Oceans -- I love looking through a loved one's cookbook, and seeing their handwritten annotations. I also like seeing hand written recipes.
I found a recipe for pound cake from the 1870s or thereabouts, in my husband's grandmother's recipe collection, and it went something like this -- "pound of flour, pound of butter, pound of eggs, beat the devil out of it." And that was it.
That same grandmother also practically wrote a cookbook equivalent of a dissertation on scuppernong wine (a kind of muscadine). I saved the one we use, which warns, no less than three times, not to mash the grapes. One year, we did -- and we were punished with a bitter batch of wine.