Tag Archives: Foodways

Japanese New Year’s Ozoni

KM is a third-generation Japanese-American from Los Angeles, CA. She now lives in Pasadena, CA with her husband and 18-year-old son.

KM described to me some of the basic traditions her family has for New Years Day, especially the cooking of “ozoni”:

“Ozoni is just a soup made with chicken broth, green onion, shiitake mushrooms, seaweed, chicken and mochi. My Auntie Kazuko would make it for us every year when we were growing up, and it’s always the first course of a New Year’s Day meal. All of [my mom’s] siblings and my cousins would get together at [Auntie Kazuko’s] house and while most of the day would be, you know, just a family gathering, we would all sit down together to eat the ozoni. It’s only cooked on New Year’s and you have to go to special Japanese markets to find the ingredients.

“Now with my siblings and kids and nieces and nephews, we get together at my sister’s place – she’s married to a Japanese man, and his mother makes the ozoni. The holiday is pretty similar to how it was for me, where everyone just gathers at someone’s house to watch football and eat food, but the making of the soup and eating it together is like one concrete tradition we do every year. I’m not sure who will keep making it after [my sister’s mother-in-law] passes away though…”

My analysis:

The most interesting part of this food tradition for me is the shared background of the family members who actively carry it out – KH told me her Auntie Kazuko was most connected to their Japanese heritage, which is why she insisted on making the soup every year. Similarly, her sister’s mother-in-law is from Japan, and she is the one who facilitates the tradition. It really reveals how certain customs make it overseas when families would move to America, but also how fragile they are. KH isn’t sure anyone else in her family is motivated enough by their Japanese traditions to continue the laborious process of making this particular food. Traditional holidays tend to become more Americanized (in this case) over the years they’re observed away from their roots, and unless enough people are committed to certain customs, they can easily die out.

For more information about ozoni, see:

“Ozoni (Zoni) Recipe.” Japanese Cooking 101. 2016. Retrieved from http://www.japanesecooking101.com/ozoni-zoni-recipe/.

“Clean your plate” and Central Texas Supper

“The other thing I remember is my grandmother on my dad’s side, when we would go eat dinner with them, well first of all it was called ‘supper.’ ‘Dinner’ is lunch and ‘supper’ is supper and there would always be at least three meat dishes on the table. So you’d always have, like, venison, there was always fried fish, and there was usually like ham or a roast as the third meat. And then for dessert there were always at least three choices for dessert. And the saying was, ‘You have to clean your plate.’ So . . . yeah, I never felt that great after eating there. So full. But ‘you have to clean your plate.’ If you put it on your plate, you have to eat it. So then you just learn to put less on your plate, unless you’re just gonna make yourself eat it. You can’t throw anything away.”

 

The informant was a 50-year-old woman who works as a middle school teacher teaching English, dance, and history to 7th and 8th graders. Although she has spent the last 19 years living in the San Francisco Bay Area, she grew up in Lubbock, Texas and Austin, Texas. She is also my mother, and this interview took place over Skype one afternoon when we were talking about things she did when she was growing up. She learned it from both of her grandmothers who “both grew up in the Great Depression and during the war when there wasn’t a lot of, when they used coupons to get their food.” She thinks this proverb is “about not wasting any food. And they didn’t have iceboxes, or well they had iceboxes which didn’t keep the food as well.”

 

I included the details about central Texas supper because it struck me as interesting and unusual that there always had to be three different kinds of meat on the table. I have no idea why this might have been, but it seems like it was a pretty hard and fast rule. I also thought it was interesting that different people refer to different meals differently, even if they reside in the same country. I agree with the informant that “Clean your plate” is probably related to the time period in which the two women grew up. In addition to there being the Great Depression and WWII, food was generally less abundant in all times before this one. I have often heard this saying in American households and I think it reflects the negative attitude most people have towards wasting food.

Stollen – Traditional German Sweet Bread

About the Interviewed: Julian is a senior at Calabasas High School. He’s passionate about Oboe Performance and Theatre. At 18 years of age, Julian is also my younger brother. He generally identifies as Caucasian American, but like myself, he has a close ethnic lineage tracing back to Germany and Ireland.

My brother commented on a food tradition he picked up on.

Julian: “Every Christmas our Mom makes the same dish every year. It’s called Stollen, and it’s a traditional German sweet bread. It’s tastes like a crunchy fruitcake, but it’s not bad. Mom’s been making it for as long as I can remember. I’ve helped her make it before, so I think I can tell you what goes into it.”

“Stollen is made out of dried fruit, cake mix, marzipan, nuts, and gets powdered sugar thrown on top.”

“From what other people tell me, it’s sort of an acquired taste. I can imagine why, but I just like it a lot so I don’t really care what other people think. My mom got the recipe from her mother and so on so forth.”

Summary:

Stollen is a traditional German Sweetbread eaten as an alternative to fruitcake.

I one-hundred percent agree with my brother here. Stollen is a delicious food. Everybody’s always got that one thing they like that’s traditional. It doesn’t taste amazing, but it has that familiar flavor that just keeps you coming back. 

 

Banoonooed

The informant provided the following as a tale his father would tell him before bed,for the purpose of making sure he didn’t eat too much before going to sleep.

Alright, so, when I was a kid my Dad, (first of all my dad’s family is Philippeano. my dad is full Philippeano.) So he would tell me that, uh, if I ate right before bed I’d, what would happen was, it was called “banoonooed.” [ban-noon-noon-ed] and what that means is that if you eat before bed when you go to sleep you’ll have a bad dream and your entire hair will go, just like… white. So yeah, anyway, if you eat before dinner and if you eat too much, er, sorry, if you eat too much before you go to sleep it will give you nightmares, and those nightmares will be so scary that your hair will just go completely white and I think that’s, like my dad didn’t make it up, but I think it’s to stop people eating before going to bed and… yeah. 

As the informer notes, this tale is not specific to his family, but it does seem to be a Philippeano tale in general as opposed to one which has spread across cultures. As the informer noted to me, large meals are a significant part of Philippeano culture, and a tale warning against their consumption before bed is likely more relevant to their culture than others. Furthermore, the scare-tactics and over the top consequences for eating too much before bed, make it a good children’s story, and that gives its moral a context.

Traditional Christmas Dinner – Lutefisk

Informant: “My family for Christmas, we eat lutefisk. Which is cod soaked in lie. It’s cod soaked in lie and then you cook it, and its this gelatinous thing that is, its indescribable, and anybody coming into the family has no idea what’s going on, like why are you serving this for Christmas dinner. But you put it on mash potatoes and you mash it in there and you put drawn butter on top and its good, but if you eat it by itself, it is like, I don’t know, its absolutely disgusting. They cook the cod in lie because you were in the Midwest, these were all Norwegians who fled Norway, and you didn’t, I mean there was no where you could really fish, I mean you could ice fish or whatever, but these were all people that grew up with an abundance of fish in Norway and here they are in the middle of the Midwest with no fish, so they would transport this cod from the east coast. But to keep it OK  they would keep it in lie, which is you know a poison, and that’s how they would keep it and transport it.”

 

Interviewer: “And it’s safe to eat?”

 

Informant: “Yeah you cook it and eat it, with lots of butter, it’s very good. It looks like no fish you have ever eaten; I mean it is like see-though, gelatinous fish.”

 

Interviewer: “Why on Christmas?”

 

Informant: “I don’t know, but there are these huge lutefisk dinners in Minneapolis and St. Paul. I mean like people pay like 50 bucks to go have a lutefisk dinner.”

 

Interviewer: “How was it to have this tradition be apart of your yearly Christmas experience?”

 

Informant: “Well I mean for me I grew up with doing it, so it is very traditional, it is like how we felt like we were connecting with our heritage. It is important to carry it on. Like this year , my aunts were like oh, lets do something different, lets do like lobster or something like that and all of my generation was like ‘No, were are doing lutefisk,’ because to us that is like the traditional Christmas dinner and we want it. Regardless of the fact that nobody else would ever come to your house and eat that. That’s it yeah.”

 

The informant is a middle-aged mother with three boys. She grew up in Minnesota with a large family in the suburbs of Minneapolis. As stated in the interview, the informant grew up eating lutefisk for Christmas and she associates the food with Christmas dinner.

Lutefisk is a traditional dish from the Nordic Countries like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland and has been carried over to Nordic-North American areas of Canada, the Finnish community at Sointula on Malcolm Island in the province of British Columbia, and the United States, particularly in the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest.

Lutefisk is made from cod, and to make it, the skin and bones need to be removed, then the fish is salted and hung to dry for several weeks until it hardens. Then, it should be soaked in lye for several days. (Merriam-Webster: Lye – strong alkaline liquor rich in potassium carbonate leached from wood ashes and used especially in making soap and for washing). According to the informant, lutefisk can be served with gravies, green peas, mashed peas, (boiled, baked or mashed) potatoes, meatballs, lefse, gravy, mashed rutabaga, white sauce, mustard sauce, melted butter, syrup, or cheeses, though they usually serve it with mashed potatoes and butter.

I think this collection really emphasizes how people can become attached to their traditions even if they don’t necessarily like them. The informant is determined to continue to have lutefisk dinner on Christmas because she feels that it ties her to her heritage and it is an important tradition for her, even though she considers the fish itself to be “disgusting,” .

Plate of Lutefisk

The informant sent me this picture of Cream of Lutefisk soup after our interview

Interestingly, Lutefisk is present in many different popular culture genres, for example in movies and music. A movie was released in 2011 called “The Lutefisk Wars” directed by David E. Hall and Christopher Panneck about: “A rural frozen food delivery man is mistaken for someone else and ends up in the middle of an ancient feud between two Norwegian Mafia Families” (IMDb). There is also a music band called Lutefisk which released an album in 1997 called “Burn in Hell Fuckers.” Lastly, a parody song concerning lutefisk called “O Lutefisk, O Lutefisk” was created by Red Stangeland to the Tune of “O Tannenbaum” by Ernst Gebhard Anschutz.

Movie Cover

The Lutefisk Wars. Dir. David E. Hall and Christopher Panneck. Perf. Ken Baldwin, Haynes Brooke, and Regan Burns. Sojourner Pictures, 2011. Film.

Album Cover

Lutefisk. Burn in Hell Fuckers. Bong Load Records, 1997. Audio CD.