Readers share heirloom recipes and family stories in Guardian compendium

The Guardian’s Feast published a compendium of heirloom recipes submitted by readers, pairing each recipe with the family stories behind it in this week’s collection. The pieces range from baked beans given a Gujarati twist and an Atlantic‑hopping spinach and feta pie to a billowing yorkshire pudding with Bramley apples, and the contributions emphasise the role of family recipes in cultural preservation and domestic ingenuity.

Contributors recount personal histories alongside the dishes. Sonia, 40, from Manchester, shared “Bapa’s beans” — tinned baked beans turned into an Indian curry she learned from her grandfather and serves with rotis or hot buttery sourdough; she says she will teach her 15‑year‑old son the recipe so he can pass it on.

Grant Whitehead, 57, in Canada, submitted a Christmas pudding recipe that travelled from Scotland with his grandmother; he describes the original handwritten page as a family relic and also shared the white sauce method his Yorkshire grandmother found in a 1940s women’s magazine. Other submissions include Zack, 27, from New York, who traces spinaka (a spinach and feta pie made with a rustic “peasant dough”) back to his great‑grandmother from Turkey, and Desanka, 69, in London, who sent a recipe for boranja, a lamb‑and‑green‑bean stew from the former Yugoslavia that she says cooks for four hours and tastes better the next day.

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