Preserving Personal and Local Food Heritage: Chef Morgan Yezzi
An interview about family recipes, vintage cookbooks, and upcoming classes
In a world where it seems everyone and their mother has a food blog or is out there on social media creating jump-cut reels of food demos for likes on TikTok, there's Chef Morgan Yezzi, analog to the core. A self-created food historian and lover of all things handwritten, ancestral, or connected to a memory, his goal is to honor Erie's food legacy while creating a new Erie food history, based on collecting family recipes, food journals, heritage cookbooks, and more.
He's recently partnered with Grounded Print and Paper Shop, "an interdisciplinary, contemporary print and papermaking shop/artist residency located in Erie's Little Italy neighborhood," to offer a three-part class to help others in Erie acknowledge and honor their own family's food history, whether that's through preserving handwritten family recipes or creating their own handmade recipe cards while learning to bind them into artfully made, hand-bound books and recipe boxes.
I recently connected with Yezzi over his research on local Erie historic cookbooks, including Laura Sterrett's own The Erie Cookbook, that has been covered within the pages of the Reader before, and jumped at the chance to get to know more about him. The following Q & A covers his inspirations, his current projects, the collaboration with Grounded Print Shop, and his goals for the future.
Erin Phillips (EP): Tell me about yourself and how you became interested in food history.
Morgan Yezzi (MY): I was born and raised in Erie. I am a verdant home cook, domestic bad boy, home ec granny, physical recipe archivist, consumer science enthusiast, partner, dog dad, and lover of long breakfasts.
My cooking can be described as an elevated and easy melting pot of comfort food with a focus on transforming the nostalgia from the kitchens of my past to the kitchens of my present. My mission is to inspire you to build more conscious recipe collections and think about how physical recipes connect us in the kitchen, where the shared experience of cooking and eating together transforms us into storytellers.
I am currently cooking in my grandparents' vacant house on the west side of Erie. The house is a time capsule of objects from the 1960s to the present, so needless to say, time is standing still. I am cooking on the same stove and using the same oven my grandma used all her life.
While I do have a digital footprint (@Yezball), I am averse to recording recipes digitally, because my phone is not an heirloom I am hoping to pass down. So, like my mom and my late grandmas, and a few other influential people in my life, I like to record physical copies of all of my recipes.
EP: How did your interest in heritage recipes translate into your upcoming class at Grounded Print Shop? Talk a little bit about the upcoming class, what will be covered, what the vibe will be like, and why you chose Grounded to collaborate with?
MY: None of this would be possible without Grounded Print Shop. Ashley's (Pastore, owner Grounded Print and Paper Shop, and 40 Under 40 Class of 2022) resources inside of those walls continuously unlock the practices that I have been trying to produce in my work. There are moments in history that you read about when people meet, for example: Julia Child meeting Judith Jones or Bert meeting Ernie, that just change the course of history. That was Ashley and I meeting at Grounded on Gallery Night just before Christmas last year. We chatted on Erie's food scene, disrupting Erie, and she showed me the Grounded space, but it wasn't until weeks later that we connected about our shared passion for preserving the past and our general love for food. I showed her my way of recording recipes and a few pieces of food ephemera I've been inspired by and she said, "This needs to be a class."
So now, it is a class, a class on recipe filing and bookbinding. Under Ashley's guidance, we will be making two different book structures to hold our recipes — a long stitch book as well as a custom recipe box. The class will also be an examination on how the way in which we cook and record our recipes makes up our personal story as well as different organizational strategies to file recipes. Additionally, we will get into the practice of recording and writing down recipes as opposed to storing them digitally.
Our hope for the class is that it's an open parlor for anyone to attend and discuss the way in which physical recipes connect them to their past while still being present in their future. We want to see people's personal recipes, family recipes, boxes of index cards, stuffed folders, dog-eared books, or rubber-banded stacks. We will also have some nosh and welcome others to bring any food or drink to share as well.
EP: Can you tell me a little about your own food history? What recipes from your family history are important to you? Why do you think it is important to preserve this kind of food history?
MY: I can still remember where each of my grandmothers kept their cookbooks in the kitchen. Each one is stuffed full of recipes reaching back a generation; mostly family recipes shared between mothers, sisters, cousins but also with newer ones mixed in from family friends. The level of detail within these books has stayed with me for my whole life and because of that core memory, I have been keeping detailed cooking journals for the better part of 15 years.
Both of my parents and my brother are very active in the kitchen; we are always sharing recipes. My dad makes donuts and bread, my mom is a vegetable and soup connoisseur, and my brother is a sauce and grill aficionado. For years, my mom and I have been experimenting with my grandma's pierogi recipe to the point where we have perfected it as well as her stuffed cabbage and czarnina (duck soup), which is another recipe that has always been of interest to me.
My grandma used to have to bribe me and my brother to eat duck soup (anyone unfamiliar should know that it is a traditional Polish blood-based soup). My Papa was the one who ended up guiding me on how to perfect the recipe. I would be remiss if I didn't mention Urbaniak Brothers Quality Meat for being the only place I have ever been able to find duck blood in the country.
My true passion is cooking, but the act of preserving how I cook is what really drives me to continue cooking. Getting down to it, the way I cook and record my recipes is connected to my grieving process for both of my grandmothers. The main way I felt connected to them when they were alive was through their food and now that they have passed it's a way of me keeping them close.
Self-described "lover of long breakfasts" Chef Morgan Yezzi makes his daily morning meal a thoughtful one. Drawing from family recipes, heritage cookbooks, and cooking in his grandmother's kitchen, Yezzi honors history simply by preparing and enjoying breakfast each day.
EP: Do you like to experiment with vintage recipes? What are some of your favorites? What are some things you've learned from reading vintage/historic cookbooks?
MY: I collect vintage cookbooks like it's nobody's business, but I am selective about which recipes I actually set out to make. I just got a copy of The Lily Wallace New American Cookbook at an estate sale, choosing it because I liked the chapter graphics — it has ended up being one of the most interesting and well-executed cookbooks I've collected. Older cookbooks have taught me two things: embrace variety and live economically.
There's a passage in The Erie Cook Book where Mrs. Sterrett refers to using a "crumb jar" so I have started keeping one myself. I eat a mountain of bread every week and the crumbs and heels I generate now get swept into a jar on a shelf in my kitchen waiting there for me when I make meatballs or need a bit of body in a vinaigrette.
I am going to start sharing more of my cookbook collection and the way that I use my cookbooks as inspiration on Instagram in the coming months.
EP: How do you hope to grow this project in the future?
MY: My hope is to inspire a movement where everyone begins to build more conscious and communal recipe collections. That starts by keeping a journal of your eating and kitchen habits, your food preferences, grocery lists, menus, recipes you want to try out, restaurants you want to go to, and so on. Putting a pen to paper makes it all the more personal.
If I could visit everyone's kitchen in the world, I would, because I am interested in learning how people cook. I want to continue working with Grounded Print Shop to scale my recipes and create a monthly mail order subscription service for recipes, featuring some friends and guests along the way. Through this, my goal is to create a recipe file categorized according to my life for people to have in their home where they can add to the file and create a trove of their own recipes.
People alway ask me if and when I am writing a cookbook, to which I respond, "not yet, but I will have recipes available soon!" Last summer at The Great American Book Sale, I found a copy of a cookbook called Tastes and Tales of Erie, Pennsylvania and it holds the recipes of Erie's cultural clubs and social organizations as well as some historic recipes. Think the pierogi recipe from The Polish Falcons Club and Harry Burleigh's Maple Pecan Cake. Creating an updated community cookbook would be a fantastic project as a lot has changed in our community since 1971 so I would like to reflect upon that. On the horizon, I would like to start hosting more food-focused community events in the form of potlucks, recipe swaps, and pop-up dinner parties.
Morgan Yezzi at a glance:
Go to cookbooks: The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adria by Ferran Adria, The Breakfast Book by Marion Cunningham, and Power Vegetables by Peter Meehan
Fun Food Fact: I shared a cheeseburger with Martha Stewart at Eeeeeatscon in Queens, N.Y.
A Favorite Recipe I Collaborated On: In respect to the East Coast delicacy, the fluffernutter sandwich, my previous boss and I, Dan Pelosi, made a Fluffernutter Ice Cream Cake.
Go-to Weeknight meal: A wedge salad
Lazy meal/lots of work meal: Garlic soup/fresh pasta
To register for the Recipe Bookmaking Class being held on Tuesdays from Mar. 12 through Mar. 26 at Grounded Print and Paper shop, visit: groundedprintshop.com
Morgan Yezzi can be found, forever making breakfast, on Instagram @Yezball
Erin Phillips can be reached at erin@eriereader.com.
