Family Heirloom Cookbooks

Heirloom cookbooks are a wonderful tradition that are passed on for generations.  We are fortunate here at Author, Inc. to have several family heirloom cookbooks that are associated with our family.  The most well-known cookbook writer, Alexander Moffat, author of The Galley Guide, writes:

“Lucky is the crew which number among it’s members a man who likes to cook.  There are such men, but generally the function of cooking is accepted as one of the few disagreeable duties of cruising by each member of the crew in turn, with varying degrees of success.”  This excerpt is from the Forward of a wonderful family heirloom cookbook written in 1928 by Alexander Moffat, Tracy’s maternal grandfather.  Mr. Moffat was an author who wrote several books about the sea.  The Galley Guide was his only cookbook.  It was re-released several times over the years, with different covers and minor revisions. The references to cooking methods and equipment used on yachts in the late 1920s provides a unique perspective.

Because the cookbook has been out of print for some time now we almost always stop in used book stores to see if we can find another copy.  They make wonderful gifts for anyone who enjoys boating and cooking or is somehow affiliated with our family.  Preserving family recipes (and cookbooks) in our family was in large part the inspiration for The Cooks Palate cookbook software.  Like many families, we also had fragile scraps of paper from family heirloom cookbooks that needed to be handled with care for fear of damaging or losing them.  Recipe software to transform these heirloom scraps was not readily available at that time.  For over ten years we have been helping families preserve their family cookbooks by making it easy to make a family cookbook.

We hope that the family cookbooks written with The Cooks Palate will be as treasured as our heirloom cookbooks are.