Turning Family Recipes into Art

The last time I visited my Oma, I stumbled across a large Ziplock bag full of family recipes. They were scrawled on scrap pieces of paper in the original script of my Oma and my aunts. The beauty of my Dad's side of the family is that there is no such thing as a recipe card. My Oma (and her 6 children) are guilty of scribbling lists and recipes and sometimes even birthday cards on the reverse side of plumber ads and auto mechanic coupons. I asked my Oma if I could keep them. Since then, I have been able to supplement all the half-paged, mostly illegible recipes from my Dad's side of the family with the neat and precise recipe cards of my Mom's side of the family. And splayed before me is a beautiful collage of half century-old, bacon-grease-splattered family documents--my heritage being served up in the form of a plum cake.

These prized recipes are worthy of display. I dare not stuff them into a folder where they would be referenced once a year. So here is what I did.

I narrowed it down to the best of the best. I tried to find recipes that truly represent my lineage of cuisine (cuisineage?): my Aunt Katie's Italian spinguni and my Oma's stollen; our family's famed frog-eye salad (made with acini de pepe as "eyes") and my mom's Easter pie. I also looked for recipes with a little color, either from the ink in which it was written, or the paper on which it was written.

I dragged out the canvas that I've had laying around ever since the last Hobby Lobby 50% off sale and placed it on a surface of newspapers.

And I did a dry-run.

And now for the Mod Podge.

I used a thin layer of mod podge for the glue, and after it dried, I used another thin layer for the sealant. *I would recommend using a straight edge or a ruler to try to smooth out some of the air bubbles. The reason I didn't, is because most of the recipes I chose are onion-skin thin and I didn't want them to tear. 

And.....

Drumroll....

Voila! 

Now my eating nook will have a beautiful, meaningful and practical piece of art hanging in it!

Parting Words: 

I photocopied every recipe front and back before I glued them to the canvas. 

If you don't have any of your original hand-written family recipes, no problem. You can either start accumulating now (send well-chosen pieces of paper to various family members and ask them to scribble out your favorite recipe. You can tea-soak these pages to acquire and aged look.) Or you can pop into a flea market or thrift store and search the shelves for old cookbooks. I found pages that were aged and also appropriate to my family. The typed recipe pictured above the small mason jar in the center of canvas is a "minestrone" recipe from a cookbook from the 60's. I think a canvas full of typed " recipes from "vintage" cookbooks could be pretty nifty, too. 

Please look for my next blog post: Fried Chicken with a side of Rouladen...coming soon!