Family Recipe Book

Last month I received a letter from my niece. ‘Guess What! We officially have 5 recipes in our family recipe book!’ She was writing to update me on her new recipe journal, which was a Christmas gift from me. We started writing to each other during the pandemic lockdowns and it delights me that this way of connecting hasn’t fizzled out.  Now there is a new shared interest: handwritten recipes.

When I was looking for her gift, there were two options in the bookstore. An expensive Moleskine branded recipe journal with an embossed image of a whisk and knife and a byline, ‘gather all your favourite recipes in one place’, or a lower priced book with a brightly coloured border of vegetables entitled, ‘Our Family Recipes’.

Christmas shopping options

My niece is 11 years old, still growing into her handwriting, and as much as I am devotee of Moleskine – the black hardcover diary has been my mainstay for 18 years* – I felt compelled to go with the more kid friendly, ‘Our Family Recipes’ book. Since who am I to deny potential family history being made! Naturally the five recipes my niece has documented are all sweeties (her family’s word): waffles, pancakes, ice cream, mango smoothie and cherry cheesecake.

On Christmas night when my side of the family met for dinner, we heard about the Christmas lunch gathering for my niece’s other side of the family. There seemed to be a bit of a bake-off. Two cousins from different families had each made a dessert, a mango trifle and a key lime pie. Apparently the mango trifle was made from scratch with no shortcuts. The other slightly younger cousin’s key lime pie also made without any shortcuts, consisting of five cups of lime juice (‘how many limes would this have been?’ I asked) so for the duration of dessert no one uttered a word. Each silently eating their desserts judging their individual tolerances for tanginess, and perhaps weighing up their preferences. What a classic Christmas memory!

My niece was clearly inspired by the trifle as she made a lemon version for my birthday dinner in the new year. She was going to opt for caramel, but her father advised that would be better suited for Nanna Liz (my late mother) who loved caramel, whereas he told my niece, your aunty’s favourite flavour is lemon. So my niece set about using her cousin’s other grandmother’s recipe for the sponge that was typed out on paper. This was how it was done, hand or typewritten recipes passed on from family member to family member on request after a memorable meal. In the family archive, I have a handwritten recipe for ‘Caramel Chiffon Pie – smooth and delicate’ written out and addressed to my mother, Liz, initialled by my great aunt Elsie. I attempted to make it years ago, in fact my niece was about 3 years old at the time. The pie crust was not quite right – possibly imperial to metric conversion issues – but the little tacker happily ate the caramel filling and left the crust.

My mother was well known (and well loved) for supplying homemade festive red and green jelly slice and lemon slice at family gatherings on Boxing Day. Year in, year out.  So I have taken it upon myself to honour this legacy. After ten or more years refining the quantities to suit the trays, I still haven’t got it quite right, and naturally I complained about this on Christmas, as I do every year. My brother and his wife insisted my mother would also say the same, every year. I don’t recall this as vividly as I do the platters with Instagram worthy perfect slices. Perhaps I am keeping up more traditions than I realise!

What makes a family recipe heritage?

My mother’s recipe book for the jelly and lemon slice is from a 1983 North Ringwood Mid-Week Ladies Tennis Club booklet. I can’t remember when she first made them, but potentially there was more than twenty years of a Christmas jelly and lemon slice tradition. My husband’s grandfather always brought a pipe loaf to his family’s weekly dinners, cementing a nostalgic and singular association that revives memories of his grandfather every time he sees a pipe loaf. Relatives of Nancy Stanley, my grandfather’s sister-in-law, whom I know very little about, told me that their most enduring memory of their aunty Nancy was her pavlova and passionfruit sponge, both a regular contribution to the Stanley household’s weekly Sunday night dinner. The commonality between these examples of food memories is the regularity or the ‘habitual memory’ of these dishes, that over time, repeated use and occasion are perfect ingredients for associations of memory, identity, culture and heritage.

Elsie, Dorothy and Margaret Donovan pre 1939

Both traditions and rituals require a layering of time and memory, and an excellent example of this is the making and joy of eating from family recipes. The time taken to make the recipe, perfect it, and own it so that it becomes a part of your identity may eventually form a key memory associated with you. However, if the stories or the recipes are not passed on in some form or another, the memory can not be sustained. The semi candid photo above shows what may have been a commonly enjoyed ritual, an al fresco afternoon tea. My great aunty Elsie, an excellent cook, sits to the far left, my grandmother Dot, in the centre with their mother, Margaret on the right, moments before tucking into what looks like tea and scones (with no doubt, a pot of homemade jam). Margaret died before either daughter was married, so there are no memories or stories, verbal or written, that I’ve come across about her culinary expertise. Although not all stories have been lost – Margaret’s mother thwarting a bushranger was recorded for posterity by Dot (read here).

Dot’s Cinnamon tea cake

My brother and I would be left in the care of our grandmother, Dot, every Saturday in the winter, whilst our father took our grandfather to the football. My enduring memories of those Saturdays were green tomato pickle (you can read about it here) and freshly baked cinnamon tea cake. Whilst we ate our lunch she would prepare the tea cake for afternoon tea using her handwritten recipe book. I have that book in the family archive, and for years I couldn’t find the cinnamon tea cake recipe.  I longingly thought of this cake often (as I still do for another childhood cake made by a Latvian neighbour – lemon syrup cake). Given I couldn’t find Dot’s recipe, I obtained a copy of a cinnamon tea cake from my niece’s mother. It was a recipe from her grandmother, Lucy, my niece’s maternal great grandmother.  When I wrote the essay about Dot’s green tomato pickle, I finally found a recipe for a passionfruit tea cake in the book, which she must have adapted by not using passionfruit pulp in the mix.

Dot’s recipe book

Reflecting on the traditions of time, food, and family, has me thinking not only about what my food history and family recipe memories are, but also, what do I want as my personal heritage?[1]

Memories about food simultaneously place us in the past and the present and often can create situations for recollections in the future ²

It dawned on me as I was writing this essay that the humble cinnamon tea cake might be a good candidate for my niece’s recipe book, not only because it is one of my favourite recipes and an easy to make sweet treat with pantry staple ingredients, but because it is steeped in my childhood history (and her father’s) and contains interweaving family connections. In my opinion, this connection is more poignant for my niece calling on the ancestral memories of both her paternal and maternal great grandmothers, via an intermediary, me, her aunty.

Baking in a new tradition

My niece had a sleep over at my place during the summer school holidays. We watched Roman Holiday (her first black and white film), played bananagrams (current favourite game), went to a local museum, a favourite local café and most importantly, baked the cinnamon tea cake together for the first time.

My niece’s first cinnamon tea cake using her great grand mother’s recipe

As I regaled her with stories about the cake, we studied the two recipes side by side: the old hand written book of her paternal great grandmother, Dot, and my email printout of the recipe from her maternal great grandmother, Lucy, to tease out if there were any differences in the recipes. Dot had a pinch of salt in hers, while Lucy’s had vanilla essence, but all other ingredients were like for like (with exception of passionfruit pulp). As we were looking through Dot’s book, to my surprise, we discovered another tea cake recipe with plums on top!

We made the tea cake and served it warm to my husband and a friend who was over that afternoon. It was really delicious. She took the rest of the cake home with her to share with her family. Prior to her visit I had asked my niece in a letter how she decides what goes in her family recipe book. I’ve since received a reply, she wrote, ‘With the Journal, I am planning to put recipes that I’ve tried and liked and ovcorce [sic] My Favourites!’

In a bid to see if the cinnamon tea cake will make the book, I have handwritten the recipe on lemon bordered writing paper and I have my fingers crossed! Whilst I wait for a reply, I might test out the Plum Tea Cake recipe with some fresh summer plums.

*My uncle once said to me in the early days of my devotion to Moleskine, ‘you look like a nun with a prayer book’.

End Notes

[1] Toh Ee Ming, How personal heritage shapes lives, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/partner-content-how-personal-heritage-shapes-lives [NB This is partner content for National Heritage Board – literally an advertisement using family history!]

[2] Abarca, M. E., & Colby, J. R. (2016). Food memories seasoning the narratives of our lives. Food and Foodways, 24(1–2), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2016.1150101