Ancestry Magazine

Handed-down family recipes are a source of family history.

Writer and historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes about the idea of tracing “female inheritance through recipes.” It’s an interesting thought, although she finds it has its flaws, as you’ll see when you read her story, “Danish Pancakes” (see page 19). However, family recipes certainly have a connection to family history. A simple (and often-told) story about pot roast started me thinking about this connection. In the story, a young bride is preparing pot roast for dinner. Her husband watches as she carefully cuts each end off the roast before putting it in the roasting pan and placing it in the oven.

"Why did you cut the ends off the roast?” he asks.

"I don’t know,” she replies, “that’s just the way my mother taught me.” The next time the young woman talks to her mother, she asks about trimming the ends off the pot roast.

"I don’t know why,” her mother answers, “but that’s how your grandmother always did it.” On a visit to her grandmother, the young woman asks about the pot roast.

"Oh,” replies the grandmother, “I had to do that simply because my roasting pan was too small to fit an entire roast.”

Grandma’s answer explains the mysterious “cut off the ends” tradition. It also raises the question, Why didn’t Grandma have a larger pan? The answer is probably simple enough—perhaps she just never bothered to buy a larger one. On the other hand, a family historian with an active imagination might indulge in a slew of fanciful questions: Were Grandma and her husband too poor to afford new pots and pans? Could they only afford a small home with a tiny kitchen and scanty cupboard space? Had they been forced to jettison a lot of household goods to travel to America or across the plains?

Granted, these questions take a sizeable leap from the starting point of the pot roast story. But they do illustrate how details of a family’s history can be linked to what, and how, a family cooks.

From Cookbook to Novel
Handed-down recipes in a family often have stories associated with them which add richness to a family history. These recipes and stories can make your family history more vivid. Just ask Janice Woods Windle, the author of True Women, a historical novel based on the lives of her ancestors. Windle started out with the intention of compiling family recipes as a wedding gift for her son and his bride-to-be in 1985. But as she pored over piles of recipes, letters, and diaries, she pieced together a fascinating story. Not long after presenting her son with the recipe book, she borrowed it from him so she could use it while writing True Women, a novel chronicling the lives of three generations of her family in Texas, from the fall of the Alamo to the Second World War.

Initially, Windle thought that her mother, a former schoolteacher and historian, would be more involved in writing the family story. But her mother kept urging her to write episodes, “and over the course of six years, it just kind of escalated.” Windle says she eventually chose the historical novel format, rather than a traditional family history, so that she could write dialogue and “capture the melody of the women’s voices.”

Runaway Wedding Cake
True Women was published in 1993. Twelve years after getting the idea to compile the recipe book, Windle finally had time to produce the True Women Cookbook, published this year. The cookbook is full of stories about Texas history and about Windle’s family and forebears, and features such recipes as “Reverend Potter’s Hellfire and Brimstone Chili,” “Every-Sunday-After-Church Chicken,” and “Runaway Wedding Cake” (a cake prepared for an ancestor’s elopement). Windle says she discovered a lot about her relatives by looking at their recipes: “Women write around the margins of a recipe, making notes, mentioning events where the dish was served—baptisms, family reunions, and so forth—so you can really track a woman’s life through her recipes.” While she was researching her ancestors’ cookbooks, Windle was struck by the way the women had taken responsibility for their families’ well-being: She found notations such as “Peter is allergic to pecans” and “this soup sustained Bettie through her long illness.”

When asked what advice she would give others who are interested in compiling a family history or recipe book, Windle says she feels it’s important to involve children in the process, to teach them about their lineage. She also recommends recording stories that you’ve heard, then recording interviews with family members. Taking along old photographs, Windle says, may help jog an older relative’s foggy memory.

Bathtub Gravy
There are those who haven’t felt compelled to pen a sweeping historical novel inspired by the lives of their forebears, but simply wanted to preserve family recipes for posterity; this is what my mother and her sister decided to do. They conceived of compiling a family recipe book to give to each of their families as a Christmas present. Thus began the arduous task of going over their own recipes, as well as the recipes that my grandmother, who passed away a few years ago, had left behind. The long and involved process produced a welcome gift: Our families now have a cookbook that includes all the family favorites, many of which have been handed down from my great-grandmother to my grandmother, to my mother and aunt.

My family’s English heritage is evident in such recipes as Yorkshire pudding, plum pudding, and mustard pickles. My great-grandmother passed along her recipes for homemade bread, roast beef, and gravy (the gravy was always a favorite, and the family joke was that it was made in the bathtub to make sure there would be enough to meet the demand).

My great-grandmother’s parents were early settlers in Utah, and the necessity of laying in provisions for the winter was reflected in Great-Grandma Carrie’s penchant for canning and preserving. My mother remembers the delights contained in Carrie’s fruit room: jars and jars of peaches, cherries, and raspberries. Today my mother and aunt still use Carrie’s recipes for making home-canned peaches and chili sauce.

An Heirloom in the Making
Sometimes a family recipe book doesn’t necessarily contain handed-down recipes, but recipes that will be handed down to future generations. Ken and Connie Bean married later in life, combining their families from their previous marriages. When they created a family cookbook, they included recipes that both sets of children had learned to love, and then personalized the book with inspirational thoughts and quotations for their children to pass down through the family.

There are as many ways to preserve a collection of family recipes and traditions as there are families. If you want to create an heirloom recipe book, think about including these elements in it:

• Original handwritten recipe cards
• Stories telling how certain recipes came into the family
• Anecdotes about which recipes were family favorites
• Photographs of ancestors
• Stories about ancestors

Janice Woods Windle cherishes a steamed pudding recipe given to her by her beloved grandmother-in-law, and talks about families becoming close through the sharing of recipes. My mother puts it this way: “Food, what we eat, what we cook, is the core in so many families.”

Alyssa Hickman Grove is a Salt Lake City-based reporter and freelance writer. She is the former managing editor of Ancestry Magazine.