Not Your Average Family Cookbook

One of my most prized possessions is a faded, stained, dog-eared old notebook with a date in the front: June 26, 1947. It’s the notebook in which my best-loved auntie wrote down her recipes, both for special dishes and for every day use.

These recipes were mostly collected from her mother and grandmother, even from her great-grandmother, who cooked mostly from memory and habit. So, if Auntie Marj hadn’t recorded these recipes on paper… well, a bit of our family history would have been lost.

Best yet, she added a little note about each recipe — where she’d first tried the dish, who in the village made it the best, what substitutions could be risked, and how she presented it (with a side of radish rosettes? spooned out of Gran’s wedding-china tureen? carried out to the field in a basket to feed the farm hands?).

I’ve just had a number of copies made — chocolate fingerprints on the Whoopie Pie page and all — to keep the treasure safe. And this is what I will be giving for wedding gifts when this next generation of our family starts getting married. Not just a recipe book, but a piece of their heritage.

If I were starting from scratch, however, with a stack of recipe cards instead of the historical “artifact” that is my Auntie’s notebook, I’d probably have a close look at TheSecretIngredients.com.

Our beekeepers’ group made a cookbook last year as a fundraising project, using one of the big printing companies that do that kind of thing routinely, and the result was fine for the purpose — but there wasn’t a whole lot of customization involved, once we’d picked a cover-and-divider package. And I think I’d want a family heirloom cookbook to be a lot more personal…

Five years ago Kate Walling began to make handmade cookbooks in her home for friends and family. A personal history of creativity and artistic expression made these types of projects particularly exciting since her love of art, food and family could be combined into one vision.

That’s what Kate Walling offers on her Secret Ingredients website: high-quality personalized cookbooks that you design yourself online. You can make this an individual project, or get the whole extended family involved in designing it and contributing recipes and photos.

The only skills required are the ability to use a keyboard and mouse. Just sign up at TheSecretIngredients.com (it’s free to sign up — you can try it out first, and pay nothing until you place an order for your custom cookbook), then upload your family recipes (up to 250 recipes), photos, and book dedication. Choose your preferred style of fonts, binders, divider pages, etc. — the interactive sample will show what it’s all about.

“Preparing food is a universal human experience,” Kate says. “it can evoke strong emotions, remind us of our past and keep us looking into the future. I hope Secret Ingredients becomes a place where families can learn more about where they come from and more about each other.”

Contest — The Stock Pot Challenge
Anyone who has purchased a Secret Ingredients cookbook or who is in the process of creating one is eligible to enter to win one free copy of their cookbook project. If you’ve got a story and family recipe you think is worth sharing, submit it to Secret Ingredients to enter the contest. Ten winners will be chosen from the pool of contest entries.