Tag Archives: food

Black eyed peas for New Year

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 7, 2013
Primary Language: English

“On New Year’s, we eat black eyed peas and greens.”

 

My informant is of Italian Catholic extraction and grew up in Chicago. Despite her family having no connection to the South, they eat the traditionally Southern dish of black eyed peas and greens on New Year’s. This is an indication of the way that culture spreads throughout the United States. Both foods are traditionally lucky to eat, especially as a way to help ring in the new year. My informant wasn’t sure what the significance of the foods is; she just knows that it’s lucky and they do it every year.

Maslenitsa

Nationality: Russian
Age: 23
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: March 30, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Russian

“Maslenitsa is basically like a pre-fast to Lent, where you just…you give up meat that week, dairy…so it’s meant to work you off of it. Blini are sweet, so you’re not so depressed, uh…that’s…that’s my take on it. Then you just don’t eat meat or fish or dairy for forty days. Not just Wednesday, Friday–every day.”

Most Christian cultures have their own version of the famous Brazilian Carnival, the blowing off of steam before the fasting that comes with Lent. In Russian Orthodox culture, it is called Maslenitsa. During the week-long holiday, the faithful partake in a pre-fast, as noted by my informant. They give up meat and dairy in preparation for the intense fasting of Lent. In addition, the celebration of Maslenitsa originated in Slavic mythology and was a celebration of the end of winter. Because it still persists to this day, we can see how pagan rituals have been absorbed into Christian holidays. Obviously, this is common across cultures; however, it is especially obvious in this Russian holiday because of the pagan folk elements such as bonfires and the burning of effigies.

Blini, essentially the Russian version of crepes, are the most popular food during this time. They are a traditional Russian dish and are wildly popular; as my informant notes, the fact that blini are everywhere during the week leading up to the Lenten fast makes it easier on everyone.

Christmas Eve Dinner (Danish-American)

Nationality: Danish-American
Age: 20
Occupation: College Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/19/13
Primary Language: English

The informant describes how his Danish family celebrates Christmas each year in San Francisco.  The informant details the Christmas Eve dinner and a game involving rice pudding and an almond at the end of the meal.  The informant explains that he learned this tradition from his Danish family and has partaken in the tradition every since he was a little kid.  The tradition of the dinner has sentimental value for him because he has done it for so long with his family.

The informant explains that his Danish-American family celebrates Christmas Eve in a distinct fashion.  The family always has a roasted duck for dinner and after eating the duck the family always eats a bowl of rice pudding, but plays a game along with the eating of the pudding.  The family places an almond into a large bowl of pudding and the goal of the game is to pass the bowl of pudding around with each participant taking one scoop of pudding until someone finds the almond.  The participant who finds the almond typically wins a prize.  Traditionally the prize was marzipan, but the informant explains they do not eat that anymore because it does not taste good.  The trick of the game is to do your best to keep it a secret if you have found the almond because you want to make your other family members continue to eat the pudding without them knowing the game is actually over.  The informant explains that he actually added a variation to the game by putting in two almonds into the pudding without letting the others know.

I find the Danish celebration interesting as it varies largely from the celebration in the United States.  There are apparent Danish adaptations to the celebration of Christmas as seen with the roasted duck meal and the rice pudding game with the almond.  I have never heard of either of these practices in traditional U.S. Christmas celebrations.  The games give possible deeper insight into the traditional food eaten within the Danish past and how they play games.

Korean Holidays

Nationality: Korean
Age: 24
Occupation: Student
Residence: Daegu, South Korea
Performance Date: February 9, 2013
Primary Language: Korean
Language: English

This story was told to me by my friend who had come from Korea recently. It was the day right before Seollal and I wanted to know more about how it was celebrated in Korea. He had experienced this tradition every year for all of his life, and he had learned most of what he did from his parents and grandparents. In telling me how they celebrated the New Years and “Thanksgiving,” he also informed me of what it meant to him personally. He said that he believed these properly reflect how you should be thankful to nature and to your parents. Both of these holidays involve filial piety in that you honor your parents and the ones who came before you. You thank them for providing for you, and you thank nature for being bountiful as well, providing for your own needs. He believed that these holidays were also a very unifying time. Families come together during this time period to talk about anything and everything, catching up on the latest family gossip or simply asking how other people were doing. Family is an essential part of his life, and so anything that helped strengthen the bonds that family made were exceedingly important to him.

추석 (Chuseok)

Chuseok is a traditional Korean holiday. It is celebrated on August 15th according to the lunar calendar. As a result, its date moves around from year to year according to the calendar that we use. It can be considered as the Korean equivalent to Thanksgiving, but it is also very different. Chuseok is a holiday that is meant to celebrate the newly harvested grain. It celebrates that the earth had been fertile and provided so much grain that everybody could have food for the following wintertime.

It is a very important time when it comes to family. There is a three day holiday from work, and everybody is not expected to do anything work related. Everybody goes back to their hometown from wherever they are. So what happens is that in order to celebrate, people leave on their first day off to drive back to wherever it is that they came from. It is such a big holiday, that there are even special buses that are meant for taking people back home. However, because everybody is going back to their hometown to visit their family, the traffic is really bad. It is well known that the traffic jams are impossible to the point that it takes up to 20 hours just to move from city to city. It doesn’t matter to the people though. Regardless of how many people or there, or how long it takes, people will work their way just to get back to their families.

When you get back home, you must reunite with your family. Traditionally, you will eat dinner together and talk about your lives while you have been apart. Or if you have been living together the whole time, then you talk about what it is that you appreciate most and be cheerful. It is usually a very lively party. Everyone will make a Korean dish called songpyeon. It is a dessert, and is essentially a sweet rice cake filled with different fillings. Some are made with eggs, others are made with sesame seed paste, and some are just made with sweet filling. It is a family event, and usually everybody will learn it from their grandmothers. After they make it, everybody will come together to happily eat it. It is a very enjoyable time, and will also end up being a way to wish for revitalization for the land so that it may be “fertile” once again, and that good fortune will come for the following year.

Earlier in the day, the family will go the grave mounds where their ancestors are buried. They will clean the mound by trimming the plants around it and making it look presentable. Then they will hold a ceremony that will honor the dead, hoping to placate the spirits that guard the family and have them continue to bestow their blessings. They will usually offer food up to their ancestors, and some of them will provide pleasures that their ancestors enjoyed during life. However, the placement of the food is ultimately very important. Rice and soup are placed on the north side while fruits and vegetables are placed on the south side. On the west are the meat dishes, and on the east are the drinks. They do vary from region to region, but otherwise it is pretty consistent. Some people light cigarettes and leave them in a dish nearby. Others buy liquor and pour it all over the burial mound. All of this is done in order to respect the dead.

Around dinnertime, before or after the eating, there are usually games that are played. One notable one is Ssireum, which is essentially Korean wrestling. It happens between two people, and the winner is determined based on who can push the other one out of the ring. People also have archery competitions. However, this tradition is only for the men. The girls traditionally play much more childish games, and do not really do more active things. The most noticeable thing for girls in this holiday is a dance called the Ganggangsullae. The name has no meaning; it is just the phrase that follows the verse from the song that this is danced to. Essentially, the girls of the village will hold hands and dance around in a circle. They will wear their traditional Korean clothes called hanboks, and they will just circle around singing Ganggangsullae. With all of these festivities though, the people will simply enjoy their time together and get to know their families even better.

설날 (Seollal)

Seollal is the Korean New Years. It is also placed according to the lunar calendar. It changes dates quite often, but it is usually around January to February, in line with the Chinese New Years. This is the other big holiday in Korea where people will go back to visit their families from wherever it is that they may be staying. Another three day holiday is provided to the people so that they are able to do so.

The customs of Seollal are very similar to those of Chuseok. The family will again go back to the burial mounds of their ancestors and take care of them. They will snip away the weeds and make the grass growing on top of the mounds look presentable. They will talk to the dead ancestors and make their wishes for a good afterlife for them. They will also provide food set in the traditional manner for the dead as well.

The food of Seollal is very traditional. People will eat rice cake soup, which is usually prepared with meat, rice cake, egg, and seaweed. This recipe will vary regionally, but at the very least, the rice cake part will be included. According to Korean tradition, people turn gain a year at the new lunar calendar year. They are one when they are born, and become two when Seollal occurs. However, they only gain a year if they eat the rice cake soup. That is why every year, people at it so that they can gain a year of age.

Children will be very traditional and wear traditional clothes that are called hanboks. They will bow to their parents, grandparents, and elders. They will wish them blessing and a long life with the phrase “새해 복 많이 받으세요,” which means “I hope you receive many new blessings for the new year.” The bowing is very traditionalized, as the children will first get on their knees and then bow, putting their head to the floor. Then they will get back up on their knees, and then stand one again. As a reward for the children’s filial piety, they usually receive money in beautiful money pouches. Inside the money pouches are also contained sayings and phrases that are meant to instruct the children to live moral lives, but that has become less popular in the recent days.

Then everybody plays games. The girls will play on a seesaw. Rather than sitting on it, two girls will stand on the ends of it. One will jump, and then the other girl will be launched into the air. In falling back down, the first girl will be launched into the air. It is a very amusing game, and that is how they spend their time. The boys would play jegichagi, which is very much like hacky sack in America. Once that is done, everybody will play Yutnori together. Yutnori is a board game that involves throwing sticks. You move your pieces around the board in a circle to try and make it to the finish line. However, there are two teams. Each team takes turns throwing sticks, and depending on the way they land, you must move a certain distance. If the other team throws a number and lands on the exact same spot, then the first team’s piece is taken off the board and they must start over again. It is a race to finish, as each team usually has 4 pieces. If it is not racing to finish, then it is a race to catch the other team to make them start all over again. It is a friendly competition between family members, and usually the winning team will get a monetary reward.

These holidays are celebrated very differently in America than they are in Korea. In America it’s much more relaxed and less focused on the family. Knowing that this still exists in Korea is actually very meaningful. I had wanted to celebrate the holidays with my own family, and we do—but it is not as important to us as it is to them. In addition, this also seems to reflect the religious nature of Korean people. The idea of honoring the dead ancestors is a very Confucian ideal. Personally, my family does not celebrate that part of the holidays because we are Christian and we believe otherwise. I definitely respect these holidays for being such a unifying factor between families and even between Korean people as a whole.

This appears in a children’s book:

Miller, Jennifer A. South Korea. Minneapolis: Lerner, 2010. Print.

Ethiopian wedding receptions

Nationality: Ethiopian-American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 28, 2013
Primary Language: English

My informant’s parents immigrated to the United States from Ethiopia. My informant grew up in Washington, D.C., where she says there is a large Ethiopian community. She had so much to say about Ethiopian wedding ceremonies that I decided to include her description of the wedding receptions as a separate entry. This is her account:

“Ethiopian wedding receptions are always the same. They’re always really late. They’re scheduled at like, six or seven, but most people I know call it APT: Abidjan People Time. Abidjan refers to people from like, Ethiopia or Eritrea, which used to be part of Ethiopia. Um… But yeah, way more people always go to the reception than the actual ceremony. Like, two to three times as many people, because of the food. And the food is being prepared all day. So a lot of people who actually don’t go to the ceremony are like, in the kitchen all day preparing food because it can take a long tie. Like, I don’t have any family here, but my mom usually involved in that process. That’s a very social aspect of it. People usually wear… It depends on the family-friend circle that it is, but people can be wearing anything from very generalized Americanized dresses to people who do a hybrid. So it’ll be a dress made out of the same fabric, so it’s all like, cotton with the cross design. But they make it in American silhouettes, kind of, if that makes sense. Or they just wear their traditional habesha-quemis, so I have worn many of those. Usually if you’re at the age of like, fourteen, your mom is usually making you wear that. Guys don’t wear traditional clothing as much as girls do, not even in Ethiopia, because it’s just… I don’t know why. They just don’t. But my brothers definitely did when they were younger, when they were eight and under. So there’s a lot of dancing at the reception. And that’s when the bride gets up. And you’re not supposed to start eating at the reception until the bride gets there, which is really annoying especially when the bride is three hours late, which has happened before. So then… there’s a lot of dancing. It gets really loud and people get really drunk. And there’s just more socializing, and it’ll go to like, two or three in the morning. There’s loud Ethiopian music, which is very fast. I’ve never really heard a slow Ethiopian song unless it’s like, at church, but that’s not what they’re playing at a wedding. There will usually be someone there with a drum that’s basically the size of their body, and it’s strapped on to them, and when they hit the drum they’re completely turning and spinning. They throw their entire body into it. So it’s kind of like a dance ceremony. There’s one part when first all the women go out and dance with the bride, and then all the men go out and dance with the groom, and then everyone dances together. That usually happens a couple hours after the ceremony has been going on.”

Wedding receptions tend to be the time when people can let loose and truly celebrate the wedding ceremony that has just occurred. They have more relaxed environments, and people can freely express the joy of the new marriage. Ethiopian wedding receptions are no exception; they are very celebratory. My informant values and appreciates actual wedding ceremonies, but she admits that the receptions are more fun. As she said, many more people attend the reception than the ceremony for that reason—and for the food. This is another celebration in which food plays an important role, as people spend the entire day preparing food, which is later enjoyed by all of the guests. At Ethiopian wedding receptions, they serve food that the guests all recognize as being traditionally Ethiopian. For the Ethiopians who attend the weddings my informant described, this food is a comforting reminder of their country of origin. Along with the music, the special clothing, and the other Ethiopian elements, the food ties these reception attendees to their home country and to each other.