Greek Family Cookbook

My essential question is: How can I preserve and learn about tradition through cooking. This question is important to me because Greek culture centers around large family gatherings where we eat lots of food. I want to learn how to make this type of food. These dishes will all be my grandmother’s or my great aunt’s recipes. Both of these relatives are getting older and no one in the family knows how to make their signature dishes. That’s why I chose to do this project. I think that it would be great If I can create a family cookbook with some of my relative’s best dishes. This cookbook will include at least 15 recipes accompanied by family stories related to a certain dish and/or the history of the dish. By doing this, I will finally learn about and how to cook Greek food and by doing this, preserve the family tradition of cooking Greek foods for another generation.

A challenge that my advisor has identified is how am I going to fulfill the 20 hours a week requirement? I will do this by learning three recipes a week. All of these recipes are quite challenging and labor-intensive. It can take hours just to prepare the ingredients and it takes even longer to cook them. It will also take time to write the recipes and the steps down. I think that just learning and cooking the three recipes will take at least 10 hours of my time per week. Most of the other 10 hours of work will be spent learning and writing about the History of Greek foods for blurbs in my cookbook. I will learn the history by reading “Gifts of the Gods” by Andrew Dalby. Dalby is a historian who has spent his career exploring and writing about different cuisines. Gifts of the Gods include information about the history of popular Greek dishes, spices, and vegetation. This book is very dense so It is the only textbook I think I need. The remainder of my time will be spent with my Grandmother on zoom, talking about family stories that are related to certain Greek dishes. I will write all these stories down even if I won’t include some in the final product. I think that these two things will put me well over 20 hours, especially since the cooking will most likely be more than 10 hours a week.

Doing three recipes a week will give me 15 recipes in five weeks. I plan on spending the final week compiling the recipes into a cookbook using blurb.com and if need be, remake certain recipes that I need another try at in order to master them. blurb.com allows me to create a custom book. I’ve used this site before to make a photo album for my dad’s birthday this year so I know how to navigate the site quite well and will be able to create the book with ease.

My final product will be a Greek cookbook that includes 15 recipes accompanied by pictures and a blurb. The blurb will either be a family story related to the dish or the history of the dish.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16xdusiBKp68NGutjx7uzytshQkJ8aT4pvfGsramjr0A/edit?usp=sharing