Tag Archives: cooking

Zongzi

Age: 23

JL: “I’ve been Chinese for 23 years. Every year my family in the beginning of May wraps sticky rice in, I think, banana leaves? It’s either banana leaves or another type of leaf. My grandma did it, but now she’s too old, so my mom does all of it now. I help my mom wrap the rice. There’s a story behind it- Why we do this tradition. There was this married couple, and the man fell into a river, and there’s, like, fish inside. His wife made the wrapped sticky rice to feed the fish so that they wouldn’t eat her husband. So, that’s just kind of a fun story. Its sticky rice usually filled with cured meat and sausage and mushrooms and mung beans and peanuts. It’s like a comfort food. Mom freezes it. I have some in the freezer, and I ate it recently. It’s portable. It’s easy to heat up. It lasts a while.”

Interviewer: “who who told you that story?”

JL: My mom told me it multiple times. I heard it in Chinese school. It’s a very common Folktale slash Uh, story, cultural story. In Chinese culture, there’s a lot of meaning behind a lot of things. Every word has a story behind it. Every holiday has a story behind it. People speak in idioms with stories behind it. So that’s important.”

Context: The informant considers herself very close with her Chinese heritage. She is a first gen USC CS games student, and has noted that Chinese traditions rituals, beliefs and culture play a big part in her everyday life. She has a lot of experience cooking, specifically Northern Chinese food, and really enjoys this specific comfort meal.

Analysis: Because the story is rooted in reality, I think this would fall into the Legends category. This cultural Foodway tradition of making this specific meal on a certain day of the month is a big reinforcement of Chinese identity. The informant learned this through an institution, Chinese school, reenforcing the popularity and importance of this story in Chinese culture. The fact that most holidays and rituals are paired with a narrative or story shows how these traditions have adapted in order to be kept alive, even across generations, since the “origin” of this Legend and food started thousands of years ago. Looking at this through a functionalist lens, this story also solidifies this specific food item’s importance. Zongzi metaphorically saved this mans life, is also portable, easy to store, yummy to eat, and filled with nutrient heavy foods, reenforcing how nourishing it is for those who make and eat it.

Throwing Salt Over your Shoulder

Age: 22

“I feel like this is a fairly common superstition slash like, like little thing that you do, um, but this was particularly common on my dad’s side. I don’t know why. He’s from the Midwest, and I think that maybe people are just more superstitious there. They’re like pretty rural Midwestern. My dad was the one who taught me to always throw salt over my left shoulder when I’m cooking. So, if I’m grinding salt from a salt grinder, I won’t do it. But if I pour salt into my hand to put it onto something, you always have to take a few grains and throw it over, specifically your left shoulder. The left is the side of the devil. If you throw the salt grains over your left shoulder, they’ll hit him in the eye, and he’ll run away from you, which I think is also an Italian thing. It’s weird, because I don’t have any Italian ancestry.”

Context: The informant, who is ethnically Irish and grew up in California, recalls an Italian tradition that was taught to her by her dad. She typically does this while cooking, and notes that her family is very superstitious and follow many rituals that center around good and bad luck.

Analysis: I think that it’s interesting to note that Folklore is so strongly spread across cultures and places that even the informant was wondering how her family came across this specific ritual even though she has no Italian ancestry. Different kinds of folklore can be removed from its origins and put into different cultural contexts, even though the Italian ancestry is absent, its still meaningful within the informants family. Folklore has a common connection to good or bad luck based on rituals, and this salt throwing example is no different. Life is very unpredictable, stressful and sad, so it makes sense why this ritual emerged in order to “take control” of the uncontrollable (life). Since it involves protection against the devil from the Bible, I believe this may also fall into Folk magic since it is a way to ward off evil.

“Sampanelli” (Family Recipe)

Age: 20

Text:

“My dad makes sampanelli, which is like an Italian dish, because my grandmother is 100% Italian. So they grew up having a lot of olive oil and vegetables and that type of stuff, but there weren’t that many recipes fully passed down.

My dad doesn’t really cook, like we don’t want him to cook, but one thing he does make is sampanelli, which is kind of disgusting—it’s raw meat, garlic, Parmesan cheese, and like a crepe. The meat is raw—like salted pork—and he makes the crepe himself.

But the funny thing is, we were doing research this year, and I think it’s actually called something else, like “sampanel,” but they just assumed it was sampanelli because they wanted to make it sound Italian.

So now whenever people come over and my dad says, ‘I think I’ll cook,’ we all know what that means.”

Context:

The informant describes a dish made by their father that is understood within the family as an “Italian” recipe connected to their grandmother’s heritage. The dish often in social situations when guests are present. It has become a recognizable and somewhat humorous tradition within the family, especially as her father isn’t much of a cook. The name “sampanelli” is the family interpretation rather than an accurate term, showing how the dish has been adapted and redefined over time. The informant now lives in the US on the east coast with her family.

Analysis:

This is an example of material culture and foodways folklore, where cultural knowledge is expressed through preparation and sharing of food. A key aspect of foodways is its nature of bricolage, where people create tradition by piecing together available ingredients, memories, and cultural influences rather than following a fixed and original recipe. So, even though this recipe may not be authentically or accurately Italian, or prepared as such, it functions as a symbol of heritage and identity within the family.

The uncertainty around the name and origin of the dish demonstrates the variation that occurs in performance and through generations. This highlights how folklore adapts overtime and this doesn’t make the recipe less valid. The family maintains a version that reflects their own understanding of their culture background. It shows that folklore doesn’t need to be historically accurate to have meaning and still functions in preserving their culture.

This dish is also a form of family humor and shared knowledge. When guests come over they are brought into the collective experience of disappointment in the father cooking and therefore join the folk group of the family while present for the event. It is a way for all the bond and constructs an identity through performance and even for those experiencing the performance.

Grandma’s Indian Food

Nationality: United States
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Language: English

Text: “Whenever I visit my grandma’s house in Seattle, she always makes a plethora of my favorite Indian foods. She will begin cooking several hours before we even arrive as the dough has to be made by hand. She makes traditional north Indian foods such as aloo sabzi (broken potatoes), raita (yogurt sauce), gulab jamun (syrup dough balls), and pooris (a ball of fried dough used as a vessel for everything else). Despite how she is feeling or when we get there, she always has food waiting.”


Context: This ritual was shared by the informant, D, during a discussion about family and food traditions. D emphasized how her grandmother in Seattle consistently prepares traditional Indian dishes whenever they visit. D shared how even when her grandma isn’t feeling her best, she always cooks, making the experience a meaningful act of love and care. 

Analysis: This is a food-centered ritual that reflects themes of hospitay and cultural continuity. By cooking traditional Indian food, especially labor-intensive dishes like pooris, D’s grandmother is both expressing her love and maintaining the family’s cultural identity. Given that she will prepare the food regardless of circumstances, this ritual turns food into a symbolic gesture of love that further strengthens familial bonds. This example shows how culinary traditions can help both deepen familial relationships and also preserve heritage. 

Pre-Thanksgiving Festival/Tradition

“A tradition that my family had is called Pie Day, and it’s not 3-14 but instead the day before thanksgiving. It’s essentially a party where friends and family come together and make pies for thanksgiving, everyone is in the kitchen. Before we moved to Washington my grandma would always have pie day at her house and that is the one time of year that I would see the most extended of extended family. There are lots of wine snacks and cooking. In Washington it was much more my parents’ friends and a couple cousins and such, and the night ends with everyone gathering on the couch and sitting down for a show or movie.”

The informant performs this tradition every year the day before Thanksgiving, typically held at her parents house in Olympia, Washington, USA. Depending on the year, different people may arrive to participate in this tradition. The informant’s immediate family, her parents’ friend group, her dad’s work friends, herself and her siblings, who invite a couple of their friends, and then some extended family are all potential participants, depending who is in town. Every person who comes can bring a dish they would like to make for the next day, but most people just come to socialize and decompress before the busy Thanksgiving day. The informant is not sure when it started, but her family started preparing the pies for Thanksgiving in the days before and as the years went on, more and more people were invited to participate in preparing food prior to the actual holiday.

The tradition demonstrates a culture that values food and socialization, as nearly all cultures do. Cooking together is a common way to build bonds between people, especially family and close friends. It is a sort of unofficial folk festival for just the small group of people involved, taking place the day before a bigger holiday. This is relatively common as people prepare for holidays. There are group cooking days for food-centered holidays, group shopping excursions for the winter holidays that involve gift giving, and group decorating days before decoration-centered holidays like Dia de Los Muertos or Christmas. It is a way to mount the excitement for the holiday as well as extend the celebration.