501-918-3025
calsfoundation@cals.org
calsfoundation@cals.org
Your Favorite Meal
As a family tradition, for each of our birthdays, we would request a special homemade meal for dinner. I can vividly remember my eleventh birthday. My mom called me for supper, and I ran to the table, sitting expectantly as my mom set down a piping hot glass dish full of scalloped potatoes.
This was my annual tradition. My birthday would roll around, my mom would ask, “What do you want for your birthday dinner?” and every year I would tell her, “Scalloped potatoes!” My mom would then move a chair over to a cabinet above the stove and search through hundreds of recipes, cookbooks, and recipe boxes to find a small well-worn card written by my grandmother. My granny had written out the recipe for my mom after I had fallen in love with her scalloped potatoes on a family trip to Ohio and demanded that we take it home with us in a Tupperware container. After that, my granny would make scalloped potatoes for me every time I visited her.
My mom recently pulled out that recipe card. It was worn and the ink had diffused, but seeing it again transported me back to being eleven years old, filling my entire plate full of thin potato slices smothered in hot cheese.
I have since tried scalloped potatoes from other recipes, and I find myself critiquing it in my head, thinking about what my granny would have done differently. For me, scalloped potatoes are forever tied to my granny sitting on a stool in the kitchen, quickly and precisely peeling potatoes one by one just for me to have my beloved dish. With Thanksgiving and the holidays fast approaching, I find myself craving them and thinking back on those visits to Ohio.
Oftentimes when I talk about digitizing and preserving history, most people’s minds jump to photographs, photo albums, letters, and documents, but many people have memories just like mine of a meal they savored coming from the hands of a loved one. A family’s recipe cards should also be digitized so they can be preserved and organized.
In my time assisting people with digitizing their personal collections at the CALS Memory Lab, I’ve heard countless stories of people not only losing a beloved family member but also losing a special family recipe with that family member’s passing. I managed to digitize the scalloped potatoes recipe card from my granny and send it to my family this year. I cannot imagine what I would have done had my granny passed without her scalloped potatoes recipe being saved. I could have tried a million times to wrack my brain or figure out the right proportions, but there is no way I would have ever gotten it right. It continues to be one of my strongest connections to my granny.
With the holidays, I want to encourage you to think about the recipes you have tucked away somewhere and take the time to share and digitize them. This is the season when we often find ourselves surrounded by our families and our community. If you have a treasured family recipe, write it down and share it with your family members. If there are priceless recipes that live in the head of an elder, I encourage you to sit with them and write those recipes down. Ask questions! “Who did this come from?” “Why did we use this ingredient instead of this one?” “Who has made this dish a thousand times more than you have?” These recipes are our strongest tether to our backgrounds, our families, and our culture, and they are well worth preserving.
I encourage you to treat the recipes you love with the same care you would a photograph or other documents. Save those recipes that immediately transport you to being a child sitting at your family dinner table again, with your favorite meal on the way.
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Come visit the CALS DIY Memory Lab in the Roberts Library! Find information about how to make an appointment, along with other resources, here. Before patrons come in to use the Memory Lab, we strongly encourage attending our free Personal Archiving class. This class is held once a month and introduces patrons to organizing their photos and other papers.
By Meredith Li, Memory Lab coordinator, CALS Roberts Library of Arkansas History & Art
