A few years ago I wrote a recipe book. Our daughter decided to marry and would be living four hours away in country Victoria. Too far to drop over for a cuppa as I’d imagined when she was little. I wanted her to have some tangible memories from home.
Food connects people and brings us together. Favourite meals have a way of evoking feelings and memories. The smell of baking bread or the taste of a sweet treat can transport us to the past in a blink. Food is such a basic essential part of our lives and we can overlook the rich memory making such a simple thing like cooking can create. I thought a recipe book with all our family favourites would be like giving our daughter a little piece of home.
When our children were small I made my own bread and the kitchen was always bubbling with a pot of something. We were on a tight budget and I often cooked in bulk and froze meals so we always had something on hand.
I involved our children in the cooking process and it was a big part of our daily lives. I somehow understood that playing in the kitchen was a necessary part of our children’s education even without being teacher trained. I let them play with their food and make a mess. I told my horrified husband they were experimenting, it was science. I assured him it would all wash off in the bath. He quietly placed newspaper all over the floor around the high chair.
Our children both loved being involved in the cooking process, especially our daughter. Our son would be happy to join in although he would often rather play with his lego. We had a lot of fun in the kitchen. Our son loved making pizza and tacos and was always on hand to lick the spoon if I was making his favourite chocolate porridge cake.
For our daughter it was a high priority. She wanted to be involved from the start and would want to see it through to the end. I often had to draw the line at letting her use the frying pan or stove top because she was only two when she started bread crumbing our chicken schnitzels. She was determined to ‘do it her own self.’ I was only allowed to observe and occasionally give tips. We had tears over the limits I put in place for her safety. It taught me patience and I had to allow a lot more time for the process as everything took so much longer.
This picture is a recipe our daughter wrote down while watching her favourite show – A Country Practice. I kept the same spelling in the recipe book.
I was the same as a child, I wanted to be fully immersed in the kitchen. My mother was different from me as a mum. She allowed me to play with the left over pastry and I was allowed to stir the cake mixture three times for luck. The bulk of the cooking she did herself. Mum taught me how to knit but she didn’t teach me how to cook. I think she liked being the only one with the knowledge.
I left home at seventeen and was completely unprepared for independence. I shared a flat with two guys who expected me to cook the meals. I very quickly disabused them of that assumption. I wrote out a roster and they learned some valuable lessons about ‘seventies’ women and about making assumptions. I had no more idea that they did of how to cook or take care of a household. I had only observed my super efficient mother. My friends and I learned to cook by trial and error.
That’s why it was important to me that our children learn to cook and take care of themselves from a young age. I wanted them to be set up for success. I wanted them to be ready for the world. To be able to cook and clean and look after themselves was just as important to me as their happiness.
The first version of the recipe book included our family favourites. I made the book in a rush making it up as I went along. I quickly scraped together recipes from family and friends and wrote a blurb about each person represented. It was a lot like going through old photo albums. Each recipe brought memories of family gatherings, meals with friends and a ton of birthdays.
Mum had most of the recipes in her hand written recipe book. She regaled me with stories of her mother as we pored over mam’s handwritten recipes passed on to mum. Some were a list of ingredients and it was assumed the method was known. We found Auntie Jane’s sponge cake recipe and Cousin Wilma’s Bara Brith among dozens from church friends.
I loved seeing their handwriting and the splashes and splodges where something had dripped onto the paper. My grandmother’s handwriting was poignant for me. She suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and every word would have been painful to write.
Those recipes are the most precious to me. I didn’t have the luxury of learning to cook from my grandmothers, we moved to Australia when I was eight and I only saw them again briefly when I was fifteen. I started including small bios of the people behind the recipes. The recipe book morphed into a brief family history.
My friend Naara helped me with the cover photo, along with a few recipes from her collection. I wanted to include pictures of my grandmothers’ utensils, a whisk and a little milk jug along with some of their hand written recipes. Naara jumped up on the bench and took and aerial shot of all the recipes and utensils I’d collected. I loved it.
I printed it, laminated the pages and punched holes in them and tied them with ribbon saved from hour daughter’s wedding decorations. Then I gave it to her along with a few kitchen utensils and a home made yellow polka dot table cloth which was a wink to ‘Calamity Jane.’ A movie we had often watched when she was little.
The first of many newer versions happened almost immediately. After I gave it to our daughter I thought it would be a nice gift for all the women in the family for Christmas which was only a few weeks away. Then I realised the original was written specifically to our daughter almost like a letter. I very quickly edited the book, changing the personal messages I had written, into a more generic version. Once again making work for myself with a very tight deadline. Let’s just say there was a lot of laminating that Christmas. My spontaneous nature can bring me undone and make a lot of work for me which usually leaves me stretched thin.
Our son married the following year which meant I could include his new wife and her family favourites along with her mother’s and grandmother’s favourite recipes. She was now part of our family history.
Nearly a decade later, when I visited family in the UK, my cousin and Auntie wanted a copy.Once more I collected recipes from them and included them in the latest, latest version.
I took the latest recipe book to a local printer this time. He told me that his wife read it during the printing process and she was now going to make one. She particularly like the blurbs about the people and the photos. I loved that. I’d like everyone to write a book of family favourite recipes with little blurbs about the people who cooked them.
Our daughter is a wonderful mum who cooks with her girls and they are following in her footsteps. Meg took over making the annual Christmas trifle from my mum. Quite an honour for my mum to hand it over.
I’m pleased to say our son is a wonderful cook as well. He is quite at home in the kitchen or doing housework and he is a lovely dad. His barbecue skills are next level. He often slow cooks meat for hours and hours after getting up in the wee hours to start the process. He cooks roasts and vegetables and makes all his own rubs and marinades. It’s a delight to see.
Our tastes and dietary needs have changed radically over the years and I don’t make many of the recipes anymore. My husband does the majority of the cooking now. I told him forty years of cooking was long enough and it was his turn. I didn’t want him to end up like my dad who could only make himself a sandwich if he absolutely had to. Glyn enjoys cooking and regularly tells me how excellent it is :0)
There have been many versions of the recipe book created and saved in a variety of computers. I didn’t think to save them as editions or even order them numerically. I did add a metric conversion chart and a page on edible flowers. If I made another I would include an index and perhaps break it into the types of foods. Hindsight is 20/20.
Recording the past for our future generations is important. I think including the food and the people who made it brings life to the past. I would love everyone to write a recipe book with a little blurb about the people who made them. It’s a valuable way to remember the people who made us who we are today. I am glad I spent the time gathering stories and recipes from all the generations and friendships over the years. It has made all those relatives and friends more tangible somehow.
Have you ever thought about creating a family recipe book? If you do have a go, remember the index. I hope you have a wonderful Easter spending time and sharing meals with family and friends.
Rhiannon Dowding - Writer 