Cookbooks
Chances are, if your Latter-day Saint grandmother or great grandmother participated in Relief Society during the 1950s and 1960s, she probably had a Relief Society cookbook.
Provident living, growing vegetables and fruits, canning, and collecting recipes are not exclusively Latter-day Saint activities, but they have played a huge role in the history and culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Women along the pioneer trail shared recipes and ideas of how to sustain life with their available food supply. A variety of recipes came from continental immigrants. Those recipes were collected, recorded in journals, and handed down from generation to generation.
“According to information in the Church History Catalog, Relief Societies of specific wards started making cookbooks in the early 1900s, which is when these cookbooks started becoming popular.”[1]
These cookbooks were often single pages kept together with metal rings, and later spiral bound. They included categories such as “main dishes,” “soups,” “salads,” “casseroles,” “breads and rolls,” “desserts,” and tips or tricks for successful cooking, and typically included the name of who submitted the recipe.
Relief Societies were not the only groups of Latter-day Saints compiling and sharing recipes. Often the cookbooks were produced as a ward or stake effort. And extended families loved to collect family recipes, print cookbooks, and distribute them at family reunions. Daughters of Utah Pioneers also compiled cookbooks.
During the 2002 Olympics held in Salt Lake City, a Green Jell-o Olympic pin became a collectible item, as did the pin depicting a cheesy potato casserole often called “Funeral Potatoes,” which is frequently served at the luncheon for families of the deceased. Both Jell-o and potato recipes are traditionally included in Relief Society and other Latter-day Saint cookbooks.
Latter-day Saint cookbooks have been commercially popular as well, with collections by Winnifred C. Jardine, and others, and with titles such as Worldwide Ward Cookbook: Mom’s Best Recipes: More Than 250 Recipes from LDS Moms Around the Globe (Deanna Buxton) and The Essential Mormon Cookbook: Green Jell-O, Funeral Potatoes, and Other Secret Combinations (Julie Badger Jensen), not to mention the essential Lion House recipe books.
The love for recipes, for tradition, for community and connection, and for feeding each other endures among Latter-day Saints.
Recipes from a ward cookbook were featured in a segment of Netflix's "Somebody Feed Phil" in host Phil Rosenthal's visit to Portland, Oregon's food truck Ruthie's.
