Book Helps Cartersville Residents Preserve Family Recipes

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CARTERSVILLE, GA -- Later this month, the Bartow History Museum will welcome Valerie Frey, who will discuss her latest book, Preserving Family Recipes: How to Save and Celebrate Your Food Traditions.

Frey will discuss the value of recipes and approaching them as historical documents during the organization's Lunch and Learn event.

The event will be held at noon May 18 at the museum in Cartersville.

She will also talk about working with older recipes, give basic tips on preserving heirloom materials and briefly discuss what is needed in your toolkit to work with family recipes effectively. A book signing will follow the discussion.

Heirloom dishes and family food traditions are rich sources of nostalgia and provide vivid ways to learn about our families’ past, yet they can be problematic. Many family recipes and food traditions are never documented in written or photographic form, existing only as unwritten know-how and lore that vanishes when a cook dies. Even when recipes are written down, they often fail to give the tricks and tips that would allow another cook to accurately replicate the dish.

Unfortunately, recipes are also often damaged as we plunk Grandma’s handwritten cards on the countertop next to a steaming pot or a spattering mixer, shortening their lives. The book is a guide for gathering, adjusting, supplementing, and safely preserving family recipes and for interviewing relatives, collecting oral histories, and conducting kitchen visits to document family food traditions from the everyday to special occasions. It blends commonsense tips with sound archival principles, helping you achieve effective results while avoiding unnecessary pitfalls.

Chapters are also dedicated to unfamiliar regional or ethnic cooking challenges, as well as to working with recipes that are “orphans,” surrogates, or terribly outdated. Whether you simply want to save a few accurate recipes, help yesterday’s foodways evolve so they are relevant for today’s table, or create an extensive family cookbook, this guidebook will help you to savor your memories.

Frey is a writer and archivist from Athens, with projects focusing on genealogy, local history, storytelling, material culture and the everyday home life of our ancestors. Valerie holds degrees from the University of Georgia and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Her archives career began in the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress and she went on to serve as an archivist at the Georgia Historical Society, the Savannah Jewish Archives, and the Georgia Archives. She now writes full time.

The lecture is free to museum members and included with the price of admission for not-yet-members. For more information on this and other museum programs, call 770-382-3818 ext. 6288 or visit our website at www.bartowhistorymuseum.org.

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Image via University of Georgia Press