The keeper's handbook

Guides for the family recipe keeper

Every family has one person who keeps the recipes. These are for you — practical, unhurried, and written by the team that built Legacy Table after losing a grandmother's gumbo recipe to a hospital stay no one expected.

• How to preserve family recipes — before they're lost

  The 5-step method: the dish, the story, the judgment calls, the paper, and the voice. Start here.

• Record the recipe in their own voice

  Why sixty seconds of audio outlives any card — and the 10-minute recording session that gets it.

• 25 questions to ask the family cook

  Bring these to Sunday dinner. Press record before question one.

• Digitize the handwritten recipe cards

  Rescue the shoebox in an afternoon — without ever losing the handwriting.

• "Until it looks right": recipes with no measurements

  For the dishes carried by hand and by heart — preserving by-feel cooking on its own terms.

• How to make a family cookbook everyone actually uses

  From shared archive to printed heirloom — including pages that play the cook's voice.