Start Date

29-5-2024 12:00 PM

End Date

29-5-2024 12:15 PM

Description

In post-war Germany in the 1950s my grandmother used to collect recipes from magazines, newspapers, and the backs of food packaging that she neatly cut out and saved. Other recipes were carefully copied with pen and ink. At some point, when my mother was still a child and my grandmother still alive, she and her sister compiled all these recipes and tidily pasted them into a black notebook for safekeeping. Growing up many of the recipes from this book became much-loved dishes prepared by my mother and expected by my siblings and I almost religiously for important holidays such as birthdays, Easter or Christmas. Some my mother made to the exact specifications of the original recipes, some she altered. But the notebook lives on and still holds a special place of importance on the kitchen bookshelf amongst other cookbooks. This paper takes a closer look at this personal family recipe collection highlighting specific recipes, their stories, and how they shaped a multi-generational family’s food traditions.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
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May 29th, 12:00 PM May 29th, 12:15 PM

The Little Black Book: When Recipes Tell Stories

In post-war Germany in the 1950s my grandmother used to collect recipes from magazines, newspapers, and the backs of food packaging that she neatly cut out and saved. Other recipes were carefully copied with pen and ink. At some point, when my mother was still a child and my grandmother still alive, she and her sister compiled all these recipes and tidily pasted them into a black notebook for safekeeping. Growing up many of the recipes from this book became much-loved dishes prepared by my mother and expected by my siblings and I almost religiously for important holidays such as birthdays, Easter or Christmas. Some my mother made to the exact specifications of the original recipes, some she altered. But the notebook lives on and still holds a special place of importance on the kitchen bookshelf amongst other cookbooks. This paper takes a closer look at this personal family recipe collection highlighting specific recipes, their stories, and how they shaped a multi-generational family’s food traditions.