Recipes help tell families' stories

A Hopkins historian has created a computer "coach" that helps families create heirloom cookbooks.

By Kim Ode, Star Tribune

Last update: December 5, 2007 - 3:16 PM

Hella Buchheim sums up the notion of identity with two simple statements: "We are the stories we tell. We are the food we eat."

Buchheim is a personal historian who helps people write their life stories, from documenting a singular defining incident to covering the sweep of a family tree. "It's one step away from genealogy," she said of going beyond tracing the begets, to exploring the becauses.

Recently, she began taking history one step further by helping people assemble what she calls "family story cookbooks." Buchheim, a former television writer and producer who lives in Hopkins, created a DVD called "A Plate Full of Memories" that guides people in creating a family cookbook/memoir. It's available for $24.95 through her website, www.platefullofmemories.com; and at Common Good Books, 165 N. Western Av., St. Paul, and Amazon Books, 4755 Chicago Av. S., Minneapolis.

The idea for including recipes came when she was writing a personal history about her mother, Lore Buchheim, a Holocaust survivor. Writing about her family meant anecdotes about food, which spurred an interest in recipes and, ultimately, the sadness of a fruitless search. Her grandmother's recipe for crepes, which she recalls as being as pale as moons, is lost to the ages, although a treasured recipe for Apple Kuggel survives in the book.

The DVD is a how-to tool, listing necessary tasks, providing templates for recipes, letters to family members and forms for stories, tips on timelines, photo release forms and progress charts. The final cookbook is designed to be printed on a home computer or placed on a computer disk, then taken to a print shop for binding.

The forms are simple, designed to serve more of a "coaching" role, Buchheim said, "because there are a lot of people who start stuff, but never finish it."

Family cookbooks, by definition, reflect a family -- even one that rarely cooks. One man whose family often ate out assembled a book by going from diner to diner asking for recipes for his favorite meals. "For him, it was about the stories that were told over the meals," she said.

A good cookbook shouldn't create indigestion. Buchheim counsels people not to sugarcoat their lives, but when confronted with a difficult event, to think about whether sharing it is important to the larger sweep of history. (She also teaches classes on making heirloom cookbooks; for dates, e-mail her at info@personalhistories101.com.)

"Choose your words wisely, because all the family members will read this," she said. "This is one way to help people discover the value of their lives. Recipes are a starting point for this reflection."

Kim Ode • 612-673-7185

Kim Ode • kimode@startribune.com

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