About me

Hi, I’m Marguerite

I learned to cook standing on a kitchen chair beside my mother, shelling peas into a colander and being told, gently and repeatedly, that I was stirring too fast. Everything on this site grew out of that kitchen.

Marguerite in a red sleeveless shirt kneading dough on a floured counter

A childhood measured in Sundays

Ours was not a fancy kitchen. One dented sheet pan, a wooden spoon worn flat on one side, and a radio that only picked up two stations. But every Sunday something was going in the oven by nine in the morning — a chicken, a tray of potatoes, a cake if somebody had a birthday within a fortnight of it. My job started as scraping the bowl and slowly turned into doing the roast myself while my mom read the paper and offered commentary.

I learned to cook the way most people actually learn: badly at first, by ruining things, with someone patient standing nearby. That is the tone I try to keep here.

A mother and daughter kneading dough with a rolling pin — Me and my mom — still arguing about how much butter is too much.

The woman who taught me

My mother cooks by feel. Ask her how much salt and she will say “until it tastes right,” which is maddening when you are eleven and extremely useful when you are thirty. She never wrote anything down, so in my twenties I started following her around with a notebook, converting handfuls into grams and “until it smells done” into minutes. That notebook is the reason this site exists — and why it is called The Heirloom Kitchen.

She still tests things for me. If a recipe makes it past her, it goes up.

Two women standing in a kitchen taking a selfie together — The obligatory flour-covered selfie, taken every Easter since 2016.

A woman kneading dough on a floured kitchen counter — My mom, mid-knead. She has never once measured the flour.

Woman in a floral apron decorating a cake with icing — Icing a cake in the floral apron my mom handed down to me.

Close-up of hands piping icing onto a cake — Piping bag in hand — most recipes here get tested twice before they land.

How I cook now

I cook seasonally, in a small home kitchen, on a normal stove that runs hot on the back left burner. I like slow Sunday braises, bread that takes overnight and no effort, and the kind of weeknight pasta you can make while still wearing your coat. I am not precious about ingredients — if the good tomatoes are not there, the tinned ones are fine, and I will tell you when they are not.

Mostly I write things down so they do not get lost, which is what my mother never quite got around to doing. If something here ends up in your own notebook, that is the whole point.

Say hello

I read every message — recipe requests, substitutions that worked better than mine, arguments about butter. Head over to the contact page for how to reach me, how recipes are tested, and the site’s photography and affiliate policies.