When Scarlett Martin’s grandmother, Dorothy Lisenbea was younger, she didn’t have time to cook meals for her family so she wrote recipes down for her kids to cook them instead,

Decades later, those recipes are still in the family, according to Martin, a New Iberia resident and teacher in the Teche Area.

After Lisenbea’s husband died years ago, she needed to find a way to support her four children and decided to open up a beauty shop at her home.

Because she was so busy running the beauty shop, the children had to take over the cooking for the family.

“She would write down these recipes,” Martin said. “My mother remembers her saying, ‘This is what we’re having for supper’ and she would give her these hand-written recipes so that the children can take turns making them.”

The handwritten recipes by Lisenbea have been featured in The Daily Iberian the last few weeks and they are a constant testament to Lisenbea’s children and grandchildren for keeping all these years later.

Martin described Lisenbea as an “old school Christian,” who tried to steer the gossip at her beauty shop towards the recipes and cooking.

“She didn’t want them gossiping in her beauty shop,” Martin said. “That was a common occurrence in a beauty shop with all of the ladies there.”

Giving out recipes back then, according to Martin, was a rare occurrence, as the women rarely liked to share how they made their signature dish.

“If you were really good at making a peach cobbler, well that was your peach cobbler and you were asked to make it for all the functions and all the get-togethers,” Martin said. “And you didn’t want to give out your recipes because somebody would be able to make your peach cobbler.”

It didn’t matter if it was a peach cobbler or home-made pickles, the recipes were sacred to the women.

“That was their identity,” Martin said. “That was their thing.”

Martin said her family has over 50 cards of Lisenbea’s handwritten recipes, with recipe boxes full of desserts, meats, vegetables and even some she cut-out from newspapers and magazines, gluing them to notecards.

Martin and her family, including her mother Andrea, know that handwritten recipes are a rare occurrence nowadays.

“People don’t treasure those hand-written cards,” Martin said. “When you think of someday’s handwriting, you can look at something and say, ‘My momma wrote that. My grandmother wrote that.’”