Flambae has recipes from his grandmother. Old recipes, passed down through many generations, so really he has recipes from his great great. . . However many greats, grandmother. He'd been given it just before his family fled Afghanistan, as a way to remember her and to fuel his budding love for cooking.
They're all confined to a leather bound journal, one that looks almost homemade, but also crumbling with age. It was missing the back cover, the spine was cracked and worn to threads, the front cover was torn at the edges and weathered by generations of his family's handprints.
The papers within don't fare much better. They're all yellowed, soft. Frayed and worn and bent at the corners. Some pages are barely holding on, and Chad fears if he doesn't handle them with the care they deserve, they'll crumble to ash.
The ink on the pages has long since bled out, blotted in some places yet still mostly legible. Each recipe is handwritten in his birth language, lovingly scrawled across each paper. All the mistakes and spelling errors are on full display, merely crossed off and rewritten. There were some areas with fresher ink, sections where other grandmothers and mothers had changed ingredients to something more readily available, and altered cooking methods through the years.
While Chad had been a villain, he hadn't given the book much thought, too stuck in his head to even think about family connections. Prison gave him plenty of time to stop and think though, and once he was out as a hero through SDN, that recipe book became his favorite thing. It helped him reconnect with his parents, it helped him apologize to his sister and stick around for her kid. It reinvigorated his love for the kitchen.
When he was too scared of damaging the book further, Chad went out and custom ordered his own leather journal, and spent days painstakingly rewriting each recipe, all in his first language. It gave him more of an appreciation for his birthplace, made him more grateful that his mother kept up certain traditions and insisted on calling him his birth name rather than Chad.
The original cookbook now sits on display in his living room, sandwiched between family photos, and Robert's mom's cookbook. The new one stayed in the kitchen, front and center on the shelf of cookbooks, and the most used aside from Robert's own rewritten one of his mom's Korean recipes.
