From the Family Kitchen: Discover Your Food Heritage and Preserve Favorite Recipes [Hardcover]

Gena Philibert Ortega (Author), Jacqueline Musser (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 10, 2012

Celebrate Your Family Recipes and Heritage

From Great-grandma's apple pie to Mom's secret-recipe stuffing, food is an important ingredient in every family's history. This three-part keepsake recipe journal will help you celebrate your family recipes and record the precious memories those recipes hold for you--whether they're hilarious anecdotes about a disastrous dish or tender reflections about time spent cooking with a loved one.

The foods we eat tell us so much about who we are, where we live and the era we live in. The same is true for the foods our ancestors ate. This book will show you how to uncover historical recipes and food traditions, offering insight into your ancestors' everyday lives and clues to your genealogy. Inside you'll find:

• Methods for gathering family recipes
• Interview questions to help loved ones record their food memories
• Places to search for historical recipes
• An explanation of how immigrants influenced the American diet
• A look at how technology changed the way people eat
• A glossary of historical cooking terms
• Modern equivalents to historical units of measure
• Actual recipes from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks

Editorial Reviews

Review

If you are interested in food, in families, and in genealogy, this book will inspire you to record and preserve your family's food memories and recipes for future generations." --Lisa & Sarah at A Spoonful of Sugar

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About the Author

Gena Philibert Ortega is a consultant for Family History Expos, RootsMagic and the National Institute for Genealogical Studies. She speaks on various subjects involving genealogy to nationwide and international audiences via webinars as well as to groups throughout California and Utah. Gena serves as Vice-President for the Southern California Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists. She is also a Regional Director for the California State Genealogical Alliance. She is the director of the genealogy social network GenealogyWise, which currently has over 24,000 members.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Family Tree Books (May 10, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1440318271
• ISBN-13: 978-1440318276
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.8 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,592,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting from an historical standpoint June 11, 2012

By Tooncesmom TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

I received From the Family Kitchen from Amazon Vine for an honest review. Here's my take on it.

Did you ever wonder about your food heritage? Studying social history will help you understand how your ancestors lived. In this attractive hardcover book, you can learn about the foods your forebears brought with them when they immigrated to the Land of Opportunity. They brought recipes, raw ingredients, even seeds from their homelands, and these cultural heritage items blended into the American diet. Six chapters discuss this and more: food traditions by region, food throughout history, cookbooks and menus and how to find your ancestors' recipes. A second section offers a look back at historical recipes with a primer on old cooking terms which I found interesting but not new to me, the art of menu planning and proper cleaning techniques and twenty pages of historical nineteenth and early twentieth-century recipes.

The third part of the book is a journal to write down your own favorite recipes. In addition to the name of the dish, space is provided for a list of ingredients, cooking instructions and memories of the particular recipe.

The historical recipes were a bit off-putting for me. I don't plan on preparing haunch of venison, kidneys, brains, squirrels, mock mince pie (why not make the real thing?), mutton pot pie or rinktum tiddy any time soon, however, they provide historical interest.

Since the journal isn't indexed, it seems an unlikely place to look for recipes, but the book might be a lovely gift to share with a family member Even if you don't use it for its intended purpose, the old recipes and methods are interesting reading.
205 pages. Published by Family Tree Books.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Based on an odd notion June 20, 2012

By W. Maite VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

I found this to be a very odd book. It is specifically aimed at those writing genealogical narratives of their families, with the thought that one can spice up his or her family history by adding some information about the foods their ancestors may have eaten at the time. I suppose that's all well and good for some people, but to me it's a weird notion. If I wanted to pad my family history with what my ancestors ate, I'd prefer to include actual handed-down recipes rather than create a fiction based on what they may, or may not, have eaten.

I'm not quite sure what the point is of saying that my great-great grandmother may have eaten squirrel for dinner when I have no idea on earth whether squirrel ever passed her lips, simply because squirrel recipes appear in cookbooks of the time. After all, I'd hate for my descendants to think that I ate squirrel because they found recipes for it in my copy of Joy of Cooking when the truth is that I was downright shocked when I came across that section!

That said, there's some interesting food history included, as well as very good tips on where and how to research food history on your own. There are a handful of recipes reprinted from a London cookbook, although I'm not sure why. The back of the book has a nice section for writing down family recipes and any memories of them.

All in all, if you're interested in creating a fictional history of the food your ancestors ate, then I guess this is the book for you.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Book in search of an identity June 9, 2012

By beckygardens TOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

When I read the description of this book I thought of it as sort of scrap booking family recipes. I have Living Cookbook 2011 and love it, but I thought a book with some of our very favorite recipes would be a nice family heirloom.

This is not a family heirloom book. Had the book description been something along the lines of "food history and how to preserve your family recipes" and left off the last half of the book this would be a five star book.

Had this been a two book set, the first half stand alone, the second half a place for family recipes, this would be a five star book.

However, as written and marketed this is a book with a split personality disorder. The first half is really great as a food history, a map of finding your own family recipes, inclusions of old time meanings like what exactly is a "moderate" stove. From the family kitchen also talks about how to preserve recipes so they don't discolor or fall apart. Then it gives a bunch of recipes from the past. Nice, but this impersonalizes this book to the point it's no longer viable as "my family recipes."

Then there is the matter of the last half of the book where one is supposed to write their family recipes. It would have been nice if this had been ring bound so that I had the option of including the original hand written recipe. Also, every single page is exactly the same, If your family recipe has over 14 ingredients, or you have big hand writing and can't fit, "One cup finely chopped onions," in the area given, oh well.

This review might make it sound like I'm steering a reader away from buying the book, and I'm not. If it were a total failure it would have one star. The first half of the book is actually fascinating and full of valuable information. I would buy this book, but I'd also buy an auxiliary book to actually put the recipes in. A simple Amazon search found several suitable notebooks, binders, family keepsake type books that would work. When passing this on to my family I would give it as a set, so they could hopefully get the helpful information included in the Family kitchen book, and then continue on in the separate book of family recipes.