You think you're just making dinner. You reach for the onions, or you open a jar of the same barbecue sauce he always used, or the pan heats up and the fat starts to spit — and then the smell hits. And you're not in your kitchen anymore.
Food is the grief trigger nobody warns you about. It's not in the pamphlet the funeral home hands you. Therapists mention it, sometimes, but usually in passing. The people in your life who want to help bring you food — they show up with casseroles and cold cuts — without realizing that the very act of eating has become its own kind of landmine.
Here's the thing though: that landmine is also a door. Cooking your dad's food is one of the most useful things you can do inside grief, and one of the most quietly devastating. Both at once. That's the part nobody says out loud.
Why Food Hits Differently Than Everything Else
There's a physiological reason scent ambushes you in a way that photographs and voicemails don't. The olfactory system has a more direct connection to the brain's memory and emotion centers than any other sense. You see a photo and your brain processes it. You smell his aftershave — or his cooking — and your brain is already there before your conscious mind catches up.
This is why the grief that food triggers tends to arrive late. Not in the raw weeks right after the loss, when you're running on adrenaline and casseroles from neighbors. It shows up months later, or years later, when you're standing in your own kitchen on a Tuesday night and something in the air undoes you completely.
It also explains why his food lands differently than finding his jacket or his watch. Those are objects. You can put them away. You can choose not to open the closet. But you have to eat. You're going to cook. And if his food was ever part of your life — even peripherally — you will eventually stumble into it.
For a lot of men, this catches them completely off guard. The assumption is that the hardest grief moments will be the big occasions: his birthday, Father's Day, the first Christmas. Those hurt, yes. But the Tuesday night onions-in-butter sucker punch? That one nobody scheduled.
The Recipe as Inheritance
Here's something worth sitting with: a recipe your dad made is an inheritance. Not in the legal sense — it won't show up in the will alongside the tools and the truck. But it's a direct transmission from him to you, encoded in proportions and technique and the particular order he did things.
The tragedy is that most of those recipes were never written down. He didn't follow a card. He made it the way his mother made it, or the way he figured out over thirty years of feeding people, and the knowledge lived entirely in his hands. Now it doesn't live anywhere.
This is true for a lot of what our dads knew. It connects to something worth reading about in The One Question I Never Asked My Dad — And How to Find the Answer Now: there are entire categories of knowledge, skill, and story that exist only as long as the person does. A recipe is just one of them. It's the one that happens to have a fuse attached.
Some people are lucky. There's a handwritten card somewhere, water-stained, with measurements that make no sense because he cooked for twelve people and never scaled it down. Some people have a mother or a sibling who watched more closely. But a lot of men find themselves staring at a dish they ate a hundred times and realizing they have no idea how he actually made it.
That's not a small loss. It feels disproportionate — why should a chili recipe make you cry? — but it isn't disproportionate at all. You're not grieving the chili. You're grieving the fact that there's no more transmission. The line of knowledge just ended.
What Cooking His Food Actually Does
If you can bring yourself to try it, making his food does something that most grief rituals don't. It gives your body something to do.
Grief, especially for men, tends to get stuck in the head. You think about him. You replay conversations. You rehearse the things you should have said. Cooking is physical. You're moving, chopping, tasting, adjusting. There's a problem to solve — does this taste right? — and that problem keeps you anchored in the present even while the memory is pulling you back.
There's also something about the act of feeding people. Scott Cunningham, co-host of Dead Dads, has written about how family meals became the place where his dad came back into the conversation — not because anyone planned it, but because sitting around a table and eating together is where stories live. When you cook the food, you create the occasion. You give the people who loved him a reason to talk about him again.
This is exactly what Scott did with Dairy Queen. His dad's affinity for the place — a flame-grilled burger before dinner, a hot fudge sundae, a habit that stretched from Scott's childhood all the way through his visits to Vancouver — became the raw material for a ritual his own kids now ask about weeks in advance. Every March 14th. "Is it time to go to Dairy Queen yet?" It's not about the food. It's about the occasion the food creates.
You can do the same thing with a recipe. Make his Sunday roast. Make whatever it was. The dish itself becomes the permission structure for the conversation. The kids ask why you're making it. You tell them. He comes back into the room.
The Problem of Recipes That Don't Exist
So you want to try. Now what?
Start with whoever watched. A sibling, a parent, an aunt or uncle. Someone else was in the kitchen with him at some point. Call them. Don't frame it as research — just ask them to tell you about cooking with him, or eating with him. Stories carry more useful information than they look like they do. A detail like "he always added it at the end" or "he never measured, he just tasted it constantly" tells you something you can work with.
Then accept that the version you make will not be his version. This is not failure. Every cook who's tried to reconstruct a lost recipe knows this. The goal isn't to replicate it exactly — you can't. The goal is to make something in the tradition of it, something that carries the shape of what it was.
The approximation is its own kind of tribute. You're doing what he did: solving the problem in front of you with what you have. That's the inheritance, not the exact measurements.
It also helps to write it down once you've made it. Not to preserve some perfect version — there isn't one — but because the act of writing forces you to pay attention. What did you use? What would you change? What came close? That document, even a rough one, is something you can hand to someone else someday. You're doing for the next person what your dad probably didn't do for you: leaving a map.
When the Dish Doesn't Turn Out Right
Sometimes you'll make it and it won't taste the way you remember. This is almost guaranteed the first time, and it's its own particular ache. You did the work, you were present for it, and the result is a reminder that you can't actually get back there.
That's real. Sit with it for a minute instead of moving past it.
But also: you probably don't actually remember exactly how it tasted. Memory degrades and reconstructs. What you remember is the feeling of eating it — the warmth, the company, the safety of the table. No dish you make is going to recreate that feeling from scratch. The feeling came from all of it together: the food, the person, the occasion, the age you were.
What the dish can do is point toward it. Give you a bearing. When grief ambushes you in unexpected places, the instinct is usually to retreat — to avoid the thing that triggered it. The opposite move, the one that's harder and more useful, is to stay with it. Make the dish again. Get closer. Let the approximation become something you own.
Over time, the dish stops being purely his and becomes partly yours. You've made it enough times that your version has its own history now. That's not disrespectful to him. That's exactly how food has always worked — it moves forward through people, changing slightly with each hand that makes it.
Making It a Ritual Instead of a Relic
The difference between a grief ritual and a grief relic is whether it keeps moving. A relic is static. You preserve it, protect it, don't disturb it. A ritual lives because you repeat it, because it grows, because other people get added to it.
His recipe can be a ritual. Make it on his birthday. Make it on a random night in February when you're missing him and it makes no sense on the calendar. Teach your kids to make it — not as a solemn duty, but as something that's just what your family does. Let it be imperfect and loud and slightly wrong every time.
The family meal table is where the stories happen. Roger Nairn has talked about this: you sit down, you eat, and you tell the stories not because you planned to but because that's what family time is. Not to eulogize. Just to keep the person in the room.
A dish can hold that function better than almost anything else. It requires participation. You can't passively eat. It happens in real time, together. And when the food is his food, the meal carries his presence into it whether you meant to invoke him or not.
That's not magic. It's just how food works. It's also why losing access to his recipes feels like something more than a cooking problem.
The recipe he never wrote down is still somewhere. It's in your memory of watching him. It's in a conversation you haven't had yet with someone who was there. It's in the version you're going to approximate, and then approximate again, until something clicks into place that feels like him.
You should go find it.
Dead Dads is a podcast for men navigating life after losing their father — honest, occasionally funny, and built around the conversations most people avoid. Find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else you listen. Or visit deaddadspodcast.com.