of cocktails.
Coming: A Fourth Category, Yours
Two categories is where this starts, not where it ends.
Once the rest is running properly, submissions open. You send your family's cards, I publish them with your name on them, spelled the way you want it spelled. The treasures and the catastrophes both. Mine are not more interesting than yours. They were just the ones handed to me first.
Leave your email and you'll know the day the seats are ready.
Also Coming: Advice, Of A Sort
The job that pays the bills is fifteen years in HR. Recruiting, hiring, onboarding, terminations, learning and development. I have read the résumé, sat in the room, and written the script for the conversation nobody wants to have.
So there will be a column eventually. Work, adulthood, and the things nobody hands you a manual for. You'll be able to send questions anonymously, and I'll answer like a person instead of a policy document.
No company names, no story anyone could recognize themselves in. That's not legal caution, it's manners.
My Qualifications: It Depends
I do significantly more eating than cooking.
Put me in a kitchen under any real pressure and a sailor's mouth appears out of nowhere. My signature move is the protein shaker bottle. I have never once secured the lid, and every single time, first shake, it redecorates the kitchen. Whoever designs those lids owes me an apology and a new backsplash.
A martini shaker, though? Flawless. Not a drop. Make of that what you will.
I have made peace with it. Anything in "My Recipes" involves simple or overly complicated dishes, or one very cold glass. This is not modesty, it's truly a risk assessment.
What I am good at is the other half. Knowing how much to buy, what time it has to go in, who is doing what, and writing it down so nobody has to work it out again next year. Bad cook, excellent quartermaster. It's why this site exists at all.
Inspiration to actually cook does strike now and then. When it does, you'll have a front row seat. Bring popcorn.
One Rule About Names
You won't find anyone's name here, including the ones who have passed. Being gone doesn't cancel a person's privacy, and it definitely doesn't cancel the privacy of everyone still living who shares their last name.
The recipes are the point. The genealogy stays in the family, where it can be argued about properly.
That rule covers my people, not yours. When submissions open, you decide exactly how you want to be credited, and I do it your way. Mine never had the chance to agree. You would be volunteering, which is a different thing entirely.
The Fine Print
I'm Kristen. Geriatric millennial, no kids, which people assume means free time but I am busy as hell.
It gets done anyway, because I'm the eldest daughter, granddaughter, great granddaughter, sister, and niece. That's not a family tree, it's a job description.
A note on the photos. Some are real, taken on the rare occasions I cook something worth documenting. The rest are AI generated, and I'd rather tell you that than pretend I styled a tablescape at seven in the morning. The recipes are always my family's, exactly as they were written, and anything pulled from a cookbook gets cited properly, because who doesn't love a well cited cookbook?
Stick around. Worst case, you'll learn what not to serve at Thanksgiving. Best case, you end up in it.
Thanks for being here.