Personalized cookbooks preserve memories
MINNEAPOLIS — A black linen napkin made the chicken pop.
After ruffling a white towel over a square of rustic wooden planks, Rachel Ingber thought better of it and grabbed the darker cloth from the hallway “prop closet” in her home. She set it with a casual billow next to an All-clad casserole dish holding a char-flecked roast chicken so plump it was practically hanging over the edges, and snapped a photo from above.
Moments later, the picture appeared on a laptop screen. “Winner?” Ingber asked her client and friend, Sarah Sherman. “Winner winner, chicken dinner,” Sherman answered.
The photo shoot was one of several sessions between the two that will ultimately become a keepsake cookbook preserving the recipes of Sherman’s late mother.
Ingber is a book photographer and designer, and her business, Heirloom Collaborative, specializes in food. Clients meet with her over the course of weeks or months to flesh out a vision for a personal collection of recipes that, when printed, will be a hardbound and glossy cookbook.
The self-professed “cookbook addict” creates a volume that connects to history and memory in a visceral way: through tastes, smells and mouthwatering food photography.
“Food is such an emotional thing for families,” said Ingber, 34. “It brings me so much joy to hear the stories and preserve these recipes.”
A former market researcher, Ingber started making cookbooks as a hobby. A few years ago, as her husband’s grandmother, who went by Nana Minnie, was about to turn 97, Ingber decided to gather
a few of Nana Minnie’s beloved recipes and type them up for herself.
She started taking photos of the dishes as she prepared them, and as she worked, formatting recipes and designing the book using publishing software, family members asked if they could have a copy when she was done. She finished the book, which has a closeup of Nana Minnie on the cover, for the matriarch’s 100th birthday. When she died months later, the cookbook became even more meaningful to the extended family who purchased copies.
Over the years she worked on the project, and in the time since, Ingber stumbled onto a powerful way to keep a dear relative’s memory alive. “I feel like our kids know Nana still, because they see her, and they know when we make the chocolate chip cookies from her cookbook, those are Nana’s cookies.”
Ingber loved immersing herself in Nana Minnie’s recipes during the yearslong process of making the cookbook, and she imagined she could streamline it and do the same for others. She left her job last year to pursue custom cookbooks as a career and has since created books for clients as far away as North Carolina.
Some clients cook their own food and bring it to Ingber to photograph. Other times, Ingber makes the dishes in her own kitchen, as she and Sherman
did together on a recent afternoon, the scent of garlic and onion wafting over Ingber’s makeshift photo studio on her dining room table.
Ingber and Sherman began working together on the book earlier this year, and their sessions came with an unexpected twist for Sherman.
“This has been super therapeutic for me to get to process my grief in a very healthy and natural and comforting way,” she said.
CREATING MEMORIES
Want to make your own cookbook? After a consultation, Ingber will set a project fee based on the amount of recipes, photography and cooking needed. Projects typically take two to three months to complete, and copies of the finished books are additional cost and start at $40. For more information, go to heirloomcollab.com, or find Ingber’s work on Instagram @heirloomcollaborative.
ALICE’S CAVATELLI
This is one of Sarah Sherman’s mother’s no-recipe recipes, which will be published in a custom cookbook made by Rachel Ingber’s Heirloom Collaborative. “The cavatelli was an accident,” Sherman said. “My mom was out of pasta, so it’s actually three pastas mixed together.” Use any kind of pasta in your pantry, enough to equal about a pound dry. Or use leftover cooked pasta.
Makes: 6 servings
to pound each of two to three different types of pasta
1 pound ground beef
Olive oil
1 medium onion, diced 1 green pepper, chopped 2 cloves garlic, minced
pound sliced pepperoni 1 to 2 jars of spaghetti sauce cup shredded provolone cup shredded mozzarella cup shredded Parmesan cheese
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cook the pasta according to package directions. (If there are different cook times, make them separately.) Drain, drizzle with olive oil and set aside.
3. In a large skillet, cook the beef until it’s totally browned. Remove the meat with a slotted spoon and set aside. Discard any grease from the skillet.
Heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil in the skillet and add onion and peppers, stirring until the onions are translucent. Add garlic and cook for 1 additional minute. Off heat, mix in the cooked beef, pepperoni and tomato sauce.
4. In a 9-by-13-inch casserole dish, layer half the mixed noodles, tomatobeef mixture and cheeses, then repeat, ending with the cheese on top.
5. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes until hot. Cover with foil if the cheese is starting to burn.