Opinion: From mama’s kitchen: Our lost connection to the family recipe

Michael Harris is the author of several books, including Solitude: A Singular Life in a Crowded World and The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.

Anton Ego, the prickly food critic in Pixar’s Ratatouille, lifts a forkful of the eponymous dish to his lips and is transported to his loving mother’s kitchen. The narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time dips a madeleine in lime-blossom tea and his entire childhood springs up “like a stage set.” In the film Lion, the lost boy Saroo takes a syrupy bite of jalebi and recovers a precious memory of his first home.

We’ve all had these moments, mouthfuls that don’t just recall a superficial catalogue of taste memories but somehow reconstruct for us a whole lived experience. It’s as though a time in our lives may be tethered by an unbreakable string to a bowl of perfectly cooked rice or a still-warm chocolate-chip cookie.

But that experience – that tethering ourselves to a personal past – has grown less frequent in an age of cooking apps. The food we prepare today seems to arrive from nowhere, with no familial strings at all. It’s often more nutritious than the fare we grew up with, and it may even be more “to our taste,” but breakfast, lunch and dinner are meant to fuel more than our bodies. Have we wrought for ourselves a spiritual malnourishment?

In our household – as in most households – the question “What’s for dinner?” carries a stressed-out, nearly existential tone. My husband and I do not want too much meat (the environment) or too much dairy (our digestion) or too many onions or too few greens or the same thing as yesterday … and so few of the dishes I grew up with can fit our exacting bill. Desperate, I turn to the New York Times Cooking app for ideas. There, experts guide me toward ornate dishes that my ancestors would’ve squinted at. I could also call up the Yummly app, where AI-powered personalization and search-by-ingredient functions may help. Or Kitchen Stories, where step-by-step video tutorials take nervous cooks by the hand. Or perhaps I will give up on choosing altogether and sign up for preordained meal kits; their usage is rapidly climbing. But the results – delicious and sophisticated as they may be – would still leave me hungry for something more.

The movement toward non-family recipes – recipes created by celebrity chefs and foodie bloggers – has been a long time coming. For most of human history, of course, there were no guides to cooking beyond family and friends. We watched others cook and learned. But two things changed all that in the 19th century: A rise in literacy made cookbooks possible, and a rise in migration made them necessary. Young, educated adults moved far from their hometowns. This allowed recipes to begin detaching from family know-how. As measurement systems were standardized, recipes detached further, turning into scientific instructions.

Today, those two factors – literacy and migration – are maximized. Our culture is text-gorged, with online instruction becoming second nature, and we’re now so mobile, so detached from the circumstances of our parents and grandparents, that making their food feels as arcane as churning butter. This rupture made room for a few celebrity chefs in the 20th century (Julia Child, James Beard) and a whole phalanx of culinary personalities today. They dish out a bottomless supply of new recipes, techniques and gear. (Do you have an air fryer? A sous vide cooker? Are you stocked up on pomegranate molasses? Have you heard there are five new ways to make choux pastry?)

Recipes once reminded us who we are. Today, they tell us what we ought to become.

Around the time my husband’s mother grew ill with dementia, Kenny became much more serious about the Korean food she used to make him. Korean mothers tend to be marvels of meal prep – so replacing Omma’s meals entirely was near impossible. But he taught himself the basics of kimchi. Suddenly enormous vats of cabbage and bags of gochugaru dominated the kitchen. Empty pickle jars were declared “excellent kimchi jars” and added to his collection. He called friends over for kimjang (a kimchi-making party) and passed on his new-found knowledge. Replacing his mother’s kimchi was never quite possible, of course, since she had always made food by son-mat (hand taste) rather than exact measurements. There was no written recipe for Kenny to rely on, only sense memory. (Western recipes had a similar vagueness to them not so long ago, by the way – some cooks would gauge oven temperatures by seeing how long they could hold a hand inside.)

When my grandmother died, I watched Kenny pull apart scored napa cabbages (making that perfect assassassassa sound) and wished I had a stronger connection to the food she used to make. I’d never stood by her in the kitchen, never learned the basic lessons she could have passed on. Her food was there all my life, part of my most literal sustenance, and yet I took for granted that the meaning and memory baked into everything she produced would always be there.

My memories settled on the sweet and chewy buns my grandma was famous for (part kaiser, part brioche). I remember them piled high in wicker baskets at family parties, or crammed into Ziploc bags and handed over with mock benevolence.

How real are these pangs of nostalgia? How hard-wired are our memories of food? Dozens of gustatory receptor cells cover each taste bud on your tongue, and these send messages to the brain when you try a bite of dinner. Meanwhile, 12 million smell receptors send accompanying data to your olfactory bulb, and it all moves on to regions of the brain related to memory and emotion. The memory that food produces is necessarily intense: Animals often learn about poisonous foods the hard way and lasting aversions to a brightly coloured insect or a spiky pufferfish are what keep us alive. But primal memories can be positive, too. From babyhood we learn what is safe, what is good for us. And those memories enjoin us to not just seek out the calories and vitamins we need but also to crave the food that reminds us of family, friends and home.

What, then, have we lost when we forget the meals our parents and grandparents made? It’s not just about a missed chance to reminisce; without Omma’s kimchi or Grandma’s baking, we leave dormant some of the foundational memories that make us who we are.

Scrolling through a cooking app again, wondering for the umpteenth time what to make for dinner, I found myself lamenting the many meals I’ve made that have no ties to either my own family’s history or my husband’s. We all need occasional doses of familiar nourishment – the culinary equivalent of mnemonic devices that remake the Proustian “stage set” of our past.

An aunt salvaged a handwritten copy of my grandmother’s bun recipe. Instructions in hand, I spoke with a cousin who’d made them before (“put a hot water bottle under the bowl, to help the rise,” she counselled). And then, one afternoon, I fell into hours of experimentation. The comforting, faintly alcoholic smell of yeast bubbled in a bowl of warm water and caught me off guard. Ditto the smell of hot milk and melting butter, dissolving sugar. The dough’s components moved from pot to bowl to counter in a simple yet alchemical procedure. Then I sat by the oven door, watching the wonky blobs through the glass to see if what emerged would look right.

Sort of.

It’s the usual, I guess, when trying a bake for the first time. Some trick or technique was missing. Something I could only learn by being in the room with one who knew, having it properly passed down. Still, I managed a miniature Madeleine Moment as I withdrew the first tray and pulled apart a steaming sample. I knew that taste. I did know that bake. I felt I could smell not just the buns but also my grandmother’s living room, the dust and sunlight of her home.

When Kenny looked at the dozens of golden-brown attempts, he asked why the recipe made so many. I surveyed the countertop, shrugged. “I don’t know,” I told him. “I guess she was baking for all of us.”