A Handful of This

A family recipe keeper that shows you how to get the recipes out of people's hands and off the old cards, and gives you the pages to keep them on.

Some of the best food in a family has never been written down. It lives in a grandparent's hands ("a handful of flour, milk till it looks right") or on a stained card that says "1 c. oleo" and "bake in a mod. oven". Blank recipe books give you boxes to fill in. This book teaches you what to put in them, so that anyone in the family can cook those dishes again.

It assumes you know nothing: not what a moderate oven is, not how to weigh flour, not how to talk a cook through a recipe they've never measured. Two family recipes are worked all the way through as examples, from first conversation to finished page.

What you'll be able to do

• Catch a recipe while someone cooks it: weigh each handful before it lands, catch pinches in a spoon, measure "till it looks right" from a full jug, and ask the twelve questions that get the rest
• Decode an old card line by line: oleo, sweet milk, a teacup, a gill, a saltspoon, butter the size of an egg, a moderate oven, a No. 2 can, a box of cake mix that has shrunk since, and British pints and gas marks
• Rebuild a dish nobody wrote down, from what the family remembers and three published recipes compared side by side
• Test it fairly: one change at a time, everything weighed, judged by someone who remembers it, with a table of what went wrong and what to change
• Write it so a stranger could cook it: cups and grams, oven heat, pan, time, what it should look like, with the cook's own words and story kept beside it
• Keep the original cards safe and copied, and make a family cookbook to a date (an eight-week plan, for Christmas or any other day)

What's inside the book (54 pages)

• Start here: what the book is, the five steps, and a finished recipe page explained part by part
• Part 1, Catch it while they cook, with a worked example: Nana June's biscuits, caught on a scale and turned into a recipe, with every sum shown
• Part 2, Decode the old card: an annotated old card, real measuring tables from two 1880s cookbooks, decoders for hand measures, cups and glasses, spoons and shorthand, oven words in degrees, old ingredient names, packages, the flour trap, and American and British cards, then Aunt Dot's card decoded line by line and a page on updating old food-safety habits
• Part 3, When there is no recipe, with Grandpa Walt's cornbread rebuilt from memory
• Part 4, Test it, with three photographed tests of Aunt Dot's cookies and the test log that explains them
• Part 5, Write it: ten rules, a before-and-after, and both sides of a finished keeper page
• Part 6, Keep the originals: photographing, scanning, naming and storing the cards
• Part 7, Make the family cookbook: a letter to send relatives, an eight-week plan, how to order, print and give it
• Reference: what a cup, spoon or stick of 25 everyday ingredients weighs (USDA), spoons, cups and pints in millilitres, oven words and gas marks, pan sizes, the decoder A to Z, and sources

The Keeper Pages

Fourteen working pages in a separate PDF, in US Letter and in A4: the twelve questions, the catch sheet, the card decoder, the no-recipe clue sheet, the test log, the two-sided recipe page, the cook's page, two 6 x 4 inch recipe cards, a letter to the family, the eight-week plan checklist, and a cookbook cover and contents page. You can type into them in Adobe Acrobat Reader (free), Chrome or Edge, or print them and write by hand. Every page is shown filled in somewhere in the book.

What you download

• A Handful of This (54 pages, PDF, US Letter), with bookmarks and a contents page
• Keeper Pages, US Letter (14 pages, fillable PDF)
• Keeper Pages, A4 (14 pages, fillable PDF)

Good to know

• Measures are American cups and spoons with grams and millilitres beside them. Weights come from the USDA's FoodData Central; fixed meanings of old measures come from cookbooks of the 1880s to 1910 and other named sources, listed in the book. Where an old word has no fixed meaning (a teacup, a handful), the book says so and shows you how to measure or test it.
• The families and recipes in the worked examples are made up for teaching. The 1880s cookbook pages are real.
• This book is about keeping your own family's recipes. It is not a cookbook of new recipes.
• Some phone and tablet apps can't type into PDF forms; if yours can't, print the pages. Print at "actual size".
• This is a digital download. No physical book is shipped.