Category Archives: Material

Fideo

Text: Recipe for a soup made when your sick.

Ingredients: 

  • Noodles; Traditionally you use Fideo noodles but they can be any noodles
  • Oil, usually like vegetable oil
  • Tomato sauce – Informant’s family specifically swears by Del Monte tomato sauce, the mini ones, which you can get at smart and final for 99 cents.
  • Chicken broth
  • Optional: Bouillon cube
  • Large amount of garlic salt – informant’s family usually uses McCormick
  • Pepper
  • Worcestershire sauce
  • Optional Lemon juice and Tapatillo

Recipe: Traditionally you use fideo noodles but they can be any noodles. You put noodles in a pan with oil and fry the noodles a little bit, so they’re a little bit browned, and then you add tomato sauce enough of that to cover the noodles. You stir it, to make sure all the noodles are coated, and then after that, you eyeball an amount of chicken broth to add. It’s like vaguely double the amount of noodles that you have, like it has to cover noodles, but however much broth you want, you add the chicken broth. If you want, you can add a Bouillon cube that makes it taste really good. And then you add an eyeballed large amount of garlic salt. The Informant’s usual rule of thumb is to put in a decent amount and then when they think that it’s enough, then they add a little bit more and then they’re done. And then also pepper, and you stir it all together. You wait until it boils, and then once it boils, you shut off the heat, you cover it, and you leave it for 15 minutes. After that, it’s ready to serve. Their family traditionally serves it with worcestershire sauce in it. The Informant also thinks it’s really, really good with lemon juice and tapatio. That’s usually what they make if I’m sick and then it clears out my sinuses. 

Context: The Informant, 21, white with Mexican heritage, lives in Southern California, learned this recipe from their mom and grandmother. Though they’re pretty sure people in their family have been making it longer than that and assume it came from their great grandmother, their grandmother’s grandmother, who was the matriarch of the family and and from Mexico, where the informant assumes she learned it. The informant remembers “making it as a kid. My grandmother used to pick me up from preschool and she would take me back to her house and I would help her make Fideo, and then I would go, and I would sit, and I would watch Sesame Street, and then when it was done, she would bring me a bowl of, uh, a Fideo when I would sit there and watch PBS kids. So like Sesame Street and Zoboomafoo and Bob the Builder and all of the like. All the, all the old uh, things. And so, yeah, and then anytime I was sick, my grandma or my mom would make it for me. My grandma calls it Mexican penicillin. Um, cause it makes you feel better whenever you’re sick.”

Analysis: This soup is folk medicine and the process of making it can be thought of as a low context ritual. Rituals, especially in regards to folk healing rituals often include a narrative, I believe part of the narrative that gives this medicine it’s power is the process of someone lovingly making it for you, it is the heartwarming memory that the informant has of their grandmother or mother making this soup by that gives it its power. Even if they make it by themselves it still has that memory association, to the process and the taste. As Kaptchuk says, it has a ‘could be’ dimension to the healing through this tradition and memory.

Taking a closer look at the ingredients of this recipe the base ingredient is chicken broth which has its relation to the to chicken noodle soup, a very common recipe to bring when someone is sick. The addition of garlic salt is also interesting given garlic’s preestablished presence in folklore. We repeat these ingredients in folklore because they are familiar. We also see bricolage in the optional ingredients, lemon juice and tapatio, that the informant adds in at the end, this is a traditional recipe but it also gets personalized.

Citations: Kaptchuk, Ted J. “Placebo Studies and Ritual Theory: A Comparative Analysis of Navajo, Acupuncture and Biomedical Healing.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 366, no. 1572, June 2011, pp. 1849–58. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0385.

年年有余: A Fish for the New Year, and Not to Flip It

Text: On Chinese New Year eve my family eats a whole fish for dinner. The rule, as enforced by my mother IW, is that we must eat the fish from the top down. We never flip the fish over. To flip the fish, 翻 (fān), invokes 翻船 (fānchuán), to capsize a boat. If you flip the fish, you’re putting yourself at increased risk of capsizing your boat in the following year (valid for car analog also). Halfway through the meal, once the top side has been eaten down to the bone, we carefully lift out the spine in one piece and lay it aside, exposing the meat of the underside. The fish doubles as a pun in Chinese: 年年有余 (nián nián yǒu yú), translating to “may every year have surplus,” works because 余 (yú, surplus) sounds like 鱼(yú, fish). Hence “may every year have fish”. The fish must remain partially uneaten at the end of the meal, leaving leftovers for the next day (the first day of the new year) to literalize the surplus. 

Context: My mother, IW, grew up in a suburb of Beijing and has not deviated from the tradition since. She has done it every Lunar New Year I can remember. We typically have two fish over the holiday: one served on New Year’s Eve and another on New Year’s Day, we call the second fish leftovers even though I’m not sure that’s how it works traditionally. The fish at our table is most often halibut, this is tangential to the tradition and just a habit my family has fallen into (I think Costco has a good deal on halibut around that time), the strict tradition would call for carp or sea bass. 

Analysis: Two folkloric mechanisms run in parallel inside one piece of food. The first is homophonic word-magic: 鱼sounds like 余, so the fish itself becomes a small, uttered wish for surplus, and the requirement that some of it remain for the next day extends the wish across the new-year boundary. Homophonic mechanisms like this are common in Chinese culture, an artifact of the language’s limited distinct syllables that lend to a high density of homophones. The second: flipping the fish, enacts, in miniature, the boat-capsizing it warns against, and the taboo presumes the small gesture is continuous with the larger outcome. The careful spine-lift halfway through dinner is the practical accommodation of the rule, with the skeleton removed in one piece so every side of the fish can be reached without ever turning it over. The capsizing prohibition is, in origin, a coastal-fisherman’s taboo that has been carried into Lunar New Year practice throughout China, and in our household, a boat-less one, it has been extended to cars. Strict tradition can involve carp (鲤 puns with 利, profit), the species drift to halibut in my family is folkloric variation. 

Material Culture – Mosuo Dress with Handwoven Mosuo Traditional Patterns

Text:

This dress is a traditional dress of the Mosuo people, handwoven by the Mosuo people.
The patterns on the dress are all traditional patterns with symbolic meanings to the Mosuo people.

This dress was made by my informant’s mother. Her name is Du Zhi Ma, a 60 years old Mosuo woman living in Lijiang, Yunnan’s Mosuo village. Du Zhi Ma is a provincial-level inheritor of the Mosuo traditional hand-weaving craft. Since 2003, Du Zhi Ma has transformed her home into a workshop studio, leading local Mosuo women in hand-weaving.

Over time, according to the informant, the growing tourist economy around Lugu Lake made machine-made textiles a lucrative commodity at tourist sites. Many Mosuo textile makers struggled to compete and lost income. Du Zhi Ma continued to lead women in Lugu Lake in weaving and making embroidery through her workshops, hoping that this tradition would not completely fade away.

Context:

The informant is the son of Du Zhi Ma. He learned about the story behind this dress from his mother, who made the dress and is a Mosuo person. The informant shared with me this picture as he told me about the Mosuo traditional handweaving as a cultural preserver—he is a local Mosuo museum owner, who specializes in the Mosuo culture (culture specific to the Mosuo ethnic group). The informant thinks of Mosuo traditional weaving as a precious technique that should be preserved, and he is personally very proud of this.

Analysis:

This Mosuo traditional dress is more than just a physical dress—it embodies the Mosuo culture, their artistic expertise, and traditional patterns which capture their cultural beliefs. It represents how material culture acts as a living tradition of the Mosuo.

Du Zhi Ma’s role as a provincial-level inheritor makes this culture endure in a special way. As society become modernized, machine-made clothes have created economic pressure that threatens to hollow out the living craft tradition. Du Zhi Ma’s workshops and her role as a provincial-level inheritor make room for this material culture to be preserved and promoted over time.

Reuben Sandwich

Text

J: So, in my family, um, my grandmother says — told me that uh, that her uncle invented the Reuben sandwich before it was called the Reuben sandwich. It didn’t have a name. And-but she would eat the same sandwich when she was a kid… at the– at her uncle’s deli a- in New York City and, uh, after school she would go and he would make her the sandwich and um, and that she claimed that Aurther Reuben worked at this deli when he was young and that then, when he went off and made his own deli, that he took… that sandwich and then put his name on it and made the Reuben… as we know it. But it was really not called that before when– so the-the family, you know my-my grandmother believes that our family invented the Reuben sandwich.

Interviewer: What’s in the Reuben sandwich?

J: I don’t even know. *laughs* no, no it’s something with Russian dressing… I can’t remember actually what’s in the Reuben sandwich so I feel a-very ashamed that I don’t even know my family’s sandwich. But — and I’ve never had a Reuben sandwich… obviously.

Context

J: I just remember when [informant’s grandmother] was telling me that story and then I — you know, there’s no way to actually to you know, to actually find evidence of this, but… my grandma tends to be… on the money with most things, so I — all of her stories that I have been able to confirm have checked out pretty much to the t, so I’m inclined to believe it, but I have no evidence to actually believe that it all actually was true. But we like to go with it because it’s a fun story to tell and, you know, it’s-to me it’s become some family, you know, it’s our- you know, it’s part of our family folklore I guess you could say.

The informant and his family have been New York City residents for many generations.

Analysis

This story is much less about the food itself, and more about the legend that surrounds it. In fact, the informant has never made a Reuben sandwich, much less eaten one. This suggests that the legend has a deeper purpose than to simply pass on a family recipe. In this case, I suspect that this story serves to connect the informant and his family to the greater history of New York City and the United States.

Folklore is a way to communicate identity, and since the informant does not claim Russian or Irish heritage, the heritage he is identifying with can only be his family’s identity as New Yorkers (even though the region of origin of the Reuben sandwich is generally disputed). Having a story that connects the family to the history of the city through a family deli allows for a greater claim on the place where they have lived for generations.

Onion Sugar for a Cold

Text

Dad: You take an onion, uh, usually I put it– I cut it in half and I put it inside a cup and then I sprinkle sugar on it and then I let it sit, um… At some point someone told me that this is called sweating an onion

Context

Dad: You give it to somebody who has a cold or, you know, where there’s just congestion or respiratory stuff going on or whatever. I mean, not pneumonia obviously, and this became, in our family, uh, what we called magic juice and so, then I would feed the magic juice to, especially my son when he would get a cold, which were quite, um, productive, lets just say. Um… I would feed him a spoonful. Now, is it just a spoonful of sugar with a little bit of onion flavoring? Who’s to say. But I’d give him a spoonful of, of, what we called magic juice, um, whenever he had a cold. And it was something he kinda looked forward to. And I don’t know if it made him feel better, but certainly the ritual was something that made, I think us both feel better in some degree– to some extent.

My dad learned of this home remedy from his good friend RL. RL is of Chilean descent, who grew up in the bay area of California.

Analysis

I remember taking this cold cure when I was younger, but it was never as important for me as it was for my younger brother. He used to have the worst colds when he was growing up that were violently contagious, so it was important that he felt cared for during those difficult periods.

As my dad points out himself, he is not certain of the benefits of this home remedy. That is not what is important to him. In the case of the ‘magic juice,’ the most important component is the fact that it is a remedy that takes time and care to make. It served much of the same purpose as a chicken soup in that it makes you feel cared for. In fact, my dad never made this home remedy for himself, and he stopped making it when we grew up.