I’m sure you all know that Conner Prairie prides itself on sensory engagement – letting you see, touch, hear and smell pieces of the past. And I’m sure that many of you have been here on a day when you wish we offered things to taste. Maybe you’ve been here when Mrs. Curtis is baking her delicious smelling batter bread, or when Abigail at the Campbell home is frying up some mouth-watering chicken, or as Mrs. Zimmerman is pulling a beautiful pie out of the oven. Well, if you have ever found yourself wishing that you could get a nibble of a delectable historic recipe, have I got an opportunity for you!

This weekend, August 29th and 30th, Conner Prairie will be offering several opportunities to actually Taste the Past! Three of our historic areas will be featuring historic recipes that you can take home with you, and, while supplies last, we will have small samples of the recipes that our staff members will be cooking.

While this opportunity brings some challenges with it, like how to create enough samples for several hundred people, I am particularly excited about providing a connection to such an important part of life. What food we eat and why we eat it says so incredibly much about who we are. If you think about it, every family has some secret recipe or traditional food item that goes along with special events. For me, it’s fresh, homemade salsa – that’s the food I now associate with my birthday because, since I’m a summer baby, my mom would have usually made a big batch of it the week of my birthday, and we feast on it all week long.

Of course, there are other foods that trigger strong emotional cues for me. Whenever I have anything with cooked cabbage in it, I am immediately transported back to my grandmother’s kitchen, and remember nights when she was preparing a big meal for the whole extended family and letting her Irish roots show through. I always love this phenomenon because it makes me feel so connected to all of the women in my family who came before me – I’m sure my grandmother learned to cook cabbage from her mother and grandmother, and so on for many generations. It’s really moving to know that I am the next link on that long chain. Anyway, I love running across a new and intriguing food tradition and thinking about all of the lives that have been touched by that tradition over time. So, I hope that our program next weekend can inspire curiosity about food traditions amongst all of you who come to visit. But until then, I’d really like to hear about your own traditions.

What types of food define important events in your life? What recipes have you had handed down from your ancestors?