The Melancholy of Lost Recipes: Preserving Family Food Traditions even when you are Vegan

What happens when a beloved family recipe disappears?

In this episode of More Plants, I talk about what I call the melancholy of lost recipes: dishes remembered from childhood, recipes that vanished when no one wrote them down, and the extraordinary ways food traditions have survived through handwritten notebooks, community cookbooks, note cards, archives, and family stories.

From my own personal stories of beloved recipes lost and found, to ancient Babylonian recipes preserved on clay tablets, to a handwritten cookbook created by women imprisoned in Terezín, this episode looks at what recipes can carry across time. I share practical ways to preserve your own family recipes, how to honour them when you become vegan, and how Brownble’s online vegan cooking school keeps the recipes we are learning together in one reliable place.

Family recipes can be preserved by recording relatives as they cook, writing down exact quantities and sensory cues, photographing original recipe cards, scanning fragile documents, storing digital copies in more than one place, and sharing the recipes with younger generations. Traditional recipes don't mean a freezing of time and tradition. They can (and do) include change. They can be made vegan by identifying the flavors, textures, techniques, and rituals that define the dish, then replacing animal ingredients according to the function they perform rather than trying to imitate them blindly, giving old familiar recipes a new life. 

Tune in for a slightly sentimental episode about food, memory and the food, recipes and cooks we love and want to hold onto.

For all the links mentioned in today's episode click here, or visit brownbleprograms.com/blog