About Genealogy: Creating a Family Cookbook Tips
Kimberly Powell of About Genealogy offers “Creating a Family Cookbook”, a good guide to creating a cookbook that represents the history of flavors and meals in your family to pass down to your descendants and share with other family members:
A wonderful gift for family and friends, a family recipe book is a wonderful way to combine favorite family dishes with memories of treasured family moments and members. But how to turn those family culinary favorites into an actual family cookbook?
Start by sending a letter to your relatives, asking everyone to send back one or more of their ’specialties’ by a particular date. In the letter, be sure to encourage the submission of recipes that have been passed down from earlier generations, along with a story or photo of the family member best known for the recipe. Ask for memories of times spent cooking and/or eating together, as well as photos of holiday and other family get-togethers.
For best results, and to cut down on your workload, include a sample recipe format for submissions to follow. For example, you can ask family members list the ingredients in order, together with the quantities. A fill-in-the-blank recipe form can be useful here, because it helps remind people not to leave out important information like the cooking temperature, and you can also add spaces to encourage submitters to include a brief story about the recipe’s creator or a favorite family memory. You may also want to ask family members to explain why they chose the particular recipe.
With all the good cooks in your family, why not ask them to share family recipes as well as stories of memorable meals with the rest of the family. It’s a gift that will give forever.
November 6th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Great advice on putting together a family cookbook, Lorelle. I own a little company that sells software for making family cookbooks, and I was pleased to see how many of your suggestions come with our software.
You may also consider including a birthday calendar and address book in your family cookbook. It’s so handy to have all that information in one book.
Matilda
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:53 am
Lorelle,
I am planning to write a “Family” cookbook with old recipes. When I cleaned out my mother-in-law’s house after she died, I came across old recipes and put all of them into a box. My mother (she has passed away)was an excellent cook and I call my sister many times to get mother’s recipe for this and that. I HOPE each family member can contribute recipes and that each recipe will have a story attached to it.
Do you have any suggestions about software to make such a cookbook or any tips?
I don’t want to start until I have a “format” for
each family member to use, and it should be easy to follow.
Laurie
April 26th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
@Laurie Sprague:
Honestly, I’d not invent the wheel. Use WordPerfect or Word or whatever word processor you are comfortable with and just use a “book” template and start writing, emulating cookbooks you’ve enjoyed over the years.
I recommend that you test the recipes and photograph them, as best you can, so the recipes will have visual presence. Also include photographs of your family members, maybe even their stories and memories of eating together, picnics, and other social events, which it sounds like you are doing. Then use one of the many online book publishing tools and services to print it out. There are plenty to choose from, each with their own costs and formats. Word processing files can easily be imported into them.
Actually, instead of a book, I think it would be much more fun to create a blog, since a blog can easily be converted into a book. This opens up your family’s history and recipes to a wider audience, and is much more accessible and fun. You might even get other family members to pitch in and help more since it is something they can see as you publish each story one by one. I recommend WordPress for your blog.
There are many family cookbook blogs out there preserving the history of their family’s recipes. Check them out.
Also, make sure that you do not reprint any recipes previously published without permission of the author or the estate. Copyright laws protect recipes, though check to make sure you know how the laws work covering recipes, to protect your own as well as others.
Good luck and let me know what you decide to do.