Rhonda Gibb, a friend of mine from high school, was looking for a recipe. This is the story she shared on Facebook:
When David's mother was on hospice care, he asked for some of his favorite recipes to be included in her history book so that he would still have them after she was gone. There is something comforting about food that ties us to tradition and those we love.
Food is one of the best conversation starters for oral history work.
Here are a few family interview questions to get your creative juices flowing:
- What is your favorite family recipe and why?
- Is it part of a holiday tradition?
- Whose recipe is it?
- Did you make it with this person?
- What did it smell like?
- What does it taste like?
- How long has it been in your family?
- What’s the best part about the recipe? Making it? Eating it? Both? Why?
- When is the last time you ate it?
- Did the person hand-write the recipe? Where is the recipe now?
Rachel Trotter has written a great article on food:
What food takes you home?
Rocky Road fudge. When Steve Rockwood, CEO of FamilySearch thinks of this treat, he can almost taste home. When he was in a faraway land on his LDS Mission a few decades ago, he dreamed of the stuff, especially at Christmas. That’s why when his mother sent it to him with love, but it didn’t arrive until two months after Christmas, he picked the mold off and ate it anyway – best rocky road fudge he ever ate. The recipe was a family favorite, passed down from his grandma to his mother. Now it is a family favorite in his own family.
What’s your rocky road fudge? What is your family recipe that is home in your mouth? That morsel that the second you eat it, all the feelings of love, deliciousness and family tradition flash into your mind like a warm blanket on a winter’s night?
...[food] elicits specific memories, thoughts and questions.
What do food and recipes have to do with family history? So much! For [Rachel Trotter], when I think of food and recipes my mind goes immediately to cooking with both my grandmothers and my own mother – happy times of doing what we love and then eating it!
... I am deeply grateful that my extended family had the foresight to put a couple of family cookbooks together over the years because that is where a bulk of our cooking repertoire comes from and it shows. When Rockwood talked about family recipes, my mind immediately went to my tattered and torn ... Family cookbooks.
Challenge #1: write about what food means to you.
Challenge #2: upload a family recipe and story to family search.
(family search, top tab, find under Activies, In home, My family)
Eat What They Ate
Eating the same foods your ancestors ate is a great way to connect with them and to experience in one small way what their life was like.
POSSIBLE ACTIVITIES
- Make your favorite meal. What about this meal makes it your favorite? Do you know your family members’ favorite meals?
- Cook a favorite family recipe. Talk about the story behind the recipe: where it came from, why it is part of your family story, and how and when you enjoy it.
- Eat a favorite food of one of your ancestors or a food from a place your ancestor is from. Consider eating an ancestor‘s favorite food on his or her birthday.
- Who is the oldest person in your family? Ask him or her if he or she has any family recipes to share.
GO DIGITAL
- Take a picture of the meal you made (your own or your ancestor’s) and put the photo and recipe on FamilySearch as a Memory.
[How did I get here? Family search home page, top left pop-up]
Note: these blog pages have beautiful photo illustrations, historical information and recipes that are sure to tantalize your tastebuds! (Thank-you Rachel Trotter! - for Finnish food)
Do you have a favorite family recipe? Upload it for future generations to enjoy!
with guest MaryJan Munger.
I've followed MaryJan on Facebook as she has posted recipes based on her family heritage. She described the process to me thus:
"I choose a dinner (or at least a dish) I either know they've had from their records or, more often, one that they would likely have been familiar with, appropriate to the season [of] their birth. But I'm not religiously authentic. I want things to taste good and be healthy for my family and not be too difficult to make. I meant to write my sketches beforehand and read them at the start of the dinner but I have rarely been able to pull that off. So I make the meal and then share the story when I get it written.
"I've learned a lot about why certain recipes were common at certain times and in certain places. It's made me aware of what kinds of things grew in different climates and some of the difficulties faced - and also how some cheap and ubiquitous choices are now difficult and expensive. And taking the time to look at each story from the point of view of each ancestor has shed interesting lights for me and certainly made them seem more real to me."
Examples...
Today is the birthday of Ann Jewell, the servant girl who married her widower employer and became Ann Rowley. We could have eaten boiled ship's biscuit in her memory but instead we made Cottage Pie for the lovely farmhouse she left in Worcestershire and Malvern Apple Pudding for the beautiful green hills she could see from the front step.
December 5, was my 3rd great grandmother's ... birthday: Ann Jewell Rowley, my maternal grandmother's maternal grandmother's mother-in-law was born in the village of Leigh in Worcestershire, England, and she died in Huntington, Emory County, Utah. If you've heard the story of the Mormon handcart pioneers, you've heard her story -- not because her experience was so extraordinary, but because it was so representative. And maybe because she was particularly good at telling the story.
The prayed-over ship's biscuit that expanded to fill the Dutch oven and then the hungry stomachs of her eight fatherless children? And before that the gray-haired husband who answered, "But these are our neighbors, what harm can come to me?" to her plea that he not go out to talk to the angry mob? The precious featherbed saved from the auction of every worldly good, bundled up and borne miles and miles across the Atlantic, across half a continent, just to be ripped open on the frozen prairie, its feathers floating down like snow on snow, and the tick tucked around the sparse remaining belongings in a lightened handcart because when you came right down to it, a featherbed was just a featherbed but Zion was Zion? The sixteen-year-old son, collapsed on the snowy bank after returning over and over to carry others across the icy Platte River, whose mother refused to leave him, even when the company's captain insisted, "He's dead," pushing at him with a foot, her son suddenly opening his eyes? "I would be the happiest woman if I could reach Zion with all my children alive"?
Ann Jewell Rowley, every time.
Really, it's amazing we have so many details of her life considering she had to rely on others to put her remembrances down on paper.
I know the power of the retelling of those stories personally. Once, in a reenactment of that costly handcart trek, I sat down for a noonday rest with my back turned to the leaders of our modern well-supported trek who spoke about those early pioneers and then one of my friends began to tell Ann's story ... in first person. I felt the hair in my arms rise as that so familiar story unwound once more:
"Our handcarts were not designed for such heavy loads and we were constantly breaking down. They had been made of green lumber and were affected by the weather. Rawhide strips was used to wrap the iron rims to the wheels and the wood would shrink and the rawhide would come loose. It hurt me to see my children go hungry. I watched as they cut loose rawhide from the cart wheels, roast off the hair and chew the hide.
"There came a time, when there seemed to be no food at all. Some of the men left to hunt buffalo. Night was coming and there was no food for the evening meal. I asked God's help as I always did. I got on my knees, remembering two hard sea biscuits that were still in my trunk. They had been left over from the sea voyage, they were not large, and were so hard, they couldn't be broken. Surely, that was not enough to feed 8 people, but 5 loaves and 2 fishes were not enough to feed 5000 people either, but through a miracle, Jesus had done it. So, with God's help, nothing is impossible. I found the biscuits and put them in a dutch oven and covered them with water and asked for God's blessing, then I put the lid on the pan and set it on the coals. When I took off the lid a little later, I found the pan filled with food. I kneeled with my family and thanked God for his goodness."
(Though this story, I find, is actually word-for-word, except for "I" and "my" in the place of "my mother" and "her," from the life history of Ann's son Thomas.)
You can see yet another retelling of Ann's pioneer experience with the Willie handcart company in the movie "17 Miracles" and the documentary "The Sweetwater Rescue," as well as in various paintings, especially those of Glen Hawkins, a distant cousin.
***
Mary Ann Woodcock had her birthday back in October - in fact, she shares her day with her 3rd great grandson, my father - October 16th - but in 1804. If I could have found a different recipe from her birthplace in Birmingham, England, we would have commemorated Mary Ann a month or more ago. But I couldn't face pig trotters and so I've spent a month tracking down a source for pork liver to make faggots and peas - a dish that my dad's great grandparents were still making whenever they butchered a pig and used up everything but the squeal.
Essentially, these are meatballs spiced with nutmeg, allspice, sage, parsley and a pinch of cayenne and wrapped in caul fat (or lacking that, bacon), served with potatoes and gravy and peas. And surprisingly good - I was a little put off by the ground liver before making them.
Mary Ann too was a little put off by the prospect awaiting her. She was comfortably off in England, her husband a silversmith and also the manager of an iron foundry and her children able to attend school, though two boys had died as babies. Mary Ann and her husband had established "a family of means, never knowing want, and had very pleasant surroundings." Even when son Alfred lost three fingers when 13 in an accident while working with his father, steadying sheet iron through rollers, Mary Ann was not cowed by officious hospital staff who forbade food brought in from outside - instead Mary Ann sewed a deep pocket in her underskirt and slipped him dainties to keep his spirits up.
***
the Baked Cranberry Pudding was truly wonderful. Amen to the words of some distant Day cousin:
"from the Original Day Family cookbook
"This is one of our all-time favorite family desserts. We used to have our own little cranberry patch out beyond the barn at what is now the Roger Day family farmhouse. That is gone now, but we still make this dessert, especially at Thanksgiving and Christmas."
Baked Cranberry Pudding with Butter Sauce - perfect balance of tart and sweet, rich and plain.
***
Pumpkins were such a mainstay of the Massachusetts Pilgrims and their descendants that they even wrote a song about it:
"Stead of pottage and puddings and custards and pies
Our pumpkins and parsnips are common supplies,
We have pumpkins at morning and pumpkins at noon,
If it were not for pumpkins we should be undoon."
And so to honor Miranda Jones, born ...16 November 1784 in Berlin, Massachusetts, on the far eastern edge of Worcester County, we chose two historic pumpkin recipes from the plethora offered by Old Sturbridge Historic Village in Worcester County, Massachusetts: Gourd Soup and Winter Squash Pudding (both delicious!)
***
PS I can just imagine my descendants centuries from now reading through my journal entries and asking "What is Costco? And where can we find some..."
Saving family favorites on family search:
I tag our "family favorites recipe"(s) when I add them to family search. (In case my descendants don't know which ancestor I attached the recipe to!) That way when I search for them, it will pull up all recipes thus tagged. I like to include photos of the dish, but even more, people making or posing with the dish! If there is a fun story attached to the recipe, tell it!
example: David - oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
David/Linnea - strawberry pie glaze (you can tag more than 1 person!)
Did someone else use your same tag? You can make your tag unique or search only your close relatives...
After David's mom died, there was something comforting about making her gingerbread house recipe for Christmas. It was as if a part of her could still be with us.
see Jackie - Mom's gingerbread house (photo, pattern, recipe)
What traditional foods do you still make? Where did that tradition start?
see Sue Huber - pizzellas
What recipes are your kids always calling home to get a copy of? Include those in your memories!
Insight from Mary Jan (posted 29 Sept 2018):
A strange thing is happening as I take an hour or so on their birthdays to learn about, think about, write about each ancestor up to five generations back. I can see in their photos traces of my own parents' and grandparents' faces, in their actions and recorded words traces of myself. Where I have thought of myself as a solitary unit, bulletting through time and space with a definite beginning and end, I'm starting to feel my sense of self expanding, spreading. I am a quivering leaf on a tree too big to imagine. Or at most, I am a fruit, full of seed, streaked and reddened by my own position toward the sun, but wobbling with the tossing of larger branches, pulling from roots I can't begin to see.
Recipe Idea from Rhonda Lauritzen:
She sent out a Christmas card with a photo, recipe, and a bit of family history!
Rachel Trotter lists 3 reasons why Holiday Food and stories go together:
1. Holiday food traditions bring memories of Christmases past that we cherish.
2. Holiday food traditions teach us about our heritage, an important part of our story.
3. Holiday food traditions unite family and friends in a very unique, uplifting way.
Sometimes the unitedness comes in the preparations, sometimes it comes in the eating of the food... Santa Claus punch is a mixture of cran-raspberry drink, sprite, vanilla ice cream and raspberry sherbet.
What can you learn from recipes? How about character traits! Watch Recipe for Success...
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