A Recipe For Your Family History

Family Recipe Books Hold Family Stories

What’s important to you? Your family?  Your friends? Food? All are common answers to the question: What’s important to you?.  Food and family are so common a combination and the kitchen so central a place to where families often gather don’t overlook the importance of family recipe books when you research your family history.

As the family gathers to celebrate major holidays such as Christmas, Easter and significant birthdays many of us have family recipes for those special celebratory foods that somehow the celebration wouldn’t seem the same without.  Other families share the cooking duties and gather in the kitchen, either getting in the way or helping, as we prepare food to later share. And at the parties themselves most often the kitchen is the most populated place at any significant family gathering.  There is something primeval about food and its preparation, central to the hearth and the inbuilt knowledge of the importance of fire, food and warmth to the wellbeing of family.

But what about the family recipe books themselves? Have you ever stopped to really look at a family history book?  Not the ones you buy in the shop but those that have been written out by hand and which have evolved as the keeper of the book evolved.  Passed down from generation to generation these family history gems often contain much more than how many eggs and how much flour goes into a particular dish. They are snapshots of time. Recipes written on the back of envelopes, letters from friends or family that contain more than just a shared recipe.  These gems give you an insight into the personal interactions of the owner or owners of the recipe book.

The photos accompanying this blog are from one of my own family recipe books.  The family recipe book once belonged to my patriarchal grandmother. It’s now passed through my own mother’s hands and on to me and I can trace entries and cuttings placed there by both.  I have always endowed it with significance but what can it tell me beyond the recipes themselves?

Firstly there is the book itself.  A ledger book in origin, when asked,  my father tells me it was from my Great Uncle Bob’s office, a desk accountant at a major newspaper in New Zealand.  No doubt it was permanently “borrowed” from there as it was well bound and provided lots of pages for entries. The well thumbed corners and the stains on various pages tell me its own story.

Recipes Can Be Recycled Family Letters

Another item that is well worn and wrinkled is the hand written letter from “Flossie”, my Great Aunt to her sister “Aggie” my Grandmother, a direct connection to Flossie as the letter is undated but can be placed in a period as it asks about “Bobbie” my father coming back from some military training and my Grandfather registering to vote so with a little more detective work I could date it fairly accurately.  And the recipe on the back of the letter? This is for a chocolate cake, a favourite in our family.

Family History Grocery List 1957

On turning over another recipe I find the store docket from Blue & White Stores, from days when you went into the grocer and sat on a chair and gave him your order. Dating from May 1957 it’s an historic snapshot of what was ordered at the time and what it cost.

Family Recipes for Health

Another section of the recipe book itself has detailed recipes for making homemade potions for curing ailments.  In a time when medicine was expensive and home cures were quite common this tells me what my grandmother thought important for her family.  yet another slip of paper, typed, details out a special diet my grandfather had to stick to after he suffered a heart attack and was confined to working from home a few hours every day until he passed on from the same condition a few years later.

Envelopes Tell You Stories

The last photo I have included is an envelope address to Signalman M. B. Lawrence, post stamped 1943. Right in the middle of the WWII every scrap of paper was re-used and so I can see this was to my Uncle, sent to his army base and then to his home address perhaps because he was on leave, it seems to have followed him about.

All of these items are of interest to me and some are of general interest.  It tells of a family that sent short letters to each other to keep in touch and the various scraps of letters also indicate who wrote to who most regularly as those letters were re-used to write on the back of them.  It shows the grocery purchasing of the time and the prices of goods and also the address where the family was living at the time.  The recipe book also records what family recipes were used for health care and therefore what ailments feature in the family history and how they treated themselves with home remedies.  And it has snippets of my Father and my Uncle’s military service with references in letters and mail addresses to them whilst in service.

So the next time you pick up a family recipe book have a closer look and see what yours can tell you about your own family’s story.