Your Family's Food Tradtions Wanted for a New Book

The following is a press release about a new book from F & W Media, the same publishers that bring you Family Tree Magazine. Typically, I don't post press releases but this one is different.  It's is about a book that I am writing.I am very excited about this different look at our ancestor's lives and hope that you will consider telling your family's food story. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE ...

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Food Friday: Chocolate and Tomatoes

One way to market a food brand or an appliance is to provide a cookbook with purchase or as a premium.  You probably have a few of these sitting around your house. The last one we received was in the packaging of our outdoor grill.While a cookbook for an outdoor grill will have everyday favorites, some cookbooks for food products in years gone by included, let's say, imaginative ways to use the food product. Obviously, the more ways you convince someone they can use a food product the more likely you are to sell large quantities of that food...

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What Have New York Restaurants Served Historically?

Restaurant menus can tell us a lot about a historical period. They provide another look at what people ate that can be different than what we find in cookbooks. Eating out would have been out of necessity (like when you travel) or for a special occasion, unless the person was wealthy.Digitized collections give researchers easier access to materials that may not be studied as much if it was not digitized. Recently the New York Public Library has announced that they are digitizing more than 40,000 menus dating back to 1843 from the city's restaurants....

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What is Ephemera?

One of the questions I am asked when I present to audiences is what the word "ephemera" means.  Ephemera is something that genealogists and historians deal with quite a bit but may not know that there is a word to describe it.Ephemera is generally some type of printed matter that was not meant to be kept or archived. There are many items that have genealogical or historical value that fit this description. Greeting cards, posters, menus, tickets, receipts are all ephemera.Our ancestor's hand written recipes, newspaper clippings and some cookbooks...

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