Family Recipes on the Big and Little Screens
Recent tributes to the value of tracing and preserving food traditions
It’s hard, when the subject of food movies and programs comes up, to not delve into conversation about other great food shows we’ve seen over the years.
I’m trying to stay focused here on a few recent examples I watched that celebrate family recipes and food traditions, and the memories and experiences associated with them. It was all I could do to not sit down and rewatch Tampopo and Big Night and The Taste of Things and Babette’s Feast with my recipe-box radar out and remind myself to what degree family/cherished recipes played a role in them.
OHHH! But I did recently rewatch Ratatouille (which I own, as I do Tampopo, on DVD because that’s how old I am) and remember that when the snooty restaurant critic takes a bite of the elevated, elegant ratatouille, he was immediately transported back to his childhood kitchen. We see his mom at the stove making the traditional, humbler version, and she puts a bowl of it in front of his boyhood self…that’s such a beautiful scene about how powerfully evocative food can be. And of course I love the fact that Remy pulls that recipe for ratatouille out of a recipe box on the kitchen counter.
Well, so much for not going off track…. Back to the newer things I’ve watched recently.
What stands out for me about these more recent shows is that—particularly for two of them—beloved recipes and cherished food traditions are front and center.
Most distinctly so is the series Milk Street’s My Family Recipe, with Christopher Kimball (founder of Milk Street) and Cheryl Day (author and pastry chef) as co-hosts. The series originally launched in October of 2022 per the show’s website, though it only hit my radar recently when it began airing on a local PBS station.
Each of the ten episodes features a home cook and a beloved recipe they’re striving to recreate in their home kitchen—one that’s been lost or the version they have lacks important details. Each home cook travels to the Milk Street kitchens in Boston, joining Christopher and Cheryl to cook the revived version that the Milk Street team came up with. Then it’s back home, to recreate the recipe in their own kitchen to share with family and friends.
This very quest is so relatable for so many of us. The piecing-together that we see the kitchen team do not only teaches us about that particular dish being made while hearing its story, we also can pick up some insights and inspirations for our own lost-recipe quests. We may not have a team of culinary experts to help with the research and testing (if the episodes could be longer, it would be great to see more of that “sleuthing” part of recreating those recipes), but we can certainly learn some tips from them.
I loved so much about the series: the touching reactions the cooks had tasting their beloved recipes again (sometimes for the first time in many years); seeing the treasured tools they sometimes used (mom’s whisk, mom’s Le Creuset, grandmother’s rolling pin); recognition of how much it would mean to loved ones to know that their recipes were being kept alive; and just how much joy that recipe brought to the cook and those they shared it with, perfectly expressing how much value those recipes have.
No Taste Like Home is one for all food fans, but also one that family historians are going to love. There’s a lot of digging into family heritage and finding familial connections in these episodes, mixed in among the cooking and food explorations. Launched on National Geographic in February of this year, it’s hosted by Antoni Porowski, the culinary expert on Queer Eye (which I’m still a big fan of). With that NatGeo home, you can bet there’s lush imagery of beautiful and interesting places—the series is great for a bit of armchair travel, too. (The channel is also the new home for Stanley Tucci’s latest series “Tucci in Italy” that premiered this month.)
The six episodes takes us to different parts of the globe helping six celebrities trace family history—much of which through the lens of a recipe or family tradition. For Awkwafina, it meant exploring the foods of Korea, where her mom—who died when she was young—was from. The portion cooking a seaweed soup that her mom used to make her is particularly meaningful. For Justin Theroux, tracing the origins of a particular pasta recipe beloved in his family helps him understand more about his family’s roots in Italy. And Florence Pugh learns where her family’s passion for food and hospitality comes from, tracing back to a Yorkshire pub owner generations back. The shepherd’s pie she and her mom and grandmother make (while also disagreeing a bit about the best way to make it!) looks exquisite. There are a number of dishes I wish they could have shared recipes for—including a lamb maafe (stew with peanuts) made on the episode with Issa Rae tracing her heritage in Senegal.
Last but not least, have you seen Nonnas yet? A lot of people apparently have; as of this writing it’s sitting at #3 on Netflix in the U.S. It’s a very sweet movie, based on the true story of a man who opens an Italian restaurant on Staten Island after his mom passes away, having been her caretaker in recent years. We see scenes from him as a boy, with his mom and grandma standing side by side in the kitchen, his grandma making her traditional Sunday sauce. His current-day self regrets never having asked them to write any of their recipes down. The restaurant he opens, Enoteca Maria, is a tribute to his mom. And he decides to staff the kitchen not with trained chefs but with grandmas, nonnas. There isn’t a lot of recipe exploration in this movie, but there is a lot of appreciation for the rich and meaningful connection that food has in our lives, whether it’s as a vehicle to memories of those we’ve lost, or a means to building and nourishing connection with those in our lives today. Be they family we’re born into or family that we make.