My grandmother left her recipes in fragments. There’s her little black book, scribbles of ingredients in English, French and Ladino, the language once spoken by the Jews of Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey. In one recipe, Savta, grandma in Hebrew, based measurements on a yogurt cup which she called un gobelet. According to my mom, they didn’t see a measuring cup until they moved from Israel to America in the early 1970s.

There are also recipes my sister Celine jotted down as Savta cooked. And there were loose sheets of paper I tucked into plastic folders, oral histories with no oven temperatures. I’ve transported them among the cities I’ve lived in over the past several years, but until last week, I had never attempted to make a single dish.

Since coronavirus forced us all inside, people on the internet have been yearning for elsewhere. “Throwback to Tulum,” someone wrote on an Instagram, under a picture of a sunny beach. Create a virtual trip using Google Street View, suggests The Times.

I can’t do that for Savta’s cooking, though. Or for Savta. There are photos, of course. And the voice messages she left me. But what about the invisible memories? The tastes and smells, the olfactory soundtrack of my childhood, vivid but intangible. We asked for her recipes only sparingly. The whole thing seemed too morbid. Maybe we should have been more bold.