Tag Archives: Family recipe

Grandma’s secret recipe

Background Information: Justin is a senior at college, and he grew up in San Francisco. His family on his father’s side is from Hong Kong, and they used to run a noodle stall while they still lived there. Now, his father works in real estate, but some family recipes still live on. I interviewed Justin about a ‘secret recipe’ passed down from his grandmother.

Justin: So, um, there’s… So my dad says a lot of like, “secret recipe this, secret recipe that”, but usually he’s making it up, but, one time, during I think, Thanksgiving dinner with like, my extended family on my dad’s side, two of my uncles brought some kind of, um, zha jiang mian (炸酱面), um, that they’d made. And, I thought it was pretty good and I was wondering where they got it, and my dad tells me that… “oh this is actually like a family secret recipe, like for real this time”. Um, and… they actually made it like, buying the ingredients and putting it together, and… whatever else you need to do to make the sauce. And, apparently it’s passed down from my grandma, who used to make it, or… she and, um, the rest of my… the rest of her kids, including my dad I suppose? Used to make it, because they ran a noodle stall in Hong Kong before they moved here. And so they made that, and it’s pretty good. And so when they came to America, and they were looking for work, um, one of the restaurant owners that my dad ended up working for as a waiter, offered my grandma a job? But, she couldn’t take it, because the sauce is really labor intensive, and you—you couldn’t make restaurant quantities of it with just one person, but she wouldn’t teach anyone else how to make it. So, she had to turn down the job.

Thoughts: It is interesting to me how protective Justin’s grandmother was over her family secret recipe. She was unwilling to relinquish ownership of it to the restaurant. This is reminiscent of the discussion we had in class about authorship and folklore. If Justin’s grandma had taught the restaurant her secret recipe, it would then belong to the restaurant and become standardized and institutionalized as a dish of that restaurant. Instead, it remains within Justin’s family, and can have variations and different forms.

Ziti Recipe

This informant comes from a Middle Class, New York Italian family. He learned the recipe from his father, he has never bothered to ask his father were he learned the recipe from but here is how he describes it.
“we melt mozzarella and Polly O’ String cheese and onions and garlic
it’s like a layer cake made of pasta… one layer of pasta,then meat, then cheese then sauce…
shove it in the oven… we are a very white family”
This dish really follows no real traditions, it seems to be made whenever. The informant has made the dish by himself but usually makes it with his father. It seems to be a recipe passed down from his family.
I believe that this dish is a combination of both of the informant’s cultures. It’s a very traditional Italian dish of layered ziti but with American bought items. His phrasing of how he must use Polly O’ String Cheese as supposed to any other brand of string cheese. A string cheese found in many New York supermarkets and convince stores. It’s a homogenous blend of both of the informant’s cultures, combining both cultures from his family’s past in Italy and his family’s current situation in Queens.

Faherty Irish Bread

Folk Piece:

Recipe for Faherty Irish Soda Bread

3 cups flour                        1 cup raisins
½ cup sugar                      ¼ pound butter (less 1 tbs) – room temp
1 shake nutmeg                 2 eggs
3 tsp baking powder        1 cup milk
3 tsp caraway seeds

Preheat oven to 350. Grease and lightly flour 8” round cake pan.  Mix all ingredients together by hand or bread hook (if using machine).
Bake for 55 minutes.

Background Information

From the informant: “I learned the recipe from my mother Rosalie Faherty.  She learned it from her childhood friend’s Mom.  The recipe originally was in terms like a saucer of this and a pinch of that.  She had to convert it to cups and tablespoons. I first made the Irish bread in high school, and since I have made it every St. Patrick’s Day that I can remember.  My mother used to make up to a couple dozen on St. Patrick’s Day, but now me and my eight siblings make it and make about thirty collectively each year.”

 

Context

My mom taught me this recipe, too, but I never cooked it on my own this year. I never even had the recipe written down until I asked my mom for the formal one – it’s often taught from person to person. I thought it would be perfect for this project, so I asked her a bit more about it. It’s widely known in my family as our go to family dish.

 

Analysis

I grew up eating this Irish bread each and every year on St. Patty’s Day. Living north of Boston, other neighbors would leave Irish soda bread on our porch, and we would leave some on theirs. I would take it to class, my parents would take it to work, and it really signified the Irish holiday of St. Patrick’s Day. This specific recipe was taught to me by my mother when I was in high school, and I would occasionally help her cook it. Similarly, her mother, my grandmother, taught it to her when my mother was just a child. Interestingly, even after all this time, I had always just thought that the recipe originated with my family. This class made me speculate that wasn’t true; recipes don’t just appear out of thin air. After my interview I found out that my grandmother actually learned it from her friend, and my grandmother was the one to translate this “folk dish” into an actual measured recipe.

Therefore, the dish that my family feels identifies ourselves is actually only two generations removed from another family. Additionally, while it was my grandmother that authored the recipe, she herself is not Irish. In fact, she’s the only grandparent of mine that isn’t 100% Irish; that I associate my Irish identity with a recipe that was from another family, authored by a woman who isn’t at all Irish, just shows how folklore can change hands and mediums every year and every generation. For an added bonus, see below the Irish bread I made this year, brought into work just like my parents.

 

FullSizeRender

 

Tomato Soup

The informant is a Film Production and Biochemistry major at the University of Southern California, where he is in his third year. He is originally from Washington state, and his family moved there from North Dakota. Before North Dakota, his family lived in various parts of Eastern Europe. The informant says that is very much influenced by his grandfather, who is a professional storyteller.

In this piece, the informant describes how his family sees tomato soup—they have very particular thoughts on how it should be made and why.

“Both of my grandparents come from European places, and they’re very particular about their recipes and stuff. Like if you look at the way they care about their recipes, it’s just like equally the way that they would care about their folk tales. Like, we have the same borscht recipe that has been used since like my great grandparents. It’s passed down, you know, and it’s an old piece of paper and you can tell it’s been recopied over the years, but the most recent copy is in an old 1940s, it’s like an Eastern European cooking book that a bunch of the grandparent women, my family’s from North Dakota, so it was a bunch of North Dakotan Czech and German and Austrian, you know women and Russian and they all came together and they sat down at a typewriter and made, typed up all their family recipes from whatever cards or whatever.

So it’s kind of like, a little encyclopedia of like, a lot of family recipes, and my family’s borscht recipe, which is like a Russian soup, is in there. And it’s like, that’s like a very important thing to pass on, that recipe. And, you know, in like, I wish I had like a story I could say that they took from Europe, but that same preservation, like in a sense the recipe is its own like thing, and there’s a dill, like a dill tomato soup.

There’s like a little story about, like it’s like you know those grandparent sort of rant things about like “you don’t realize how important this is” but it like really changed, like, it’s like, they have this rant about tomato soup, and how like, how like Russia kind of invented tomato soup, and like how important, it’s like… Cause their version of tomato soup is um, there’s tomatoes, there’s dill, there’s sour cream, and like rice, and more like, substantial than just a regular soup.

And they kinda just like, this is like the original soup because you have grains for the soup that wouldn’t last because of mold and other stuff, you have tomatoes, which is like, were kinda hard to come by, so when you got those you just, cause it’s acidic and it’ll go bad, and like, they just talked, I don’t know, like, it’s just kinda a thing that they’re like, and you wouldn’t have tomato soup like this today, cause it’s just tomato soup in a modern sense. And this is another one of those recipes that they put into this book. I wish I had more of that rant off the top of my head.”

Analysis:

This piece brings up the question of ownership—when the grandparents talk about tomato soup, it’s to imply that Russian tomato soup is the “original” and most important tomato soup. The recipe itself is also interesting; though the informant did not remember the exact recipe, he remembered the specific reasons why ingredients were chosen, which gives the recipe much more context. To an outside listener, tomato, dill, and rice may seem like an arbitrary combination, but with the context that the tomatoes and grains would go bad unless made into soup, the reasons become clear. The way that the older women recorded these recipes for their descendants was also interesting, and it helped reinforce the importance that these recipes hold for them.

French Kiss Cookies

Me and my grandma, my Gigi, we would always make cookies together, these like these French cookies, they’re called like, Bisi or something, it’s “kisses,” like bissou, I think the plural is Bisi (Bises?), I can’t remember but you can just look it up. But we would always make them and she invented these cookies which she called them French kisses, and they’re basically like buttery as fuck, even though cause like French people love butter, like even though a lot of the stuff like in their pastries they love butter, in their croissants and stuff. And then we have this meal that we have every Christmas, I’m not good at this cause I don’t speak French, it’s called…oh it’s just Chicken Kiev, but you just change the chicken, whatever chicken is in French. But it’s so good, it has like cheese inside, you stuff the chicken, and there’s asparagus and different vegetables, and then you kinda pair it with like Ratatoui or stuff like that, so it’s kind of weird, but it’s good. And my great grandma has the recipe, she just died. It’s a really old family recipe. We have it every Christmas. Basically a lot of like, for us, how we’ve taken on our French culture is through food, so we have a lot of French food, and all those have come through my great grandma, it just keeps getting passed down. My great grandma lived in France, she was the first one from our family to come to America.

 

If you see my mom, she has black hair, like all my family has really dark brown hair and really tan skin, so they all call me white bread. Cause for some reason I came out like this, really blonde, blue eyed, like a little German kid. They all have green eyes.

 

ANALYSIS:

This is an example of a family tradition that has been kept alive and continued in an effort to preserve their original (French) heritage and nationality, even generations after having moved to America. It is apparent that even so, much of that tradition is being lost, as the informant doesn’t speak French or know what the cookies are called, or much about the French culture surrounding the food that her family makes. It seems that she has a very American view of French culture, but yet has a desire to hold onto and continue her family’s French traditions as best she can. Her family’s ethnic traditions are important to her, and this is one way for her to access this, through food. This ritual of making cookies and other dishes with her grandmother is her way of expressing or trying to get close to her French heritage, and it has become much more of a family ritual and tradition than a national one.