{
  "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1",
  "title": "Amicorum Journal",
  "home_page_url": "https://amicorumalbum.com/journal",
  "feed_url": "https://amicorumalbum.com/journal/feed.json",
  "description": "Stories and guides from Amicorum about wedding guest books, family recipe books, and the keepsakes worth making.",
  "language": "en-US",
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "https://amicorumalbum.com/journal/family-recipe-book",
      "url": "https://amicorumalbum.com/journal/family-recipe-book",
      "title": "The Recipes That Were Never Written Down",
      "summary": "A family recipe book begins with the cook. Learn how to gather unwritten recipes, kitchen memories, and photographs before they are lost to time.",
      "content_text": "My grandmother’s Southern kitchen\nMy grandmother is an amazing Southern cook, preparing everything from fried chicken to pound cake with effortless skill. Her kitchen has always been the gathering place for our family, and many of her recipes came directly from her mother and her grandmother, who was alive in the 1800s.\nThe challenge with heirlooms like hers is that very few of them are written down. The recipe cards that do exist rarely match what she actually does when she cooks. Some cards list ingredients she never touches, while others skip the small instincts she relies on without thinking. Anyone who has tried to recreate a family dish from an old index card knows the disappointment: the food comes out close, but it is never quite the same.\nWhen we sat down with her\nA few years ago, my family decided we could not let those dishes disappear. We sat down with my grandmother to go through her recipes together.\nWe photographed every handwritten card in her collection. We stood beside her at the counter and took detailed notes on everything she did differently from what was written down. We took photographs of the finished dishes, and we filmed her preparing some of them so we would always have a record of her explanations.\nIf there is a cook like that in your family, sitting down together is the place to begin.\nCapturing what a card cannot hold\nThe most vital parts of a family recipe are almost never recorded on paper. A pinch of seasoning, a handful of flour, or knowing to pull a pan from the oven when the crust looks a certain shade of gold are instincts passed down through practice.\nWhen you cook beside someone you love, write down what you observe. Before a handful goes into the mixing bowl, tip it into a measuring cup to see how much it really is. Keep their spoken words in your notes, because the way they describe a dish is just as much a part of your heritage as the measurements. If you are able, record their hands as they work. A short video of a grandmother rolling dough will teach future generations what an index card never could.\nPreserving the original cards\nThose stained, worn recipe cards are precious family artifacts. Rather than pasting them into a scrapbook where glue can damage them, photograph or scan them flat so you have high-resolution copies.\nThe original papers should be stored carefully in acid-free folders, not taped or glued into an album, and away from damp basements and hot attics. In the printed volume, placing a clear photograph of the original handwriting alongside the corrected recipe preserves the character of the cook who wrote it.\nGathering the whole family\nA family cookbook becomes richer when it gathers dishes from every kitchen in the family. One relative may hold the holiday dessert, while another has perfected a summer side dish. When you reach out to family members, ask for the story behind the meal: who taught them to make it, and which gatherings are incomplete without it. Those small narratives turn a simple collection of meals into a family chronicle.\nTurning memories into a printed volume\nOur family cookbook has been planned for years, and I will admit that we have not finished it yet. Preserving family history takes time, care, and steady effort.\nThe inspiration to help other families solve this problem arrived when my wife and I were celebrating our anniversary. We were in a bookstore and overheard a father and his daughter talking about using a cookbook as her wedding guest book, with guests signing favorite recipes.\nThat conversation stayed with me, and it is how Amicorum began.\nAmicorum gathers recipes, personal notes, and photographs from your family through a private link, and has them printed and bound as an enduring hardcover book. It allows relatives near and far to contribute their kitchen traditions without needing to pass paper around or mail cards across the country.\nPeople have cherished shared recipe collections for centuries. The Folger Shakespeare Library, which holds the world’s largest collection of handwritten recipe books from early modern Britain, illustrates how families continuously added to volumes that were handed down through generations.\nAmicorum has not opened yet, but you can read how it will work and join the waitlist. Do not wait for a perfect moment to ask your family for their recipes; write them down while the cooks are still here to share them.",
      "date_published": "2026-10-02T00:00:00Z",
      "date_modified": "2026-10-02T00:00:00Z",
      "authors": [
        {
          "name": "William Easom",
          "url": "https://amicorumalbum.com/about"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://amicorumalbum.com/journal/wedding-guest-book-ideas",
      "url": "https://amicorumalbum.com/journal/wedding-guest-book-ideas",
      "title": "Wedding Guest Book Ideas Worth Keeping for a Lifetime",
      "summary": "Discover wedding guest book ideas that gather heartfelt words, recipes, and photographs from everyone you love, including those who cannot attend.",
      "content_text": "A book you will open again\nPicture an evening ten or twenty years from now. The house is quiet, and the two of you take your guest book down from the shelf. When you turn the pages, you find your grandmother’s handwriting, a favorite kitchen recipe contributed by an aunt, an unhurried story from a childhood friend, and photographs of the people who shaped your lives.\nThat is what a guest book should be. It is not about proving who was in the room; it is about preserving their presence.\nMost weddings still feature the traditional blank register on a table in the foyer. A line forms, guests pick up a pen on a ribbon, and between the ceremony and the cocktail hour, they jot down their names and a polite congratulations. There is nothing wrong with having a guest book, but a blank page asks for very little, and so it preserves very little. If you want a volume you will treasure for the rest of your life, you can invite your guests to give you something far deeper.\nWhat a guest book can hold\nWords, stories, and hard-earned advice\nWhen given the time and space to reflect, the people who love you have wonderful things to say. Instead of a single greeting, you can ask guests for the memories that make them smile, their thoughts on what keeps a marriage strong, or the words they hope you will read on a difficult day. When those notes are gathered into one place, they form an enduring source of encouragement for the years ahead.\nCherished family recipes\nFood and marriage have always shared a table. Asking your guests to contribute their favorite dishes creates a volume you will actually cook from together on quiet Sunday evenings. Bringing beloved family recipes into your new home weaves the culinary heritage of both families into one shared tradition. If you have cooks in your family whose dishes were never properly recorded, my story on the recipes that were never written down explores why saving those meals matters so deeply.\nPhotographs of the people you love\nPhotographs belong alongside the written word. In addition to portraits from the wedding day itself, inviting guests to share candid pictures, old family snapshots, and casual memories brings every page to life. Decades from now, seeing how your loved ones looked, smiled, and embraced you will tell just as much of a story as their written notes.\nVoices from loved ones who cannot travel\nOne of the greatest limitations of a physical book on a table is that it only reaches the people who could attend in person. An elderly grandparent who cannot travel, a close friend living overseas, or a family member resting at home is completely left out of a traditional book. A guest book should welcome every voice that matters to you, allowing absent loved ones to contribute their blessings, photographs, and recipes so their presence is permanently included.\nThe tradition of the Book of Friends\nCenturies ago, people understood the value of gathering the voices of their community. In the sixteenth century, university students and scholars carried personal volumes known as an album amicorum, or “book of friends.” When they met friends, teachers, and fellow students, they invited them to contribute to the book with a verse, a motto, sometimes a drawing or a painted coat of arms.\nEntries often followed a deliberate formula: a personal motto or classical quote, a formal inscription of goodwill to the album’s owner, and the contributor’s signature, date, and city. Far from dry bureaucratic rosters, these books became cherished albums of affection and loyalty. Bringing that intentional spirit to modern weddings turns a standard guest book into a true heirloom.\nWhy I am building Amicorum\nA while ago, my wife and I were out celebrating our anniversary when we stopped in a bookstore. There we overheard a father and his daughter who were looking for a “coffee table book” to serve as the guest book at her wedding. They happened to be near the cookbooks, and she pulled out a couple and began flipping through them. “I think it might be a cool idea to use a cookbook,” she told him. “Yeah, that would be neat,” he replied. “Just have everyone pick out a recipe page and write a note or sign it.”\nHearing that conversation was the moment Amicorum began.\nI wanted to make that kind of keepsake effortless to create. Amicorum gathers personal notes, family recipes, and photographs from guests through a private link, and has them printed and bound as a hardcover book, on acid-free paper. Guests can write unhurried from their own phones before or after the wedding, and the people who could not make the trip are included just as easily.\nAmicorum has not opened yet, but you can learn more about how it will work and join the waitlist.\nA wedding guest book is the single keepsake from your celebration written by the community that surrounds you. Give your loved ones the room to tell you how much you are loved.",
      "date_published": "2026-10-02T00:00:00Z",
      "date_modified": "2026-10-02T00:00:00Z",
      "authors": [
        {
          "name": "William Easom",
          "url": "https://amicorumalbum.com/about"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}