Family Cookbooks – Objects of Family Memory

Eleonora Sava

doi:10.24193/mjcst.2021.11.06

Abstract

The article proposes an analysis of family cookbooks from the perspective of memory studies. Its main goal is to show that these are objects that shape family memory, helping to preserve and transmit it from one generation to the next. The first section outlines the theoretical framework, discussing the multiple layers of content and meaning in homemade cookbooks, the similarities between them and scrapbooks, as objects that can elicit voluntary (or involuntary) memories. Other theoretical issues that are essential for the problem in question are also examined: the complex relationships between individual memory and family memory, the layers that make up family memory, how family meals shape family memory, and recipe books seen as Proustian devices. The second part proposes a case study that explores the particular way in which the aspects discussed in the theoretical section are illustrated by two recipes notebooks belonging to a woman who was born in a Romanian town in 1944. As regards the research methodology, the case study is based on a life-story interview and the qualitative analysis of the two notebooks.

Highlights

Cookbooks – levels of content and meaning Family cookbooks are objects that gather together food, family and memory
The role of cooking is to provide “a conduit of memory transmission, an embodied practice that transfers skill and technique and distinct recipes or particular uses and understandings of ingredients and flavours that may have existed in the family for generations” (Shore and Kauko 106). This aspect of intergenerational transmission suggests that family cookbooks house a second level of content, namely the level of family memory, since recipes are inherited within a family and passed on, from one generation to the
Cookbooks as recipe scrapbooks Many family cookbooks, such as the notebooks examined as a case study in the second part of this article, are memoirs

Summary

Introduction

Cookbooks – levels of content and meaning Family cookbooks are objects that gather together food, family and memory. Commensality is closely related to family memory through the sensory experience of food: taste, smell, and sight, hearing, the sense of touch, as well as the synesthesia produced by combining the senses.

Results

Conclusion