Celebrating Everyday Recipes
There’s value in any recipe that provides connection, even the “nothing special” ones
I’ve been having so many conversations with so many different people about family recipes and the stories behind them. I wish I could remember every word of them, but every discussion is interesting, insightful, sometimes funny or touching. I love it all.
And every now and then one of those conversations sticks with me more than most. One in particular happened last August with a woman I don’t know all that well. We’re in a tai chi class together and the teacher has been enamored with my recipe-box project—so the subject comes up now and again before or after class. (The teacher also instigated a really wonderful recipe-box related get-together that I’ll be writing about soon.)
My classmate was lamenting that a family recipe for which she has fond memories, a potato salad, was nothing special. Hardly worth mentioning, let alone sharing.
That’s all it takes for me to go into recipe-preservation-champion mode. I assured her that the recipe itself need not be unique, innovative, distinctive, or otherwise special to be worth valuing as a cherished recipe. Even a seemingly mundane recipe for potato salad can represent connection, ties to family, memories, childhood, a sense of time and place. And I encouraged her to think about any stories, memories, and connections stirred up by the potato salad, and to keep them in mind when she makes and shares that recipe.
Sometimes these nothing-special recipes may be from the side of a box or a bag or otherwise seem like a universally-known recipe. So why bother keeping them?
The example I always turn to is “my mom’s” cranberry relish, which I make every year for Thanksgiving. My thinking it was her special recipe was not because my mom had ever tried to put it off as hers or withheld the source. It was just a leap I’d made in my little-kid head, one that was dispelled when later I found the recipe cut from a bag of Ocean Spray cranberries in her recipe folder.
It may be exactly the same cranberry relish many others make every Thanksgiving, but remembering my mom making it, picturing the old hand-crank grinder attached to the counter, the sound of the cranberries popping and orange spurting as they are drawn through, and the smell of pure comfort. That’s what the recipe is to me, not just the handful of basic ingredients ground together in the same way everyone else does.
So the potato salad, the cranberry relish, the pancakes, the coffee cake—they may seem every-day, but if there’s a story to go along with those recipes, they’re something special.
Lori Olson White, for one, does not have to worry about her family’s cherished potato salad recipe being mundane. I won’t spoil the surprise, you’ll have to read about it in her recent newsletter here. Rich with potato salad stories, Lori also shares a touching one about her dad, and a funny memory from a barbecue joint in East Texas. It was fun to read, particularly with potato salad already a conversation point for me in recipe-box discussions.
After sharing her few potato salad stories and seeing some comments readers shared, it prompted her to put out a call for family potato salad recipes. If you have one you’d like to add to that mix, you’ll see her reference to it in the comments of that newsletter linked above.
As I’ve mentioned at least a couple of time in this newsletter, I’m a keeper of things. I can’t bring myself to toss any recipes from my mom’s folder because I see the whole collection as the treasure—the range of decades represented, places lived, people from her life, sources for the recipes (friends, magazines, newspapers, boxes and bags of products she bought).
And I get it: not everyone is a keeper of all the things to that degree. But when it comes to recipe culling, I sincerely encourage keeping connections and memories in mind. Try not to dismiss a recipe simply because it’s dated, uses ingredients or techniques we prefer to skip, or we don’t think we’ll ever make it. If there’s any connection behind it, I vote for putting it in the “keep” pile. And then you can work on some updates, if you’d like, for a version of the recipe that better fits how you cook today while still honoring and preserving the original.
You nailed it, @Cynthia - every recipe carries a story. Sometimes it’s the dish created, sometimes it’s the eating and sharing or preparation, sometimes it’s how the recipe was passed down or by whom. There are always stories and memories in the mix.
And thanks a bunch for including my little potato salad story and recipes, and especially the call for others to join the fun and share their family potato salad recipes and stories.