By Hanna Christensen, scireporter@sewardindependent.com
A Milford market is gathering more than just ingredients – it’s collecting cherished recipes for a new cookbook.
Savannah Bontrager, the 27-year-old daughter of Main Street Market’s owners Craig and Karen Bontrager, is creating a community cookbook for the store. She hopes to have it on sale by Christmas, as she said it would make a great gift.
Bontrager often helps out at the store, which features groceries, a deli and a cafe, but works full-time as a scientist. Inspired by community-style cookbooks she has used over the years, many of which are Mennonite, she decided to create one that reflects the people connected to Main Street Market.
“When I’m flipping through the Milford Elementary Cookbook or the Stutzman Family Cookbook, I flip through the names, and you can remember people who maybe have passed on or that you used to know a long time ago,” she said. “That’s special, too, being able to look back and recognize certain people’s names.”
Bontrager said anyone who has ever shopped at Main Street Market can contribute recipes to the book. People do not have to live in Milford to participate, as the market regularly sees customers from a wide area.
“The market sees all sorts of people from all over,” she said. “We want to gather recipes from everyone, whether they’ve been to the market once or 100 times.”
Bontrager said the cookbook will likely include most of the recipes submitted, except when there are multiple versions of the same type of recipe. For now, contributors are limited to two submissions per person.
Recipes can be submitted online at bit.ly/4brvGJy or through a link on Main Street Market’s Facebook and Instagram pages. People may also mail or drop them off at Main Street Market, 115 S. Hwy 6 in Milford.
The submission form asks for the person’s name, the ingredients and the instructions for making the dish. It also includes an optional section to share a story or historical information related to the recipe. Bontrager said she will not be able to include every story but plans to feature some of them throughout the book.
“This will just show the community even more,” she said.
The cookbook will be organized into sections based on different types of food. She said she hopes to have a gluten-free section, as the market recently expanded its gluten-free options, and many people have appreciated it.
Several people have already submitted recipes, and Bontrager has enjoyed seeing the wide range of dishes and the stories behind them.
“I like reading the features and how it’s special to that person, maybe where they got the recipe from, and also just seeing names,” she said.
Her father, Craig, said their family has noticed that some younger people who did not learn recipes from their grandparents are now becoming interested in traditional cooking and foods made without additives or excess processing.
“Savannah is big on heritage and where she came from and being proud of all that,” he said. ‘Milford has a really great Mennonite history, and a lot of baking and cooking, we just have a big history of that through the Mennonites and other folks that are here.”
Charlotte Roth, Bontrager’s great aunt and a part-time employee at Main Street Market, plans to submit recipes for the cookbook. She owns a Milford Community Cookbook from the 1980s and uses it frequently. She said she loves its down-to-earth, home-cooked meal recipes.
Roth said although there are many recipes on Google, and she uses them sometimes, there is something special about using old recipes from a physical book.
“When I go through the cookbooks, and I see those names of those women, and a lot of them in my cookbook aren’t living anymore, it just brings back those memories,” she said. “You kind of go down memory lane. So, cookbooks are really not just recipes; they’re memories of people with their recipes.”
Roth said she looks forward to discovering recipes from new people through Savannah’s book. Their recipes may even spark new interest in cooking and baking in others, she said. She is also excited to see recipes from communities outside of the Milford area.
“When you go down to Crete and Wilber to the more Czech areas, they cook different than what we do here,” Roth said. “I feel that they’ve got some really good recipes, and if they’d be willing to share them, I would really be interested in that kind of thing, too.”
Bontrager looks forward to creating the book and encourages everyone to contribute their cherished, creative or family recipes.
Dining and Cooking