“Just for fun, my mother and I are writing a cookbook,” I
told a friend back in October.
“Busman’s holiday?” she asked.
Yes, it’s true: my job is to write and my hobby is to write.
And for the past four months or so, when I haven’t been working on deadline to
finish drafting an article, a brochure, or a piece of marketing copy, I’ve been
putting together a compilation of family recipes.
And yes, it’s a little geeky, but it’s fun. Like many
families, we have long wanted to pull together all our favorite old recipes,
and as I worked on my project, many friends and acquaintances told me of how
their mothers or grandmothers or even they themselves had made up binders of
photocopied pages, one set to be given to each family member, or even had them
bound at a copy store.
But print-on-demand publishing opens new possibilities for
families who want to generate recipe collections. True, it will look more
professional – if perhaps not as artistically creative – than a looseleaf
binder or leatherbound scrapbook compilation of recipes, but more importantly,
we’ll have an unlimited supply. Because we are doing this with a
print-on-demand publisher, our book will exist in the cloud, available to
anyone at any time, for as long as there’s an Amazon. And speaking as a reader
of the Business section, it looks to me like Amazon will probably survive both
nuclear holocaust and Armageddon.
It’s important to us, because my mother is the author of two
previous cookbooks that are both out of print, simply because a number was
determined for the print run and every last book sold out. Each family member
has a copy, but there aren’t any more copies for new friends or acquaintances
or even future generations.
It’s not that I think this particular cookbook that my
mother and I wrote together is so important. It’s no “Mastering the Art of
French Cooking” or “Moosewood” or “Silver Palate,” to name a few that I really
do think changed the way people cooked. It’s just….well, us. It’s our family’s
favorite recipes. It’s the ones we all trade around and copy for each other and
pass back and forth time and again.
And it’s the ones my children and nieces and nephew asked us
to include. Even those as young as nine or ten knew that it was important to
them that we preserve certain formulas, like the way Grandma makes hot
chocolate, or the way Grandma makes guacamole, or the way Grandma makes
Portuguese sweet bread. (Come to think of it, all the ones my kids were most
concerned with getting down in writing were their grandmother’s recipes, not
mine. I’ll try not to take offense. I suppose it gives me something to which to
aspire.)
As my mother wrote in her introduction to the book, “As I
work on this third collection, I find myself thinking not about my cooking
class students or anonymous cookbook buyers, as I did [with the first two
books], but my six grandchildren. These are their favorites as well, dishes
they've savored at countless family dinners and holiday gatherings over the
years, and I imagine that someday they'll want these same recipes at their
fingertips to make for their own children and grandchildren.”
Maybe. Maybe not. It’s always a mistake to project too many
expectations, particularly misty-eye or rose-hued ones, on future generations.
But if they do want to cook the familiar dishes of their childhoods, they’ll
know just where to find the recipes.
