Writing It Down Before It's Gone: The Italian Dubliners Preserving Their Grandmothers' Kitchens

The problem with a recipe passed down by hand is that it lives in the hands. Not on paper, not in a notebook tucked into a kitchen drawer — in the particular motion of a wrist turning dough, in the instinct that says the sauce needs another five minutes before it's ready, in the smell of something browning that tells you when to turn down the heat. You can watch it a hundred times and still not quite have it. And when the person who carries it is gone, it goes with them.

This is the quiet crisis playing out in kitchens across Dublin right now, in households where Italian grandmothers — nonnas who arrived in Ireland in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s — are growing older, and their grandchildren are suddenly, urgently aware of what might be lost.

The Generation That Didn't Write Things Down

Italian immigrants who came to Ireland in the mid-twentieth century brought their food with them the way they brought everything essential: packed tightly, carried carefully, and never really unpacked for outsiders. The recipes weren't secrets, exactly. They were simply understood. You learned by watching, by being in the kitchen from the time you were small enough to stand on a stool at the counter. Writing things down wasn't part of the process because the process was the writing.

The problem emerged a generation later, when children who had grown up watching but had been busy building lives — going to school, going to university, going to work — looked back and realised they'd been watching without really learning. They knew the smell of the dish. They knew the table it belonged on. They didn't know the recipe.

By the time the grandchildren arrived, the gap had widened further. Some of them had never lived in the same city as their Italian grandparents. Some had grown up eating the food without ever seeing it made. And now, in their twenties and thirties, they're racing to close that gap before it becomes permanent.

Sitting Down With a Notebook

The documentation projects happening across Dublin's Italian community take many forms. Some are formal — family cookbooks compiled over years, with photographs and handwritten notes digitised and shared across siblings and cousins in multiple countries. Others are informal to the point of being almost accidental: a phone propped against the spice rack to record a grandmother demonstrating how she makes her ragù, a voice note of a grandfather explaining why his version of the dish is the correct one (all grandfathers are certain their version is correct).

What these projects share is a sense of urgency. Families who might have assumed there would always be more time are beginning to understand that time is the one thing they can't manufacture.

One second-generation Italian-Dubliner, whose family came from Campania in the late 1960s, described the moment she realised she needed to act. Her mother had been making a particular pasta dish — a simple one, pasta e fagioli, beans and pasta — for every Sunday lunch she could remember. When she tried to make it herself for the first time, she discovered she had no idea how her mother achieved the particular texture of the broth, the way the beans were somewhere between whole and dissolved. "She couldn't explain it either," she said. "She just knew when it was right. We spent three Sundays making it together before I felt like I understood what I was looking for."

Those three Sundays became the model for a larger project: cooking with her mother every week, recording everything, writing it up afterwards while the memory was fresh.

What Gets Lost in Translation

Food scholars and culinary historians have a term for what happens when traditional recipes are formalised for publication or commercial use: standardisation. The process of making a recipe reproducible — measuring ingredients precisely, specifying cooking times, accounting for the variables that a home cook might not control — inevitably strips something out. The margin for instinct disappears. The recipe becomes a procedure rather than a practice.

For immigrant food cultures specifically, this standardisation carries an additional weight. The dishes that Italian families brought to Dublin weren't just recipes — they were regional, hyper-local, specific to a particular village or even a particular family. A ragù from Naples looks nothing like a ragù from Bologna. A Sicilian caponata and a Venetian one share a name and almost nothing else. When these dishes get absorbed into a broader "Italian food" category — as they inevitably do when they move into commercial kitchens or mainstream recipe books — that specificity is the first thing to go.

What the families currently documenting their food histories are trying to preserve isn't just the recipe. It's the regional identity embedded in it. The story of where the family came from, encoded in what they ate.

The Commercialisation Problem

There is a harder conversation sitting underneath all of this, one that Dublin's Italian community navigates with varying degrees of comfort. As Italian food has become enormously popular in Ireland and the UK — as "Italian" has become a shorthand for a certain kind of quality and authenticity — the commercial pressure to package and present that food in ways that are broadly palatable has intensified.

This is not a new tension. It exists in every immigrant food culture that achieves mainstream success. But for families who have watched their grandmothers' specific, regional, deeply personal cooking become a category on a chain restaurant menu, it can feel like a particular kind of erasure.

The families doing archival work are, in part, pushing back against this. They're insisting on specificity. On the record showing that this dish came from this region, this household, this woman who learned it from her own mother in a village that most Irish people couldn't find on a map.

Practical Steps for Preserving Culinary Heritage

If any of this resonates — and it will, because this isn't only an Italian story, it's the story of every family whose food carries a history — there are practical things you can do.

Start with questions, not recipes. Before you try to document a dish, ask the person who makes it where they learned it, what it means to them, when they make it. The context is as important as the method.

Cook together, more than once. A single session rarely captures everything. The first time, you're watching. The second time, you're beginning to understand. The third time, you start to feel it.

Record process, not just ingredients. Video is invaluable here. You want to see how the onions are cut, how the oil moves in the pan, what "a handful" actually looks like in this particular person's hand.

Accept imprecision. A recipe that says "cook until it smells right" is not an incomplete recipe. It's an honest one. Write it down exactly as it was given to you.

Share what you have. Even an imperfect record is better than none. A voice note, a rough transcription, a photograph of a handwritten card — all of it matters.

What We're Holding Onto

At Il Baccarò, we think about this often. The food we serve isn't just Italian in a generic sense — it carries the specificity of regions, of traditions, of cooking practices that have been refined over generations. That specificity is what makes it worth eating. Worth travelling for. Worth sitting down and paying attention to.

The families across Dublin who are racing to record their grandmothers' recipes before they're lost are doing something that matters beyond their own households. They're keeping a record of what Italian food actually is — not the sanitised, standardised version, but the real thing. The version that tastes like a particular kitchen, a particular Sunday, a particular person who is still here and might not always be.

Write it down. Cook it together. Don't wait until there's more time.

There isn't always more time.