For the Love of Cooking: Family Recipes

There’s something wonderful happening in cooking right now. It isn’t new, but it is picking up steam like Grandma’s pressure cooker, and we love it! In fact, it’s all about Grandma, the way she cooked, and the way it influences what we eat today. Let’s pull out our stained recipe cards and those spiral-bound cookbooks compiled by churches and women’s clubs, and talk about family recipes.

Family Recipes: Secret Ingredients

It can be difficult to find the ingredients that make a recipe taste just like ones you treasure from childhood. For example, it can be challenging to bake a great biscuit outside of the South because we’re using the wrong flour. The best biscuits are reportedly made using White Lily Flour, milled from a soft winter wheat, and lower in protein and gluten that other brands. The brand is still primarily only distributed in Southern states.

But as Bon Appetit pointed out, it’s never been easier to get your groceries online. We can’t wait to check out Snuk Foods. It's the online global grocery store of our dreams, selling over 2,000 hard to find ingredients, organized by region.

Family Recipes: Hometown Tastes

Maybe your family did not write down those classic recipes. So, while you remember the taste of signature dishes, you cannot figure out how they were made. Thanks to a demand for regional specific cookbooks and the wonders of self-publishing, you may just be able to locate a cookbook featuring the region from which your family originates!

We love Food52’s list of the 28 Best Cookbooks of 2021, According to Home Cooks & Pro Chefs Alike and Bon Appetit’s The Cookbook Gift Guide That Covers EVERYONE You Know: 2021 Edition. These collections include several authors who celebrate the recipes of their homelands, their cultures and their ancestors. These lists are by no means exhaustive; luckily there are several bookstores that specialize in cookbooks and may be able to help you track down the title you need.

Family Recipes: Keep Them in the Family

For those lucky enough to have a family member that cooks, and perhaps even created the recipes you love, consider preparing a meal with them.

A few tips for preserving these recipes:

1. Longtime cooks are known for their innate sense to add just enough of this and a bit of that, so it can be difficult to get those recipes right every time. If you've got a family cook who's up for it, record your cooking classes to reference later.
2. Pick up a large binder or small recipe box to store family recipes for the next generation. If you’re going to handwrite your recipes, avoid pencil because it fades.
3. Go digital! There are several online recipe organizers to help you store and share family recipes.

However, you choose to embrace your heritage, or learn about someone else’s, we think a meal is an excellent place to start. Do you have a way your family shares recipes that we didn’t mention? We’d love to hear about it!