Why – and How – to Create a Family Cookbook

Just over two years ago, I wrote a blog about trying to recreate my Grandmother Bess’ “mystery” pie. This thin vanilla custard creation is a mystery because no one knows how to make it. My 97-year-old mother would love to have a piece of that pie. When they were girls, she said, she and her three sisters would eat it immediately.

It seems that when they were growing up, they didn’t help with the cooking; they were assigned to other jobs. Their mother made that pie almost every week, but not one of the girls ever observed, and the recipe was never written down. While they all tried – as did I – we haven’t been able to get it just right. Inspired by this fruitless quest, I’ve decided to create a cookbook to capture my family’s treasured recipes for posterity.

Collecting recipes, stories, and memories

On a recent visit back to Illinois to celebrate my mother’s birthday, I corralled my sisters (that’s us pictured above, circa the mid-1950s) to make sure that I have all the best – as well as the most traditional and best-remembered recipes from the family meals. The process has been thorough. I’ve had conversations with almost every family member from each generation (not relying on e-mail). Several had mentioned a certain dish that they would love to make – but guess what! They don’t have the recipe. So, I’ve tried to track them down, getting in touch with the original creators, but of course, that’s not always possible.

As you might imagine, this has been a fun project for me. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been collecting stories, as well, because it puts those dishes within a time and a place. I think the best family cookbooks include memories about particular dishes or meals. Through those short anecdotes, the cookbook will capture and express a lot about our family traditions.

I hope the resulting cookbook is useful for all of us. The recipes themselves are generally easy, accessible, and make generous use of the ingredients we find locally. I will even include my Grandmother Isabelle’s broken-glass pie from the years of the Jell-O craze. I already have close to 10 of her recipes. And I just snagged her rhubarb custard pie thanks to my sister.

I will add my mother’s chicken and noodles, chicken and dumplings, and ham and dumplings. I’ll also throw in some of the salads that my sisters and I loved as kids, though our families would shun them these days. (There’s a good story to go with that.) Included at the request of children and grandchildren are specific recipes for certain sandwiches, desserts, main dishes, muffins, jams, and even lefse, a Norwegian-American specialty that my mother and I have prepared around the holidays. And, of course, I’ll include my version of Grandma Bess’ pie.

Producing the book

As for the remaining piece, putting together the book: I could take it to a Staples print shop, but I think this version deserves a more loving touch. And we want it to be durable – that’s the whole point. In the past, I’ve used Blurb (www.blurb.com) successfully for biographies I’ve written. The site has templates for cookbooks, with design tools and other elements necessary to produce a nice soft- or hardcover book for a reasonable cost. Blurb will print and bind them and ship the finished products back very quickly – in my case, in time for Christmas gifts. What a great present for grownup family members, and younger folks, too.

The moral to this story is that you shouldn’t wait to let those family recipes slip away. If you launch a family cookbook project, you can reconnect with your clan, maybe enlist others to help you, and capture not just recipes but memories.

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