Family recipes inspire scrapbookers

Homemade cookbooks preserve memories with a dash of love and a sprinkle of creativity

By JIM MYERS
Staff Writer

When Laura Davis took one of her grandmother’s old recipes and made a framed piece of artwork out of it and then presented it to her mother, she knew she struck a heartfelt chord.

“Oh, she cried,” said Davis, a Murfreesboro resident who has been actively scrapbooking, or scrapping, for more than four years.
Indeed, scrapbooking’s popularity continues to grow, especially in this age of digital cameras where snap-happy folks record the images of our lives in great detail. Instead of languishing in the digital ether of hard drives and smart cards, people want to organize and display those pictures where they can be enjoyed.

However, it’s more than just picture books, points out Chris Cutler, owner of Paper Moon, a paper arts store in Bellevue that sells supplies for scrapbooking, bookmaking and rubber stamping crafts.

“As a mobile society, we need to hold on to something,” says Cutler, who especially recognizes the value of preserving family recipes through scrapbooking.

“My mother passed away about 18 months ago, and when my niece got married, I wanted to include some of (my mother’s) recipes, especially handwritten ones, in the book for her.”

Recipes tell a family’s story

Cutler says that by including stories and photographs with the recipes, it’s a way of passing on knowledge that might otherwise be lost.

“We’re finding recipe scrapbooks being done a lot among older people, basically to pass on that stuff. How much do you really know about your own family? As we get older, we’re starting to realize we’ve forgotten things, and we’re disconnected from family in other parts of the country. The recipes help connect us,” Cutler says.

Tracy Raby of Nashville agrees, reiterating the importance of journaling, or writing stories, on the scrapbook pages. “It helps people to know what they were thinking and feeling, that there’s more to the story than just what you see in the pictures,” Raby says.

Take your Aunt Peggy’s potato salad, for example. You can put her recipe in your scrapbook and then say that she was famous for this dish and how everyone loved it. “She’s gone now, but this ties the memory to the dish,” Raby says. Now your 10-year-old may make it because she knows her mom loved it.

‘Cut-and-paste’ preserves the past

Another good reason to scrapbook those old family recipes is so they’re physically preserved before the ink fades and the pencil marks rub off, leaving you to wonder whether that was a tablespoon or a teaspoon of salt.

Pam Byrd, who teaches scrapbooking classes, says most scrapbooking supplies used today are archival-friendly, from the acid-free papers to the adhesives and sprays you can use to stop disintegration of your original recipe cards.

Byrd also suggests using contemporary photos to liven up old recipe pages. “My mom was well known for her white fruitcake, but I didn’t have any pictures of her making it. So I took pictures of us making it, and I really appreciated what she went through, and how heavy the batter was,” Byrd says with a laugh.

She also suggested photographing different steps in making a dish, like taking a digital camera to the grocery store to show kids picking out ingredients.

Last October, after deciding to scrap her finance job at Lifeway Christian Resources, so to speak, Tammy Durham opened up a dedicated store for the scrapping arts.

Located in southeast Davidson County between the town of Nolensville and Old Hickory Boulevard, her storefront Scrap’n Memories bears the single word “scrapbook” in large red letters, a beacon for self-professed scrap-addicts.

There, among the papers, cutters and stickers, is a whole section dedicated to food and recipe pages. Durham also says there’s a strong attraction to scrapping for the social aspect of gathering together with friends in a modern-day equivalent of a quilting bee.

Some of those scrapping parties turn into recipe swaps, the latest extension of the recipe-scrapbook trend.

It was mostly pictures and recipes from Thanksgiving, a natural family moment tied to food, that scrapbookers wanted to capture on the page. Now, Durham says, it’s more than that.

“People are doing recipe books for their friends and family,” she says, giving new life to the original meaning of cut and paste in this modern world.

http://www.rctimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070117/FEATURES02/701170378/1004/MTCN0303