Family recipes are lost one move, one water-stained card and one funeral at a time — and the ones that go first are the dishes nobody ever measured. If your family has a cook whose food everyone talks about, the time to do this is while you can still ask her questions.

Step 1 — Photograph the box this week

Before the list, before the app, before any decision at all: get every card photographed. Flat, in daylight, front and back, and do not stop to read them. A whole tin is an afternoon and it costs nothing.

Ballpoint and pencil on index card fade faster than people expect, and the cards that fade first are the ones handled most — which is to say the recipes the family actually cooks. A photograph is not preservation, it is insurance, and it is the only step here with a deadline set by chemistry rather than by mortality.

Step 2 — Take inventory before you organise

Now the list. The tin. The church cookbook with her three contributions. The splattered page in a hardback with notes down the margin. The email from 2011 with the marinade. The one recipe your aunt has and nobody else does.

Ask the siblings and the cousins what they hold; the full collection is almost always scattered across four households, and the version everyone remembers is often not the version anyone wrote down. You are recording where things live, not fixing them yet.

Step 3 — Interview the cook

For the dishes that exist only in somebody's hands, cook them together. "I just eyeball it" turns out to mean something very specific the moment you stand next to it and watch.

Catch the flour by spoonfuls as it goes in. Ask what the dough should feel like, not what it should look like. Write down the things she would never think to say out loud — the pan she always uses, the "until it smells right", the rest that is not optional. Film a minute of the part your hands cannot copy. One session per dish is usually enough, and this is the step that has a real deadline attached to it.

Step 4 — Transcribe once, and keep the card beside it

Type each recipe up once, in full, expanding her abbreviations and keeping her margin notes as margin notes rather than tidying them into prose. Then keep the photograph attached to it rather than instead of it.

You need both, and for different reasons. Nobody cooks from slanted cursive at arm's length over a hot pan, and nobody frames a transcription. In a printed book the two can face each other on the page, which is the arrangement that tends to make people cry at Christmas.

Step 5 — One line of provenance, not an essay

You do not need a memoir attached to every dish. You need a line: "Ann's, from Kraków via Buffalo. Christmas Eve only." Whose it was, where it came from, when it appears.

That single sentence is what turns a recipe back into a person at dinner twenty years from now. It is also the only field nobody can fill in for you later — the recipe survives on the card, but the reason it matters lives in whoever still remembers it.

Step 6 — Put it somewhere the family can actually reach

A binder in one house recreates the original problem: one copy, one address, one flood away from gone. Whatever you choose should let you take everything out again whole, hold the photographs of the originals, and produce something printable — and it should not require every relative to make an account before they can read their own grandmother's handwriting.

Then make copies while everyone is alive to argue over them. Four copies in four houses is the most reliable backup any family has ever managed, and it is the one that still works when the phone, the format and the company are all long gone.

Heirloom is built for exactly this order of operations: photograph the cards, transcribe them once, and it sets the result as a book you can hold, share with siblings, and hand down — one payment of $29.99, a keepsake rather than a service, and it does not stop working if the company does.

They do not disappear.They fade.