Did your parents pass on any of the family recipes down to you?

So a couple of weeks back, I hosted a get together with my cousins. It was pot-luck style, so everyone brought was supposed to make & bring a dish. Growing up, we always ate dinners at each other’s houses, and our parents always made dinner - so we thought it would be a nice way to replicate this as adults.

For reference, our family looks like the United Nations. We are a mix of Portuguese, Turkish, Japanese, Filipino, Mexican, and Black. So you would expect a pot luck from that background to be good right?

Turns out none of my cousins learned any of their family recipes. Most of them either just bought pre-made stuff or made some generic side dish. When I asked them, “Why didn’t you make X, we loved when your mom made that,” the answer was always, “IDK, I never learned how.”

I ended up being the only one that learned to cook the food from our “homelands” out of my generation. Granted, I’ve made some changes and improvements to the recipes of my own, but overall they are still “authentic” in spirit.

Most of our parents were 1st generation immigrants, but my generation is much more Americanized, so I feel like a lot of this got lost through assimilation. But also a lot just gets lost through the years as things don’t get passed down.

Anyone else go through a similar thing with their family? Did the recipes of your parents and grandparents get passed down to you or not?