Looking for an interesting gift for a cook or a “foodie,” or even for yourself? Why not give the gift of legacy — food legacy – with a scholarship to The Heirloom Meals Recipe Project?
Who can deny that memories frequently revolve around food? Even if, in this holiday season, you no longer go over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house, do memories of her holiday meals and the smells of her kitchen carry you back to a world of family and belonging? And what about Marcel Proust, for whom the very thought of Madeleine pastries unleashed a torrent of childhood memories?
According to Carole Murko of Stockbridge, the history of your family or even of your own life can be told through recipes and food traditions. As a result, she created the Heirloom Meals Recipe Project to help you gather together your own family food memories and to preserve them as a tangible legacy for future generations – and you don’t have to be a Marcel Proust to do it well!
Carole has completed her own legacy project, The Lanzetta & Murko Heirloom Family Cookbook , and is now helping project participants to do the same:
Take the example of the woman who inherited her grandmother’s recipe box in 1992 and had been trying to figure out what to do with it ever since. Now, with the help of Murko’s Project, she has turned the recipes into the building blocks of a warm and funny family reminiscence.
Or the remarried widow from Northampton who is chronicling the different phases of her life with stories about the foods and meals she prepared during her first marriage and now during her second.
Or the salt-of-the-earth woman from Maine whose daughter gave her a place in the Project as a gift. Now this woman is making every one of her favorite recipes all over again, photographing them, and compiling them as a cookbook for her children.
Chef, caterer, producer of food programs for public television and frequent contributor of recipes to The Berkshire Edge, Carole Murko launched the Project earlier this year as a series of eight-week “done-with-you” workshops that help you get your stories onto the page. Workshops are small, limited to eight people, so you get lots of support, not only from Carole but also from the other participants.
She shows you how to take your recipes, your fading photographs, the dog-eared 3”-by-5” cards where your grandmother (or your mother or you) wrote down ingredients and instructions, and to work your stories around them. She provides you with a template to help you organize all these pieces.
Once you have all your pieces together, Carole takes over and, at the end of her process, presents you with your very own full-color, hardcover 72-page book for your family, friends and, presumably, descendants to enjoy and cherish. The book includes 20 blank pages at the end, so you can keep adding on to your legacy. Plus you get the pdf of the book so you can reproduce it or pass it around on the Internet.
Since the workshops are conducted by phone and online, you don’t need to be in the Berkshires to join in. Participants have come from all over the country. So far, they have all been women, but Carole is hoping that men will also start telling their stories.
Can’t fit an eight-week “done-with-you” workshop into your schedule? By mid-2016, Carole will be offering a “do-it-yourself” video, so you can work at your own pace. And expect that you’ll never have time to compile your own book? Carole also offers a “done-for-you” service, in which she collects your memorabilia, collects your stories from and for you, and writes the book for you herself.
The next Heirloom Meals Recipe Project starts on January 11, 2016. For more information, see https://heirloommeals.com/workshops/
And best wishes for happy holiday meals now and into the future.
