However, as more people turn to home cooking, they're realizing they don't know how to prepare some of their favorite meals from childhood. And unfortunately, not everyone has the ability to ask a mother, grandmother, aunt or someone else for a recipe or cooking lesson.
If food and meal culture is important to you and your family and you have numerous recipes you could pass down to loved ones in the future, consider putting them together now. Here are five ideas for creating a legacy of family recipes to pass down to loved ones.
One of the easiest ways to pass on recipes is to gift someone a card box that's already full of recipes you've recorded. You can do this in a few ways:
Not everyone keeps recipes on cards in boxes. If you have a notebook where you've kept recipes through the years, you can have that photocopied too. Or you might buy some inexpensive notebooks and personalize them for various recipients. You can copy their favorite recipes from your collection into each notebook by hand or photocopy your recipes, cut them out and glue them into the notebook.
Take it a step further and type up all your recipes and order printed and bound copies so you can give loved ones a literal cookbook. You can often get pages printed and bound at copy shops and office supply stores like Staples or OfficeMax.
You can make this option as fancy and formal as you like. Simply type your recipes in a word processing program like Microsoft Word and have the pages bound at Staples or a similar store with ring or coil binding. You can discuss options for binding and printing at the copy shop or office store.
On the more formal end, you can hire someone to format your book so you can self-publish it on a platform like Kindle Direct. With this option, you can order author copies to gift loved ones but also offer your recipe book for sale.
If you want to eschew paper and printing completely, you can create an online repository of family recipes. Choose a cloud storage option, such as Google Drive or Dropbox. Then, begin saving digital copies of your recipes to that location. You can type recipes into Google Docs before saving them in Drive, for example, or scan handwritten recipes and save them as image files. This might be a great project to work on in partnership with a grandchild or someone else who's tech-savvy and interested in ensuring your recipes are available to others in the future.
This option takes the premise of passing on your recipes and cooking knowledge to a whole new level. You can use smartphone cameras and other easily accessible technology to record yourself making the recipes in question, demonstrating specific steps and walking your family through more complex cooking skills. Even if you live in an assisted living community, you may be able to embark on a project like this. For example, the country kitchen at The Gardens at Barry Road assisted living community is available to residents for some events, so you can talk to staff about options for using cooking spaces to make videos for your loved ones.
Talk to your children, grandchildren and others in your life to find out if they might be interested in your recipes and how best to preserve this knowledge for the future.
