Preserving our Family’s Heirloom Recipes
A pinch of this, a dash of that. Or how about a saucer of flour? Would you know how much to add? Probably not. Actually, a saucer is 1 heaping cup. A kitchen spoonful is 1 teaspoon while a dessert spoonful is 1 tablespoon. If the recipe called for you to bake in a moderately slow oven, would you know to set the oven at 325 degrees? Have you avoided trying an old family recipe because it confused you, so you stuffed in the back of the recipe box?

Most of us have at least one hand written recipe that brings back a flood of memories. The photo here shows 3 recipe cards hand written by my Grandmother, Ann Baker Robnett Johnston. She was a wonderful cook! She provided me with memories of holidays and Sunday afternoons. A hot sweltering July day and a big bowl of Homemade Peach Ice Cream. Or Thanksgiving Day and a turkey stuffed with Grandmother’s Cornbread Dressing. Maybe you remember Sunday dinner at Nonna’s and Nonno’s with homemade Sunday Gravy over spaghetti, using a recipe Nonna’s mother brought over from Italy in the late 1800s. Or Oma’s recipe for Lebkuchen, those spicy soft cookies she used to eat in Germany and introduced you to when you were a baby. Or how about the recipe for English Trifle that your Granddad fell in love with while stationed in England. Will your great grandchildren have those memories and stories if you don't share them?

Have you considered how important that hand writing is? What it could mean to your grandchildren to see a recipe written by their great great grandmother? If you have a recipe hand written by your grandmother, that is exactly whose recipe it will be to your grandchildren, their great great grandmother’s.

There are bits and pieces of history right under our noses, just waiting to be protected and shared. They are yellowing, they are tattered and torn, maybe a little stained with ingredients from years ago. I am well aware that my own children think maybe I’m a little nuts…have carried this “genealogy stuff” too far, but what if I just let it die with me? What if future generations didn’t know who I was, how important our family history was to me, how much I loved to cook? Once again… they would surely know where they are going, but if our descendants don’t know our history, they will never know where they came from.

Sitting and reading genealogy reports would be like reading that chapter in the Bible…
Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren; And Judas begat Phares ….on and on, and on. Too much “begattin’ going on!

But, on the other hand, if you compiled a book of heirloom recipes and scattered photos and stories throughout the book, you would have something wonderful to leave to your children and grandchildren! It doesn’t have to be a book with hundreds of recipes, but if you have that many, you really need to consider preserving them some way. A cookbook with heirloom recipes, photos of previous generations, photos of your grandmothers by their handwritten recipes, would truly be a work of art.

I will be teaching a 4 week class in July at ARTichokes, (a wonderful gallery and painting studio at 105th and Mission Road in Leawood, Kansas) where each person will compile just such a cookbook! We will design your cover, the layout of your recipes and history, and discuss a possible translation of your recipes, if needed. At the end of the 3rd class, I will take the books to the printer, and then at class #4 you will receive your very own Heirloom Cookbook to leave for future generations!

This might seem like too much of an undertaking if you were to do it alone, but as a group, wewill feed each other’s fires, so to speak. We will share ideas, and maybe even recipes!
The class will be posted on my blog as soon as I know the exact dates, so stay tuned! Start going through all those recipes now, get them organized along with some photographs. Bring them to our 1st class……..You are going to love your book!

One of the cards pictured above is my Great Great Grandmother Harriet Lyle Whaley's (b.July 3, 1862 in Fulton, MO) recipe for Blackberry Shrub. I did not know what a "shrub" was until I did a little research. It turns out maybe Great Great Grandmother Whaley liked to have a little toddie everyday! A Fruit Shrub is a drink.

Her recipe calls for 3 gallons of berries in a large crock, to which she added 3 ounces of "tarbic acid" dissolved in 1 quart of water. She let it "stand" for 24 hours, then she strained the mixture, added "measure to measure of sugar; bottle and seal." A bottle was opened and rum was added and Granny had herself a drink! One little note:

On the recipe card there is one word underlined; Fine!