Collecting Heritage Recipes

Cooking is a wonderful pastime and it was even more celebrated in our grandparents´ time. The recipes from this era are often passed down in handwritten or oral form. They are worth collecting now before they all disappear.

To start collecting your own heritage recipes, there is no need to look further than your own family. Talking to grandparents is a good start. Many times a grandmother will have a collection of recipes or even a cookbook or two from her mother or family. These are invaluable since women of this era wrote their observations and tips in the margins of their cookbooks.

Even if your grandmother doesn't have physical recipes from her youth, she will certainly remember the most-used recipes, so ask if she would mind dictating them to you or writing them down, along with her memories of those days. You can record her talking and later transcribe the recipes.

No grandparents still living? Perhaps they left their cookbooks and a recipe or two to their children. Talk to any living aunts and uncles about the possibility. Even if they don't want to part with these precious items, you can probably get permission to copy them. A photocopy is perfect for recording the margin notes, and you can type the actual recipes up for every day use. In some cases, relatives may not even want the heritage recipes and will happily pass them on to you.

Other good sources of food information are your remaining great-aunts and uncles, distant relatives, and even your own parents who might have old papers stored in the attic. For recipes that are not necessarily family-related, search garage sales, estate sales and the like. You could also put an ad in the local paper asking for anyone considering tossing these valuable recipes to give them to you.

Once you have collected as many recipes as possible, it is time to compile them. You should keep the originals in a safe place, protected from the dampness and insects. Make copies of everything and store them in a separate location in case of disaster. Now you will need to either type or hire someone to type up all the papers, along with people's memories from that time or of the recipe.

For personal use, typed pages can be hole-punched and stored in a binder. To protect the pages from splatters and drips, try covering them with clear contact paper.

However, it is possible that a number of the recipes are good enough to publish. Or perhaps you have a large family who would be interested in buying a copy of a heritage cookbook. Another option for earning is to print up a cookbook gathered from people in a group, such as a church, and sell the cookbook in the community to raise funds for the organization or club.

There are quite a few places to self-publish books and many actually specialize in cookbooks. Shop around for the best price. These printers often have low print-outs; they don't require you to print one million copies, so you can see how the cookbook sells before ordering more.

Heritage recipes are a big thing these days and if they aren't preserved now, they will eventually vanish and we will lose a great part of our history.