How Mamina Turned Family Recipes Into a Story-Filled Legacy
Christina - Jul 28, '26 - Cookbook Stories - Cookbook Ideas
Mamina's Family Favorites is what she calls it now. A play on words—favorites her family loves, and favorites of hers. Sourdough on the cover, because bread is what she got into after she retired at the end of 2020, and this loaf earned its place on the front. Inside: eighty-one recipes in the second edition, more pictures of the grandchildren a little older, more of the things they've started asking for.
More Story Than Recipe Book
"I feel like these books are less a cookbook or recipe book and more of a story," Mamina says. And that's the shape of it. The recipes are there—tested, annotated, ready to cook—but so are the holidays, the celebrations, the small notes about where each dish came from and who first made it.
There's a pie in the book that started with her son, who prefers blueberry over birthday cake and gets one every year. Now his oldest son and oldest daughter want the same for their birthdays. Three generations, one recipe, and a chapter that captures why.
A Grandmother's Handwriting, Rediscovered
Mamina dedicated the book to her late grandmother, an excellent cook who died in 1999 at almost 108. The dedication is the emotional anchor of the whole project. But the real find came in a recipe she inherited: a card in her grandmother's own handwriting, passed down by her daughter-in-law's mother, whose own mother and aunt had once published it in their family cookbook.
Her daughter-in-law took the handwritten card and the printed page and turned them into a collage. One page, three generations of hands. The kind of page that only comes together when someone goes looking.
A Book Made by the Whole Family
When Mamina started, she began taking pictures of food deliberately. But most of what ended up in the pages was already there—she just had to find it. She went through her Facebook posts, her phone folders, her camera roll. Years of holiday spreads and birthday dinners, hiding in plain sight.
She also asked everyone. Her mom. Her daughter. Both daughters-in-law. Her son. Every contributor got a thank-you in the front of the book.
"It's a family cookbook because the whole family made it," she says.
What She Really Preserved
The recipes are there. So are the pictures, the stories, the handwriting, the collages. But what Mamina really preserved is the thread—from her grandmother's kitchen in 1999 through her own sourdough loaf on the cover, all the way to a blueberry pie a grandson will one day bake for his own kids.
A cookbook full of favorites, made by the family who's been eating them all along.