8 ways to preserve your recipe legacy

Don't lose those wonderful recipes your grandmother knew by heart. Here's how to keep them forever. By Olivia Gordon

From the perfect chilli con carne to the best sugar biscuits in the world, every family has its own special recipes for favourite dishes which we make again and again, because we love them so much. Whether they're everyday staples or special occasion feasts, great recipes are family treasures to be handed down the generations - yet what should be enduring heirlooms are easily lost, left in the cook's mind and never written down. Nowadays more and more people are getting into the trend of 'recipe rescue' - preserving family recipes and celebrating undervalued dishes which are just too good to be forgotten. Here's how to make sure your family's favourite recipes last and last, starting with the simplest methods and moving onto the more high-tech...

 

Write your own cookbook

You don't need to be Delia to write a cookbook. All you need is a pretty but practical exercise book of your choice - preferably something sturdy with a wipe clean cover - and a pen, and away you go. Write up all of your own recipes and your favourites from cookbooks or from your online recipe search. Every time you love a new recipe, add it to the book. In a few years' time, you'll have written your own cookbook to refer back to time and again. The fact it's handwritten will make it even more special, and you can pass it down to your children and their children.

 

Keep a recipe file

A recipe file is a great way to store recipes you tear out of magazines, or recipes which friends or family hand you. A concertina or card index both work well, or you can buy ready-made recipe files - our favourite is My Recipe File - available online from the Cancer Research gift shop. Recipe files of original scrawlings from relatives make fabulous treasure troves!

 

 

Blog your recipes

Once recipes were shared between families and friends, but today the internet means you can pass your favourites onto millions. With a food blog, you can post your best recipes and illustrate them with photos, as well as writing about your favourite restaurants, cookbooks, what you like to eat, and life in general. Some food bloggers become highly  respected in the food world - discover our top 10 food bloggers here. And start an allaboutyou reader blog here.

 

Share your recipes online

You can also immortalise your recipes by adding them to an online recipe bank so that others can try them (and you can get new recipes from others in the same way). Doing this can be a great motivation, since you can track the popularity of your recipes and aim to make yours the most downloaded dish of the day!  What's more, this facility is coming soon to allaboutyou.com. In the meantime, have a look at letssharerecipes.com.

 

Start a recipe exchange

Another way to share recipes is to exchange them with others by setting up an email group, so that a group of foodie friends pass recipes amongst themselves. Now and then you could actually get offline and meet to have a recipe exchange party where you each bring along a favourite dish from the recipe exchange.

 

Enter competitions

If you can cook and have created brilliantly original recipes which are crying out to be famous, you're an ideal candidate to enter recipe competitions. Look out for TV cooking competitions like BBC's Masterchef or Channel 4's Come Dine With Me, and check for competitions in national or local papers and magazines, companies, charities and at food festivals. (Google ‘recipe competitions' to see what's current). You can win all manner of prizes, and your recipe may well reach a wider audience.

 

Go to market

If you've got a dish all your friends love, why not turn your recipe into a brand, and sell portions to your local deli or café, or trade them yourself at a market or event? Don't rule out the chance of hitting supermarkets nationwide eventually. Oxfordshire mother of five Kiran Bhandari approached Asda with her homemade curry sauces, and recently won a £300,000 contract to supply them to the store.

 

Give a gift

What gift could be greater than a homemade collection of recipes? ‘For my mother's fiftieth birthday, I asked all of her friends and family to handwrite their favourite recipes and send a photo of themselves,' says Londoner Chloe Fuller. 'Then I took all the recipes to a printer and got them bound together. It made a fantastic keepsake.'

 

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