>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Frederick Augustyn: Welcome to today's presentation by Valerie Frey on Preserving Family Recipes. My name is Fred Augustyn and I work as a Reference Librarian on a split assignment in the Manuscript Division, and also I'm a Past President, still in this century, but quite a few years ago, of the Library of Congress Cooking Club, and a continuing member of it. Those of -- both of the organizations that are sponsoring this program. We are being videotaped and by asking a question you're hereby giving your permission to have your voice recorded and, depending on the angle of the camera, your image as well recorded. And I ask you to turn off any electronic devices that might possibly interfere with the recording. And I'm going to introduce Laura Kells who is an Archivist in the Manuscript Division. >> Laura Kells: Hi. Introducing lots of introductions here. But anyway, I just want to -- I'm so pleased to have the opportunity to introduce Valerie Frey who has returned to the Library of Congress to speak to us about her book, Preserving Family Recipes, How to Save and Celebrate Your Food Traditions . I first met Valerie in 1999 when she was a Junior Fellow in the Manuscript Division. She worked with me on processing the Herbert Philbrick papers that summer. And while she was here at LC she also participated in the Library of Congress Bicentennial Cookbook Project. By the time she was a Junior Fellow Valerie had already received a Master's Degree in Art Education from the University of Georgia and had just completed a Master's Degree in Information Science with a concentration in Historical Research in Archives from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I think the thing I remember about Valerie is right after she left she went to Nepal. I think that was the best [inaudible] before, and she sent us a postcard of Mount Everest [laughter]. But after she returned she began her professional career. She was a Manuscript Archivist in the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah, an Archivist of the Savannah Jewish Archives. Then she became the Education Coordinator of the Georgia Archives. Valerie is currently a writer and consultant whose projects focus on genealogy, local history, storytelling, material culture folklife, and home life, both modern and historic. Valerie kept in touch with me over the years and she returned to the Library, I think it was about 2008, to do some research for this book here. Valerie's interests and experience are quite evident in Preserving Family Recipes . She looks at recipes as primary documents. Her book is a mix of personal stories and fact, tips and guidance for books -- for people interested in gathering, adjusting, and preserving their family recipes, and collecting and documenting family food traditions. But I'll let her elaborate. So please welcome Valerie Frey. [ Applause ] >> Valerie Frey: It's really a pleasure to be here. Starting off at the largest library in the world when you're right of library school is daunting. But everybody was so welcoming here and the things that I learned as a Junior Fellow were amazing. So I've been pushing lots of bright new shiny faces to come this way and hope that you'll get some. So this books was a long labor of love and it started off with -- I worked as Education Coordinator at the Georgia Archives and I was pretty sure going into the job that first day what the job was going to entail. But I think as a lot of us know, sometimes you have to change when you realize what the job really needs most. I would go into the classrooms, mostly Atlanta, but all over the state of Georgia, and bringing primary documents, helping them to learn how to do historic research. And there was enough resistance that one day I finally asked, how many people here like history? And only two kids raised their hand. And right there my whole job shifted of it's not okay, you know, for kids to think that history is boring or irrelevant to their lives. They're not going to be good citizens. They're not going to have kind of the grounding roots. This is a photography of my grandparents and my dad. My dad was around three years old. They lived in -- about an hour south of Little Rock, Arkansas. And they were my memory-keepers. They were the ones that -- they were always telling me stories about the way life was for them, but also in the past. Both sides of that family, my grandmother and grandfather, they arrived long before the Civil War. And told me stories and shared recipes and shared things so that I grew up caring about history. And when I found that these kids across schools didn't care about history, that was the best way I knew how, was to start in with stories and to also find photographs of kids their age a century ago, and sort of start in that direction. And one of the things -- I had my great-great-grandmother's teacake recipe. She was born in 1830, died in 1900, would have cooked on a wood-burning stove. And so I would make these teacakes and then bring them in. And the kids would taste them. We would talk about how they were alike and different than Oreos. How they would have been cooked. And from there I started getting their attention. And I realized that foodways was one of the best ways to get an in, to get -- everybody eats, everybody loves food. And so from there on out I started including information about preserving recipes in my adult programs that I did on genealogy and oral history and those sorts of things. And it really struck a nerve. I think a lot of people are interested in preserving it but don't know how. So I started interviewing people who had done family cookbooks. One of the things I learned right off the bat is people assume that once you have some kind of a recipe you're done. And it's really not true. Sometimes they don't work the way you had hoped they were or that you'd make it and it doesn't taste anything like grandma's apple pie. So what do you do from there? So I did a lot of interviews to sort of figure out what you do from there. Let's see. The value in a recipe -- here's some cookbooks from my shelf. And there are a lot of buzzwords on the spine labels about whether it's simple or natural or diet or quick. There's a lot of reasons we reach for a recipe. And that's -- you know, for what you're going to cook tonight or tomorrow or next week. But when you look at family recipes, I'm hoping that I can expand your horizons to look at them in a little bit different way and with a little bit different values. There's a nutritional value to food. Of course we want it to be something that we want to eat. There is definitely a sensual value. And it's not just the way things taste. It's that smell. I have some favorite autumn recipes that almost always include molasses and spices, because then the whole house smells divine. But just -- I get into biscuits and when you do biscuits and you pour that chilly buttermilk in the soft flour and you start working with your hands, there's a sensual value to cooking for sure. And there's also an emotional value. This is my son, Eli. He was, I think, four in the picture. And he's seven now. He's off at the Air and Space Museum with my permission [laughter]. My husband was going to come today and I was like, no, you sat through this presentation. Go ahead, go. Pictured here is my mom's chess tarts. She would make these in Athens, Georgia, where we lived every Thanksgiving. And she'd pack them in shirt boxes and carry them to Arkansas where we always had Thanksgiving. And since -- my parents died when I was in my early 20s. And Thanksgiving, the first Thanksgiving was pretty hard. From then on out, you know, turkey tastes pretty much the same. My mom used a boxed stuffing mix, so that was easy. But what it boiled down to for this holiday is this is the taste of Thanksgiving for me. And they didn't work right off the bat. Thank goodness my mother wrote in her cookbooks. Please write in your cookbooks even though if -- you know, as a Librarian I feel weird telling people to write in a book, but please write in your cookbooks because that's an information trail for the people behind you. But I still had trouble. They tasted good. People who didn't grow up with them, they ate them up. But my brother and I would always kind of look at each other and shake our heads the few times I tried to make them. And then this year, when my -- maybe it was my son, maybe he was the magic mojo, the grandson that she -- my mother never got to meet. But I took my time and one of the things I thought about is -- I measure the way the -- Betty Crocker tells you to measure flour where you dump the flour in and level it off. If you use the scoop, you use it like a scoop like my mom always did, you can pack the flour and you end up with too much flour. But I thought, well, that was the way she did it. And when I tried it that way -- I baked them, I handed one to my brother, he took a bite and closed his eyes, and then his head snapped up and he said, this is a little round time machine. There's something to that. When you take a bit of something that somebody has made for you with love, it means a lot. And so it's something I make every Thanksgiving now. So there's definitely an emotional value with food that kind of carries you back to other times and places. What I'd like to talk a little bit more about today is the historic value of recipes. And we're going to zip through some recipes and look at them for their historic value. In recipes you will find family history, culinary history, and social history. And I love social history. I know some many genealogists that -- when I worked at a public reference desk they go leaping right for the dates and the -- confirming the names, and without some social history, and especially when you go far enough back that you don't know real life stories about those people, the social history helps you know what life was like for your ancestors and makes them come alive. And food history is fantastic for that. So let's take a little foray into social history around a recipe. Actually, let me back up a little bit. So my parents got married in 1962. It was a small church wedding. My dad was from rural Arkansas. My mom was from right along the Columbia River in Oregon, not far from Portland. And he had gone to school up there. They met, fell in love. And at that time, travel was pretty expensive. They were both poor students. And so they got married. But my grandparents -- my grandmother was sick and wasn't able to come to the wedding. She had -- was chronically ill at that time. So they married in September. And in December the gift that all the parents gave was train tickets so they could go to Arkansas and meet his family for the first time. So my mother arrives at night. And the next morning there's this huge dinner for the whole family. My dad was the only child, but my grandpa was one of 14 and my grandma was one of four, so the house was just jam-packed with all these aunts and uncles and cousins and everything else. And my grandpa made -- he was the cook in the family and he made his signature stew. And when he handed her a bowl, this is sort of what it looked like. This is a batch -- I took a photo in 1991. And if you'll notice that there's sort of this strange object in the middle of the pot. To help you picture that, that's a skull [laughter]. Nobody thought to tell her that it was squirrel soup, squirrel mulligan, and that was his specialty. And it was -- for rural Arkansas, squirrel was quite common at that time. I think a lot of people still eat squirrel and -- >> Yuck. >> Laura Kells: But it was not exactly what she was expecting when she reached for that bowl. So it was this hilarious story in our family is, you know, here you're the new bride going thaaanks [laughter]. After my parents died in my early 20s, I started realizing that my links were gone. My grandparents were all still alive but my parents were gone. And all these stories that my parents knew -- I could no longer ask them. But there was this older generation to ask. And so ask I did. I recorded stories. I took lots of photographs. And I asked about the recipes. And this was one of the things that I asked my grandfather for. And he just kind of laughed. He said there is no recipe. Oh, here's another picture of the skull just to -- you know, you can see its fangs -- his little teeth [laughter]. So I asked my grandpa for the recipe. And he was wonderful. He took a stab at writing it down. But when I read through the recipe -- he was actually a highly intelligent man, but he had a eighth-grade education, and the recipe that I got reflected his grammar and knowledge of spelling. But that was easy to sort out. What was not easy to sort out was -- there was so much know-how he didn't even realize he knew. He didn't tell me how much liquid to put in the pot. He didn't tell me -- real, the secret to how good it tasted was his home-grown vegetables and how he prepared those and canned those. So I ended up learning how to interview him for more information, how to interview other cooks that did squirrel mulligan for more information, and then how to search through cookbooks from the time period when he developed this recipe to learn more. So what I ended up learning from the process was that, just like primary and secondary sources are great when you're a genealogist and you're trying to learn more about your family history, it also works for the recipes. There are so many cookbooks now that are available. It used to be, I think, you know, 30 years ago if you needed old cookbooks you would have to track down a reputable bookseller and have them do searches for you. Well, now in the days of the Web, there's so many of the cookbooks that have been digitized. And the Library of Congress has digitized some. There are a lot of sources for that. They're listed in the book. But so if you need a help on that it's there. And so to compare a recipe, if you are missing out on, you know, how long do I cook this, how much liquid do I put in the pot, if you compare it with other squirrel mulligan or soup recipes or like my grandpa actually adapted the recipe for chicken, thank goodness. So I was able to look at a lot of chicken soup recipes to figure out what he did. And then the secondary sources -- food history has just exploded in the last couple of decades and they're wonderful sources. And I found a lot of them that mentioned squirrel. Thomas Jefferson -- Damon Lee Fowler worked with the early Monticello recipes,, and Thomas Jefferson had recipes for squirrel. There's so many good books that I read through. Mark Kurlansky wrote Food From a Younger Land , and I learned that the squirrel mulligan recipe that was my grandfather's -- that was a regional dish, fairly close in range to where my grandparents lived. And that it started in the Golden Age of Railroading. The hobos would sort of do these communal one-pot dishes. And it's a cousin to burgoo and booya and Brunswick stew and some other things. So by understanding this recipe in context, the primary documents help me sort of narrow down when and where it came from, but also how to cook it successfully. And those secondary sources really help me to know how my family fit into this culinary history and social history of the United States. So it's fascinating that recipes can do this for us. Every single recipe you have has a story. Some of them may be very boring. I think the most boring recipe story in the world is -- I clipped this out of the newspaper last week and I haven't made it yet [laughter]. But for so many other recipes that we have in our boxes and our card files, there's a lot of more there to it. The story of a recipe is where it came from if you know that. Who used it. How it was served. You know, the squirrel mulligan story. You know, I love this serving it to the new daughter-in-law. How it changed over time. We're going to talk more about that in a second. Stories or tales connected to it. And then again how it fits into all that food history. So think about that as you go through the recipes. I think a lot of us flip through family recipes with, no, I wouldn't want to make that. No, I wouldn't want to eat that. That's how we look at them. But if you look at them as what can this recipe tell me about the people who came before me or about the people that I share my table with, then they start to have a new historic value. Let me tell you another recipe story that will tell you a little bit more about recipes here. This is me back in 2006. So I got engaged. And the next year I got married. If you'll notice the groom has an Air Force officer's uniform. What that adds up to very quickly is moving boxes. So we got married. He deployed the next month. A couple of months later he came back. And then in the middle of the summer, when I had a baby on the way, he announces that we're moving to California. And I had lived in Washington, D.C. those three months, but otherwise I had always lived within a four-hour driving distance of home. So suddenly I packed up everything I owned, left everybody that I knew except for my husband, and headed cross-country. And so really it was sort of a recipe for home sickness is what it was. This is a picture -- we ate at Chez Panisse, if you all know that famous restaurant in Berkeley. We ate there on our first wedding anniversary. And then the next month little guy popped up here. And I was working on this book at the same time. And what I realized is the home sickness was so thick you could almost grab it out of the air and squeeze the juice out of it. I missed my mom and dad. Especially though when you're pregnant, you know, you just really want your mom there. I missed my brother. I missed all that familiarity. The first holidays came -- Thanksgiving and Christmas and none of the food tasted right. I realized one afternoon, through kind of a veil of tears, that what I really wanted to help make things right was my mom's spaghetti. Now, if you're of an Italian descent I would like you to just cover your eyes please and not look at this because [laughter] this is in no way high-brow spaghetti. But I think that's important because I think a lot of times the foods that are dear to us, they aren't always highfaluting recipes. And I think that's fine. I think when it comes to family recipes that we can just take our snobbery and kind of put it to the side for a little while and enjoy what we enjoy. So there in my California kitchen I called my brother several times. We both had made the spaghetti with my mom. It wasn't written down anywhere. And this is what we figured out. And when I made it this way it tasted, it tasted right. But I noticed that my mom -- I had inherited my mom's skillet, but we had one of those glass cooktops and you're not allowed to put cast-iron on it. So I had to substitute my cast-iron skillet. And then I realized my mom, she would buy these tubes of ground beef whenever they went on sale, and she would slice them and put them in the freezer. And, as a kid, you knew it was spaghetti night because you'd come from breakfast and there'd be this lump of beef thawing beside the sink. Well, I was about to leave the lump of beef by the side of the sink all day the way my mom did, so I thawed it in a microwave which didn't exist when this recipe came about. So I'm going to kind of hurry through this because this isn't -- this is something I'd like you to just get the gist of, not absorb completely. But when I started working with the recipe further I started to realize that, hey, I'm living in Berkeley, California, foodieville. I'm going to go for the fresh and, hey, why not grass-fed bison? Why not free-range turkey? And as I worked my way through I started to realize I was making all kinds of substitutions that my mother didn't have those choices. That Athens, Georgia, it was a fairly small town when I was growing up, and the grocery stores were pathetic. There wasn't much choice there. It was like yellow onion or white onion basically. But, hey, if you want to see a happy Georgia girl in Berkeley, California, who's pregnant and homesick, try finding a Vidalia onion from Georgia. I about did a happy dance in the grocery store. One of the things my pediatrician told me is don't eat out of cans while you're pregnant, which was really a scary thought to me that, you know, the lining of the can would have BPA or whatever. So I made sure to track down -- they have the little sealed cartons. And then I started, hey, might as well just use fresh tomatoes, and organic and heirloom. And I bought the herbs and put them on the back porch. They have the new pastas that are the high fiber and they have the lentil flour, so they've got the protein and by the time my son was, you know, came along and was old enough to eat, you know, the thought of this vermicelli that we always twirled at the family dinner table, that was not going to fly with an 18-month-old. So, you know, you do the little bowties so they can pick them up. My mom always put a lump of shortening in the water to keep it from boiling over. And, you know, then we had the whole trans-free fat thing and then I read that you're not even supposed to put anything in the water because then the pasta doesn't stick. And so I think you can see what's going to happen with this recipe that after a while we wonder is it even mom's spaghetti anymore? There's all these changes. But it's fascinating when you stop to look at why all these changes. It's because technology changed. You know, the glass cooktop and the microwave oven and the nonstick cookware. The ingredient availability is -- it really shows where our culture has gone in the last 25 years that there's all these fancy things available. The things we know about health and the decisions now that -- I don't think my mom ever made any decision of to put something in the grocery cart depending on how it would affect the environment. And I do. I care. She would have cared, too. But it wasn't, you know, it wasn't an issue then. How much time we have available. Our needs and preferences. So all those things are part of the story of that recipe. And, unfortunately, I think that halts a lot of people because they think, well, I don't do it the way my mom did, so I don't even know which is the real family recipe. Well, the answer is they're both the real family recipe. And the changes between them, if you take the time to sort of explain, is a fascinating trail for future generations to read about how life changed. I mean, this was just, you know, one generation. So let's look at some other recipes to kind of see what historical trails are inside them. This is -- I've got these written down so I know sometimes it can be hard to see. So if you wouldn't mind passing those along. >> Sure, yeah. >> Valerie Frey: This is a recipe for boiled Indian Meal Pudding. Mix one quart of cornmeal with three quarts of milk. Take care it be not lumpy. Add three eggs and a gill of molasses. It must be put on at sunrise to eat at 3 o'clock. The great art in this pudding is tying the bag properly, as the meal swells very much. Now the first time I read this recipe my only thought was, huh? I had no idea what it was even talking about. Anybody want to hazard a guess of what time period this recipe may have come from? Yeah. This one's pretty old. This is a hearth recipe. This one came from The Virginia Housewife, 1824 . Is it in standard receipt format according to what you have seen? That's one of the first clues, is a lot of times once you get past about 1900 it was the reformers. Everybody credits Fannie Farmer, but it wasn't just Fannie Farmer. It was Eliza Acton and a bunch of other women reformers that were pushing for more clarity in recipes, a list of ingredients that would be moved through in chronological order. But that didn't exist here. Are the ingredients common or easy to get? >> Easy. >> Valerie Frey: They're pretty common. So it's -- this -- I mean it's basically just cornmeal and milk and molasses. So it would have been things that, in the South, they would have had on the farm. So it's not a fancy recipe by any means. Do you think it was a everyday recipe or a special occasion recipe? Is it fancy? Can you tell? I know it was hard to tell sometimes. Some of these questions you can ask yourself and you can't maybe not come up with a clear conclusion until you've read some more sources. This is actually a pretty every -- would have been used for an everyday occasion. This is yesteryear's crockpot. If it's hog-killing time and the lady of the house has her hands full, you know, she doesn't have time to cook a full meal and, you know, help scald the hog. So this would have been put on -- I made my little example here. If you do a image search on the Web for pudding bag, you will see something that looks more elegant than what I was able to do. This is one of those things, you know, where -- there's Pinterest. You see an idea and then when you actually do it, it's much harder than it looks. This is one of those kind of things. But they would have put the ingredients -- the milk and the eggs and the molasses would have been put inside fabric like this. Sometimes it was buttered and floured, and sometimes it wasn't. And it was gathered and tied with twine. And then this whole thing would have been set in a pot of boiling water over the hearth. And so the lady of the house would have had to just come in once or twice just to bank the fire, make sure that it was bubbling along nicely, and then would have been able to lift this out. And it would have been solid by then and she would slice it up and everybody would have had a slice. But one of the things that they're eluding to, the trouble. If you tie it too tight then the cornmeal's pulls in liquid from the outside. It would burst it. So you come in from the field hungry and what you have is a burst bag and everything is floating around in water and you can't even just put the kids in the car and go to McDonalds because it doesn't exist yet. And a gill, by the way, was four ounces or a half cup. So, again, that's one of the clues to this recipe that it's older, is it -- there's an unusual measurement there. Let's jump a little bit up in time. Anybody want to hazard a guess for eggless, milkless, butterless cake? >> World War II I'd say. >> Valerie Frey: That -- as -- I always thought it was just World War II. It's actually -- this recipe was a World War I recipe which was a surprise for me. But it had a big resurgence during the Great Depression and during World War II. When you didn't have to use eggs, milk, and butter, you saved ration coupons and also saved expensive ingredients. So is it in standard recipe format? It is. We've reached that, that period where that's becoming more common. Are they ingredients that you could have gotten off the farm? >> No. >> Valerie Frey: Not anymore. We're reaching that age. Probably 20 or 30 years before, some of these ingredients would have been really rare and hard to get. And this would have been a super fancy item to make for company. But we've reached the age where nutmeg and cinnamon, they were coming from a long way away around the world, but they were becoming more common. You could get them in the, you know, the grocery store or whatever. No, they wouldn't have had a grocery, but a -- I want to say trading post, but that's not the right word. Just your general store would have had these items. Another clue if you're -- you know, if you found this recipe in a family recipe trove and you didn't have any indication of where it came from, the seeded raisins is one indication. Older recipes would tell you to use the seeded raisins or seedless. Seedless came later. And seeded raisins -- I actually found a recipe not long ago to tell you if -- let's see, it was a 1909 cookbook that told how you did that. And you soaked the raisins and then with a knife you would slit each raisin and pick out the seeds. So my father's -- it's also a recipe you only make for people you like [laughter]. It would have been a lot of work. And then the citron is an ingredient that -- it was very popular in cookbooks in the 1800s. And it's a citrus fruit, but you use the rind instead of the pulp. And now we see it really only once a year, and about this time of year when all the fruitcake materials pop up. You find it in little tubs now and it's already been candied for you. And that's really the only time we see citron anymore. Ingredients come and go in terms of popularity just like, you know, recipes come and go or, you know, the fondue pot that was so popular in the '70s, you know, went the way of the dodo. But now it's had a resurgence. I think a lot of people are doing fondue again. All right. We'll jump up one more time. Anybody want to guess where Sock It to Me Cake, what decade or so that might have been from? >> The [inaudible]. >> Valerie Frey: Yeah. That's Laugh-In in the 1960s had that as their catch-phrase. It was fascinating. When I searched for Sock It to me Cake the first time, I didn't find much about it. And then last week I talked to the Southern Festival of Books, and I met Anne Bern who's -- she's the Cake Doctor who does the books where you work on the cake mixes. She has a new book called, American Cakes . so if you love food history, this is a beautiful book. And she really tested those recipes so they're -- and she had a selection of cakes for us to try, so I know that they're good. But she has a little sidebar about Sock It to Me Cake. And I discovered that it started in Texas and kind of circulated through Oklahoma, so the fact that my Arkansas grandmother had it in her cookbook makes sense, how very close they are geographically. But I did find out that later on Duncan Hines put it on one of their cake mix boxes. But the recipe's a little different. And I brought that for you -- >> [Inaudible] much the same though. I used to make the Sock It to Me -- >> Valerie Frey: Did you [laughter]? I printed it up for you here. A lot of times people ask me sort of what my ideal format would be for recipes. So I did the Sock It to Me Cake that way so you could see where I've done, you know, put it in the standard format with the ingredients listed first, because the way my grandmother had it here -- I mean, that's the whole recipe, so people have always asked me, wait, what do you do? So I looked it up. I looked through all the -- and came up with directions for it. I love doing them in steps -- one, two, three, four, five, so if I get interrupted I remember what step to go back to. I always put cooking notes and history notes. And then, if I can, I'll put a little image of the original recipe so that the handwriting's there. And here's a picture of my grandma. So I'll have that for you today as sort of a template on things. So this one is no longer in your standard recipe format, but is it unusual ingredients? Not very common for the 1960s. Any grocery store, even a little country grocery store like my grandma had, would have worked. Is it fancy? Not particularly. You know, I could see making it for when company comes but it would have been very easy and quick and cheap to make. It is very mid-century. You know, we looked at that Eggless, Milkless, Butterless Cake recipe that would have been scratch and you'd have done the whole thing. Well, by the time you get to the middle of the 20th century, you know, get the lady out of the kitchen, make things quick and easy, just doctor up a cake mix. That's a lot of the recipes that I was left with, are those kind of recipes. And it's not the way I cook anymore. So when I've made Sock It to Me Cake I have a favorite yellow cake recipe that's from scratch, and then I make that and go on with the rest of it from there. So with these old family recipes you can go those directions. If it's fancy, you can, you know, swap a -- instead of mush make your own mushroom sauce, you can put in a can of mushroom soup. Or you can go the other direction and go fresh with it. The main thing is to play with it and enjoy it and have fun with it. So let's talk -- I'm going to switch gears on you a little bit and just talk about some of the things that I notice when people worked with family recipes, the things that I heard over and over again. That they would be excited about them but then they wouldn't end up working with them. Well, why? What can we do to get you past that? One of the things I heard a lot is that the old recipes are out of date and nobody wants them anymore. And, as we just talked about, please play with those recipes. If you are a from-scratch person, and it has a cake mix, you can get around that. You would record the original in its original format so that any, anybody else wants to play with that recipe, they can go back to the original. But make your own version. I type all mine into the computer and so I just hit Save As and then I go to town using other cookbooks, using other recipes for ideas, and testing it, tweaking it until it's something that really fits my needs and my purposes. I lighten up a lot of things. I go fresh with a lot of things. But they're still those original recipes. Another thing I've heard is that, you know, how many great cooks or great recipes in our family? And I think that's kind of true for me. I mean, that chess tarts recipe that was one of my absolute favorites is Betty Crocker. My mom may have put her own twist on it, but it started with Betty Crocker. And that's okay. Not everybody has the Italian grandmother who knows how to do things from the old country. You take what you have and you play with it and you make it into something special. But it's still grounded in those original roots. One of the things that -- I worked with my great-great-grandmother's teacake recipe a lot, and when I first made it, my family didn't like it very much. They're a very crisp cookie and there's no extract and they basically -- they're very shortbread-like in a way. You just taste the flour and it was made with shortening. So it didn't even have that buttery taste like shortbread. So I played with it a bit. I took out a little bit of the flour. I reduced the baking time and the baking temperature a little bit until we got this wonderful cookie that -- with the -- a little bit of lemon or orange extract. They're mild and they hold their shape wonderfully. So when you make them with those -- these intricate cookie-cutters, you don't have to chill the dough. You just do it. And that recipe is in the book, by the way. So it's become a favorite recipe because I played with it. And by the way, I included this photograph. I love this cookie-cutter because of the button shape and so I ordered them online. And when they arrived I realized that they had been printed on a 3D printer. And I thought, this great-great-grandmother, who was born in 1830, could she have ever pictured, number one, this PowerPoint slide with the picture of her dough, but this cookie-cutter that was made on somebody's home computer and printed 3D? So sometimes I think that these recipes, they can travel a long way, and they're very flexible and can do a lot of different things. Another roadblock I hear often is either I don't cook or I don't cook anymore, so I don't have anything to offer. And I would say that capture the whole foodways of your family, not just recipes. If you don't have a lot of recipes or there's just a few, you can still write about the things that you are for holidays. My uncle used to always take us out for blueberry donuts and whenever I eat a blueberry donut I think of my uncle even though I don't think he's ever baked or cooked a thing in his life. But in my family cookbook I found a great recipe for blueberry donuts and I credited where it came from, but that it was in his honor. And it has a place in the family cookbook. So those family foodways, if you don't have enough recipes, you can kind of bring in surrogates. Don't try to pass them off as uncle's, you know, blueberry donuts. But you can do things in honor. Add supplementary materials. So stories and photographs and things to add to those recipes. They mean so much more than just this little bit of writing on a card. And then there are lots of ways -- if you're going to go about collecting recipes, to work either by yourself or to work with family. And my experience is working here with the Cookbook Committee for the Bicentennial Cookbook , are mentioned in my book. I learned a lot about working as a group on recipes and testing them and how that can be very beneficial. Another roadblock I hear is getting recipes together is too hard. My recipe stash is a mess. And a lot of the people I interviewed, they would, you know, hold out these little stacks, so they'd be digging out of the junk drawer and behind the microwave. It's a challenge to organize recipes and -- but as an archivist, and many of us here are archivists, organizing papers is our job. So I gave some hints and clues on how to go about getting organized. Also how to identify which recipes are heirloom. When I looked at things from my grandmother's generations, they each left me a small handful. So I saved everything that they passed on. But my mom had a lot of recipes and whoa be, you know, what I leave to my son because I have shelves and shelves of cookbooks and stacks and stacks of recipes. So how you sort of go about identifying which ones are really heirloom recipes you want to pass on. And then what's near and dear to my heart in this book is I put my best archivist tips on how to make sure those materials last as long as possible because a lot of people want to save those things but don't know how to go about properly housing them and what to do to make sure they last. So that information is there. Another roadblock. The recipes just don't work for me the way they did for Grandma. And that was one of my biggest challenges because I'm not a cook or a chef in a classic sense. I was never trained. But I had to learn. You can clarify a recipe by adding a little more information, making sure you know exactly how much liquid to put in the pot or clarifying at what point you slide it into the oven. But then sometimes you modify a recipe like I did with the teacake recipe. I have the original version just as it was worded. But I also have my version. So if my son wants to make the Christmas cookies he always remember, that he knows how I modified it. So how to research and adjust a recipe. I tried to leave a trail of information that I discovered. I also did some appendices to kind of give learn-by-example. So I looked at biscuits and how it's a -- you know, biscuits are simple. There are just a few ingredients. But there's a lot of ways to adjust them, whether you want them taller or fluffier or whatever. So I have an appendix where I looked in depth at biscuits. So if you're into biscuit-making it is the cheat sheet. You can find a way to make your perfect biscuit through that appendix. And it's sort of an example of how you would do that with other foods. I also put in information about -- for many of us, if we go very far back, suddenly we're working with recipes from another time or place, another culture. So I had to go about that -- the finding ingredients and translating and converting. But sometimes it's just a matter of region. When I lived in Berkeley, the trouble I had finding a decent bag of grits was incredible. So how you go about finding, you know, the ingredients that you really need to make a recipe happen. Another roadblock is the books in my family don't use recipes, so there's nothing to share. And that was a tough one with me. A lot of my Arkansas relatives, they didn't have anything written down. I've taught at oral history workshops so I put in a lot of the information that I had from there. But I learned a lot of tricks. One of the things that I realized early-on is that if you stop them to try to make them measure something, it's [inaudible] screws them up. They can't continue their cooking process. So I figured out to get an electronic scale and weigh everything and then let them cook and then you weigh it again and do a subtraction, you know how much they used. That was a big breakthrough for me. There were several recipes that, once I figured that out, it suddenly came clear and were usable. So how to interview people, how to do an interview plan, some sample questions on what to ask, and I also developed, with the help of a couple of fellow cooks, a kind of a checklist. If you have a complicated recipe that's just not working, how you go about sort of narrowing it down to figure out where the problem spot is in it. I'm too late. All the good family cooks are gone. And that's one I've heard a lot. I put in how to research things. How to go -- these community cookbooks are a goldmine. And a lot of times people have written things down that you didn't even know that they had written. They've written them for other people. These great old family cooks, a lot of times they didn't write down a recipe because they knew it by heart. They didn't need to have it written down. But sometimes they would write it down for a new bride or someone leaving home for the first time. And by knowing ways to track it down, sometimes you discover that those recipes that you thought were unwritten got written down at some point if you can find them. I also did some appendices that help with that, with biscuits. I researched sort of the origins of biscuits and how they came about and the ingredients that needed to come together to develop, to make those kind of fluffy baking powder biscuits. And then when I was growing up our -- my next door neighbor was a fantastic cook. She was Cajun and she was going to -- she talked often about how she going to write a cookbook when she retired. And then died of cancer, and never got there. So I interviewed her husband and her three sons, trying to figure out if someone's gone, how do you pull out some of that legacy? How do you make sure that -- you can't save it all. But how do you make sure that something is carried forward to the next generation? And I learned a lot about doing that. I don't have time for a big project is another one I heard. So there's one chapter about sort of different ideas. I interviewed a family that they're scattered across the United States and then as far as Saudi, Arabia. And they have a cooking blog where they all have the password and so they post and they post pictures and comments and then periodically they print it all out. And it's their way of this scattered family of sharing these family foodways. So there are a lot of neat ideas now that are out there. And then I brought show show and tell. It never has to be too elaborate. Here's a little cookbook that somebody made. They just typed out the recipes, sewed it with a sewing machine to make the binding, and then cut up a piece of a Christmas card for the cover. Simple, but a goldmine. Here's another one that somebody did the same thing. This one, thankfully, they added a few sentences about the recipe which I think is really important. And they just punched a hole in the side, added a ribbon, and gave it to everybody for Christmas. Here is one -- this is a woman, that she did this one with -- she had lots of recipes and then she put it together with her favorite quotations to inspire her grandchildren -- family stories, took it to the office supply place and had them put a spiral binding on it. It's not fancy, it's not expensive, but it's very effective. Then this is my favorite way to do gift ones. I think -- like Snapfish and Shutterfly, Walgreens, there's lots of places that do these photo books. And by -- you can type out recipes and print them and turn them into JPEGs with a scanner. Or you can just scan the original recipe so you see the handwriting and all that. Oops, I'm sorry. By doing it this way, you can sort of share copies of all these family recipes sort of in all their glory along with the photographs and the life dates and those sorts of things. These things, they live on the server of the photo company that you're, you know, working with their software. So what I do is I make them and then I let them sit there, and when I know another gift occasion like somebody else is getting married in the family, you can do a Save As on that website and design, you know, like a frontpage for that specific person and then print it out, you know, a new copy for that new person. They also do a lot of sales, so if I do something like this, I'll get it done as early as I can and then every week I check the coupons, and when they hit the three-for-one sale, bing, I order everything for Christmas in one fell swoop. And then the last thing I want to share with you -- this is the cookbook I made for my son. We love to cook together and we were always sort of missing peach season. We'd come and go and we'd forget to do the peach recipes. So we put it together in chronological order and it's all the recipes. I had typed them up so I printed them out on pretty paper because it makes it more interesting for a seven-year-old. I did some little photo collages, again just at the drugstore, printed them out, of pictures of things we cooked and pictures of the two of us cooking together. But also pictures of the people where the recipes came from. So my son, even though he's seven, he knows the names of his -- the grandparents he never got to meet, and knows what they look like. He knows what his great grandparents' names are and what they look like. He's connected to it and he knows a lot of the special things that we've done and where they've come from over the years. And we have a lot of fun pulling out those same things at the same time every year. It's a easy way to do it. I can wipe off if there's spatters because they're in those little plastic sleeves. And if it ever, you know, falls into the fire I can print out another copy which is always good to know. It can't get lost at time. The last roadblock I'd say is people -- I've heard often said that nobody is interested but me. And I put this as the last one because it sort of comes back on you. I think to teach your children, your nieces, your nephews, but also the people that are on the same generation as you. The more you talk about food, the more you talk about family history, the more they start to feel interested in it. And even if they feign indifference now, or maybe they are indifferent now, but as time goes on they may become interested. I think -- one of the things I've seen is a lot of times people get interested at about retirement age, so right about the time that the generation before them has all died out. They suddenly think, I didn't think to ask. Well, if you save these things, then the people who come behind you, if they didn't think to ask early enough, you've been kind enough to save things for them. The last thing I would say is that sometimes you think there's not a lot out there. When I started this book I had two recipes from one of my great grandmothers. And by learning how to do the research and learning who to ask and learning some of the tricks, I now -- this recipe that's pictured here is for uncooked peanut butter fudge. My aunt sent it to me. I did ask her several times about family recipes and she told me, oh, I don't have any. When my book came out and I sent her a copy of the book, the next week I got this in the mail. She said, I knew you wanted recipes. I knew I had this. But I just didn't connect it in my head. And once I -- she finally did and sent this. Now I have recipes from all four of my great-grandmothers which I would have thought was impossible because they didn't live for me to meet them. But sometimes it is possible, which is fantastic. That was kind of fast. So are there any questions or comments? Lots of those people like to tell me stories which I love, too. Yeah. >> If you're living [inaudible] a little bit. If you get a recipe that [inaudible]. I got two -- not so much the food itself, but the memory that was [inaudible]. This is [inaudible] when I was around 11 years old, we were living at my grandmother's house [inaudible], and she was making cookies, and I used to sneak in the middle of the night, take two cookies, bring them to my bed, and I couldn't get up in the morning [inaudible]. It was the memory of an idea [inaudible]. But that's an item itself, but what it evokes. >> Valerie Frey: It's true. What he said is it's not the item itself. It's what it evokes. And I think that can be true. One of the things that several people I interviewed mentioned was that not knowing when they finally found a recipe and made it, is this really what it tasted like? Sometimes it's disappointing like this isn't good. I think the memory of it is probably everything. You know, if you -- you know, if you make something and it's not, it doesn't taste as good as it used to. The memory is still very important and compelling. One of the most interesting essays I've read about the concept was in the Cornbread Nation which is a collection of food-writings, and they've done several. And I think it was Cornbread Nation Four . It was a essay about the -- there was a lull after Hurricane Katrina, and then all of a sudden the recipe boards on various websites were hit and hit hard with people desperate to find copies or surrogates of recipes as a birthday came around and you're living in a FEMA trailer. But if you can make the cake that tastes like home, we would all feel better. And people trying to find those recipes and track them down again. There is real meaning, emotional meaning, behind those recipes, like with our chess tarts. You know, to take a bite. It means something to me that that recipe is there and I've been able to make it the way it tastes. And it means something to my brother. It does. >> Judith Jones, who edited Julia Childs, always invited the [inaudible]. She did many cookbooks. But she invited the authors to cook in her penthouse apartment which had a kitchen the size of a closet. But she has Lidia Bas Tianich and she was observing her. And she saw her make a dry spot in the middle of the frying pan and squirting in some tomato paste. And so she said to Lidia, "Lidia, whatever are you doing?" And said, "Well," she said, "I always toast the tomato paste before I stir it in because it gives me an extra layer of flavor." And Judith put her hands upon her shoulders and said, [inaudible] that and worse, you're going to tell your readers this?" And Lidia said, "I didn't know I did it, you know [laughter]." And -- >> Valerie Frey: Yeah. >> -- and that was the very reason that Judith had her do it, because she knew that if she watched the cook that she would catch up. That's some of these little things that make a difference. >> Valerie Frey: Yeah. The kitchen visit can make all the difference. This, you know, recipe for mulligan that my grandfather sent, he thought he had sent the complete recipe. There were so many things he did without even thinking about it. It made a difference in the flavor. So being able to watch sometimes is really key. Yeah. >> My mother was a very good cook. And my best friend really liked this [inaudible] made from pork. So she asked her for the recipe. And she said, I don't have a recipe. Well, please give me the recipe. So she finally, you know, said, [inaudible]. But she cooked it and it tasted [inaudible]. And the thing is, what my mother did, she put all what she said in her cooking. But then she changed it. And then, oh, it's not enough salt, so she added salt. There's not enough sugar so she added it. So the adding stuff is not included. That's why it tastes different. >> Valerie Frey: It's true. And I think a lot of times what I discovered was -- like my grandpa, he couldn't tell you exactly what to do with the tomatoes because it depends on how juicy the tomatoes or acidic the tomatoes, you know. Have we had much rain lately? How were the tomatoes turning out this year? But the more I cooked with him, I got him in the habit of talking out loud to me of -- he would say, taste this. It has that taste. And I would suddenly realize that, okay, it's a little acidic. That's what we're dealing with here. It's not an exact science. And there's no way to -- for me to promise you that if you go through these five steps you will get a successful recipe at the end. But I think one of the things I learned is that when you work with another cook, it develops a really beautiful relationship as the two of you as sort of co-artists work together and learn to talk together and learn to really look and watch what each other's doing to get close. And then to -- you know, in the end, a lot of times you have to have your own way of doing it. It may not taste exactly like grandma's. But you've gotten close and maybe if she's still here you've spent time with her and really sort of gotten into her head of how she makes her cooking decisions. Not exact science, but a beautiful thing when you're talking about connections and foodways and why it matters. You know, working with those cooks is one of the best, best time you'll ever spend. >> Valerie, thank you for being an inspiration. I can actually -- [ Inaudible Speaker ] I'm a social entrepreneur. Kind of work my [inaudible]. >> Valerie Frey: Oh. >> I also did a lot of [inaudible]. So I've been to Greece a couple of times when the [inaudible] first come in. There's a restaurant called Damas, short of Damascus. And it's fascinating. So [inaudible] the first thing you lose is your language when you go to a new land. Then some of your customs. The last of your connections with food. So it's interesting. It's fascinating to have people leave Syria, go across to Turkey, and take this really biggest journey across the Aegean. And they come to Greece. Their native food in this restaurant [inaudible]. So I'm not [inaudible] going back to [inaudible] and their recipes. So this is very important to me [inaudible]. >> Valerie Frey: Oh, thank you. That's really, really important. Yeah. To be a stranger in a strange land. I've only tasted, you know, that by, you know, leaving when I was pregnant and having a baby somewhere thousands of miles away. It still is nothing compared to what they're dealing with. And the challenges of finding the recipes that work and the ingredients. So, I hope that goes very well. >> Thanks. >> Valerie Frey: Yeah. [ Inaudible Speaker ] >> -- my grandmother [inaudible] the first step [inaudible] from her. But when I made it, it just didn't [inaudible] -- >> Valerie Frey: Right. >> -- right. And that really [inaudible] in the kitchen with her. And then realizing that she left out something. >> Valerie Frey: Yeah [laughter]. >> Because it's like, oh, well, writing it down. I'll make sure I do this. And she didn't write it all down. So really having that connection and being able to work [inaudible]. >> Valerie Frey: Yeah. >> [Inaudible] really. >> Valerie Frey: Yeah. >> Yeah. Oh, I forgot to add this, you know. And even if you get the same recipe. For instance, you cook a recipe and I cook a recipe, and we did exactly what they tell you, it's still comes up [inaudible]. >> Valerie Frey: It can. >> And because I think our taste buds are different. And I also know this, you know, like I'm buying food for different -- from different people. So I [inaudible]. So I have two friends [inaudible] and from one friend, whatever she cooks, I like it. And the other, you know, I [inaudible]. So, first page, from the one that I like, is exactly like my [inaudible]. That's why I like all -- whatever she cooks I like it. >> Valerie Frey: Right. It's true. I mean it's a fascinating thought that people who are good cooks, that they -- without being able to articulate it, there's a range of flavors and techniques that they've adopted that's sort of -- that person in cooking form, which is -- it's fascinating. And when you've lost that -- that appendix that I wrote about the Cajun chef, I think her sons have kind of -- you struggle with that. But after a while, at least to be inspired and learn to cook your own way. But it's still grounded in those roots because you've taken the time to collect those recipes and learn from that way of doing things. It's fascinating. >> Yeah, it's very personal. >> Valerie Frey: It is very personal. Yeah. >> I've been lucky enough to be in a family of pretty good [inaudible] all the time. However, my grandmother, who would [inaudible] was apparently a terrible cook. My mother and my aunt have no interest in -- I know that you've kind of talked about this already, but you know, they feel very above all of the stuff that their mother made. What advice do you have for me to kind of spark their interest and say, hey, I know that, you know, you can doctor this up and make it better, but how can I get -- convince them that it's worth it, I guess. >> Valerie Frey: Yeah. Well, apparently a lot of sources -- there's a lot of cookbooks and websites and blogs that are very interested in the mid-century cooking. And if that's what they're sort of dealing with, is opening a can of this, opening a mix of that -- Julia Child called them assemblies, not recipes. But they do have value. I mean, one of my favorite things -- my mom would open cans of cherry pie filling and then you -- I'm sure some of you are nodding this. You dump cake mix over it, and then some butter. It's called a dump cake. And it's fantastic [laughter]. It's really low-brow and it's fantastic. I guess to -- if you can show them some of those cookbooks. You know, go to the library and see if you can grab some of those mid-century celebration kind of cookbooks and show them that there are people who are interested in this and there are people who love this. And that you would really like to know the way, you know, that those were done. And it's true that -- I've developed a mushroom sauce that's the right -- it's the right proportion, so you can use it instead of any of those cream of mushroom soup. And you can do things like that. And if you let them know that, hey, this is the trail I want to follow, but I want to stay grounded in these roots. I hope that they'll listen and [laughter] -- that's kind of difficult. But I hope so. Yeah. >> Sort of picking up on that [inaudible]. It seems to me that holidays, whatever your family holiday traditions are, is that it has to be a prime place. Because, you know, your chess tarts or grandma's sugar cookies or whatever your family tradition is, even if it wasn't great, there has to be pretty solid memories, right [laughter]? So that would be a pretty good [inaudible] -- >> Valerie Frey: Yeah. >> -- to talk about where that came from or where your -- what their parents did [inaudible], too. I mean [laughter]. >> Valerie Frey: That's true. And so if you go far enough back you hit the fresh and local thing again. You know, my great grandparents -- that was the only way they cooked was fresh and local and you could say, hey, there's a lot of interest in that now. I want to learn how to do it. Yeah. >> Will you be at the Smithsonian's Food [inaudible] Festival this Saturday? >> Valerie Frey: No. I wish I could. My husband was a VMI graduate and their reunion is this weekend. But I would love to. Yeah. >> So one of the pushbacks that I got as I try to show value [inaudible] cookbooks, is, well, I can get a recipe off Google. And, you know, I try to say, well, how about [inaudible] in memories and -- what do you usually -- how do you stop and see that [inaudible]? >> Valerie Frey: I don't know. I mean there's some times like, you know, trying to teach somebody to love history or teach them to love their family history. It can be a long road. But sometimes it can always again turn on a dime, you know, to get them to understand that the recipes that they have are very specific. They were chosen -- brought into the family for various reasons. And they really reflect that family. And it's sort of a unique conglomeration that will never ever come again, that collection. So that's probably the way I would approach it, is even if they're not the most unique recipes in the world, it's a unique collection. And I guess we're getting sort of short on time. Let me take one more question though. >> When you did your cookbook, and there was a relative who had not given you a recipe, do you think sometimes they're -- well, I'm not going to give that one recipe. You know, that's my recipe. >> Valerie Frey: Yeah. >> And any suggestions that you would have -- I think producing the cookbook, that's a good thing because they under -- they see it. But yet that recipe was contained in it [inaudible]. You understand what I'm saying. >> Valerie Frey: Yes. That was a problem I came across over and over again. And I did, I did talk about it in the book. That a lot of times it's a quality control issue. This is my pet recipe and what if you don't do a good job with it and then you say it's mine? So a lot of times when I -- when someone is kind enough to give me a real signature recipe, I assure them that I will take great pains with it. Also a lot of times, people really want to be credited for that something special that they've developed. And so I will tell them, this will have your name in the title. And I will not change anything about it. And sometimes that puts people's fears to rest. But I came across so many stories about that. And what I recommended is if they just can't stand to not have the corner on the market, have them write it down in detail as best they can and put it with their last will and testament [laughter]. That's the -- sort of they can have it. But one of the things that I pointed out to them -- if you hold that recipe forever and you die with it, people will talk longingly about it for, oh, a decade, maybe two, and then you vanish into the ether. But if you've saved that recipe and you've shared it, and you've taken pains with it, you'll become legendary [laughter]. >> Yeah, thanks. [ Applause ] >> Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.