Tag Archives: recipe

Kimchi Recipe

Nationality: Korean
Age: 50
Occupation: Housewife
Residence: Cupertino, CA
Performance Date: 3/17/2014
Primary Language: Korean

Kimchi Recipe

Most women made their own kimchi (cabbage side dish) for their respective families. With the onset of contemporary times, kimchi is now mass produced and rarely homemade. This recipe was taken from my mother who had been given her mother’s (my grandmother’s) recipe and so on. She added her own addition to it (the shrimp) years after making the kimchi for our family. There is a different taste from this homemade side dish to the mass produced one, and between my mother’s kimchi and other families’ kimchi tastes. Each family has their respective recipe that they follow, which can vary for the amount of time the cabbage is soaked to the individual ingredients used. Creating kimchi for your family was also a sign of a girl learning ownership of her household and family, as it takes a while to make and families tend to make a lot to last through the winter in one sitting.

The Recipe:

배추를 사서 반으로 쪼개고 그리고 그걸 또 반 살짝 자르는거야 중도까지.

그렇게해서 물에다가 소금을넣어서 풀으는거야. 소금을 녹을때까지 배추를 당거.

그렇게해서 2시간후에 뒤집어. 그리고 총4시간후에 싯어.

싯어서 소쿠리 에다가 나.

양염은: 무 하나, 양파 반, 파 한단, 마늘 6족, 생강( ginger) 조금, 새우 조금 (1/2 cup), sweet rice죽, 미나리, 갓. 다 썰어서 고추가루랑 양염하는거야.

Sweet rice죽에다가 새우를넣고 그냥나둬.

죽에다가 예쁘게 만들어 빨갛게. 무 하고 야채를 따로 고추장을 양염해.

그 후에 배추에다가 죽 양염한걸 섞어. 섞은후에 배추의 잎 사이에다가 썰은 무 양염한걸 뿌려, 빨갛게. 다해서 냉장고에 2주동안 나두면 맛있게 익을거야. 겨울에는 4주.

 

The first step is the buy the cabbage. Wash it and cut it in half. Take these halves and cut it again to the midway point. Prepare a tub of water and sprinkle a lot of salt in it. After doing this, soak the cabbage in the mixture until the salt melts in the water. After 2 hours flip the cabbage and soak the other side. Take them all out after a total of four hours. Leave them to dry. 

Sauce ingredients: 1 Radish, half an onion, one bushel of green onion, 1 clove of garlic, a little bit of ginger, half cup of mini shrimp, sweet rice porridge, parsley, and leaf mustard. 

Place the shrimp aside. Cut the rest into small slices and marinate them with gochugaru (chili powder).

Put the shrimp in the sweet ridge porridge and stir. Mix in the gochugaru until it’s a pretty red color. After this, spread the porridge mixture across the cabbage. After this, spread the other mixture with the radish and other ingredients in chili powder in between the cabbage leaves. Do this until the cabbage is red. After finishing, put the cabbage in a glass jar or store it and place it in the refrigerator for around 2 weeks to ripen. It can take up to 4 weeks in the winter.

 

 

Korean Pajeon Sauce

Nationality: Vietnamese-American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Henderson, Nevada
Performance Date: March 16th, 2014
Primary Language: English
Language: Vietnamese

Information about the Informant

My informant is from a Vietnamese family. She’s currently an undergraduate student at Indiana University Bloomington. In her spare time, she loves to knit and cook, primarily baked goods, but also some “Asian” recipes that she learned from her family. This is a recipe for a Korean sauce for “pajeons,” which is a type of pancake-like dish with green onions as a primary ingredient (for the pancakes, not the sauce).

Transcript

“To make the sauce for the Korean Pa jeon, I do–let’s estimate it to 3 tablespoons of low-sodium soy sauce, 1 tablespoon of Worchestershire sauce, 1 teaspoon of chili garlic sauce, roasted sesame seeds, and 1 tablespoon of the–just the lemon ponzu sauce.”

Collector: “And you just mix it all together?”

“Yeah. And I think that’s it.”

Analysis

One of the things my informant shares with her mother is their mutual love of cooking. This is a recipe passed down to the informant from her mother, and is interesting because it clearly not “authentically” Korean. There is the obvious “inauthenticity” of a Korean recipe being passed down through a family of non-Korean though East Asian extraction, but in a closer examination of the ingredients that my informant gave me, one in particular stands out as unusual. Worchestershire sauce is definitely not of Korean, let alone, Asian origin, an ingredient that is strongly associated with the European continent. There is also the ingredient chili garlic sauce, with chili being a plant that is native to the Americas and which only spread after Columbus’s voyage. This raises questions, as is often the case, of what is authentic cultural food? Is the use of the chili pepper acceptable as the plant spread in the 16th century, but Worchestershire sauce is not because it has stronger ties to a non-Asian culture? This is a recipe that my informant and her mother have been using for years, but it’s clear that some elements did not come from some grand chain of passing-down all the way from the ancient Koreans.

Nước Mắm

Nationality: Vietnamese-American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Henderson, Nevada
Performance Date: March 16th, 2014
Primary Language: English
Language: Vietnamese

Information about the Informant

My informant is from a Vietnamese family. She’s currently an undergraduate student at Indiana University Bloomington. In her spare time, she loves to knit and cook, primarily baked goods, but also some “Asian” recipes that she learned from her family. This is a recipe for a Vietnamese fish sauce that her mother taught her and which she has memorized, that she recited for me while I was visiting her with another high school friend of ours.

Transcript

“For the uh, mixed-out fish sauce. I don’t know what it’s called in English. Anyways, it is one part fish sauce, two parts warm water, two parts sugar, and two parts vinegar or mixture of vinegar and lime juice or something. Vinegar doesn’t taste as good, but it doesn’t go bad as quickly. Optional sliced ginger and optional chili garlic sauce.”

Analysis

My informant, as stated above, enjoys cooking with her mother, and, as her family is Vietnamese, this is a recipe that may have been passed down through her family. One questionable (questionable as in whether or not this recipe is “authentic”) item is the chili garlic sauce. While undoubtedly, Vietnam could have encountered the chili plant (which originated in the Americas but quickly spread around the globe after Columbus’s voyage) centuries ago, when discussing the question of whether or not a dish is authentically ethnic, people are usually uncomfortable with the idea that an ingredient was imported into the country that the dish supposedly originated in. It is mitigated here by her stating that the chili garlic sauce is optional, but does raise an interesting question (as ethnic food recipes often do) of what do we call authentic and how do we define authenticity?

Swedish Saffron Buns

Nationality: American (ethnicity: half Swedish, half Chinese)
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California (Originally from Montclair, New Jersey)
Performance Date: 4/29/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese, Swedish, German, Spanish

Item:

“Um so my dad has this recipe, it’s for, it’s halfway between cake and pastry, I’m not sure, it’s called coffee cake to be clear. So, it’s a standard dough, um it’s saffron flavored, sometimes raisins go into it, sometimes…[can’t hear the word], sometimes both, sometimes neither. And, it’s coated with egg whites and this kind of like um sugar that’s confectioner sugar that’s re-agglomerated, um maybe uh .2 centimeter sized cubes that are sort of crunchy, but they aren’t grainy and they’re vanilla flavored.”

Context:

The family of the informant’s father comes from Sweden, and this is a recipe that the informant learned from his father. His father always makes these cakes on St. Lucia’s day, a popular holiday in Scandinavia celebrated on the 13th of December. In regards to the holiday, the informant said that “what’s supposed to happen is the youngest female in the household is supposed to wear some sort of like crown of pine branches that has candles on it and present these cakes to the father of the family along with coffee.” His family, however, has only boys, so this part of the holiday is not carried out.

Analysis:

That the informant’s family (a mixed family, his father being from Sweden and his mother from China) still celebrates St. Lucia’s day in America, demonstrates the father’s insistence on passing along this bit of his heritage to his children. Even more indicative of this is that the cakes are still made despite the fact that there  is no female child in the family who could enact St. Luica. Also, that the informant knows this recipe off the top of his head further demonstrates the efforts his father made to instill this bit of Swedish culture into his children.

 

 

Enchilada Sauce

Nationality: Declined to State
Age: 21
Occupation: Student (Fine Arts Major)
Residence: Winnetka, CA
Performance Date: April 23, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“So, the enchilada recipe started with my grandma. She concocted this, beautiful enchilada sauce, and then she passed it down to my mom, and she made some alterations… and in my opinion, it’s the best. And then now, it’s my term to make the sauce, and I guess I add my own twist to it. But, um… what’s in the sauce: you have your… um, red peppers. The dried ones, they’re long, I don’t even know what they are, I just know how they look. They’re long and dried up and they have tons of seeds and you take the seeds out and you boil them… so they get plump, you know? And then you boil them with garlic… you take most of [the seeds] out so it’s not too spicy. So you throw that in there with garlic, and tomatoes, and onions… that’s all cooked. Together. And then you throw that all in there [a blender], and then you add sugar, and water, and… the secret, is the chocolate. It’s a special kind of chocolate, it’s the Abuelita chocolate, and you cut a chunk off and you throw it in there. And that’s the sauce and it’s the most amazing thing I have tasted in my life.”

She described how her mom tweaks the recipe.

“She, um, she… no, my grandma makes it way more savory, mom makes it sweeter and spicier. So, like, you get those extremes, the sweet and the spicy. My grandma is just more a less like… I feel like that one’s more like… like, smooth? You know what I mean? Like, it’s mellow. But it’s savory, you can taste the garlic, she puts a little more garlic in it. But, umm… and she makes it a little runnier. My mom makes it real thick. That’s the difference between the two of them. My mom adds more chocolate too because I like chocolate [laughs]. But you don’t taste chocolate at all.”

 

The informant felt that the recipe is very important to her because it was her culture (the recipe itself  as well as Mexican food generally was her culture and her family). She explained that everything is regional in Mexico, so no one used the exact recipe that her mother and grandmother used. She said that her mother’s sisters and great-aunt all used similar recipes that were derived from the same ingredients, but that they were all completely different, and that she hoped, with experimentation, her version of the recipe would please her future family.

The sauce recipe, as well as all other foods prepared by her family, are made with ingredients that are measured by eye. The performance of this recipe, is thus, always subject to change (more change than the written recipe) because it is made for specific reasons and specific people (for example, the informant’s mother adds extra chocolate for her daughter because she prefers it). The sharing and modification of recipes present in the performance of this recipe is central to most cultures now, and is indicative of the fusion of different cultural foods because it is a representation of changes made to older forms.