A Tasty Foray into Family History

A Tasty Foray into Family History

By Janet Peterson

Food can be a tasty and appealing way to share your family history with younger generations. Cooking family heritage foods links past to present and provides an opportunity to remember ancestors and to tell family stories around the dinner table. A friend of Italian heritage commented, “There is a sense of family continuity and memories that come along with these traditional foods. Family dishes, like our heritage, are intertwined in our daily lives. They’re what connect us to our past.”

As a senior, you are the person to connect the past to your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Serving favorite foods of your ancestors is an inviting way to develop family traditions and to help your posterity get to know more about their heritage.

Here are some ideas to get you started on sharing your family history through food.

Food from the Old Country. My grandparents, Friedrich Gustav and Lily Wolters Fischer, emigrated from Germany to the United States in the early 1900s and brought with them many foods from the “old country.” I still remember Grandma’s rotkraut, or red cabbage, simmering on her wood-burning stove with its tart-sweet taste and deep red color. Rotkraut has been part of our Thanksgiving dinner each year.

Discover an Ancestor through Food. To become acquainted with an Irish ancestor, one family hosted a dinner of Irish stew, Irish soda bread, and Leprechaun Lime Pie on St. Patrick’s Day to honor Andrew Hanner. They listened to Irish music, viewed mementos and photographs, and discovered details about Andrew by searching for answers to questions about his life. They also learned a little about Ireland. This family enjoyed the evening so much that they have hosted other ancestor dinners.[1]

Ethnic Food Favorites. My Italian-American friend said, “I enjoy the tastes, textures, and aromas of the foods of my heritage. My fondness for them developed over the years after sniffing their piquant aromas drifting in from Grandma’s kitchen.” Some of her Italian-heritage dishes include squid stuffed with bread crumbs and baked in tomato sauce; sautéed mustard greens in garlic, olive oil, and red pepper flakes; roasted bell peppers bathed in garlic, parsley, and olive oil; and Baccala [dried, salted cod fish] stew. She noted, “Associated with all of these family dishes is a feeling of togetherness and a sense of well-being. For me, each of these traditional foods rekindles family customs, memories, and a sense of legacy.”

Just Like the Good Old Days. Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren may be surprised to learn that in the “olden days,” there were no fast-food restaurants, nor Costcos, nor even sliced bread. Food details reveal a lot about someone’s life and their times. My children have heard stories about my other grandmother, Ethel Smith Matheson, who made bread twice a week for her family of eight children and continued to make her own bread until she was 90. As a child, my niece always chose Grandma’s meatballs for her birthday dinner. As a young adult, she called her mother for instructions on how to make Grandma’s chiffon pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. These foods are one of the ways Grandma’s posterity remember her.

What Can I Do to Start Today?

Plan a Dinner. Start with some of the dishes that were passed down to you from your mother or father or grandparents and that you ate as a child. Invite family members to a meal and talk about traditions involved with those foods and share stories about your parents or grandparents.

Location Inspiration. Select a region of the United States or country where one of your ancestors is from. Research typical foods of that area and ask family members for recipes or find some in cookbooks or on the Internet, and create a meal. Explain why certain foods would be served in that region, such as salmon in the Northwest, paella in Spain, or chile verde in Mexico.

Ancestor Re-Enactment. Focus on one ancestor and share details about his or her time period, education, occupation, mode of transportation, and family life. If that person kept a journal with mention of food, find a way to prepare something similar. If no record is available, cook a dish or a meal that would be representative.

Heritage Cookbook. Create a cookbook with recipes from your heritage, which likely would include many regions and countries. Include photos and stories. Introduce each recipe with a note about its origin, such as “A hearty pioneer recipe similar to one made by our great-grandmother Ida Whitaker Taylor.”

Start Small. Choose one heritage dish as part of your usual dinner and tell about how it fits into your family history.

Grandchildren (and children) may be reticent to delve much into family history, but most all grandchildren enjoy good and home-cooked food. As the saying goes, “If you cook it, they will come.” Providing this taste of family history will help your own family to better understand their roots, to savor their heritage, and likely pique interest in their past. You, as the patriarchs and matriarchs, are your family’s link to their culinary history.

[1] See Suzanne Goodrich, “Ancestor Holidays,” Ensign, March 1987. Also available at www.lds.org.