I made my grandmother’s soup last October without a recipe, just from memory and instinct and a rough sense of what went in it. I got it wrong in small ways. Too much dill, not enough time on the stove. But the smell when it started simmering was close enough that I had to sit down for a second before I could keep cooking.
I ate it for three days. By the third day I’d adjusted the recipe in my head to something that was mine and hers at the same time. I wrote it down on a card and put it in the kitchen drawer where I keep things I don’t want to lose. Some recipes are really just memories you’re trying to hold onto in a form you can return to.