Posts Tagged family recipes

I know many of you have sent comments and emails about the Historic Family Recipes series I started and how you have liked the recipes that have been posted so far. Don’t worry, I do plan to bring the series back and start posting some more recipes for your shortly. In the meantime, to get your fix of recipes and the history of food in Canada, please check out this lovely little site: The Culinary Historians of Canada.

 This group of Historians is based in Toronto and though the focus is mainly Ontario, they give a lot of great information about historic kitchens in Canadian museums, recipes, festivals and some resources for you to check out. If you have any links to culinary historians or groups in your province, do drop the CHC a line and I’m sure they will be happy post it on their website.

Anybody who points me in the direction of food gets a huge gold star beside their name in my book! So a special thanks to Deborah for sending me the information so I could pass it along to all of you.

Happy cooking!

Photo Credit: Chris Keen

As Christine showed us in our last posting of Traditional Family Recipes, anyone can take a recipe given to them and pass it down to members of their own family for generations to come. Now, our next recipe in the series looks at how an old favourite can come from a foreign land and become adapted to new environments and food selections.  The spirit of the dish is still present, but its contents may vary slightly based on the local ingredients available. This week’s recipe comes to us from June who was born to Finnish immigrants who fished and lived in a Finnish speaking community along the banks of British Columbia’s Fraser River called Finn Slough.  (more…)

Photo Credit: David Ellis

As I’ve been sorting through the recipes I have received and reading the wonderful stories attached to them, I was struck by one particular submission from Christine in Powell River, British Columbia which helped me realise something important. Not all our recipes have been passed on by family members but by other individuals in our lives such as friends, neighbours or co-workers. Maybe these recipes have been in these other families for years. What is just as important in these recently acquired recipes is the opportunity to start a new family tradition of passing on a recipe, and Christine is proof of that new tradition of family recipes. Over 30 years ago, she received a recipe for carrot cake that came from a Scottish neighbour and now she would like to pass this new family favourite recipe on to you. (more…)

Photo Credit: Giampaolo Macorig

When Margaret speaks of her Italian grandfather, Sergio, a smile comes to her face and tears to her eyes even though he has been gone nearly 40 years now. He was a compassionate, quiet and soft spoken man who had a 30 year career as a master shipwright carpenter in the shipyards of Glasgow, Scotland. Yet, his true passion and great love was cooking for his family and passing down his long-time family recipes to his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In this chapter of Historic Family Recipes, I’ll tell you about a 150+ year old Italian pasta and sauce recipe that started in Rome, came to Glasgow and is now being used in Oakville, Ontario.   (more…)

Photo Credit: Laura Waldie

Well, I want to launch something fun here at “History to the People” and something I hope you will both enjoy and want to be a part of. One of my little hobbies on the side is to experiment with and try out a vast array of culinary dishes from around the world. I have to admit, I am a foodie at heart and just love to cook. I also have the embarrassing ability to name all the shows currently showing on Food Network Canada! I thought it would be a cool idea to post some recipes onto this site from readers. But, in keeping with this site’s focus on heritage and history, I would like to post some recipes that have been passed down through the generations. You may never have known your great, great grandparents, but you keep their spirits alive by preparing their favourite recipes  such as Scotch Baps or Newfoundland Chowder for your loved ones still to this day. If you have a favourite hand-me-down recipe you would like to share with others, please email me and tell me the story about your favourite generational recipe and I will post it on this site. Perhaps this can be the start of a Heritage Canadian Cookbook! For the first post I will pass along to you a couple recipes that have been passed down in my family.  (more…)