Culinary Archives

U.S. News and World Report, as part of their 50 Ways to Improve Your Life in 2007 issue, recommends creating a family cookbook to save family memories. While the story does not have much to say about how to store the recipes it does say a lot about not only the importance of a small scale preservation project, but also the management of the collection stage of such a project.

Importance
Author Linda Kulman notes that the memories of the taste of the food and the company who shared it are strong reasons to create collection such as a family cookbook. Like scrapbooks and photographs, recipe collections tell about the history of a family and a time. They also connect people.

Management
Kulman also gives suggestions for managing a family's recipe collection project, which we can use for our own families, but these concepts are helpful for managing the beginning stages of any archival project. Some lessons learned include:

• not all items in the collection will conform to the same format - be flexible to accept differences
• it will take time, even with technology
• it may be emotional
  
• one person should be the project manager, setting deadlines and encouraging participation
• people who wouldn't normally be involved can help and add different perspectives
• for collections that are ongoing (such as recipes) you can start with today and collect moving forward instead of doing research to collect items of the past
• the project can vary in scope, e.g. a family cookbook can include family photos, birth certificates, and handwritten items, in addition to the recipes

A large scale version of the family cookbook would be a culinary archive, such as the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, which contains thousands of items from the 1500s through the present, including menus, magazines, diaries, letters, advertisements, reference items, among other works.

Why and how do you save your and your family's recipes? Have you been involved in a family cookbook project - how was it organized? Does a family cookbook make it to your top 50 New Year's Resolutions for 2007? Why or why not?

Sources
Kulman, Linda. "Write Your Family Cookbook." U.S. News & World Report 141.24 (Dec 25, 2006): 68. Accessed 28 Dec. 2006 via http://www.usnews.com/usnews/health/articles/061217/25cookbook.family.htm