Join Me for a Webinar This Thursday

You are invited to attend our FREE online UGA Virtual Chapter Meeting

 

Speaker – Gena Philibert-Ortega

 

Topic – The Secret Lives of Women: Research Female Ancestors Using the Sources They Left Behind

 

Thursday, October 18, 2012, 7:00 pm MDT @ virtual.ugagenealogy.org

 

Women ancestors can be difficult to trace--but not impossible. How do you research female ancestors and how is that research different than searching for male ancestors? Sources discussed go beyond sparse government papers, and into libraries, archives, manuscript collections, and female specific resources.

 

Gena Philibert-Ortega holds Master’s degrees in Interdisciplinary Studies and Religion. She is the author of hundreds of articles published in genealogy newsletters and magazines. Her writings can be found on her blogs, Gena’s Genealogy and Food.Family.Ephemera. Her newest book is From the Family Kitchen (F + W Media 2012). She is a board member for UGA and editor of UGA's Crossroads.

 

The UGA Virtual Chapter meets online on the third Thursday of each month except December. These meetings are free to the public. To attend the presentation, go to virtual.ugagenealogy.org and, on the date and at the time of the meeting, click on the UGA logo. Enter the presentation as a guest. Archived copies of our monthly meetings are available to UGA members only. UGA Membership is only $35.00 per year. To join UGA, visit our website at ugagenealogy.org. Look down the blue panel and select the option to "Join UGA!" Follow the prompts.

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Food Friday: Out of Vermont Kitchens

One of the great benefits of traveling is picking up community cookbooks to add to my collection. On a trip to Illinois I picked up the very large Out of Vermont Kitchens. Compiled by Trinity Mission of Trinity Church, Rutland, Vermont and the Women's Service League of St. Paul's Church Burlington, Vermont. 1939.

This cookbook is 400 pages and bound with a metal coil. While most cookbooks are compiled by one entity this one is the work of two different churches. One of the first pages explains this collaboration

"The Rr. Rev. John Henry Hopkins, D.D. who also served as rector of Trinity Church, Rutland, and St. Paul's Church, Burlington. Thus these two great parishes have had a special bond of union and friendship."

Sometimes people assume that community cookbooks all look the same. Nothing could be further from the truth with this example. Each recipe is penned in the author's hand. So instead of a typed book, this book features each individual woman's handwriting. I haven't seen other examples of this but I'm sure there must be.

I will say it reminded me of the arguments that today's children won't be able to read cursive because it's not taught in schools anymore. They would have a tough time reading this cookbook. Let' s just say not everyone's handwriting is legible.

I love it when a cookbook's owner makes notes about recipes. And this cookbook's previous owner doesn't disappoint  Notice in the recipe below she wrote "this we will skip." She also wrote that about a wild duck recipe. My guess is she wasn't a fan of the game meats. She wrote next to a dense full page Russian Bortsch recipe "too much effort."

Below is a recipe for War Cake, making use of what women would have had due to rationing. Note that this is  a recipe from World War I not World War II.

The end of the recipe provides its origin. It says "During the war this recipe was not given away- but sold for ten cents- benefit Red Cross." I found a posting by a blogger who made  this recipe and she writes about it here.

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Food Friday: Reading Women's Club Jello a la 1976

You have to love the bicentennial celebrations here in the United States. It's during that magic year of 1976 that towns, organizations, and groups published all types of histories and even cookbooks.

Enter the Reading Women's Club (Reading, Kansas) Cookbook. This 1976 cookbook published by the Reading Women's Civil Club includes a list of members, a photograph of their presumed meeting place and of course recipes.

 Lots of great midwestern recipes in this cookbook. Of course I had to gravitate to the one that is an old favorite. In my family, as I have written before, it is called Pink Stuff.

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Food Friday: Beef Tomato Gravy from the LA Times

Today's Food Friday comes from a website that I LOVE but quite frankly didn't think included any community cookbook like cookbooks. Well, let me explain. This cookbook isn't a community cookbook, but it does include the names of women and even street addresses .

Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project is sponsored by Michigan State University Libraries. 76 digitized cookbooks ranging from the late 18th century to the early 20th century are featured here. I have some favorites on this website including the first cookbook believed to be published in the United States, written by an American.

Today's recipe comes from The Times Cook Book, No. 2: 957 Cooking And Other Recipes.../By California Women; Brought Out By The 1905 Series Of Prize Recipe Contests In The Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles: Times-Mirror Co., abt 1905.

The Feeding America website says of this cookbook,

"From 1902 to 1917, the Los Angeles Times newspaper published a series of recipe books based on its cooking contests; all are interesting in that they truly reflect the mix that was southern California at the beginning of the 20th century. This volume contains about 1000 recipes including "Old-Time California, Spanish and Mexican Dishes...Recipes of Famous Pioneer Spanish Settlers."

I chose the following recipe, not so much for what it is but more because it lists the woman's name and street address. This recipe of Beef, Tomato Gravy is from Mrs. Anna B. Rogers, 528 West 2nd Street, Pomona, CA.

page 3, http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/coldfusion/display.cfm?ID=time&PageNum=5

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Food Friday: Ham Croquettes and Liverwoerst from New York

I can't even begin to tell you how much I love community cookbooks. Yes, there's the interesting recipes but it's so much more than that. I really like the idea of getting a sense of what life was like during the time my ancestor walked the earth. Kind of like if you crossed genealogy with the movie Somewhere in Time.

Today's cookbook compiled by The Ladies of the Church of the Good Shepherd from Binghamton, New York (1896) is available for free from Google Books.

Unfortunately, it doesn't have a ton of names in it. But look what it does have.

 A history of the church

Advice on food

Wonderful advertisements

Oh yes and recipes including one passed down from ancestors.

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Travel Meets Genealogy, Part 2: Running Away to Home

This is part 2 of my interview with Running Away to Home author Jennifer Wilson. You can read part 1 of the interview on my blog Gena's Genealogy. In this interview we talk more about Croatian food and antique recipes.

(c) 2012 Jennifer Wilson. Used with permission.

Gena: I love your idea about posting antique recipes on your blog. What gave you the idea to do this?

Jennifer: As you remember from the book, I'm not the world's best genealogist on paper. But I collect ephemera like nobody's business. I just wanted to show how there are different ways you can hand down your family's story--including through food. That'll be an element that runs through the France book, too. I'd love for your readers to share an antique recipe from their own family! Everyone loves an old recipe, and some can be quite odd. Always so interesting to see. Email me at jen@jennifer-wilson.com. I'd love to hear from you!

(c) 2012 Jennifer Wilson. Used with permission.

Gena: What is your favorite Croatian recipe you could share here?

Jennifer: I absolutely love zelodac, which is disgusting to most people's palate. It's like a Scottish haggis, and the word in Croatian means "stomach." My great-grandma used to cook it in the stomach of a sheep. I just use sausage casings (stomach of a pig, technically) and boil it. It's an Easter treat. My husband would advise me to put "treat" in quotation marks. It's very simple, and a combination of ingredients that you don't really see together. I love recipes that are so old that you can just feel the antique quality to them.

1 lb. ham, diced

1 lbs. cooked bacon, diced

Sausage Casings

3 bunches green onions, chopped

12 oz cornmeal

8 eggs

6 oz raisins

Salt to taste

Beat eggs. Add cornmeal and stir well. Add other ingredients. Rinse the sausage casing by holding one end up to the faucet. You can either purchase a sausage stuffing kit, or cut a big water bottle in half to use as a funnel. It’s awkward and messy, but it works.

Stuff the mixture into the casings to form bratwurst-sized sausages. Don’t overfill or leave air bubbles. Prick with a fork. Boil in water for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

Gena: Anything in Croatia you would not eat?

Jennifer: Nah, I couldn't afford to be too picky. But I wasn't crazy about pelinkovac, which was a shot that people liked to do in celebration. Made from wormwood, I think. Tasted like ear wax. I suffered through it, of course, it's rude to turn down a drink in Croatia. But I wasn't savoring it, either.

Gena: Please describe a typical day’s menu in Croatia

Jennifer: For our family, we started the day with sliced apples (Mrkopalj had amazing apples, from the tree outside) and drinkable yogurt, that Jim swears by when we travel internationally. We were never sick from food on the road once, and he swears its yogurt that helped. Orange juice and Nescafe, which is much nuttier and more robust in Europe. Lunch we'd eat mortadella sandwiches with fresh kruh or bread from the bakery. Supper was something we shared with neighbors or friends at the caffe-bar--chicken soup or pig on a spit or sheep on a spit and some garden veggies. Lots of great food, very simple and straightforward. All organic and fresh, too. Sometimes the fishmonger would drive through the village from the sea an hour away, and then we'd eat fresh fish.

To learn more about Jennifer's book, see her website.

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Hear About Cookbooks at the Family Tree University Virtual Conference

I love attending genealogy conferences. There are so many benefits that those 2-4 days can have on your research. Presentations, networking, and new resources from a conference can greatly enhance your research.

Going to a conference without leaving your home can be even better.

The Family Tree University Virtual Conference, September 14-16, provides you with all the benefits of attending a conference without having to leave your home. Pay to stay in a hotel? Find a parking space? Hassle with traffic? Forget about it!

Where's the Cookbooks???

I will be presenting two of my favorite subjects at the Virtual Conference. Top 10 Tools for Social History and Cook Up Answers about Immigrant Ancestors. To check out the other speakers and their topics click here.

Register Now!

Want to register but need to save a little money? No problem. Register with my special code  FRIENDSOFGENA and save 20%. You can even use this coupon code to save on other classes offered by Family Tree University.


Register today by clicking here.

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