What is a recipe? A simple question... with many answers. It could be a set of instructions on how to make a dish – but also so much more. Recipes can reveal how we lived in the past, and how we are living today. They are part of our sense of identity, belonging and loss and they are portals we can use to travel to different cultures.

This week, Ruth Alexander speaks to three recipe collectors in India, Ghana and the USA to find out why they are preserving their nation’s recipes. What can you learn by documenting these culinary guides? How do you even capture a recipe that has never been written down? And what is at stake if they are lost?

(Picture: Cookbook with utensils. Credit: Getty/BBC)

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Megan Elias, cultural historian and director of the Gastronomy programme at University of Boston, USA

Muskaan Pal, co-founder, Indian Community Cookbook Project at Flame University in Pune, India