Bartow History Museum: Savor the Memories

Description

Savor the Memories
Preserving Family Recipes: How to Save and Celebrate your Food Traditions

The Bartow History Museum welcomes Valerie Frey, who will discuss her latest book, Preserving Family Recipes: How to Save and Celebrate your Food Traditions, on May 18th at noon. Frey will discuss the value of recipes, exploring them as historical documents. She will also talk about working with older recipes, give basic tips on preserving heirloom materials, and briefly discuss what is needed in your "toolkit" to work with family recipes effectively. A book signing will follow. The lecture is free to museum members and included with the price of admission for not-yet-members. For more information on this and other museum programs, call 770-382-3818, ext. 6288 or visit our website at www.bartowhistorymuseum.org.

About the Book
Heirloom dishes and family food traditions are rich sources of nostalgia and provide vivid ways to learn about our families’ past, yet they can be problematic. Many family recipes and food traditions are never documented in written or photographic form, existing only as unwritten know-how and lore that vanishes when a cook dies. Even when recipes are written down, they often fail to give the tricks and tips that would allow another cook to accurately replicate the dish. Unfortunately, recipes are also often damaged as we plunk Grandma’s handwritten cards on the countertop next to a steaming pot or a spattering mixer, shortening their lives.

The book is a guide for gathering, adjusting, supplementing, and safely preserving family recipes and for interviewing relatives, collecting oral histories, and conducting kitchen visits to document family food traditions from the everyday to special occasions. It blends commonsense tips with sound archival principles, helping you achieve effective results while avoiding unnecessary pitfalls. Chapters are also dedicated to unfamiliar regional or ethnic cooking challenges, as well as to working with recipes that are “orphans,” surrogates, or terribly outdated. Whether you simply want to save a few accurate recipes, help yesterday’s foodways evolve so they are relevant for today’s table, or create an extensive family cookbook, this guidebook will help you to savor your memories.

About the Author
Valerie J. Frey (pronounced "fry") is a writer and archivist from Athens, Georgia with projects focusing on genealogy, local history, storytelling, material culture, and the everyday home life of our ancestors. Valerie holds degrees from the University of Georgia and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her archives career began in the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress and she went on to serve as an archivist at the Georgia Historical Society, the Savannah Jewish Archives, and the Georgia Archives. She now writes full time. Her most recent book, Preserving Family Recipes: How to Save and Celebrate Your Food Traditions was released in November of 2015 through the University of Georgia Press.

About Bartow History Museum
The Bartow History Museum, located at 4 East Church Street in downtown Cartersville, Georgia, documents the history of northwest Georgia’s Bartow County, spanning more than 200 years since the Cherokee were the area’s primary residents. Artifacts, photographs, documents, and a variety of interactive permanent exhibits tell the story of settlement, Cherokee life and removal, Civil War strife, and lifestyles of years past. The Bartow History Museum also provides a variety of educational opportunities for adults, children, families, and school groups. Our extensive archives and research library contains photographs, documents, newspapers, rare books, genealogy records, oral history interviews, and more. For additional information, visit www.bartowhistorymuseum.org.