Category Archives: Foodways

Wedding Pilaf

Nationality: Armenian
Age: 77
Performance Date: 04/02/18

The recipe calls for:

Butter

Slivered Almonds

Raisins

Pitted Dates

Long Rice

It’s a fancier kind of pilaf that’s used for weddings, celebrating momentous things like that. It’s just fancier. Instead of rice and noodles, you top it with raisins and dates and various nuts. Sometimes you have it at weddings and sometimes you have it on other special occasions and its really just fancier than regular rice.

  1. Is it difficult to make?

I’ve never made it myself however I know how to, it’s fairly simple. I’ve made rice pilaf before, it’s essentially rice pilaf with a topping of cooked raisins and almonds and such. It’s quite good?

  1. What other occasions do people eat this?

It depends. It’s a kind of celebration dish… not something you make every day. Sometimes at Thanksgiving we eat it. I don’t know it’s a special occasion food.

Snails For Dinner

Nationality: Armenian
Age: 83

My mother used to make snails for dinner sometimes. But it wasn’t like fancy cruise ship style escargot. It was a homemade recipe. It was during World War II and all the snails would come out when it rained. My dad would go outside and pick up the snails. But you can’t eat all of them, some are poisonous and some just don’t taste good. But once he got them my mom would put them in boiling water. This would get them out of the shell and also they wouldn’t be as slimy afterwards. They would get hard kind of like shrimp. And once the snails come out of their shell she took them and spiced them with peppers and other spices. Then she would fry them and we would eat them… they weren’t bad. See the thing is during World War II, there wasn’t always meat. If we could eat meet once a week, it was a treat, so snails were a nice substitute.

  1. Where were you living at this time?

I was living in Jounieh, Lebanon, it’s not too far out from Beirut. During the war time we didn’t have much in terms of meat.

My Thoughts:

There is a connection between the idea that snails were used as food when meat wasn’t available and the fact that the idea of eating snails came from the French Revolution when the impoverished had no choice but to eat what they could find. The reason they need to be spiced so severly is because… it’s a snail…it can’t taste good, but it’s also interesting how the spices differed. In France, they used garlic to mask the taste whereas in this case, in Lebanon, peppers were used

Breaking Wishbones.

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Flemington, New Jersey.
Performance Date: 4/22/18
Primary Language: English
Language: N/A

Michael Gordon, a junior studying Pop Music at the University of Southern California, who hails from Flemington, New Jersey, provided four pieces of folklore for this collection.

The interview was run, within his studio, at Orchard Avenue, on the outskirts of the University of Southern California

Folk Performance: Breaking Wishbones.

Folk Type: Folk-Practice.

“Are there any like really random practices? Like stuff you’d do unconsciously but, like, have no real context of?”

STORY: Yeah, the whole wishbone thing I’ve always thought was kinda confusing. You have a bone, right? And then you have the little joint in the middle and it’s like, it makes a V and two people pull the V and whoever gets the joint…do they make a wish? Wait, so before you break it both of the pulling parties make a wish and whoever gets the longest part will have their wish come true. Yeah.

Background information: The ritual of breaking a wishbone has its ties in Medieval Europe. The Etruscans, an ancient Italian civilization, believed geese had prophetic powers residing within their bones.

Michael learned the proverb on the playground and his attachment to it comes from the proverbs ubiquity and it’s tie to his early development.

Context of Performance: The appropriate context of this folk practice is described within the story.

Michael learned this act on the playground, from friends. It’s importance to him

Thoughts: Throughout this project, I’ve noticed that much of the folklore that one remembers is learned in early childhood. I suppose this occurs because as we grow, our views become more solidified. When we are children, we are at our most malleable and, therefore, seem to take in the most information.

 

 

 

Eye contact during toasts (A common drinking gesture)

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Flemington, New Jersey.
Performance Date: 4/22/18
Primary Language: English
Language: N/A

Michael Gordon, a Junior studying Pop Music at the University of Southern California, who hails from Flemington, New Jersey, provided four pieces of folklore for this collection.

The interview was run, within his studio, at Orchard Avenue, on the outskirts of the University of Southern California.

Folk Type: Folk-Speech.

Folk Performance: Eye contact during toasts (A common drinking gesture).

“Any drinking rituals out on the east coast?” – Stanley Kalu

STORY: Story-time, Mike again, if you do a cheers or a toast you gotta clink glasses and if you do, you need to make eye contact with each person that you’re about to toast with and when you take your drink you need to be making eye-contact with one of the other people and if you don’t it’s bad like and the cheers is forfeit.

Background Information: Michael enjoys this piece because the drinking culture on the east coast is particularly strong. He learned of it in high-school while drinking with his friends.   

Context of Performance: The context was illustrated in the story section.

Thoughts: There are theories that this practice stemmed from the frequent poisonings that would happen in European Court culture but i’m not sure how that applies to looking into people’s eyes. I wasn’t able to find any concrete reasons why this practice exists. So my current thought is frustration.

 

Drinking Mate

Nationality: Argentine-American
Age: 44
Occupation: Director of Residential Services at local health center
Residence: Claremont, CA
Performance Date: April 21, 2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“Everybody drinks mate. As long as I can remember, since I was a kid, my mom and her friends used to drink mate. I think it’s made out of coconut or something. Everybody drinks it out of these cups made out of wood that basically look like coconuts. They put tea leaves in it, and drink out of a strange straw made of metal. The straw lets the liquid through without letting the tea leaves through. Basically, whoever is serving the mate has a bowl of yerva, which is the herbs, and they put it in the mate, and once you have all the tea in, you pour in hot water and sugar. The person serving drinks first because it’s usually very bitter but gets sweeter. You pass it around, adding more sugar and hot water, and everybody gets the mate out of the same container and straw.”

Background Information and Context:

According to the informant, her parents drank mate every morning and throughout the day, and her cousin drinks it by himself by the river, but the particular ritual she described is meant for a social gathering. She’s not sure if any of this is symbolic. “People will share with complete strangers. It’s really strange,” she remarked, “My cousin will be down at the beach and meet some strangers, and they’ll drink mate together.” In Argentina, kids drink it too, but with warm milk and lots of sugar. She remembers drinking it as a kid all the time, and remarked that shMare was sad that she didn’t make it for her kids when they were little.

Collector’s Notes:

Traditions reveal a lot about social relations within a culture. Based on this tradition of sharing mate, one can see that hospitality – moreover a deference for one’s guests – is an important aspect of Argentine culture and that being friendly and welcoming, even to strangers, is expected. The first time I came to the informant’s house, I was so confused by the extent to which she’d welcomed me into her home and wanted me to make myself comfortable because it was such a different experience from my own more conservative Vietnamese upbringing. A good way to see the differences between these two cultures would be to compare this mate tradition to what I’d consider a typical Vietnamese social interaction, like greeting each elder individually and bowing, a representation of the strong sense of hierarchy in Vietnamese social groups.