Your Thanksgiving Mission: Preserve Your Recipes

We've been complaining about losing recipes for years-literal and figurative. Now it's urgent.

There’s been a viral video circulating this week of Black family members arriving for Thanksgiving dinner in 1989. It’s not a long clip, but it resonates because we’ve all seen that family entrance.

We can name the uncle, aunt, and cousin who walk in. We know them down to their clothing—especially auntie with the coiffed hair, the fur collar, and the oversized leather clutch. I already know they pulled up in a late model Lincoln or Cadillac. We also know the family members who are caught by the camera as it pans the small home (how did we always fit so many people in these houses?)

The clip is also resonant because those people aren’t with us anymore.

Gen X’ers and older Millennials bear the distinction of watching the family gatherings dwindle as individual family units spread further away from each other, and each generation had fewer kids.

Up through my teenage years I had the privilege (and profound entertainment) of being in rooms not only with my grandparents and their siblings, but my greatgrandmother and her siblings. In 2023, I went back to that side of the family’s home church for our reunion, and it hurt terribly to see the church that would once be packed with our family alone so sparsely populated.

Fortunately, my maternal grandmother and grandfather’s families were full of raconteurs. Every gathering promised stories and tales—some taller than others. The names of those long gone stayed alive though each family event. Now my cousins and I, so much smaller in number, are carrying the torch. We keep the names of the aunties and uncles we used to listen to with rapt attention when we had no business alive through our own stories (although my Cousin Kirby be straight making up stuff sometimes, but he does it for the sake of story, so we allow it).

On my dad’s side, however, information was kept close to the vest. Extended family was distant family. We’re now trying to excavate stories; put things together piecemeal. We’re reuniting with family branches and comparing what we know. We have no idea what we may have lost.

There’s a gap in our collective cultural knowledge, and it’s widening. We can see it reflected not just in things centered around gatherings like nobody knowing how to grill or how to properly host (because hosting/hospitality is skill based), but also in the fact that Black folks don’t understand why we need to vote (but I’m gonna save that particular rant). It feels….disrespectful? I’m not sure if that’s the word, but it’s in the same neighborhood. Like we have taken the lives our ancestors lived—hard earned and carefully woven together lives—for granted.

"When an elder dies, a library burns to the ground.” - African Proverb

I’ve also been struck by how many giants we’ve lost this year, and how many powerful first-hand accounts of history we lost with each of them. How much strength. I think of how we don’t use long form correspondence anymore and what that will mean when historians, or even just family members, work to put stories together in the future.

I think about how we don’t maintain proper photo albums, or true home videos instead of quick clips for the gram or the clock app. How we don’t have family bibles. And how we don’t keep recipe books with handwritten notes that can be passed down.

Somewhere, somehow, our ancestral tradition of oral history fell by the wayside. The idea of family apprenticeship to learn traditions and (actual) recipes faded away. Scrapbooking as a hobby is a whole niche market, but we don’t have proper family histories.

Here’s the thing though—we keep complaining, but it’s on US to do it! We have to be deliberate now in both collecting information from our remaining elders, and passing information down to our younger siblings, cousins, and children. We’re up to bat, y’all. Been. It’s our responsibility!

So your task this Thanksgiving, and this Christmas, and next Memorial Day, and just in general, is to be intentional in preserving recipes.

Sit with your grandmother, grab that literal recipe you don’t know yet (I have to go sit under my Godmother, who is also my great-cousin, to watch her make drop biscuits while she still can), pull a young’un into the kitchen to start teaching them what you do know. Play the music they need to show, show the movies and tv shows they need to see, show photos and talk about the people who are in them. Make a family album together. Preserve. Archive. Retain.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

P.S. Speaking of maintaining and passing traditions and recipes, I’ll help you you get started on the music side. I posted a pic of the ubiquitous couch we somehow all knew or had at some point, and asked what songs would be on its soundtrack. I took the most popular answers and created the below. I think it’s perfect for when Thanksgiving dinner gives way to card games and sh*t talking.