From Uncle’s barbecue sauce to Grandma’s cobbler, family recipes fill us with nostalgia and draw us closer to family – if they have been saved and if they actually work right, that is.
So what can you do if a beloved recipe is sketchy, horribly outdated, impossible to read, or unwritten? How can you make sure those old handwritten recipes as well as heirloom photos and kitchen artifacts last for future generations? And did you ever stop to look at your recipes with a historian's eye, exploring what that family recipe may be telling you between the lines?
Join the SPL as Valerie J. Frey, author of Preserving Family Recipes: How to Save and Celebrate Your Food Traditions, helps us explore various aspects of our family's heirloom recipes.
Questions? Contact Kerry: keodonnell@somervillema.gov
About the Book:
Heirloom dishes and family food traditions are rich sources of nostalgia and provide vivid ways to learn about our families’ past, yet they can be problematic. Many family recipes and food traditions are never documented in written or photographic form, existing only as unwritten know-how and lore that vanishes when a cook dies. Even when recipes are written down, they often fail to give the tricks and tips that would allow another cook to accurately replicate the dish. Unfortunately, recipes are also often damaged as we plunk Grandma’s handwritten cards on the countertop next to a steaming pot or a spattering mixer, shortening their lives.
This book is a guide for gathering, adjusting, supplementing, and safely preserving family recipes and for interviewing relatives, collecting oral histories, and conducting kitchen visits to document family food traditions from the everyday to special occasions. It blends commonsense tips with sound archival principles, helping you achieve effective results while avoiding unnecessary pitfalls. Chapters are also dedicated to unfamiliar regional or ethnic cooking challenges, as well as to working with recipes that are “orphans,” surrogates, or terribly outdated. Whether you simply want to save a few accurate recipes, help yesterday’s foodways evolve so they are relevant for today’s table, or create an extensive family cookbook, this guide will help you to savor your memories.
About The Author:
Valerie J. Frey (pronounced "fry") is a writer and archivist from Athens, Georgia with projects focusing on genealogy, historical foodways, and the everyday home life of our ancestors. Valerie holds degrees from the University of Georgia and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her archives career began with a Junior Fellowship in the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress and she went on to serve as an archivist at the Georgia Historical Society, the Savannah Jewish Archives, and the Georgia Archives. She now writes full time. Her most recent book about foodways, Preserving Family Recipes: How to Save and Celebrate Your Food Traditions was released in 2015 through the University of Georgia Press. She is currently under contract for another book involving historical recipes.
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