Bring your family recipes and learn more about your family and the recipe! The Culinary Historians of Northern Illinois will share information and reveal special details about your favorite foods.
The Culinary Historians of Northern Illinois (CHNI) was founded to collect manuscripts of recipes originating in Northern Illinois and then expand to eventually collect recipes from the entire state of Illinois and then the Midwest region of the United States. This initiative is part of a larger national project that originated during a conference held at New York University’s Fales Library in May, 2016.
The CHNI will create an organized digitized collection of historic cookery manuscripts. The collection will be made available to scholars and researchers as well as the general public. The Culinary Historians of Northern Illinois is sending out a call for cookery manuscripts, more specifically, historical, heirloom, and old family recipes, at least 50 years old. We invite you to participate by submitting your recipes.
We will also gather (in-person and online) to learn from these historians as they present "What Grandma Said: Manuscript Recipes as Historical Documents." As we know, "Old family recipes are the stories that women told each other about themselves, their lives, their families and friends, and the times in which they lived. Collections of these are original sources for historians to use in studies of the past in more detail than, say, a historical narrative. Recipes tell us about family origins and traditions that the makers wanted their families to know, what people grew and bought, and what they liked at the times when they were written. And maybe more than anything else they are memories of loved ones."
The Historic Recipe Roadshow will take place after the presentation and will only be offered in-person. You will have an opportunity to share your recipe and learn more about it.