The Recipe Archival Project

Help us preserve the recipes, techniques, stories, and foodways that helped shape America.

Some recipes are written down.

Others live in someone’s hands.

A pinch measured by memory. A technique learned by watching. A dish passed from one generation to the next. A preparation method that was never formally documented.

When those people and their memories disappear, we lose more than recipes.

We lose history.

The James Hemings Society is launching Food Is History: The Recipe Archival Project, a culinary preservation initiative dedicated to documenting Black American recipes, cooking methods, techniques, oral histories, folklore, family knowledge, and foodways before they are lost.

More Than a Recipe

Food carries history.

Behind a recipe can be a migration story, a family tradition, an agricultural practice, a technique born from necessity, a celebration, a memory, or generations of knowledge passed from one set of hands to another.

Yet much of Black culinary knowledge has historically been transmitted through practice and oral tradition rather than formally archived.

And too often, the contributions of Black cooks, chefs, farmers, food producers, entrepreneurs, families, and communities have been overlooked, misattributed, or omitted from the historical record.

We are not simply collecting recipes. We are preserving the knowledge around them.

What We Are Preserving

Through Food Is History, we will document and preserve:

Family and community recipes
Traditional cooking methods and techniques
Oral histories and personal narratives
Regional and generational foodways
Ingredient knowledge
Migration and family stories
Culinary folklore and cultural memory
Photographs, handwritten recipes, documents, and related artifacts
The people and communities behind the food

Whenever possible, recipes will be documented alongside the voices, hands, techniques, memories, and cultural context that give them meaning.

Our First Goal: $10,000

This campaign represents Phase I of the Food Is History archive.

Our first $10,000 will help us begin the work of identifying, recording, documenting, and preserving the first collection of culinary stories.

Funds will support:

Oral-history interviews
Recipe documentation
Recording cooking methods and techniques
Archival research
Transcription
Photography
Digitization and cataloging
Community outreach
Early documentary filming
Development of the living culinary archive

This is the beginning of a much larger body of work.

Support Our Mission

A Living Library

The long-term vision for Food Is History is a living library of folklore, foodways, culinary education, collections, content, and conversation.

The James Hemings Society aims to establish both a digital and physical repository dedicated to the retention, education, growth, and dissemination of the African American culinary legacy.

The archive will also become a source for new scholarship, educational resources, exhibitions, public programs, and critical conversations addressing the cultural histories that have too often been absent from traditional culinary education.

Materials gathered through the Recipe Archival Project will also become the foundation for a published cookbook and a feature documentary film, allowing these histories to reach audiences far beyond the archive itself.

But the archive remains at the center.

The cookbook will tell stories from it.

The film will document the journey.

The archive will preserve the history.

Help Us Begin

Every recipe carries something with it.

A person.
A place.
A migration.
A memory.
A technique.
A way of surviving.
A way of celebrating.
A way of belonging.

Your contribution helps us document that knowledge while the people who carry it can still tell us what it means.

$25 — Preserve a Story
Supports documentation, transcription, and digital preservation.

$50 — Preserve a Recipe
Helps document a recipe, technique, or culinary tradition.

$100 — Record a Culinary Memory
Supports oral-history and recipe documentation.

$250 — Support an Archival Interview
Helps support the research, recording, and preservation of an individual culinary story.

$500 — Sponsor a Story
Supports deeper documentation of a cook, family, tradition, or community food story.

$1,000 — Founding Preservation Partner
Provides significant support toward launching the archive and preserving its first collection of stories.

Preserve the Food. Preserve the Stories. Preserve the History.

Food is history.

And history survives when someone chooses to preserve it.

Join the James Hemings Society in building a living archive for generations to come.

Make Your Gift Today

About the James Hemings Society

The James Hemings Society is an educational and cultural organization dedicated to preserving, interpreting, and expanding public understanding of the contributions of Black Americans to food and beverage culture. Named for James Hemings, one of America's earliest professionally trained chefs, the Society uses his extraordinary story as a doorway into the broader history of generations of Black culinary innovators whose work helped shape American food culture.

Food Is History: The Recipe Archival Project

Preserving the flavors and stories that built American cuisine

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