Genealogy isn’t only about looking up documents, and doing searches on websites. It can also be about documenting important pieces of family history. This includes the foods that you associate with the family member who used to make it. Here are some tips about how to track down long, lost, family recipes.
In my family, there is a special recipe for potato salad that has been handed down from my grandmother. I can’t tell you all of the ingredients that are in this recipe, but I can assure you that it is absolutely delicious. One of my brothers has renamed it from “Grandma’s potato salad” to “Dave’s potato salad”. That’s fine by me. I’m just happy that someone is still making this family recipe. Maybe his children will learn how to make it when they get older.
You probably have some family recipes that you remember from when you were a child. It could be a food that reminds you of a particular family member. Or it could be a certain food that was traditionally served at birthdays, Christmas, or other holidays. What if the specific details of that recipe have been lost?
Genealogists can embark on a quest to figure out the missing pieces of a long, lost, family recipe. The first thing you should do is start asking your relatives about what they remember about that recipe. There is the possibility that one relative will remember part of the list of ingredients, and that another may recall some of the ingredients that the first relative did not remember.
You should ask several relatives if any of them happen to have written down the recipe. Who is it that inherited mother’s, or grandmother’s, hand written recipes? Has anyone digitized that information? Maybe one of your family members wrote a blog about the exact recipe that you are searching for.
Another way to fill in the missing pieces of a family recipe is to do some reverse engineering. Start with the ingredients that you know, for certain, were part of that recipe. You are going to do have to do a bit of guesswork about the rest.
See if you can narrow it down by crossing off the potential ingredients that you are certain that your relative would not have used. Get ready to do a little bit of “trial and error”. Take your best guess about the missing ingredients. Does it taste right? If not, then substitute one of those guessed ingredients with a different one.
Old cookbooks can provide you with some clues. See if you can figure out approximately what year your relative would have been making that recipe. Cookbooks from that time period can give you hints about what some of the most commonly used ingredients were back then.
Image by Edward O’Connor on Flickr