Tag Archives: memory

Giving (and Receiving) with Recipe Cards

By Ozoz Sokoh

What does adopting new-to-you methods of recipe preservation look like, especially when you didn’t grow up with an abundance of recipe cards or cookbooks (beyond culinary textbooks)? How do you package shared recipes and memories for travel? Or as Amanda Elise Herbert and Annette Elise Herbert ask in “Golden State: Recipes and Memory,” “How do recipes make memories?” Recipe cards are one way.

In 2021, shortly before Jedidiah, my oldest child (and the first to leave home), went off to college in New York, I designed a personal recipe collection of eight cards, interspersed with seven photos of her siblings, her father, and me. Usability was top of mind for me – the cards had to withstand wear and tear in what I hoped would be frequent use. Though I didn’t have personal experiences with handwritten recipes on paper, I’d seen photos of many online with ink blotted by splashes of soups and stews. I decided to type up the recipes because they were long, I didn’t think I could fit each handwritten recipe on a singular card, and I didn’t have the strength to write all eight of them by hard, so I opted to go digital for this part, along with the design in Canva, then proceeded to my local print store where I had them printed in 5 X 7 inch dimensions, and then laminated. They went into a surprise gift box along with spices which she opened in her apartment-style dorm room (complete with a shared kitchen), on her first night at school in New York. She loved them.

Mother and Daughter, January 2020. Copyright Ozoz Sokoh

Recipe cards are time capsules, holding nostalgic space for recipes as heirlooms. In “Preserving Family Recipes,” archivist Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler says “They evoke wonderful memories and keep traditions alive,” like our frequent family taco nights with tomato salsa, a recipe in the collection. Jedidiah shared that she “made salsa, maybe twice or three times – in my first year, when I had one of my dinner parties and then I think after that I made it again. It tasted just like yours and that surprised me.” I was thrilled. This is what I’d hoped for, that she would create new memories, while honoring traditions, perhaps of taco nights with corn tortillas, pickled onions, guacamole, with the tomato salsa at the centre, like we did at home.

For Jedidiah’s collection, I used favorites from various sources which spanned a 30-year period, from my time at university in the UK in the late 1990s, to recipes gifted by friends when we lived in the Netherlands in the late 2000s, and ones inspired by our favorite TV show, Masterchef Australia. Some recipes reflected our cultural identity as Nigerians (Pepper SauceNigerian StewJollof Rice), others were family favorites (Banana BreadTomato Salsa, Zucchini with Lemon and Mint), and I also included a few I thought she’d love (Masala Chai, Tomato Salad). While most of the recipes were accessible to her via my Kitchen Butterfly food blog, I wanted to create something physical–a touchstone–, of home, as she laid down new roots in New York. 

The three cards Jedidiah used from the collection. Left to (top, then) R – Banana bread, Pepper Sauce, and Tomato Salsa. Copyright Ozoz Sokoh

Four years later in August 2025, on Jedidiah’s return home with cards, certificate, and a wealth of cooking practice, I sat down with her, curious about her experience with the cards particularly after examining them. What did she think of the cards when she first opened the box? “I was touched”. In response to my questions on whether she felt like she needed the recipes, she said she found them convenient: “They were handy, I didn’t have to search (for them online), and if I needed a recipe, I could just take them to the kitchen with me, and I didn’t need my phone, and I also liked that I didn’t have to prop them open like a cookbook. And they were protected because you laminated them.” Music to my ears. Of the lamination, she shared, “I hadn’t seen anything laminated in years, and it took me back to my (secondary) school days.”

Three cards looked well used, with spots and splatters–Pepper Sauce, Banana Bread, and Tomato Salsa–while the others were virtually untouched. “At some point,” Jedidiah explained, “I separated them in my drawer.” She’d put away those she didn’t use as much in the back of her drawer, reserving space in front for those she called on time and time again.

On Banana Bread: “I used it because baking is more precise.” When asked what I could have done differently, she shared that “It would have been nice to have space to make notes, like I don’t really like bananas so I use less in my banana bread, and I also reduce the sugar.” She would have liked to note those on the card so that she’d be reminded for future bakes. It reminded me of a comment in “Recipes, Index Cards and Paper Slips” where Elaine Leong writes “The index card provides note-takers with a flexible and extendable system”. And while my cards are similar to index cards, I’d not thought far enough to see them as adaptable. 

Banana Bread recipe card. Copyright Ozoz Sokoh

My conversation with Jedidiah about the cards made me reflect on the article, “When a Recipe Was a ‘Receipt’.” It rightly highlights instruction and record keeping as essential elements of both the modern recipe, and its predecessor, the receipt. There is reciprocity with recipes, in many ways. When I gifted them to Jedidiah, I didn’t think of a future in which I’d reflect on them, many years on, or get her perspective. In the end, these recipes travelled and returned home with their steward in one piece, albeit a touch tomato-stew stained.

Recipe cards can do and be many things. They can be practical references, useful in recreating dishes, drinks and more, relics with anthropological value, and expressions of love and legacy. I’m glad I explored this format–and thrilled I got to reflect on it here–of written heritage, making memories built on shared identity while creating new traditions, across geographies.


Ozoz Sokoh is an ex-exploration geologist, food and tourism studies educator, and author of Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria (2025), the definitive guide to Nigerian cuisine drawn from over a decade of unearthing and preserving Nigerian culinary tradition. She researches, and interrogates connected foodways across the world, highlighting similarities between popular and little-known cultures and cuisines.

Her ongoing project, “Coast to Coast: From West Africa to the World” traces the histories and edible trails of West Africa and its diaspora through ingredients and “commodities” and is documented on Feast Afrique. It includes an open-access digital library of 250+ Black culinary resources, from the 1800s to date, a hall of fame, data-driven work on the role of food media in marginalizing West African voices, and a series of short films available for screening.

She makes her home on Land of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation in Ontario, Canada. Ozoz has spoken at TEDx and at conferences hosted by the Culinary Institute of America. Her work has been featured in Smithsonian Magazine, Gastro Obscura, CNN African Voices, Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, and more.

oz.kitchenbutterfly@gmail.com

‘An Extravagant Touch’: Emscote Primary School’s Charity Cookbook

By Bethan Davies
Rootling through my mother’s files in the midst of moving house last year, I came across ‘The Emscote Cookery Book’, a recipe collection created by a group of teachers in the late 1970s as a community fundraiser for their Warwickshire primary school. My maternal grandmother Betty Richards was headmistress at Emscote Primary School and contributed multiple recipes to the collection. Gently flipping through the 18 pages which had been modestly stapled together to form a book, I saw a beautiful calligraphic font which detailed over 30 sweet and savoury recipes for food and drink, alongside careful illustrations of kitchen utensils, platters, and foodstuffs. 

Image 1 The Emscote Cookery Book front cover. Image courtesy of the author.
Image 1: The Emscote Cookery Book front cover. Image courtesy of the author.
Image 2 The Emscote Cookery Book title page. Image courtesy of the author.
Image 2: The Emscote Cookery Book title page. Image courtesy of the author.

Beginning to read the recipes, I discovered the community collection to be a tantalising glimpse into culinary trends of the 1970s and the gendered expectations around domestic economies at the time. All of the contributors to this collection, bar one (a Miss Gent) were married women, working both as teachers and as homemakers. The style of many of the recipes are curt, providing the reader with detailed yet precise instructions for culinary success. Mrs Wigmore’s recipe for a ‘Quick Dessert’, which involves boiling some apples and mixing with lime jelly, a dish that could be whipped up rapidly, suggests these women straddled professional and domestic life and possessed strategies for fulfilling the demands of teacher, homemaker, and hostess. The relative sparsity of detail of the personal resonances of these recipes aligns with the cookbook’s role within a boundaried school environment, and is a reminder of the often intensely personal nature of recipe knowledge and exchange, repurposed here within a professional community. There are hints of women’s culinary and domestic responsibilities in moments when the professional façade slips, a Mrs Heelis’ recipe for ‘A Guinness Cake’ amusingly notes in her recipe ‘there will still be a slurp [of Guinness] to put the cook in a good frame of mind to tackle the washing up’, a tongue in cheek moment which gestures towards 20th c. British women’s multifaceted roles within the home. 

Image 3: Mrs Heelis’ recipe for ‘A Guinness Cake’. Image courtesy of the author.

Most striking were the clues that suggested that this communal cookbook, despite its overt function as a fundraiser, worked as a compact textual marker of social display and a register of class co-ordinates. This evidently gave teachers power to self-fashion and construct their identities as women of economic means, belonging to part of a larger familial structure that could afford to experiment with recent culinary fashions, which include the protean fusion of Anglo culinary traditions with global ingredients and European recipe cultures. A recipe for ‘Biskotta’ (Mrs Charlesworth) is an English take on tiramisu, and the magnificent ‘Spaghetti Platter’ (Mrs Wigmore) specifies the use of ‘long Italian spaghetti’ but also calls for a tablespoon of Branston pickle, a quintessential English relish. A detailed illustration of said platter indicates spaghetti’s relative novelty on the culinary scene. Other recipes are intriguing both for their use of foreign ingredients and for their relative expense, indicating some teachers’ desire to signal their ability to buy such rarefied goods, and perhaps representing a form of exclusion for those who could not afford to buy such ingredients. Mrs Jackson’s recipe for ‘Hummus’ provides the interpretative tag ‘chick peas’, alongside instructions for where to find ‘tahina’, ‘a paste from sesame paste available from delicatessens’, suggesting hummus’ new-fangled nature and its potential expense. 

Image 4: Mrs Wigmore’s recipe for ‘Spaghetti Platter’. Image courtesy of the author.

Mrs Hammond is an individual keen to demonstrate both her expensive household appliances and her rarefied tastes. She supplies a recipe for ‘Microwave meringues’, using the flashy appliance of the microwave which was only just starting to become affordable for domestic use in the late 1970s. Mrs Hammond also has an indulgent recipe for ‘Chocolate Peppermint Gateau’, an adaptation of the Black Forest Gateau, which calls for copious amounts of After Eights and whipped cream, and involves an intricate decorating scheme which would rival that of any British Bake-Off contestant today. In a moment of seemingly false modesty, she instructs that one can add crème de menthe into the layers of the cake: ‘an extravagant touch’, a phrase belying the evident richness of her cake even without the addition of liquor; her recipe is rich both in terms of taste and cost. While this is a community and charity cookbook, it is evident that the teachers are creating specific personas through their recipes which are deeply invested in social and class structures.

Image 5: Mrs Hammond’s recipe for ‘Chocolate Peppermint Gateau’. Image courtesy of the author.

Moving for a final moment from the communal to the personal, it is the memories of my grandmother, which are held within the cookbook’s pages, which encourage me to revisit the recipes. Her recipe for ‘Coconut Clag’, a kind of coconutty Florentine biscuit, is easy to make and designed to please a crowd, a reminder of her happily hectic life in multiple roles as headteacher, mother of three, and vicar’s wife. The pages sticky from golden syrup and sugar, this cookbook constitutes a living familial heirloom, and an emblem of family community and continuity in the present day.

Image 6: My grandmother Mrs Richard’s recipe for ‘Coconut Clag’. Image courtesy of the author.

Bethan Davies is a final year PhD student at the University of Roehampton in the Department of English. Her studies are funded by the Arts and Humanities Research council. Her research looks at the global and domestic intersections between sugar and women in English culture at a time when colonial economies were in their nascent stage of development. She has recently worked as a researcher on the BBC history podcast ‘You’re Dead to Me’, and collaborated with The National Archives to produce resources on sugar, tobacco, global trade, and intoxicants for schools and audiences beyond the academy. 

Related Recipes Project blog post: ‘Astonishable Composed Posset’

A Request for Memories or Recipes Related to Beans and Rice

By Heather Ariyeh

Note: If you would rather, we can even set up a Zoom or Skype meeting and you can teach me how you prepare beans and rice!

Background

Do you have a favorite memory or recipe related to beans and rice?

Throughout the world, people have combined beans and rice to form popular dishes. Together, they form a complete protein, but perhaps even more interestingly beans and rice are foods in a relationship that form a grammar expressing both common histories and local specificities.(1) In particular, beans and rice dishes trace the history of the African Diaspora into the Caribbean, the United States South, and beyond. 

Montage of many beans and rice dishes.

Project

I am working on a cookbook of beans and rice dishes, but one that will go a step beyond recipes and offer personal stories related to these dishes.  These memories may be more broad in nature (relating to culture or place), or very specific and unique to individual households or experiences.  What connections do you have to beans and rice?

Instructions

If you would like to take part, please submit any or all of the following:

  • Memories of any length, even a few sentences
  • Photos
  • Recipes or just an interesting twist you’ve added to a classic
  • We can even set up a Zoom or Skype meeting and you can teach me how you prepare beans and rice!

Feel free to be creative, but don’t feel pressure to be creative! It’s just an excuse to share a bit with one another. This cookbook is an art project, and part of my thesis work at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. It is not part of a commercial endeavor.  The final format may exist in print or online.  You will be credited unless you prefer not to be. Please submit contributions or questions to: Heather Ariyeh at hariyeh@sva.edu .

Please ensure all submissions relate to beans and rice together in some way (whether mixed together or separate on a plate).  Sides or main dishes are both fine. Any type of rice or bean is fine (including peas, black-eyed peas or cowpeas). 

Click below for common examples.(2)

Below is an example submission.  I hope you will be inspired, but not limited by it.

Chocolate Beans and Rice: A Recipe from Old and New Dreams

I came to the U.S. illegally, with only my brother at the age of 16.  My brother was 15.  We left our mother, father, and six more brothers and sisters behind in Guatemala.  That was twenty years ago, and we haven’t been able to risk going back home since.  

In the U.S., I work in the restaurant business. I always wanted to cook when I was in Guatemala, but never really had the need or the opportunity.  In my family it was sort of an unwritten rule that the men don’t cook, but every day after working with my dad on our farm, I would sit in the kitchen with my mom while she was cooking.  When I came to the U.S. there was no one to cook for me so I had to learn.  I didn’t speak English yet, so I got a job as a server’s assistant in a Mexican restaurant.  I couldn’t afford to eat there, but I noticed that the customers were paying $3.99 just for a plate of beans and rice, so that was one of my first experiments.  The first few tries did not come out right. I stirred the rice too much and it was almost like a dough, but I realized that I could use this technique to make a certain style of Guatemalan tamale, so all was not lost.  Eventually though I figured out my own version of Guatemalan beans and rice – a recipe made partly from what now seems like a dream of my mom cooking back home and partly from the reality of learning on my own.  Since I came to the U.S., I’ve reached three out of four of my goals. I have worked my way up from server’s assistant, to server, and for the last five years I’ve been a manager.  I’m learning a lot about the restaurant business, but someday I want to have my own place and sell my own food made from my own recipes.

I found family in the U.S… Not the kind you are born into; the kind you make out of the circumstances life gives you.  In this family there is a daughter who is ten years old, but I’ve known her since she was two.  When she was little, I made her my black beans and rice.  In Guatemala, we blend our black beans into more of a paste, but where we live in Oklahoma, whole pinto beans are more common.  She had never had Guatemalan food before, so when she saw the beans she yelled, “chocolate beans!” because they looked like chocolate to her.  We didn’t know if she would like them since they weren’t going to taste like chocolate, but to this day she asks me to make “chocolate beans” for her. 


References

  1. Wilk, Richard and Barbosa, Livia, Rice and Beans: A Unique Dish in a Hundred Places (London/New York: Berg Publishers, 2013), 304 pages.
  2.  Wikipedia. 2020. “Rice and Beans.” Last modified December 5, 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_and_beans

Memories of Akara and Acaraje

By Ozoz Sokoh

Kitchen Butterfly & Feast Afrique

Taste Memories

To this day, wherever I am, Nigeria or anywhere else in the world, I have a specific Saturday morning taste memory of bread, ogi and Akara lodged in my head, and heart I daresay. I spent many Saturday mornings as a teenager soaking black-eyed beans till the skins softened, then rubbing them between my palms to strip the creamy halves of their cloaks before turning that into a thick enough puree, seasoned with red onions and scotch bonnet peppers, one with enough integrity to hold it together as it ‘fritters’ in hot oil

 

Two hands mixing together black-eyed beans over a steel bowl with liquid in it.
Acara

Comfort Food

Saturday mornings make me think of home more than any other day of the week. And I’ve been away from home a lot. So what do you do when you’re far away and discover the street food delicacy that’s Nigerian Akara is also Brazilian Acarajé? You feel all the emotions – from kinship to homesickness and saudade – and little of the comfort you desire. Instead, you find yourself deep in reflection as you eat an Akara sandwich, thinking about comfort food and what it means. I love the concept as an anchor of the soul but when I think of my Akara – born free, a dish I make to comfort myself – and put that next to Brazilian Acarajé, borne of the transatlantic slave trade, I wonder if comfort fully captures the range. 

Hand holding small colourful sandwich. There are several bowls with appetizing and colouful vegetables underneath.
Acaraje

Memory as Resistance

Across the world from Brazil to New Orleans, Georgia to the Caribbean, there are edible markers of West African culinary heritage, trails of deliciousness that span multiple ingredients and centuries, from farm or plantation – rice, coffee, pecans, vanilla – to table – calas, gumbo, sweetmeats, bean fritters, myriad cassava dishes and more. Enslaved women, men, and children remembered and transplanted knowledge-systems of wetland farming from the Grain Coast to the American South, birthing Carolina Gold. They folded knowledge into fritters and bakes, sweetened the bitter truth of humanity, and seasoned pots of soups and stews with wisdom. There’s something so powerful about leaving your mark, in spite of, despite it all. And there are wars fought and won over bubbling pots and roaring fires – battlefields of the heart and mind. Yes, there are many treasures gifted by enslaved West Africans, but no war leaves its victims unscathed.

Black spoon with small fritter in it.
Calas

Memory as Freedom

It takes might to transform some type of bitter to sweet, and enslaved West African women did it on the streets. They set up stands and stalls, seats by the side of the road paying homage to their homelands, feeding the masses and purchasing freedom. Today, centuries later, Acarajé remains sacred on the streets of Bahia. Its recipes – initially preserved, treasured and sustained by word of mouth – now live in words and taste buds across the world, proof that food and eating create the strongest memory banks which we draw from, time and time and time again. 

And so it is that when yet another Saturday comes by, you might find me, Akara sandwich in hand, fritters deep fried till golden and layered into Canadian Agege bread or challah buns (and on the best days, pieces torn by hand, uncorrupted by the silver of a knife). Is it Agege bread if it isn’t made under the sweltering hot Lagos sun? My taste bank is never confused. My memories draw on snatches of Saturday after Saturday, each contributing to the kaleidoscopic patchwork that’s yet another Saturday: the same yet different, tasting home, old and new. 

Hand holding sandwich made of white bread and fritters.
Akara sandwich

About

Ozoz Sokoh is a food explorer and geologist. A ‘Traveller by plate’, she believes that ‘Food is more than eating’. Central to her work is the celebration and preservation of Nigerian/West African cuisine, challenging myths and assumptions about its culinary legacy over 400+ years old and its impact on the world from the American South, through the Caribbean to Europe and Latin America. 

Her 12-year old blog, Kitchen Butterfly, is her creative space. In 2013, she articulated her  philosophy and practice in The New Nigerian Kitchen, focused on celebration and documentation: like the first-ever seasonal produce guide for Nigeria – only one of a handful on the continent. She recently launched Feast Afrique, a platform celebrating West African culinary heritage. One major aspect is a digital library of 240+ books, more than half of which document West African and Diasporic culinary heritage which she’s created as part of this. 

Her work has been featured on CNN African Voices and Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. She makes her home in Ontario, Canada and wakes up to sun-streaked mornings on the couch, good book in hand with a pot of tea. She is a #FutureNewYorker.