Category Archives: Foodways

Crawfish Festival

Text (festival/traditional food)

“The Crawfish festival is a classic festival we’ve all been to growing up since it has carnival rides, games, and good food you can only really find in the south.”

Context 

My informant was born and raised in Texas and has been to the festival with family and friends numerous times since they were a child.

Q: “What is the crawfish festival?”

A: “The crawfish festival is a festival usually celebrated in southern states and includes carnival games, vendors, crawfish, and other southern comfort foods. It’s basically a celebration of southern culture and hospitality where people come together and appreciate community and popular southern delicacies.

Analysis 

The Crawfish Festival is popular in Louisiana, Texas, and other southern states for both locals and visitors to come together, enjoy, and commemorate southern culinary traditions not typically found in regions outside of the south. Crawfish isn’t the only traditional culinary form available at the festival, there also includes crawfish, étouffée, jambalaya, and more. These traditional foods are all part of Cajun and Creole cuisine. Crawfish are popular in Creole cuisine as they are abundantly found in the south, étouffée is a roux including crawfish and other seafood topped over rice, and jambalaya is another rice-based dish including sausage, chicken, and seafood typically served at large gatherings. People of all backgrounds and cultures travel to the south to participate in the Crawfish Festival as this is a way for cultural heritage and culinary lore to be spread and enjoyed across various communities. Seafood and dark meat products were major food sources for enslaved African Americans. This cuisine is a reflection of various influences and factors representative of a larger cultural identity in African American communities. Appadurai discusses the cultural significance of cultural cuisines in asserting cultural identity and representations of class hierarchies. These southern foods commonly eaten by enslaved African Americans, is an acknowledgment of African American resistance to slavery while embracing cultural customs predominately seen in the southern United States. This is representative of how culinary lore and recipes move where people don’t as they assert a cultural identity and exemplify resistance to the impacts of colonialism.

King Cake

Text (traditional foods/folk belief)

“I bought King Cake one year. I thought it was just going to be a slice, but it was big enough for multiple people.”

Context 

My informant has attended the Mardi Gras parade twice and tried King cake once when she went with friends.

Q: “What is King Cake?”

A: “King Cake is a large type of cake in a circular shape but hollow in the middle almost like a rope that is decorated in icing and sugar of the Mardi Gras colors: green, gold, and purple. It typically has a tiny toy baby in the center of it that represents baby Jesus and is a symbol of a year of good luck and prosperity to whoever finds it in their slice”

Analysis

King cake during the celebration of Mardi Gras is a collective ritual most people participate in to celebrate and participate in the cultural experience as well as hoping to find the plastic baby looking forward to prosperity in the coming year. Stemming from Frazer’s ideas of belief and sympathetic magic, this shows how non-scientific belief has an influence on the natural world implying good luck and warding off bad energy. It’s a form of homeopathic magic as “like produces like” or finding the baby Jesus produces good luck and prosperity. This custom is rooted in European traditions dating back to the Epiphany, a Christian holiday representative of the Magi visiting baby Jesus. Originally, a baby Jesus figure was hidden in bread and whoever found it would be king or queen for the day. After the spread of this tradition in New Orleans, bakers would add their own spin on the ritual varying decorations and selling the cakes during Mardi Gras season. The cake is very large and meant to be shared and eaten with others as a community bonding ritual that brings people together in celebration and festivities reinforcing communal cultural identity. This is an example of the ways folklore changes through time based on the cultural context of a community. Steering away from medieval societal structures, the context in which the toy baby Jesus was used changed from an aristocratic nature to an uplifting optimistic symbol of luck and prosperity brought by the baby Jesus. Also exemplary of religious folklore, this practice is a for Catholic belief to be communally shared, and enjoyed by festival participants bringing people together to cherish and understand more about the religious custom and how it has evolved through time.

Chinese Moon Festival

Context: This festival comes from my friend JZ, a USC student who grew up in a Chinese Ukrainian household in Toronto. He celebrated both aspects of Chinese and Ukrainian culture and was kind enough to share some of the experiences he’s had with that in his life with me.

Collection:

JZ: Lunar cycles are so big in China there’s so many festivals that are associated with them. I remember this one, its called just Moon Festival. I don’t really recall the story behind it but you have to eat moon cakes for it. You literally never eat moon cakes outside of the moon festival, I hated them they suck so much. There are all of these flavors that they are filled with but I never liked any of them. The typical go to filling is this red bean paste that is really popular in China. It’s sweet but weird. Chinese people like to put weird things in their desserts.

Analysis: This festival is in line with the other things that JZ told me about Chinese culture and celebration. For one thing, the emphasis on the lunar cycles indicates that China is a very cyclical culture that has reverence for its past and history. The traditional eating of moon cakes points towards China’s emphasis on food and food as a ritual that brings family together. Although the actual moon cake may not be very good, it is still traditionally eaten because it is a way to bring the family together under one roof at one table all eating the same thing.

Chinese Rice Cake Festival And Old Philosopher Story

Nationality: Canadian/Ukrainian/Chinese
Age: 19
Language: English

Context: This festival comes from my friend JZ, a USC student who grew up in a Chinese Ukrainian household in Toronto. He celebrated both aspects of Chinese and Ukrainian culture and was kind enough to share some of the experiences he’s had with that in his life with me.

Collection:

JZ: One of the, not most important, but really big Chinese festivals is based on a story. It’s kinda dumb, theres this long backstory that doesn’t matter, but a long time ago this old philosopher went and jumped into a river, a river that actually exists in China. He ended up dying in the river, I think the story says that he killed himself but I don’t really remember. The nearby townspeople were really sad though, because the philosopher was very well liked, so the people began making these rice cakes or rice balls, I’m not sure how to describe them. Then they started throwing the rice cakes into the river so that the fish would eat the rice cakes instead of eating the philosopher. We would eat the rice cakes every year, it has nothing to do with the guy anymore its more like the lore behind the holiday, it kind of explains the origin behind the rice cakes.

Me: Did your family throw the rice cakes into a nearby river or just eat them?

JZ: No we just ate them. It was weird because people will eat these all the time but you like have to eat the rice cakes on this specific festival. I’m sure some people in China throw rice cakes into the rivers but we didn’t. The story just is kind of the lore behind the rice cakes.

Analysis: This festival and related story show some important aspects of Chinese culture. Firstly, the presence of the old philosopher shows the Chinese reverence for the wise and the elderly. In the story, the people feel the need to respect his memory by tossing their own food into the river, showing a respect and embrace of the elderly. Secondly, the supposed origin for a commonly eaten food in China places an emphasis on the importance of tradition and history. As JZ was telling me before he mentioned this story, religion isn’t very big in China and many people are actually atheist. But for many the history and traditions of China tend to replace religious holidays and festivals. A celebrated origin story for an item of food shows a great reverence for the history and ancestry of China.

Proverb – “Eat from the Bowl, Look from the Pot”

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Near USC campus
Performance Date: 2/21/2023
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

Text:
Mandarin (Simplified): “吃着碗里，看着锅里”
Pinyin (Simplified) : chi zhe wan li, kan zhe guo li
Literal translation: Eating in the bowl, looking in the pot

Context:
C is a Chinese international student from Anhui Province, Hefei studying at USC. There were a lot of pauses between sentences as C was finding the right words, as English was not his first language.
C： “This folk speech is relatively widespread in China. It’s not very local or original, but it’s more like a proverb. That kind of thing. It’s called “吃着碗里，看着锅里“ (chi zhe wan li, kan zhe guo li). My parents used that a lot with me, because when I was very young, I tend to be very protective of my food. And that’s why my parents described me as that. It translates that you’re eating the food in the bowl, and looking at the food in the pot. I remember one time when my cousin was visiting over the weekend and my parents was cooking a lot of good food. I was always the one eating the chicken leg, the best part of the chicken. And I was so protective, I licked the chicken. I was so young at the time. And my mom said that [proverb to me]. In my family, it was more about not being greedy.”

Interpretation:
This proverb is a shorthand bit of wisdom passed down from parent to child. It condones the subject for being too greedy with food. In Mandarin, it’s also a comment on personal character. The direct English translation implies a passiveness to eating and looking, merely an observation. What’s lost from the original Chinese wording is the tone of condescension and the clear subject being the person who is eating. It is not only an observation but a warning. What is in the pot, what the eater cannot look away from, is something the bowl cannot and will not have. This proverb is not only about sharing food with others, but also a caution against selfish desire. One’s personal needs cannot always come first in every situation nor can they be met perfectly. It is not the right response to be ungrateful and expectant for a self-centered result every time, but better to practice moderation and patience with what one wants most and be understanding towards others about their own desires. This proverb’s nugget of knowledge goes past the surface level hoarding of food and deeper into human nature without becoming overbearingly moral. It exemplifies how proverbs operate in folklore well; as generational sayings that though short, have deep meaning.