Preserving Your Favorite Family Recipes

Summary

All Of It: Preserving Your Favorite Family Recipes WNYC, Hosted by Alison Stewart
Release Date: November 26, 2024

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Introduction

In the Thanksgiving season, where food and family converge, All Of It delves into the heartfelt topic of preserving family recipes. Hosted by Alison Stewart, the episode features Valerie Fry, an archivist, researcher, and author of Preserving Family: How to Save and Celebrate Your Food Traditions. Valerie shares her expertise on safeguarding cherished culinary traditions and invites listeners to contribute their own stories and recipes.

The Importance of Preserving Family Recipes

Valerie Fry opens the conversation by emphasizing the personal significance of family recipes. She recounts her own journey of losing her parents in her mid-20s, which sparked her realization of the transient nature of generations and the importance of preserving familial traditions through food.

"I was interested in it and began kind of studying how to do that and working with different audiences... so I sort of knew, knew I was onto something."
[01:26] Valerie Fry

Valerie highlights that recipes are more than just instructions; they are vessels of family history, memories, and cultural identity. They play a crucial role in making holidays and gatherings feel familiar and comforting, even in the absence of loved ones.

Food as a Connection to Family History

Valerie discusses how food serves as a tangible link to our past, evoking memories and emotions tied to family and tradition. She shares a poignant story about her mother’s pecan pie, illustrating how the taste of a specific dish can transport one back to moments shared with family.

"It was the taste of Thanksgiving, it was the taste of home. It was the taste of our mother's hands returned."
[04:16] Valerie Fry

This personal anecdote underscores the deep emotional connections that recipes can foster, making them essential for maintaining a sense of continuity and belonging across generations.

Listener Contributions: Stories and Solutions

Alison Stewart opens the lines for listener calls, inviting people to share their family recipes and the emotions tied to cooking them. Several heartfelt stories emerge:

Lori from Teaneck: Adapting Traditions

Lori shares her experience of modifying her grandmother’s chicken chopped liver recipe to fit her vegetarian lifestyle, ensuring that the dish remains a beloved family tradition.

"Every time we have it, I think of my wonderful grandmother."
[10:32] Lori

Suha from Huntington County, NJ: Preserving Cultural Heritage

Suha recounts how she preserves her Palestinian heritage by cooking her mother’s makluba, a traditional dish that delights her in-laws and honors her late mother.

"Our pepper pot memories will continue."
[20:52] Suha

Kevin from Denver, Colorado: Managing Recipe Variations

Kevin discusses the challenges of maintaining the authenticity of his mother’s apple crisp recipe over the years, despite having it written down.

"It's like crazy."
[14:36] Kevin

Translating Oral Recipes to Written Form

Valerie provides practical advice for listeners looking to document their oral family recipes. She emphasizes the importance of recording conversations, using kitchen scales for accuracy, and preserving the stories behind each dish.

"Just to take the time to jot that down is very helpful."
[08:18] Valerie Fry

Valerie suggests starting with one recipe at a time to avoid feeling overwhelmed and to ensure each entry is meaningful and accurately reflects the original.

Caller Stories: Beyond Recipes

Listeners also share how they use tangible items and kitchen tools to keep their family's culinary legacy alive:

Sam from Manhattan: The Power of Family Heirlooms

Sam talks about using a pepper grinder and a nut chopper inherited from her in-laws to prepare traditional dishes, which keeps her connected to her family's culinary history.

"What a wonderful solution."
[21:00] Sam

Creating a Family Cookbook

Valerie outlines steps for families interested in compiling their recipes into a cohesive cookbook. She recommends using templates, incorporating photos and stories, and making the process enjoyable by starting small.

"Start one recipe at a time."
[22:10] Valerie Fry

Final Listener Contributions

The episode concludes with additional listener stories, such as Donald from the Bronx, who ensures his Guyanese pepper pot recipe is passed down to future generations, and Ellen from Jackson Heights, who commemorates her mother by sharing a cherished recipe printed on plates.

"This stuff is very resonant, right?"
[21:55] Sam

Conclusion

All Of It effectively illustrates how preserving family recipes is a labor of love that transcends mere cooking. Through Valerie Fry’s insights and the shared experiences of listeners, the episode highlights the profound connections food fosters within families and communities. Whether adapting recipes for modern lifestyles or meticulously documenting ancestral dishes, the preservation of these culinary traditions ensures that the flavors of the past continue to enrich future generations.

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For more stories and to share your own family recipes, call or text WNYC at 212-433-9692.

Transcript

[Lulu]

Hey, Lulu here. Whether we are romping through science, music, politics, technology, or feelings, we seek to leave you seeing the world anew. Radiolab Adventures Right on the edge of what we think we know.

[Alison Stewart]

Wherever you get Podcasts.

[Mike Carruthers]

Listener supported WNYC Studios.

[Alison Stewart]

This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Food and family are always on our minds around Thanksgiving. And how many of us are looking forward to enjoying or preparing recipes that have passed down from generation to generation? Family recipes are the backbone of how we gather together and celebrate the holidays. But of course, it's not the easiest to get that stained index car from grandma or grandpa or the recipe isn't even written down. Valerie Fry is an archivist and researcher and author of the book Preserving Family how to Save and Celebrate youe Food Traditions. She's also the author of the forthcoming book Georgia's Historical Recipes. She's here to give us advice on how to preserve our family recipes and to take your calls. Hi, Valerie.

[Lulu]

Hi. Thank you for having me.

[Alison Stewart]

Great. Thanks for being here. Let's start with the basic questions. Why is preserving family recipes important?

[Lulu]

You know, you start to talk about it, it kind of gets personal in a hurry. For me, I lost both of my parents before I was in my mid-20s. It was sort of a crash course in realizing that the generations before us are not always going to be with us. And among the many things that I wished I had asked were how to make some of the things that were important to us. I have a older brother and it was just the two of us left. And, you know, how do we scoop up our lives and make holidays feel comfortable and familiar and how do we pass that to the next generation when we were missing the generation above us? So I was interested in it and began kind of studying how to do that and working with different audiences. I was education coordinator at the Georgia Archives, and so I started including information about recipes in my presentations and it seemed to really strike a chord. I would do an hour long presentation about preserving all kinds of family materials, and at the end it was the recipes that people would be asking questions about. So I sort of knew, knew I was onto something.

[Alison Stewart]

What is it about food that makes us feel so connected to our family history?

[Lulu]

You know, I think we can talk about Proust and his Madeline, but really what it comes down to is how personal it is. I know Thanksgiving for me. My mother always made these little round pecan pies and I tried after she was gone to make them. And thank goodness I had her cookbook. Thank goodness she had scribbled notes in the margins. But I still had trouble making that recipe so that it would really taste like hers. I would, I would pass them out at Thanksgiving and everybody would, everybody liked them except for my brother would kind of give me the side eye and shake his head because it just wasn't quite right. But when I finally did unlock that recipe, I remember my brother, his, he, he took a bite, he closed his eyes and stopped chewing. And then his eyes flew open and he said, val, this is a little round time machine. And he laughed. And my brother, who is a crusty firefighter and former Marine, had tears kind of in his eyes because this was the taste of Thanksgiving, it was the taste of home. It was the taste of our mother's hands returned. So I don't know that we can really pin down more than that. But I think for many of us, especially the food of our youth or the food of very good times or the food of people that we know love us, it is indeed a connection that brings us back to something important.

[Alison Stewart]

Listeners, get in on this conversation. What's a family recipe that's important to you and you love to make? How does it make you feel to cook it? Our number is 2124-3396-9221-2433 wnyc. Where does the recipe come from? How has been passed down 212-433-9692. Or maybe you have a recipe you love but you're really unsure to go about preserving it. We can try to help. Our number is 2124-3396-9221-2433 wnyc. You can call that number or text to us now. So as we wait for these calls to come in, you have a story in your family about a certain stew that your grandma father made to impress your grandmother. And it was quite a surprise. Would you share that story?

[Lulu]

Yeah. My mother, she and my dad met in college. She was from the Pacific Northwest and had never been outside that. And she met this guy in college who was from a little rural cotton town, a tiny town in Arkansas and they got married. She was not my grandmother was sick and so they weren't able to come to the wedding. So at Christmas time, my newlywed parents went from the Portland, Oregon area to Arkansas for the first time. And my dad was the only child but my grandpa was one of 14. So this little two bedroom house was stuffed with people who came to inspect the new bride. And my grandfather was the cook in the family after my grandmother got sick. So he made his signature stew, which was called Mulligan. And after this marathon long prayer of thanks, my mother finally got the first bowl of soup. She was starving, she said, and as the guest of honor, she's given the first bowl, and she looks down, and in the middle of the bowl is a little skull. Nobody thought to tell her that it was squirrel Mulligan and that this was something just so completely ordinary to that part of Arkansas. And she was completely flummoxed on what to do, but my father sort of scooped it out. And by the way, the brain is a delicacy, but it's too tender to survive being stirred in the pot. That's why the skin skull is added, and then you crack it open to get the brain out. So my father did that and enjoyed it in her stead. But it was a really funny family story. And when my parents died, that recipe was one of the first ones that I thought, I gotta have this.

[Valerie Fry]

What can we learn from that?

[Alison Stewart]

What can we learn from the squirrel stew?

[Lulu]

What I learned was that when I asked my grandpa for a recipe, he just laughed at me because he didn't write anything down. And then he took a stab at it, but he didn't realize how much he knew. He didn't tell me how much liquid to put in the pot, how you choose your tomatoes. Thankfully, he did modify it for chicken, so I didn't have to go to the local park and hunt down any squirrels. But he and I did a lot of back and forth trying to get this recipe right. And the other thing I learned, not just that it takes a little time, but that it's a real pleasure. My grandpa and I, through phone and through letters, really enjoyed this process, has brought us closer together and really made me an enthusiast of tracking down those recipes. And even if they aren't always easy, even if they don't always work on the first try, when you are in that process, your hands are doing the motions that someone else has done before you. You're learning bits and pieces, and by the time you get to the end of that recipe and you've mastered it, you've mastered a lot of kitchen skills and knowledge at the same time. So it's a. It's a win win.

[Alison Stewart]

So we're talking to our elders. We want to find out about these recipes. What are some helpful questions to learn more about a recip recipe's backstory or how it's prepared?

[Lulu]

I think just asking those questions, I mean, I think a lot of times we expect that People are just going to be forthcoming and tell us things. But to ask, why is this recipe important to you? When did this come in the family? Are there any funny stories or warm stories about this food? You'd be surprised sometimes what people don't think to tell you. And then just to take the time to jot that down is very helpful.

[Alison Stewart]

We got a text here that says, my grandmother was born in 1900 and she made classic apple pie.

[Valerie Fry]

I've not found anything as good as the 20 in the 21st century.

[Alison Stewart]

Can you explain to somebody why it might taste a certain way initially, and then when we follow a recipe for apple pie, it might not taste the same?

[Lulu]

I interviewed a lady who was in her 90s, and she said that she hated pecan pie because it was her favorite. And I had just like, how do I even unpack that sentence? But what she meant was, when she was a girl, they had a pecan tree in their yard that had wonderful tasting pecans that eventually got old and died, and no pecan has ever matched that flavor for her. And I think sometimes there are recipes that are somewhat lost to time, that the ingredients have changed. You know, I think if it was me, the first thing I would tackle is what kind of apples were used. You know, what? How could I get that particular flavor back and just try to break apart the pieces? You know, was it the crust that was so good? Do I need to work on trying different types of crust? What was the filling like? Was it really loose? Was it kind of gel like. That would kind of help you look at other recipes to see what kind of ideas you could bring into it. But it is a process and it is a fun process.

[Alison Stewart]

My guest is Valerie Fry. She's an archivist and a researcher. She's also authored the book Preserving Family how to save and celebrate your food traditions. Let's take some calls. Let's talk to Lori, who is calling in from Teaneck. Hi, Lori, thank you so much for calling all of it.

[Lori]

Hi.

[Alison Stewart]

Hi, you're on the air.

[Lori]

Yes, yes, yes. I'm calling because I love my grandmother Hilda, and she made wonderful chicken chopped liver. But I'm a vegetarian, so I have changed her recipe to a vegetarian chopped liver. And everyone loves it. I love it. And every time we have it, I think of my wonderful grandmother.

[Alison Stewart]

Love the story.

[Lulu]

Oh, good for you. What a wonderful solution.

[Alison Stewart]

Let's talk to Suha, I think it is, or Suha from Huntington County, New Jersey. Hi, thanks for calling.

[Suha]

Hi, how are you? Thanks for taking my call.

[Alison Stewart]

Sure.

[Suha]

So I am Palestinian American. And my mom, and I'm sure she inherited that from her grandma. And you know, generations before we have this traditional Palestinian dish called makluba. And just, I mean, a lot of the families know how to make it, but somehow my mom's was always different and better. And you know, I inherited that recipe from her. And I didn't marry a Palestinian. So for my in laws, every time I make it, it's like a, it's like a big wonder. And I, you know, they all like get excited and it's always like a big wow. And you know, every time my, both, my, both of my parents passed away and every time I make it, I just kind of remember my mom. I mean, I did, I did change it a little bit to accommodate, you know, some other flavors. But, you know, it never fails. People even request it every time they come over my house.

[Alison Stewart]

Love it. Thank you so much. Suha. Following that question, in families, many times a recipe won't be written down, Valerie.

[Valerie Fry]

But it's passed down from generation to generation. What should folks keep in mind if they're trying to translate a recipe from oral to written?

[Lulu]

It is somewhat of a process. If you're talking with somebody in real time, it really helps to record it. So you can listen later and you can check back and make sure that was three cups rather than a third of a cup. You know, those sorts of things. And then you know, to save that recording because that is a treasure also. Otherwise, I think that just making sure that you have the recipe as accurately as you can and then saving stories and traditions attached to it is a wonderful start.

[Valerie Fry]

My guest is Valerie Fry, archivist and researcher. She's also the author of the book Preserving family How to save and celebrate your food traditions. We would love to know what's a family recipe that you love to make? How does it make you feel to cook it? Where's the recipe come from? How has it been passed down? Our phone number is 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. We'll have more after a quick break.

[Mike Carruthers]

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[Valerie Fry]

This is all of it.

[Alison Stewart]

You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Valerie Fry. She's an archivist and researcher and the author book Preserving Family how to Save and Celebrate youe Food Tradition. She's also the author of the forthcoming book Georgia's Historical Recipes. She's here to give us a advice on how to preserve our family recipes. And take your calls. Calls like Kevin, who is calling us from Denver, Colorado. Hi Kevin.

[Kevin]

Hey, how you doing, Allison? And shout out to Lori from Teaneck. I learned this recipe from my mom in Teaneck. I helped her as a little kid with this recipe. It was my job to peel the apples and cut the apples, but she never let me mix the batter. Okay, so when she passed away, it's a recipe for Apple crisp. I got the recipe in her handwriting. I had the recipe, but every time I've made it in like the last 10 years, myself and my brother and sister say it's good, but it don't look like it and it ain't quite the same. So, you know, and I mean, I had experience making this with her, you know, so it's like crazy.

[Alison Stewart]

There might be an answer to that. Valerie, what is one of the, what is one of the answers to why it might not just be the same?

[Lulu]

With the little pecan pie recipe that I told you about, I realized that I'm kind of a rule follower. And so when I learned the proper way to measure flour, I fluff it a little, I dump it in measuring cup and level it off. If I'm going to measure by volume, in fact, usually I just do by we. My mother just kept her flour in the bag and she would dip the measuring cup in. So she was compacting her flour and I realized that hers had a good bit more flour than I thought it should. And when I made it her way with extra flour, that was it. That was what made it taste like it should. So one of the tricks that I have used before is if you go looking for recipes online, there's some great recipe websites out there. Find something that's close and, and then start reading all the comments. So when people will say, oh, I tweaked it this way or I tweaked it that way, you may find, hey, that's the tweak that I was looking for to make mine work also. So that's a good trick.

[Alison Stewart]

To know there's also you can use scales.

[Valerie Fry]

I know that you use scales a lot to try to figure out what's in a recipe, right?

[Lulu]

Yes. I am a big fan of using a kitchen scale because I'm a home baker mostly. But you can also use your scale as a trick when you're interviewing someone about a recipe. Sometimes these old fashioned cooks, they'll put in a handful of this or a handful of that. And if you try to stop them and slow them down and get them to measure, it breaks their concentration and they get frustrated and everything's suddenly not working. But I discovered that if you weigh all the ingredients before they start and then weigh all the ingredients, the remaining remainder ingredients again when they're done, you know how much they used. So maybe they're just using handfuls out of the flour bag. But if you weigh it before and after, you will know how much flour they used.

[Valerie Fry]

Let's take some more calls. Ellen is calling in from Jackson Heights. Hi, Ellen, thanks for calling all of it.

[Lori]

Hi. Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I wrote or, sorry, I submitted a song in homage to my mother during the Public Fung project, and you've piqued my memory with this particular episode of her as well. She got married in 1958 and got an electric frying pan as a wedding gift, and it came complete with the recipe for frankfurters and noodles. She was not the most gifted of cooks, but her five kids loved it. She passed away in 2003, and a couple of years ago I found her handwritten, beautiful cursive recipe of this, and I had it printed on plates for all of my siblings for a Christmas.

[Valerie Fry]

That is so lovely. Thank you so much. Valerie, this brings up an interesting point. Does it matter what kind of pots or pans that your ancestors used?

[Lulu]

Sometimes it does. I think we've probably many of us have heard the folk story of somebody that they always cut the end of the roast off. And when they finally asked their grandma, their mother, why they did that, they said, well, my grand. The grandmother had done that. They asked the grandmother, she said, well, I had a pan that was too small, so I always cut that off. So I think a lot of times we do do some of the traditions we do based on the kitchens. We have the tools that we have at the time. But I know my grandfather used what looked like a frying pan without sides. It was a cast iron skillet that was round. And a lot of the mag of his cooking was he'd pull something out of a pot and then get it hot sizzle, you know, edges of a piece of fried fish or whatever on that hot griddle before moving it onto the plate. And I had to track down one of those because, you know, to get his fried fish to taste the same, I needed that one extra step. So sometimes, yes, you have to go searching and looking.

[Alison Stewart]

Let's talk to Donald, who's calling in from the Bronx. Hey, Donald, thanks for calling all of it.

[Donald]

Hi, good afternoon. My word have taken to get on, but I'm calling in reference. I'm from Guyana, South America. And there's a dish called pepper pot, which is a way of it's not quite a stew. It's a casual based preparation where we gather all the number of different meats and it's cooked down in a cast in a kashrip base to this wonderful, dark, incredibly tasteful stew. And it is designed so that it can be reheated on a multiple basis. And it gets better every time it's reheated. It goes right through the holidays. Now, my mother was the expert doing this and I wanted to make sure that this recipe got into the next generation. So I got my wife, my daughter and my sister and I had my mother up at the house one weekend and my wife documented the recipe and now she's transferring it to my grandchildren and my children's spouses. So our pepper pot memories will continue.

[Alison Stewart]

Love the story. Thank you so much, Donald. Let's talk to Sam calling in from Manhattan. Hi, Sam.

[Sam]

Hi there. Happy almost Thanksgiving.

[Lori]

Yes.

[Sam]

You know, I'm standing here in my kitchen listening to this segment as I fill a pepper grinder that my parents bought in 1961 on their honeymoon in Jamaica. And it's not just the recipes. You know, sometimes it's the tangible object. I also happen to have my husband's grandmother's nut chopper that I pull out every year at Passover to make haroset. And every year I would call my mother in law and say, I'm using grandma's nut chopper. And she would say, oh, I'm so pleased. And we lost her this year.

[Lulu]

Thank you.

[Sam]

This stuff is very resonant, right? The food, the traditions, the generations, what's passed down. It has immense meaning.

[Valerie Fry]

Thank you so much for sharing your family story. We really appreciate it.

[Alison Stewart]

It's possible, though, to get people together, Valerie, and make a family cookbook. What tips do you have for folks.

[Valerie Fry]

Interested in making their own version of family recipes?

[Lulu]

It's fairly easy to do. There are lots of templates out there. If you kind of do a search for that online. There are various companies that make it easy where they even share a link and everyone can upload their recipes. But I think the one thing that I've heard over and over again is people decide to start really big and then it's a project that they don't end up finishing and they feel guilt rather than pleasure. I always say start one recipe at a time. For my son and my nieces and nephews, I gave them nice binders. And when I work with family recipes or new things, sometimes at Christmas time, I'm like, here's six new pages to put in your binder. I add a scan of the original recipe as an image so that they can see the handwriting. I type it up so that it's workable. I try to put also a photograph of that person and then a little bit of the family history. My son, of course, didn't know my parents and neither did my husband. But they know their faces and they know their recipes. They know a lot of family members by the photos and the recipes and the stories in that book. So it's a great way to connect generations using recipes.

[Valerie Fry]

This last text My family recipe is my great aunt's Park Parker House dinner rolls. Family lore is that my great aunt taught my mother how to cook and how to make the rolls. I continue the tradition to make the rolls every Thanksgiving. My family thoroughly enjoys fresh baked bread every holiday. That's a great text to go out on. My guest has been Valerie Fry, archivist and researcher. Hey Valerie, thank you so much for your time today.

[Lulu]

Thank you. I really enjoyed it and enjoyed the stories.

[Alison Stewart]

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