A thousand dal recipes online, and none of them is your mom's

Type "moong dal" into a search bar and you'll get more recipes than you could cook in ten lifetimes. Most of them are tidy: one cup of dal, three cups of water, half a teaspoon of turmeric, three whistles on the cooker. Some are very good.

None of them is the one you grew up eating. So you ring your mother, and the answer goes something like this (an invented example, but you'll probably recognise it): "Thoda sa jeera, then when the smell comes, the tomatoes." How much is thoda sa? "Itna." If you were standing next to her she'd show you with her fingers. You aren't, so you write down "some cumin", and the dal you make that weekend tastes like an internet recipe.

She isn't being vague

There's a word for how she cooks. In Hindi and Urdu it's andaaz: estimation, a feel for how much. Cooks who work this way aren't holding back the numbers. For most of them there were never any numbers. The quantity lives in the hand that tips the jar and the nose that decides the onions are done.

The philosopher Michael Polanyi spent a book on exactly this kind of knowing. "We can know more than we can tell," he wrote at the start of The Tacit Dimension, first published in 1966. He meant the things people do reliably without being able to spell out how, like picking a familiar face out of a crowd. A mother who knows her tadka is ready from the sound of the mustard seeds is doing the same thing. Asking her for the number of seconds is a bit like asking someone how they keep their balance on a bicycle.

Anthropologists who study home cooking run into this too. David Sutton spent more than twenty years with cooks on the Greek island of Kalymnos, and a lot of his evidence is video of everyday technique, which makes sense: so much of cooking is easier to see than to describe. One small detail from that work is a good example. Kalymnian cooks cut food in their hands rather than on a board, which keeps them facing the room and talking to whoever else is in the kitchen. Nobody would think to put that in a recipe. It's just how things are done.

The same review notes the tensions Sutton found between mothers and daughters: kitchen knowledge isn't always easily "given up" or "passed on". Which is worth keeping in mind if your mother goes a little quiet about her fish curry. Being asked can feel like a compliment and a test at the same time.

Usually there's only one copy

Most of us learned to cook, if we learned at all, from one person. A 2016 survey of 1,049 adults across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland found mothers were by far the most common source of cooking skills, named by about 60 percent. The same researchers worried that if home cooks are losing skills generally, mothers may not be able to keep teaching the next generation.

That's one study in one country, and we wouldn't stretch its numbers to an Indian or Bangladeshi household. The pattern will still be familiar to plenty of families, though. One person holds the kitchen. Her food moves on only when somebody stands beside her long enough to absorb it, usually without anyone calling it teaching.

Then the children grow up and move to another city or another country, and the standing beside her stops. What's left is the phone call, which is exactly where andaaz turns into "some cumin".

Ask how she knows

The most useful change is small. Stop asking how much and start asking how she knows.

"How much salt?" gets you "enough". "How do you know when it's enough?" might get you "I taste the water before the dal goes in; it should be a little saltier than you'd want to drink." That second answer is something you can use in your own kitchen.

The Smithsonian's folklife and oral history interview guide, written for people documenting traditions in their own families, gives advice that fits cooking surprisingly well. Questions that start with "how", "what" or "why" get fuller answers than ones starting with "do" or "did". Follow up with "Can you give me an example?" Don't rush to fill a silence, because the person may still be thinking. And it singles out the camera as especially valuable when you're documenting a process, giving "a favorite family recipe" as its example.

The same guide prefers audio or video to notes because a recording keeps the tone and the pauses. For a recipe that matters more than you'd expect. You'll hear her stop and correct herself, or remember a step halfway through. You'll also have her voice, which no recipe card gives you.

If you can be there, record while she cooks. If you can't, ask her to talk it through the next time she makes the dish, phone propped against the spice tin. Either way, ask about one dish at a time.

Five questions to ask about one dish

Pick the dish you miss most, one she makes often. Ask these one at a time and let her take as long as she likes.

"Walk me through the last time you made it." One particular day. We think asking about one real occasion brings out steps that a summary skips: the bowl she soaked the dal in, the moment she turned the flame down.
"How do you know it's ready for the next step?" Ask this at every stage. It's where the useful signs live: the crackle of the cumin, the onions going the colour of strong tea.
"When you say 'a little', can you show me?" If you're in the room, measure what she shows you after she's moved on. If you're not, ask her to compare it to something: a fingertip, half a palm, the small steel katori.
"What do you do when it goes wrong?" Too thin, or too salty. The fixes tell you what she's aiming for better than the recipe does.
"Who taught you, and what did they do differently?" This is where the dish gets its history, and sometimes the reason for the one odd step that never made sense.

Then cook it yourself within a week, while the recording is fresh, and call her back to say what went wrong. Our guess is the second conversation will be better than the first, because by then you know which questions you missed. If you'd like to go beyond the kitchen afterwards, these twenty questions about family history are a good place to keep going.

Where Conneczen fits

We built Conneczen for conversations like this one. You can send your mother a link on WhatsApp with a single question ("Ma, how do you make your moong dal?"), and she records the answer on her own phone in whatever language she cooks in, with no account to set up. It's kept in her voice and filed as a recipe your family can search and play back. If that sounds useful, you can start here. If not, a phone's voice recorder and these five questions will still get you most of the way.