Creating Your Own Family Cookbook
By Janet Peterson

Nearly every family has its own particular food traditions. For some families, it’s Grandma’s Pumpkin Chiffon Pie at Thanksgiving. Other families savor Grandpa’s barbecued ribs or Aunt Jill’s Great Green Beans. Still other families claim their brand of homemade ice cream as the best. Food brings families together for special occasions, such as holidays, and celebrations of new babies, graduations, and birthdays, as well as for everyday dinners.

Many a phone call is made from daughter to mother or sister to sister to get the exact ingredients and directions for favorite dishes. Often recipes are passed around from cousin to cousin or handed down from generation to generation. They are usually transmitted via carefully printed recipe cards, quick notes on scratch paper, or efficient e-mail. Personal encounters in the kitchen are a wonderful way to share delectable foods as well as to teach culinary skills. However, since many extended family members live apart from each other and are often scattered around the country, those kitchen teaching moments and joint cooking efforts don’t happen regularly.

Preserving those treasured family recipes in a cookbook is a wonderful way to collect the family’s favorite recipes, share anecdotes about the food as well as family members, transmit cooking knowledge to the next generation, and to unite the family. Having a cookbook in hand with, for example, Bywater Family Recipes, provides each person with a strong sense of “our family.”

Shortly after they married, David and Stephanie Bywater decided to gather favorite recipes and create a family cookbook for Christmas gifts for the extended Bywater family. They requested recipes, input them into the computer, edited and proofread, then printed, collated, and bound the collection. The happily received cookbook is dedicated to Dave’s grandparents, Milton and Lilas Bywater, who “have shared their love, time, and life with each of us. We hope this cookbook will help remind us to always emulate their great examples.”

Bywater Family Recipes made great Christmas gifts for extended family members.

Karen Tall Sadler put together Tasty Tall Treasures, a 400-page collection of the extended Tall family, whose roots are in Idaho Falls, Idaho, but whose family members now live in various states. Filled with hundreds of recipes and illustrated with clip art, it is a tasty and fun cookbook.

Spiral notebook bindings, which were used by Karen Tall Sadler for her Tasty Tall Treasures, are worth their weight in gold.

Grace Ivory Little and Jane Ivory Metcalf gathered their mother’s recipes, added some from extended family members and friends, and printed several thousand copies. Jane said, “Mother is a fabulous cook. She is always entertaining, and when we started going through her drawers and cupboards, we realized we had an amazing collection.” Included are family stories about some of the recipes.  The sisters are donating proceeds from the cookbook to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, their mother’s favorite charity ^[1]

Before those remarkable recipes of your family get lost, are forgotten, or are irretrievably hidden in a family member’s recipe box, form a small committee and create your own family cookbook.

Here are some tips for producing a treasured cookbook:

*           Decide whose cookbook it is: How many generations do you want to include in the family cookbook? Tasty Tall Treasures is “a family cookbook from the children, grandchildren, great grand-children, and great-great grandchildren of William A. Tall and Belle Kinghorn Tall.” 

*           Decide on a reasonable time frame for publishing the cookbook. Allow extra time for responses and the production work.

*           Get as complete a list as possible of family members’ addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses from the family historian or from heads of families. If there is an upcoming family reunion, you will be able to update your list then.

*           Write a letter stating your purpose in gathering favorite family recipes, with specific instructions on the kinds and number of recipes, format for submission, and whether you want anecdotes and stories included. Be sure to state a deadline; then know that you’ll probably have to extend it. If you plan to have family members purchase cookbooks, mention the approximate cost.

*           Utilize e-mail as much as possible, which will save on mailing costs and save you time in typing recipes.

*           Decide on recipe categories and create a computer file for each division.

*           Choose a format for recipe presentation and standardize the recipes as you input them. For instance, do you want to write out cup or abbreviate it as C. Do you want to use the symbol for degree or write it out? Do you want to number instructions or present them in paragraph form? Decide whether each recipe will state number of servings.  Do you want to have recipe titles reflect family members (i.e, “Julie’s Birthday Carrot Cake”)? If a submitted recipe lists a small can of mushrooms or a large can of tomatoes, do you want to list them by ounces?

*           After typing recipes, proofread them carefully. Enlist your committee members to help you with this essential task.

*           Select type font and size as well as paper size. Decide what artwork or photos you want to include, if any.

*           Collate pages and proofread again.

*           Decide how many copies you will print in your first edition.

*           Compare prices at various copy shops or printers for copying, collating, and binding. Printing is expensive, but cost per unit decreases with larger numbers printed. You might even consider purchasing your own copier if you are going to print a large number of copies and you’ll have it for future use. If someone in the family has a copier at home or in their office, talk to him or her about using it.

*           Distribute copies of your own family cookbook to family members. They will be thrilled with it!

*           Enjoy the satisfaction of drawing your family members closer together and of doing significant family history work.