The informant told me about the meat tray, which is basically a platter of appetizers. At any family gathering, the informant’s grandma (on her mom’s side) will bring out the meat tray only at her house. The tray consists of cheese, crackers, some type of sausage, black olives, and mini pickles. Informant says she’s never been to an event for her mom’s side of the family that hasn’t had the tray. It’s something that has always existed to her. She told me that she knows it’s serious to the family and the get-togethers because one year, her grandma forgot to make it and everyone flipped out. Even family out of state know about this story and how important it is to the family and any family function. The informant looked nostalgic when she spoke about it. If something is missing from the meat tray, the family also freaks out about it and makes comments about how they can’t eat from it until it’s complete. The informant thinks it started when there started being more and more grandkids, when the grandma’s children started having kids. It’s her mom and her two sisters who both have kids. The grandma oversees the meat tray. It’s not a family function without it. The family are big eaters, so for the informant, it feels like family gatherings are centered around food – the beginning of the gathering is when the meat tray is brought out and that’s truly when the event starts. Informant also mentioned that extended family come to enjoy it too and that it’s on open door policy at her grandparents and a lot of friends can come too, even on big holidays. The meat tray signifies gathering and union. This is a place where you can eat and feel like you’re being taken care of as the informant explained. It’s also important to the family considering the passing of the grandpa very recently and the meat tray was still brought out at the funeral. I find this to be a beautiful way of being close to your family, it’s fun and good to eat which is always a plus.
Category Archives: Foodways
Mystery Mixture: A Folk Drink
Okay so -um- for the yew year in like -um- in Indian cultu- so this is actually like a regional thing for -um- like South India and -um- they- the New Year and y’know how there’s like Persian New Year and like Chinese New Year like it’s not exactly like January 1st it’s like the Spring equinox-ish? So, -um- what they do is like you have like it’s mo- it’s more of a cultural thing than like actual religious, but like you do like- you do like a prayer and then -um- you drink this -um- this juice and like- ugh it’s so gross oh my God I haaaate it.
It’s -um- my Mom makes it every year and like I was at someone else’s house this year and like they fed it to me and I had to drink it -um- and like so there’s like the five tastes in it.
Basically, it’s like supposed to represent how your- your year won’t totally be like sweet or sour so like it’s just like -um- so you drink that and like it’s supposed to represent that your year will be like have like good, bad and like happy, sad. Yeah.
When I asked the Informant if she had any special foods or recipes she could share with me, she through her head back and scrunched up her face. She immediately told me that “there’s this terrible drink!” She began to tell me about Ugadi pachadi, a holiday drink invaluable to Telugu culture. The drink combines the flavors of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, spicy and umami. When she showed me photos, she quipped that it looked like something that comes up from your stomach rather than goes down. I agreed.
As the Informant said, he Mom makes it for their family every year and every year she suffers down a gulp. The flavorful concoction, called pachadi, is a mixture of mango, neem flowers, jaggery, tamarind, chili powder, and salt and is part of the celebration of Ugadi, the Indian New Year. These ingredients provide a mixture of all five tastes and the drink is believed to have predictive powers. The first taste to meet your tongue is said to be a metaphor for the upcoming year. Hope for a sweet taste. Because of this, it’s common for mothers to tweak the recipe or pour the drink to make sure the mango is the first to touch the tongue.
For all the awful things the Informant had to say about the flavor and appearance of pachadi, a smile never left her face as she told me about the drink. It was clear that the good memories of the experience with her family outweighed the sour taste left in her mouth. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, as they say. I wish my own culture had a ritual such as this. Instead of a fun fortune-telling drink to maintain a love-hate relationship with, the New Year in my culture is celebrated mainly with alcohol – which I would guess most people also have a love-hate relationship with. That being said, drinking Ugadi pachadi seems like a wholesome family-oriented tradition akin to the way my family spent the night before Easter dying eggs.
Chili
Main Piece: Chili
The following was a story told to me by a college of mine, RD, and I am DM. The story was about a family recipe that was passed down that she learned to do on her own.
RD: Every Christmas Eve we have tamales and it’s just a tradition we’ve weve for as long as I can remember we eat tamales but uh her specific salsa she told me always had to go on her tamales otherwise I would be cursed so um to this day even if its not one of her tamales I need her salsa to put on it otherwise I can’t eat it cause I don’t know I feel like something is going to happen to me.
DM: Do you know what’s in her salsa?
RD: Yes I do.
DM: Can you tell me?
RD: Sure so its uh a couple different kinds of chiles she puts um jalapeno then she put habaneros and then she puts cilantro and tomato and onion salt and pepper. I think that’s it. Yeah I think that’s it.
Background/Context:
The participant is twenty-eight years old. She is a Mexican American assistant principal at a high school. One day she posted a picture on instagram of her making her grandma’s recipe from scratch. I wondered how long that family recipe was passed down in her family, so I asked her about.
DM:Why do you like sharing this recipe/Why do you know this recipe/ Where/who did they learn it from/ Why is this repice important to you?
RD: Cause he salsa is the best salsa I’ve ever had in my life um even when I go to Mexican restaurants I want it know. I don’t know if its because she’s convinced me that it has some special power or just because I think it is really good. She was also really important to me and she’s has alzheimer’s so um it’s like definitely not the same person as when she kind of gave me the story so I feel like it’s kind of a way to keep that part of her.
Analysis/ My Thoughts:
I think this story was actually very similar to what we were debating in class about oral versus written folklore. Her grandmother’s recipe book in her head with becomes something authored by her. She won’t be giving it to another else but her family. Instead of being an oral book it will now become something physical that can be passed down within her family. It raises the question of who the recipe book belongs to. The recipe book is hers, but the recipe book is her grandmothers. As it gets passed down, will it raise the question of where these recipes came from.
Stuffed Peppers
Main Piece: Stuffed Peppers
The following was a story told to me by a college of mine, RD, and I am DM. The story was about a family recipe that was passed down that she learned to do on her own.
RD: My grandma had uh, my grandma on my Italian side has a recipe book in her head that she verbally passed on to my dad and my dad’s sisters. And I used to be very bad at cooking but recently I got into cooking. I wanted to try some of her recipes, but they weren’t written down anywhere so I asked my dad’s sister to send me her recipe book like her mental recipe book. Could you please write down the recipes down for me? And really what all she could provide for me because she was like you just have to cook it and figure it out. Really all she could provide for me was the ingredients so now I’m trying to recreate an actual recipe book by experimenting with all of her ingredients to try to figure out like the perfect combination so that I can create the actual recipe book with instruction and the right amounts and all that stuff and then hopefully pass it down to my kids and so on and so on.
DM: Did you figure out a recipe?
RD: I did! I made her gnocchi, which I was so proud of cause everything was from scratch. I tried to make her raviolis and they were so bad so I need to try those again. And I made her stuffed peppers which were also pretty amazing.
DM: You want to tell me about either the gnocchi or the stuffed peppers?
RD: Yeah the stuffed peppers cause they are easier. Um so the stuffed peppers, you get a pepper and you cut it in half um and then you make her gravy which is meat, breadcrumbs, a bunch of Italian seasonings, um onions all just like mushed together and then put into a pot of tomato sauce and you just cook it for like three hours on low and it just simmers so that it can just pick up all the flavors and stuff. And then you stuff those into the peppers and you top the tomatoes with Ricotta cheese and then you put the peppers again in the oven and you cook them again. Then when you take them out it’s a little bowl filled with meat and cheese and it’s amazing.
Background/Context:
The participant is twenty-eight years old. She is a Mexican American assistant principal at a high school. One day she posted a picture on Instagram of her making her grandma’s recipe from scratch. I wondered how long that family recipe was passed down in her family, so I asked her about.
DM:Where/who did they learn it from?
RD: I learned this from my grandma because it was her stuff. Her children wouldn’t have know had she not passed it down to them.
DM: Why is this recipe important to you?
RD: It is what I grew up eating. Everytime my dad cooked, he cooked this recipes.
Analysis/ My Thoughts:
I think this story was actually very similar to what we were debating in class about oral versus written folklore. Her grandmother’s recipe book in her head with becomes something authored by her. She won’t be giving it to another else but her family. Instead of being an oral book it will now become something physical that can be passed down to her family. It raises the question of who the recipe book belongs to. The recipe book is hers, but the recipe book is her grandmothers. As it gets passed down, will it raise the question of where these recipes came from.
Tradition of Gift Giving- Christmas (Cali, Colombia)
During Christmas, it is, really common for people to make a lot of breads and pastries in Columbia to just give to surrounding neighbors. The more popular treats would be empanadas which are a pastry in which the inside is filled with different type of sweet pastes. The sweet pastries are a form of telling your neighbors to enjoy the festivities and have a great time, basically a good omen for the holidays. Alex is a Colombian native who immigrated here when he was just a little boy. His family left Columbia in response to all the violence that was emitting from Pablo Escobar’s reign of terror. In order to keep his family traditions alive, his parents constantly told him about the vast events and beauty of his homeland and people. This seems like a great way to start the holidays with gifts, as how usual Christmas goes in the United States.