Uncovering the Recipes of Our Great-Grandmothers

**Note from Gena: I'm excited to welcome a guest blogger to Food.Family.Ephemera. The following is from Valerie J. Frey, author of Preserving Family Recipes:  How to Save and Celebrate Your Food Traditions (UGA Press, 2015).

My mother died over two decades ago, but her old recipe box still smells the same. Lifting the lid, I get a floury, spicy whiff – what an old paperback novel might smell like if it was left behind the counter of a donut shop. Most of the recipes came from the 1960s when Mom was a new bride or the 1970s when she was a young mother. Many recipes are credited to family, friends, and neighbors.  Out of this thick handful of cards, there are two that always gave me pause – Apple Dumplings and Rocky Road Candy.  Both are so old that my mother’s handwriting is bubbly and high-schoolish.  Both are marked “Grandma Greene.” This was her maternal grandmother who died in 1958, the plump smiling old lady from grainy black and white snapshots. (Those recipes are documentary evidence that our family’s sweet tooth hails from at least a half century ago!) The yellowed cards carry traces of Great Grandma Greene’s world so that a bit of her kitchen expertise outlives her, offering a taste of the past in that near-magical way of heirloom recipes. Once you experience that magic, you begin to crave more.

Used with permission of Valerie J Frey

Used with permission of Valerie J Frey

I’ve long been intrigued by my great grandparents. All eight of them died before I was born, yet they seem vivid and real through stories and photos. Further back in our family history the people tend to be blurry and faceless in my mind, but my great grandparents formed a sort of fence marking where “family” gave way to “ancestors.” My four great grandmothers, born between 1860 and 1888, are the corner posts of that fence. First as an amateur genealogist and then as a professional archivist, I sought more facts about them. After I married and had a child, I was especially intrigued by the patterns of their daily lives and the life skills they knew. At work, the public programs I developed for school children and adults on historic documents led to a book project on family foodways and heirloom recipes. I wanted to help people preserve and celebrate their kitchen traditions. A lovely side effect was that my research uncovered family treasures for me as well. I now have recipes from all four of my great grandmothers. Here is what I learned:

Check Family Memories – My book outlines some tips and sample questions for interviewing family about foodways. By using these techniques, I learned from my aunt that Great Grandma Greene used to make a cookie called Cherry Winks. A quick internet search revealed the recipe on the Pillsbury website as it was a well known bake-off contest winner in the 1950s. The recipe calls for such ingredients as dates, cornflakes, and jar cherries, so I was dubious. The results, however, are delicious and, according to my aunt, authentic to the family cookie jar. Now I have three recipes familiar from Great Grandma Dessie Greene’s kitchen. Asking family members for their food memories may enable you to find or develop surrogate recipes – those that don’t come directly from a family source yet are very similar or even identical to a family member’s version.

Used with permission of Valerie J Frey

Check Existing Documents – My paternal grandparents left behind a small stack of recipes on various scraps of paper. After looking them over with an historian’s eye, I realized one recipe was not in their familiar handwriting. By comparing this recipe to old family letters, I found a match – Dad’s maternal grandmother. The Lemon Pie recipe didn’t have a name on it and Grandma is no longer around to help verify, but my fellow archivists and older cousins agreed with me. The evidence overwhelmingly points to this being a recipe from Great Grandma El Myra Reaves. Any gems hiding in your recipe stash?

Check Community Sources – An elderly cousin agreed to talk with me about family foodways, but she usually cooked from memory and isn’t able to cook anymore. Just when I was resigning myself to a dead end, she said: “Back when I was a school teacher, I used to write down my recipes for when they made cookbooks to sell for the PTA.  Do you want those?” Yes, please!  She gave me three compiled cookbooks that contained dozens of her recipes. She was able to tell me which dishes she had learned from her mother and she pointed out a Jam Cake recipe. “Did I ever tell you that Jam Cake was my grandma’s specialty?”  No, she hadn’t mentioned it before, but this tidbit made me happy enough to tap dance. Now that I had a recipe from Great Grandma Hepsey Frey, I recorded my cousin telling stories about the cake and the long-ago kitchen where it was made. 

My success with community cookbooks doesn’t stop there. I found several created by churches and civic groups in the county where my father’s family has lived for many generations. Not only did I discover yummy recipes from various cousins, but I also now have sources for recipes from my grandparents’ region and time period. Comparing recipes is a great way to understand a recipe better, so these cookbooks may be keys to unlocking old family recipes that are problematic or vague. 

Check and Recheck – Mom’s older sister was one of the first people I asked about family recipes.  She sent a few from her own kitchen but said she had nothing older. As I worked on my book project, I kept her informed about my progress and we talked about recipes often. Then one day an envelope with her return address popped up in my mailbox. Inside was a handwritten recipe for Uncooked Peanut Butter Fudge from Great Grandma Minnie Cowles. Thrilled, I immediately called Aunt Judy.  “I know you asked about old recipes and I remembered I had this, but I just didn’t make the connection at first,” she confessed. “I’m glad we talked more about recipes so it jogged my mind.”  Even if you’ve asked family members about recipes, it can’t hurt to ask again. 

Before I became an archivist, I figured that the only family recipes I’d ever have were the ones I already knew about. Not true! As you visit relatives, libraries, archives, and websites in your genealogy searches, don’t forget to seek out recipes, food-related stories, related photographs, and kitchen artifacts! They are a delicious part of your history.

Bio: Valerie J. Frey (pronounced "fry") is a writer and archivist. Her projects focus on genealogy, local history, storytelling, material culture, folklife, and home life both modern and historic. Sapelo Island, Georgia was Valerie’s first home and Cleveland County, Arkansas is her ancestral homeland, so both of these places remain important source of inspiration, but she considers Athens, Georgia to be her hometown. She spent many fine childhood hours there rooting through the library, building tree forts, and seeking out wild plums.

During her early career, Valerie earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Art Education from the University of Georgia. Her master’s thesis, Folk Art in North Georgia:  A Model Curriculum, wove together art, local history, and personal narratives. Her thesis experiences and a love for her grandparents' stories lured her into pursuing a master’s degree in Information Science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where she concentrated on historical research and archives. Her second thesis is entitled Personal Information Systems:  Journals and Diaries as Process and Product. After graduate school, she served as a Junior Fellow in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress and then became Manuscripts Archivist at the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah and Archivist of the Savannah Jewish Archives. During that time, she co-authored two books focusing on historic photographs and oral histories:  Images of America:  The Jewish Community of Savannah (Charleston:  Arcadia Press, 2002) and Voices of Savannah (Savannah:  Savannah Jewish Archives, 2004). 

In 2003, Valerie became Education Coordinator of the Georgia Archives where she spent her time developing public service programs as well as creating resources for educators and their students.  She won a grant from the Georgia Humanities Council to create Down Home Days, an annual event to help kids develop a love of history. 

In 2007, marrying an Air Force officer took Valerie away from the South and she became a full-time writer as well as a consultant, contract archivist, temporary Northern Californian, and mother to one easygoing and charming boy. Now that she has returned to Georgia, her current book project with the University of Georgia Press, Preserving Family Recipes:  How to Saveand Celebrate Your Food Traditions was released November 1, 2015.  She is now working on new projects and keeps a blog at www.farmtomarketroad.com.