A Gift Of The Past To The Future: A Keepsake Of Home Cookbooks And Some Fragments Of History Of Nustar

This topic offers an excellent window onto the notion of everyday life that anthropologists wish to understand theoretically and examine ethnographically in the last two decades not only all over the world, but also in Croatia. When it comes to our country, it is all about grandmothers' cooking. Grandmothers are recognized as the highest authority when it comes to cooking. They have lived though hard times and devoted their lives to feeding their husbands and children. When they are gone, valuable links with the past will vanish with them unless their children or grandchildren take time to learn from them. Therefore, their recipes represent a time capsule of generations gone by, but not only from kitchens. A very precious source of information, private collections of handwritten recipes passed down from generation to generation, deserve serious study. There is, namely, a strong connection between the home cookbooks and their historical and social framework. This paper presents the first part of the private collection of recipes collected and written by two or more female family members who according to some sources served at Nustar nobility mansion (Khuen- Belasi) at the end of the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century. Personal recipe collections may be considered not only as texts, but also as artifacts, which leads to a material culture approach. This methodology calls for inductive research, including a threestep process of description, induction and speculation. Establishment of a historical, geographical and cultural context for each collection allows the scholar to formulate an appropriate hypothesis and test for conclusions. To demonstrate this process, this paper describes the step-by-step implementation of this methodology with a specific example. This is a study of a private late 19th/early 20th manuscript collection, which examines the impact of the Habsburg Monarchy and the serving at Nustar nobility mansion.