New Orleans Paper Helps Families Recover Lost Recipes

During the Thanksgiving holiday weekend I misplaced my recipe notebook. It’s nothing fancy, just a Impressionist-themed booklet meant for journaling.

Because I do all my journaling online, I have used this book for the last 15 years to jot down favorite family recipes and paste in ones I’ve cut out from newspapers and magazines.

When I realized it was “missing,” I nearly panicked. That book has become important to me. While I know many of the recipes by heart, I have come to rely on it and, frankly, enjoy pulling it out and flipping through the pages. It’s sort of like a scrapbook at this point.

I bring this up because I can’t imagine losing all those memories in that little green book. So I was struck by a story on All Things Considered tonight about the Hurricane Katrina victims who lost all their family recipes. Decades of delicacies and comfort foods washed away.

One of my favorite newspapers, the New Orleans Times-Picayune recognized the loss and started a blog — a recipe swap — for folks to recapture their shared family recipes. Then the newspaper started digging through its own archives, looking for the family recipes that were printed in the paper.

The effort culminated in a book, “Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found.”

Fantastic.

Listen to the NPR interview here.

So if you’re a fan of New Orleans cuisine, you can buy the book on Chronicle Books for $24.95.