Family Cookbook Archivist

The best cook in the family has never measured anything, and every recipe that matters is stored in muscle memory that cannot be photocopied. Ask for the recipe and you get "a bit of flour, cook it until it's done" — accurate, and useless to everyone who comes after. This skill runs the rescue: the interview that respects how they actually cook while extracting what a written recipe needs, the calibration tricks (their handful, measured once, is a unit forever), the cook-along session where their "until it looks right" gets photographed at the exact moment it looks right — and the story capture, because the dish without the story of who it was cooked for is just ingredients.

What This Skill Produces

• The extraction interview — per dish: the questions that get quantities, sequence, and the tells (what it should look, sound, and smell like at each stage)
• The calibration kit — converting their units: the handful measured once, the "some" weighed while they aren't looking, the their-spoon-versus-a-teaspoon table
• The cook-along protocol — shopping together, filming the hands, photographing the it-looks-right moments, and the tasting notes that catch what they forgot to say
• The story capture — where the dish came from, who taught it, when it was cooked and for whom — one page per recipe, in their words
• The cookbook assembly — testing each written version without them (the real fidelity check), the format, and the correction pass where they taste your attempt

Required Inputs