Someone else's recipes
Most of the best cooks who ever lived never got a byline. Their food survived — in the hands of the people they fed — but their name came off it somewhere along the way.
A custodian is someone who puts it back on.
What a custodian is
You look after the kitchen of a cook who can't look after it themselves. A grandmother. A parent. A mentor. A chef who died. Anyone whose cooking outlived them.
The kitchen is theirs: its own name, its own handle, its own bio, and every recipe published under their name. What it doesn't have is an account — no login, no email, no one signing in as them. You do the work; they are the author of record. Attribution stays with them, responsibility stays with you.
That's what amanah means — something entrusted to you to look after — and why the site is called that.
It isn't permanent, either. If the cook is living and later wants their own account, the kitchen can be linked to it and stops being custodial. Nothing about their recipes or their lineage changes; it stops passing through you.
What it takes
Their recipes in whatever form you have them — a notebook, cards, photographs, or only your memory. Time to work through them. And a willingness to say when you're not sure, because a recipe you half-remember is still worth recording as a recipe you half-remember.
An example
Isabel Güemez Ruyan, known as Titi. Born in Culiacán, most of her life in Mexico City, twelve children and a table with room for all of them. She never used this site. Her recipes are here anyway, under her name, because someone who ate at that table sat down and wrote them out.
Titi — 42 recipes published under her name
Tell me about them
Nothing here is published. It comes to me and no one else.