Readers share beloved legacy recipes that are served up on their holiday tables

These days, social media provides much of our culinary inspiration, but not so long ago, our favorite recipes were dogeared in cookbooks, clipped from newspapers and photocopied at work, They were tucked into kitchen drawers and stuffed into binders, reliably extracted when the

calendar flipped to holidays and special occasions. The best were hard to read and stained with use, inevitably passed around among family members and friends. These weren’t gourmet dishes. They were nostalgic timestamps, linking everyone who tasted them to moments from the past.

“I just remember my grandma always making it,” says Elizabeth Reimann about her family’s cranberry ice, a cold and creamy frozen cranberry salad that her Canadian grandmother, Dorothy Otto, served atop lettuce as a holiday side.

The recipe was handed down to Reimann’s father, David Otto, who made it throughout Reimann’s Missouri childhood. Reimann says she has no idea where the dish came from, but she continues to make it now for her Baton Rouge family. It’s a ritual that connects her to forebears.

“I just think it’s really delicious,” Reimann says. “And...