India, April 4 -- What do you think of when you think of an inheritance? Grandpa's furniture, languishing in the family home; Grandma's saris, featuring designs we just don't see anymore. Mum's gold earrings, packed in deep pink tissue. What are we missing? "Recipes!" says Shruti Taneja, 37, the founder of food documentation platform Nivaala. "They should be considered heirlooms too. They're not just a blueprint for making a dish, but also a time-machine into the past."

But recipes, unlike furniture, saris and earrings, don't stay quiet. They tend to fade away as families grow and as new cuisines capture our fancy. Some recipes were never written down at all and exist only in memory. Others call for rough measurements, hard-to-source spi...