Steps to Safeguard Your Family Recipes

It doesn't take a catastrophic flood to wash away a family's food heritage. Time and procrastination will work just as effectively as a hurricane if older relatives die before writing down their recipes.

At a recent workshop at the Manassas Museum, Bessida Cauthorne White, editor and co-editor of two family cookbooks, offered eight tips for compiling a family cookbook.

Count on spending at least three times as much time gathering the recipes and editing the book as you expect.

Decide the scope of your cookbook. Will it be recipes only, or family stories as well? Will it accept recipes only from family members, or also from friends and in-laws?

Appoint an outreach team to solicit recipes. Tell members of the team to expect to make follow-up calls. Divide the list of potential contributors and visit people in person.

Establish a budget. Even if all the labor is volunteer, there are paper, computer, printing and shipping costs. Family cookbook publishing companies, such as Brennan Printing, http://www.brennanprinting.com/ , and Cookbook Publishers Inc., http://www.cookbookpublishers.com/ , can save a lot of time but generally do not want to print fewer than 50 copies.

Appoint a sales manager and ask for advance purchases to cover upfront costs.

Select as editors people who pay attention to detail. Have as many people as possible read each recipe to ensure that all the listed ingredients are accounted for in the description of how to make the recipe.

As recipes come in, arrange ingredients in the order in which they are used. Ask contributors to translate terms that might not be commonly known (White said, for example, that she would describe "Jamaican pimento" as common allspice).

Prepare an index as you go along, organizing recipes alphabetically as well as within categories so that Daddy Jimmy's Stovetop Biscuits would be listed under B for breads and biscuits and D for Daddy.

Family cookbooks are worth the trouble, said White, author of "A Reunion of Recipes" and co-author of "Help Yourself! There's a God's Mighty Plenty," "because so many family traditions revolve around food."

-- Judith M. Havemann