Oliver Hayes
Why Family Recipes Slip Away
Most British Chinese households have a dish that nobody can quite reproduce. It might be your grandmother's braised pork belly, the wontons your father folded at speed, or the curry sauce that made your family's takeaway famous on a wet Tuesday in Salford. The problem is rarely skill. It is that the recipe was never written down, because it never needed to be.
Takeaway kitchens are built for speed. A wok cooks in ninety seconds, a sauce is thickened by eye, and a portion is judged by the ladle, not the scales. Meanwhile, children learned by standing close: shelling prawns, bagging chips, watching the oil shimmer. That kind of learning is real, but it is also fragile. When the person who holds it stops cooking, the detail goes with them. Writing it down is not sentimentality. It is preservation.
Weigh It, Then Trust Your Hands
Start by weighing everything, even the things your mum insists she measures by feel. A digital scale accurate to one gram costs very little and settles more arguments than any amount of memory. Record liquids in millilitres and solids in grams, and never write "a cup" when you can write "180ml".
Be equally precise about the ingredients themselves, because British supermarket shelves are full of near-misses:
- Light versus dark soy sauce — light seasons and salts, dark colours and sweetens. Swapping them changes the dish entirely.
- Shaoxing wine — note the brand and whether it is cooking grade or drinking grade.
- Cornflour — state whether it is for coating, thickening, or velveting, and how much water it is slaked in.
- Oils — groundnut for high heat, sesame for finishing, never the reverse.
Then note the equipment: wok diameter, whether it is carbon steel or non-stick, the size of the steamer, the heat setting on your particular hob. "Medium-high" means nothing across three different kitchens. "Setting 7 of 9, oil shimmering but not smoking" means something.
Recording the Techniques That Resist Translation
Technique is where most handwritten recipes fail. A list of ingredients is a shopping note; the method is the dish. Sit with the cook and write down the physical cues, not just the timings.
- Velveting: for every 500g of sliced beef or chicken, note the exact quantity of Shaoxing wine, light soy, cornflour and egg white, plus the resting time — usually twenty to thirty minutes in the fridge. Record how the meat should feel: slick, slightly tacky, never wet.
- Wok hei: the breath of the wok only arrives when the pan is properly hot and the food is not crowded. Write down batch sizes. If the recipe feeds six, it is cooked in three lots, and that detail must be said out loud.
- Steaming: note the water level, the heat, and the timing for a specific weight — a 500g whole fish at high heat for eight minutes, then rest off the heat for two.
- Thickening: record how the sauce should look at the end — glossy, coating the back of a spoon, not pooling.
Decoding the British Takeaway Classics
Home cooking and takeaway cooking are two different traditions, and both deserve recording. The chips and curry sauce, the salt and pepper king prawns, the sweet and sour battered pork — these were built for a British palate and a Friday night queue, and they are as much a part of your family history as any ancestral dish.
Ask specifically about the shortcuts. Was the curry sauce built on a roux with curry powder, or a base gravy made in bulk on a Monday? Were the chips par-boiled and frozen, or fried twice in beef dripping? How much MSG, and at what stage? Was the sweet and sour sauce made from scratch or built from a bottled base the family has always used? There is no shame in either. Write down what actually happened, not what sounds more impressive.
Put the Stories Beside the Method
A recipe without context is a set of instructions. With context, it becomes an inheritance. Alongside the method, note the year the dish arrived in Britain, the city or village it came from, and who taught whom. Record what it cost to make in 1978 and what it costs now. Note the substitutions made in Britain out of necessity — which greens replaced the original, where to buy them, and what freezes well.
Voice notes are enormously useful here. Ask your grandmother to talk through the dish while she cooks it, then type it up afterwards. You will catch things you would never have thought to ask about: the way she tests the oil with a dry chopstick, the fact that the marinade is better made the night before.
Test It, Correct It, Hand It Over
A recipe is only finished when somebody else can cook from it without you in the room. Cook your written version alone, twice, and mark every point where you hesitated. Then ask your child or grandchild to cook it while you watch in silence. Whatever they get wrong is not their failure; it is a gap in the writing.
Keep the final version somewhere durable: printed, laminated, and saved in a shared folder. Aim for confidence rather than perfection. If the next generation can produce something recognisably, unmistakably yours, the recipe has done its job.
