Write down how many people the remembered dish was cooked for before you write down a single ingredient. Cooking, preparing or serving too much is the largest single reason edible food is thrown away in British homes: 1,094,000 tonnes, 25% of the 4.4 million tonnes UK households binned in 2022, worth £4.95 billion, in WRAP's UK food waste key facts. The condition that changes the answer is the size of the table: a dish remembered from a household of eight, cooked unchanged for two, carries the surplus inside its own recipe.

The portion is the part that goes missing

A remembered recipe survives as ingredients and method. The number of people it fed disappears first, because at the time nobody needed to write it down. Ask for that number at the start and put it at the top of the page: cooked for eight, Sunday, 1974.

Give each person a job. The older cook describes the dish and the table it was cooked for; the younger one writes the two counts, people then and people now, and reads them back before anything else is discussed. Neither role is the expert role: one holds the method, the other holds the arithmetic.

Keep three lines on one page: the story, the recipe as remembered, and the portion count. A quantity nobody remembers is written as "not remembered" rather than estimated, because an estimate written in ink starts behaving like a measurement a fortnight later.

An example: one soup, two table sizes

Example, with the arithmetic shown. A potato and leek soup is remembered as a Sunday dish for eight, using 1.6 kilograms of potatoes. That is 1.6 kg ÷ 8 = 200 grams of potato per person. Two people cooking it today need 2 × 200 g = 400 grams, not 1.6 kilograms.

The 1.2 kilograms the unchanged recipe would have added is worth about £4.80. WRAP puts edible food thrown away in UK homes at 65 kilograms per person a year, valued at £260 at 2022 prices, which is £260 ÷ 65 kg = £4.00 a kilogram; 1.2 kg × £4.00 = £4.80 (key facts). Potato is the most wasted single item in that same 2022 dataset, at roughly 2.7 million whole potatoes a day across UK homes.

Write the halved figure beside the remembered one, not over it. The remembered version stays readable as the record of a different household, and the new line records a decision rather than a correction.

What the story carries that a figure cannot

A dish also carries things no measurement reaches. Europeana's The bread of memory draws on the poetry of Yannis Ritsos, where bread appears amid wartime hunger, loss and solidarity; it is a literary essay, not a recipe archive. Use that register when the dish opens onto such a history, and leave it alone when it does not. Ask before recording a conversation or passing a name, a photograph or a family recipe outside the two of you.

Keep the detail that makes the dish recognisable. Ask what would still make it that dish: a smell, a shape, a serving bowl, the fact that everyone sat down at once. One or two of those usually survive a halved quantity. An ingredient that is unavailable or unwanted is a supply question, not a test of respect.

Keep the environmental claim on its own line

"We wasted nothing then" is a memory. Treated as evidence it collapses, because the comparison it needs was never measured. Households produced 53% of EU food waste in 2023, 69 kilograms per inhabitant out of around 130 kilograms across the whole chain, per Eurostat's release of 16 October 2025 — a count of edible and inedible parts across 27 countries, which settles nothing about one kitchen in one decade.

The narrower question two people can answer is whether the amount cooked matched the amount wanted, which is what a week of counting one food is for. Read the headline figure itself with the care described in what a food-waste statistic actually counts, and keep the recipe card alongside the story of an object worth keeping if the two of you are building a small archive.

End the page with the portion count, the two versions and the date. That is enough for the next cook to rebuild either one.

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