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Everyone's past is locked up in their recipes - the past of an individual and the past of a nation as well.

One of the things that's important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.

When you have a child, you think about your personal history and what you offer them as a larger narrative, and I realised I knew nothing about my father's circumstances other than what he'd told me.

The past has to inform the present.

I think it's important to recall... what you remember your grandmother making, where you're from and the foods you enjoyed as a child yourself, and pass that information off to your kids.

There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you if you don't repeat it.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

The long history of conversations that family members share contributes not only to how listeners interpret words but also to how speakers choose them.

I came from a family where, you know, we sat down at the table every night, and you better have a story to tell. My father never wrote his stories down. And you know, I learned that they went farther if you wrote them down.