Four Simple Ways to  Share Your Family’s Food Heritage

 

My family invented pink lemonade—at least that’s how the story goes.  My ancestors Jeremiah and Edmund Mabie founded the Mabie Brothers Circus in the early 1800’s.  According to The American Circus, acrobat Pete Conklin was making lemonade one day in 1857, when he ran out of water.   Searching around the lot, he grabbed a tub in which the equestrienne, Fannie Jamieson, had just washed her tights.  Red dye colored the water.  He used the water anyway, and pink lemonade was created.  Conklin called it strawberry lemonade and sold it successfully for many years.

This is one version of the story, and it is probably true.  True enough to be included in our family food history, anyway.  The veracity of the story isn’t the important part—it’s the tradition that matters.

Every family has a history—where they are from, what religion they observe, how many children they have.  Families also have a food history—the story of what they eat from day to day, how they celebrate, and how the memories are passed down.  The history isn’t just the method of how the food is prepared; there is also a lore that goes with it. 

Long ago, the memories of food were important because they were a record of which plants were edible and how they should be prepared.  This knowledge was passed down from parent to child as a sort of “oral” history.  Our grandmothers recorded their recipes in the margins and blank pages of their cookbooks, on recipe cards, and in the memories of their children.

Food memories, unlike other memories, are reproducible.  You may not be able to reach back in time and bring back your first kitten or re-walk your first steps, but you can make some of the same dishes you ate when you were growing up.  Did your mother bake bread?  You can also bake warm, fragrant loaves that steam up the kitchen windows.  Even if Mom wasn’t much of a cook, you can still learn to make your family’s traditional dishes. 

Food is at the heart of a family, in everyday meals and in holidays and celebrations.  Keeping the traditions alive connects us to our ancestors and future generations in a very real way.  Your family’s recipes contain a certain combination of elements that aren’t quite the same as any other family’s.  You might think that there is nothing extraordinary about the kind of foods you ate when you were growing up, but there are tremendous differences in regional cuisine.  Just compare guacamole with lutefisk, or King cake with Nanaimo bars, and it becomes obvious.

 

Here’s how you can begin:

 

  1. Gathering the Recipes

The first step in preserving your family food history is to gather the family recipes.  There are a number of ways to do this: 

What are your favorite foods? 

What  foods did you cook for Thanksgiving and other holidays?

Who taught you to cook? 

How did you celebrate family birthdays?

 

Questions can be tailored to the individual.  You could also pass the journal along from one person to another until it’s full.  The recipes and stories can then be shared, and the journal becomes a family keepsake.  You can also interview relatives by phone, letter, email, or in person to collect their recipes, memories and stories.

 

  1.  Sharing the Recipes

 

Once you have gathered the recipes, you will want to share them with your family.  There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these methods:

 

The best solution may be to use a combination of these methods.  You can put your recipe cards into ring-bound notebooks to keep them together, or have your recipes in a family cookbook and on a website, too.  Talk to your family and get their ideas before deciding on one method or another.

 

  1. Preparing the Recipes

 

Another way to keep your food traditions alive is to actually cook your family favorites.  Whether it is day-to-day food or holiday fare, this is one of the most important things you can do to ensure that your family learns about their food heritage. 

Your holiday meals reflect both your religious background and your ethnic heritage.  For example, some members of my family make a traditional Norwegian Julekake at Christmastime.  They also prepare a “Happy Birthday Jesus” cake (with one candle on it) to celebrate their religious beliefs in a personal way.  Every family has its own unique combination of ways to celebrate, and their food traditions are an important part of that celebration.

My immediate family always has waffles for Christmas Eve dinner.  Our mother was usually busy with last minute preparations on Christmas Eve, so our father would make homemade waffles, our favorite “Dad” recipe.  What started as a necessity has become a tradition. 

For Mother’s Day in most of our family, the children make crepes with strawberries for breakfast in bed.  (And if you teach your kids how to make crepes, you’ll be sure of having a good breakfast on Mother’s Day.) 

Thanksgiving, of course, is the big food holiday.  It can also be a challenge for newly married couples, especially if they are from different backgrounds.  Should you fix Grandma Rita’s stuffing with cornbread and walnuts?  Or would it be sacrilege not to make the white-bread-and-onion stuffing that your husband’s family has made for eighty-seven generations?  Holiday traditions can be kept, adapted, or eliminated—whatever works for you and your family.  That’s how new traditions are started.   

No matter what foods you prepare for the holidays, teach your kids how to make them.  They will not only pass them on to the next generation, they may make the holidays easier for you by doing some of the cooking!

 

  1. Teach your children the traditional family recipes

 

Our lives are so fast paced these days.  It’s important that our children’s food memories aren’t only of fast food.  Cook with your children—teach them the family recipes, even if you don’t think your recipes are anything special.  Children love to cook, and they will usually be your willing apprentices if you let them.  There are so many creative recipes to make with young children, such as pear bunnies or bread-dough bears.  When you cook with your children, they will not only learn about kitchen safety and food-preparation techniques, they will also learn your family history through your stories.

You and your children can take pride in cooking, and you will enjoy eating what you’ve prepared.  Family memories are built on things like this.  When I was growing up we often had a “gourmet” night in which we’d prepare all sorts of new dishes.  When things didn’t turn out the way we’d planned, that became part of the memory, too.  (Seconds on seaweed soup, anyone?)  My children still remember the time we made a “Middle Eastern Feast” with homemade pitas, hummus, tabouleh, falafel, tsatziki, and other dishes.

Teaching your children to cook will also help them when they are on their own, and they will be able to pass on the family recipes to their own children.  Food traditions become part of our daily lives, and also part of our celebrations, where the food is integral.   By cooking our ancestor’s foods, we get to know them better, and our children’s children will remember and use their recipes.  So, whether your ancestors are circus folk or just plain folks, you can celebrate your heritage every day, with every meal you prepare.

 

Sidebar:  Cookbook Publishers

Walter's Publishing
215 Fifth Ave. SE
Waseca, MN 56093
(507) 835-3691
www.custom-cookbooks.com


G&R Publishing

507 Industrial St.
Waverly, IA 50677
(800) 383-1679
www.cookbookprinting.com

Cookbook Publishers
10800 Lakeview Ave.
Lenexa, KS 66219
(800) 227-7282
www.cookbookpublishers.com

 

Fundcraft Publishing

P.O. Box 340

Collierville, TN 38027

(800) 853-1363

http://www.fundcraft.com/