What a handwritten recipe book taught Hussain Shahzad about food

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Before recipes became searchable, scrollable, and endlessly replicable, they were fleeting.They existed in moments, on television screens, in conversations, in memory. If you missed it, you missed it. And if you wanted to hold on to it, you wrote it down.

There was no archive to return to, no algorithm to serve it back to you. Just attention, instinct, and the urgency of not letting something slip away.I must have been around 9 or 10 when I first witnessed this urgency up close. Every afternoon, sometime between 2 and 4, my mum would sit in front of the television watching Khana Khazana.

There was no pause button, no rewind. Just one chance to catch everything. She would scribble as the chef spoke, trying to capture ingredients and steps.

And then came the final screen, the full recipe flashing up for less than a minute. That was the real test. Quantities, timings, all of it had to be written down before it disappeared.I would sit next to her, watching, asking questions that only a child could ask.

If the recipe used boneless fish, I genuinely believed fish could be born without bones. She would laugh, explain, and go back to writing. Those afternoons were quiet, unhurried, but filled with intent.That notebook still exists.

It is my go-to.It is also completely chaotic. There are arrows connecting steps, shorthand that only she understands, notes squeezed into margins “add this with that,” “do this before that.” It makes no sense if you are looking for precision. But it makes perfect sense if you are looking for memory.And that, I think, is what makes those handwritten recipes so powerful.