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My mother's pierogi and my MIL's pizzelles. I treasure them.

I have been a recipe junkie since I was a kid, and not only got my mothers' but also her mothers' when each of them passed, and that included all the ones they had collected from friends as well as a handful of my great-grand-mothers' which had somehow previously escaped the greedy clutches of my aunts.
Several of the heirloom recipes are in my constant rotation even now, including X-mas cookies and candies and several cakes and side dishes. Some are not really things I would ever cook but I keep all those beautifully handwritten cards and scraps of paper all filed neatly away anyhow.

The ones that are the most interesting are the ones that don't have a recipe title. More than a few are just the ingredients and very basic directions-it has been fun trying some of these out to see what they end up tasting like, or playing the guessing game with mysterious ones.
I jot recipes like that too, and woe on anyone who ever has to sort my recipe collection!
All those handwritten recipes that mean so much now also inspire me to try to always hand write my own also. Someday I would love to give the mass of them to a niece or nephew that likes cooking and who would love to see 4 generations of cooking and love and style in one box.

from my great-grandmother on the sicilian side: aglio olio - a mixture of fresh garlic, parsley, olive oil (she did it with a mortar & pestal) blended with a little bit of pasta water over linguini .... caponata....

on my ukrainian grandmother: holubki - stuffed cabbage with beef, pork, bacon, cooked with a smoked piece of meat, sauerkraut....tomato. and
chicken paprikash.

My mother didn't use a lot of recipes, mostly she cooked by taste, so the usual recipes were never written down. But I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with her, so I absorbed most of them without even thinking about it. And the ones that I didn't pick up, I've been able to recreate. Maybe not exactly how she made these things, but the results are the same.

I also have all of her old cookbooks, and there are some scribbled notes here and there. Usually when I find a note, it's not something I remember her making. So these were probably things that she tried that maybe she didn't like so much.

I never knew either of my grandmothers, so that's where the ancestors end for me. If I was a betting person, I'd bet that neither ever learned how to read or write, so there's no chance I'm going to stumble upon something from either of them.

My husband's grandmother used to make a sweet(ish) bread for him at Christmas, and it was something that he particularly liked. Again, she was one who never wrote anything down. And her English wasn't so good and got a lot worse as she aged. We figured that recipe was forever lost. However, years ago when she was staying with one of her sons, before her memory went, he translated what she said and wrote down the recipe and it got published in a fundraiser cookbook for a club he belonged to. I finally met that uncle for the first time a couple years ago, and when he found out that I liked to cook, he sent me his club's cookbook. And there was the recipe. It was missing bits of instructions, but since I bake a lot of bread, I was able to piece it all together and made the bread for my husband. He claims that my version is exactly what he remembered.

My grandpa always tries to teach me how to cook by telling, I always tell him i need to watch, since he keeps saying its allllll about the timing of when you add the ingredients. (He apprenticed in Hong Kong) and my other grandpa alllways tries to teach me how to bake or make bao (he worked at a reallllly popular chinese bakery during its hey-day in sacramento) and my grandma is always cooking and teaching me northern chinese food since the rest of our family is from the south or hong kong.

best of the best? tomato and egg (always add sugar and ketchup), red bean steamed baos and steamed chicken baos (should totally be eaten fresh from the steamer) and chinese dessert soups (nom nom nom)

I have a few recipes from my mom and even some from my great grandmother, who I never knew, in her own writing. I use them occasionally. But the biggest thing my mom ever taught me was how to make bread, I dont mean a recipe, I mean knowing while kneading when you get to the right texture, or smelling when you had a good sourdough starter, or good yeast. Those are the skills you either learn through trial and error, or someone takes you by the hand and teaches you. I was blessed that even though my mom wasnt much of a cook in alot of ways, she was a great bread maker, and took the time to pass that on to me.

@ huneybumper--- I think this was the problem. My mom baked something every day, and I do mean EVERY day. My sister and I came home from school to breads, donuts, cakes, you name it. However, she hated making cookies and was not the best of cooks, but God rest her soul in peace that woman could bake. She never wrote anything down, just did it from oh i don't know, memory, rote, habit, who knows. This is why I will forever be posting for her baked goods. Next post, 7 up cake. Father's day is coming up and that is my dad's fav. Let me go do that now.

when my grandmother died 2 years ago, i asked for her cookbooks and recipe boxes. not the national publishers, but the community cookbooks she collected over the years. i love looking back over the hand written cards that are so stained from use they can barely be read. there are also many scribbles, notes, and personal changes to recipes in the cookbooks that have been around longer than me.

i cherish granny's recipes. i might not do everything the same way she did, but she is the reason i love to cook. i love to feed those around me. granny lived the words of Jesus "you get them something to eat"

i try daily.