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86 maconmagazine.com | February/March 2026 cooks in my family," Howard said. "Everyone should be contributing something." Stephanie often carries a black notebook filled with handwritten recipes. Having these recipes allows her to recreate beloved dishes while also providing a foundation for evolving them over time. "As time changes, ingredients change," she explained. "I have some of my grandmother's handwritten recipes that call for oleo. Oleo was margarine. Some ingredients don't exist anymore or are hard to find, so you have to evolve with the times." But she also admits, "Things also improve over time." One recent improvement was switching from chicken bouillon to chicken base, which she says is more concentrated and flavorful. For Howard, writing recipes down does not mean preserving them unchanged. She believes recipes are meant to grow with the cook. "They're more like outlines to me, ingredient lists and processes," she said. "I know how my family likes to eat, and I tweak recipes based on who's coming to dinner or lunch." In this way, recipes become living documents, shaped by experience and meant to be similarly passed on. Just like Howard, Donna Terrill, a lifelong lover of baking, grew up in a home where both of her parents cooked. Her mother baked cakes, while her father made pies. Although Terrill did not inherit written recipes, she has become the one to pass many recipes down to her daughters. As a child, she spent hours watching her mother in the kitchen. "My mother didn't like people in the kitchen with her, but she would let me help with the baking," Terill recalled. "I would sit and watch her. She knew exactly how much to put in, and she would literally move the pan around to spread the batter. My job was to sit on a little red chair, look through the oven window, and tell her when it was done." One of Terrill's most vivid memories is of her mother making a 10-layer caramel cake each year as a Christmas gift for her aunt. When Terrill attempted to recreate the cake herself, she struggled with the first step — browning the sugar. After explaining her process to a friend who bakes professionally, her friend was shocked to hear she was using an iron skillet. That was just how Terrill had watched her mother do it. "She got so excited and said, 'Oh my gosh, you have a World War II recipe,'" Terrill noted. During World War II, brown sugar was rationed, forcing families to brown white sugar themselves. "Most modern recipes use brown sugar for caramel "What people love to call Southern food is Black food, I didn't have to Google it, I know how to do this because it's part of my culture. I was trained."