- The main piece: The Best Banana Bread Recipe
- Background information about the performance from the informant: why do they know or like this piece? Where/who did they learn it from? What does it mean to them? Etc.
“Basically, I have a sweet tooth, and, uh, my wife really loves me, and she knows I love banana bread. She meets a lot of people in her office, because she’s a physician. Even though she doesn’t like me to be eating desserts, one of her patients is a good cook, especially in baking, and when she found out she had a banana bread recipe from her mother, my sweet wife asked her for a copy.
“The patient gave my wife a printed banana bread recipe, and we never made a copy of that. Now, we’ve had it for 20 years, and it has all kinds of flour and oil stained on it. Whenever there’s a special event, like Father’s Day, we pull it out. In every bite, I smell my love for her!
- Finally, your thoughts about the piece
This piece of folklore is interesting because it combines a recipe with a physical artifact, used over and over and passed from person to person. The oil and flour stains on the photographed recipe show the great use it has been put to. The recipe has almost become a folk object, because instead of ever looking at a photo or copy of the recipe, the informant’s family must pull out this exact object when baking banana bread.
- Informant Details
The informant is a middle-aged Indian-American male, who grew up in an urban setting in India with three siblings. While he moved to the United States over 30 years ago from India, many of his family members still live there, and he enjoys maintaining his links with them through his heritage and Hindu religion.