Your Family Recipes Belong In A Museum

Do you have a family recipe or food story so good that it deserves a more illustrious resting place than your grandma's recipe file? I know, I know, it's hard to conceive of such a thing. Maybe it's just better to say, do you have a family recipe or food story so good that it deserves to be shared with the world at large? Well, great news: The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, is soliciting food stories and recipes to include in "RECLAMATION: Recipes, Remedies, and Rituals," a new interactive exhibit scheduled to open next month.

"RECLAMATION," the museum's website explains, "is an evolving exhibition and ingredient archive that examines food as a creative medium for visual art and a connective tool for exploring intergenerational and intercultural experiences." It centers on the work of nine interdisciplinary artists who are creating work based on their own kitchen tables, but the curators also want to include recipes and stories from members of the public to create "a dynamic portal for exploring the interconnectedness of food and the communal nature of nourishing and curing the body." In other words, the exhibit wants to show that home cooking is important and that the people—primarily women—who have produced it over the centuries should be valued. The exhibit will also include a home remedies component that sounds fascinating.

If you'd like to share your own recipes, remedies, photos, and/or stories, you can do it through a portal on the museum's website. The exhibition goes live January 18 and will run through most of 2021.