Valerie J. Frey

Online ticket sales close at 5pm EST on the day of the event. Tickets will be available at the door prior to the event start time.

Please note that the speaker welcomes program participants to bring knitting or other quiet handiwork to do as they listen. 

Many early Georgia cookbooks and recipes still survive, though most have slipped into obscurity. Preserved in archives, they reveal both long-forgotten dishes and vivid details about everyday life in the past. In this presentation, archivist and writer Valerie J. Frey—author of Georgia’s Historical Recipes: Seeking Our State’s Oldest Written Foodways and the Stories Behind Them (UGA Press, 2025)—guides audiences through recipes from 1733 to 1945 with a historian’s eye.

Discover the cooks of yesteryear and sample the culinary history of Georgia, the South, and the United States through historic foodways. The talk highlights early Atlanta-area cookbooks, including Frey’s rediscovery of Marietta’s 1885 House-Keeping in the Sunny South by E. R. Tennent, now reprinted by UGA Press.

Georgia’s Historical Recipes traces the state’s food traditions from the antebellum era through World War II. Frey begins by showing how old recipes function as primary sources and how they can be adapted for modern kitchens. She then presents fifty concise sections that illuminate the evolution of Georgia’s foodways.

Some chapters spotlight a single recipe to show how changes in technology, agriculture, transportation, communication, and social patterns reshaped Georgia’s kitchens. Many of the featured recipes—previously unpublished—have been unearthed from archival collections. Other chapters explore the state’s earliest cookbooks, offering biographical and cultural context. For the first time, Georgians receive a guide to the state’s early cookbooks, its culinary figures, and where to locate its oldest recipes—a true invitation to taste Georgia’s past.

Valerie J. Frey is a writer and archivist from Athens, Georgia with projects focusing on genealogy, historical foodways, and the everyday home life of our ancestors.  Valerie holds degrees from the University of Georgia and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  Her archives career began with a Junior Fellowship in the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress and she went on to serve as an archivist at the Georgia Historical Society and the Georgia Archives.  She now writes full time.  Preserving Family Recipes:  How to Save and Celebrate Your Food Traditions was released in 2015 through the University of Georgia Press.  In 2025, UGA Press released her newest book, Georgia’s Historical Recipes:  Seeking Our State’s Oldest Written Foodways and the Stories Behind Them.  During her research project, Valerie rediscovered an 1885 cookbook from Marietta entitled House-Keeping in the Sunny South that was subsequently reprinted in 2025 by UGA Press with a foreword and indexing by Valerie. 

Published with the generous support of Bradley Hale Fund for Southern Studies by University of Georgia Press