For years I struggled to recreate my grandmother's recipes until I discovered that 'tablespoon' in her recipe book didn't actually mean 'tablespoon', but referred to this random goddamn spoon she had in her kitchen, and all the other measurements in there had similar logic. Meanwhile when my other Gran died her daughters fought for days over her recipe notebook that nobody was allowed to touch, until they finally decided to just copy the recipes down and so they opened it and found out there was only one entry and it said 'Book that I pretend has recipes'.