Creating A Family Recipe Book

When it comes to Family Stories, there is one category that is of great importance but often gets overlooked. Family recipes figure big in our memories of going to Grandma's or Great Aunt Hazel's for dinner and having one of their specialties. 

What better way to preserve some of your family's history than to create a cookbook of the family recipes? There are presses that give you a lot of guidance and do the printing for you. One of them is Morris Press Cookbooks. There are others that you can find via a search engine. 

It's not necessary to use a publisher/press to create a Family Recipes Cookbook. You can do it on your own and have it printed and put into a booklet at a place like Staples or wherever there is a copy center. I have found the clerks in copy centers to be very helpful.

If you come from a family of immigrants, the recipes the older generations brought with them from their former country are treasures you want to keep, ones to pass down through the generations. Lately, I have been posting my blogs on a facebook page for Volga Germans to give a little help to those with this ancestry in writing their family stories. Because they have a double ethnic background, the recipes were based on both German and Russian cooking. If you have never heard of this group of immigrants who settled in Kansas and Nebraska and even Canada, take some time to read about them. 

Your family background may have roots in the European countries, Asian or Central American or African. Whatever it happens to be, what you eat was influenced by your ancestors and may still figure prominently in your recipe collection today.

One problem with the recipes that have lived through generations of a family is that the directions are not very detailed. My own grandmother, who was Irish, wrote things on her recipe cards like Add flour until it feels right. Or 2 eggs and 2 eggshells of water. There are different sizes of eggs but I suppose she just kept adding flour until the noodle dought 'felt' right. You can write the recipe as it was originally and then make notations for today's cooks. 

Because married couples are from two different families, you might want to make two cookbooks--one for each side of the family. 

After obtaining copies of the recipes to include, you need to put them in categories. For a Family Cookbook, you might arrange them according to the recipes you got from individuals. There might be a section for Aunt Jane, another for Great-Grandma Jones, and another for Cousin Lila. Or, you could put all the main dishes together, all the cookies, all the salads etc but be sure to credit the name of the person whose recipe you are using. As well as the recipes, you want to preserve the names of the people who made them and dates, if you are lucky enough to have them.

Just as in your Family Stories Book, you can arrange the cookbook any way you want to. Ask a child or teen to draw a picture to divide the categories. That makes it very personal and keeps with your family theme. Be sure to give them credit. There are endless possibilities. 

It's a big job to collect and assemble all the recipes but the result may be one that becomes another legacy within your family. Maybe two or three people can work on the book together.