I think I'll stick with my grandmother's recipe for buttermilk biscuits. I'm the only one who cared to learn it from her and have been fortunate to have a nephew who wanted to learn.

She also made a fabulous coconut cake that's nobody can recreate since she never used a written recipe.

Biscuits without a written recipe are more about how the dough feels so it's more forgiving. But cakes are more about chemical reactions. She made at least one cake per week so must have developed an instinct.

I used to make muffins every week and after a while didn't need a recipe as long as I kept to the same rough guidelines.

It's fun to look at very old recipes because they're less formulaic and call for a lump of lard or some other such type thing.

Heck, I have older recipes that call for a can of something and I know the can size is different nowadays.

Recipes and cooking tell us so much about the time in which they developed, be it the style of food, precision of preparation, or ingredients and flavor profile.

My nana used to make lardy cake, which was a delicious traybake, a yellow cake with fruit in it. I've found recipes online for 'lardy cake' but they're yeast-based bready things. I suspect my nana's recipe died with her, but I can still taste that cake. I've never found anything to match it.

I wonder if your lardy cake is similar to this lady cake?

You could substitute other fruits, even something like canned peaches.