The recipes my grandmother never wrote down, because she didn't think they'd be forgotten.

By Cecie Andaluz-Hammett · Georgia · Spring 2026

When Mommy died, the recipes died with her. Not all of them — I had the bones of arroz con gandules, the rough shape of pernil. But the parts she didn't think to teach me — when to lower the heat, when to add the last splash of vino seco, how to know the sofrito was done by the way it smelled — those went with her, on a Sunday in September.

She didn't think they'd be forgotten. Nobody in our family did. Recipes are the thing you assume the next person will pick up, because someone always has. Until they don't.

I started typing them up after she was gone. Mommy had left a few in her own hand — recipes from her mother, written on little pieces of paper, including how she made arroz dulce — and I still have them. Then came a Google Doc my husband bought me for our anniversary, a strange but accurate gift. The doc became a binder. The binder became a book.

A whole generation has the same hole in their pantry.

I thought I was writing this for my kids. Then I started cooking with friends here in Georgia — second-generation, third-generation, women in their forties and fifties cooking out of memory and Google. Every one of them said the same thing: "I wish my mother had written it down."

Spanish at home drops in half over three generations. Self-identity as Hispanic drops another ten points. But the food — the food persists. My niece doesn't speak Spanish. She makes habichuelas from scratch.

Heritage doesn't live on an island. It lives on the stove. And if we don't write the stove down, it leaves with us.