Friday, December 01, 2006

Cooking Up Family History

Around the holidays, our taste buds retreat to childhood. This year I’ve been given a hand-me-down guide to my family’s culinary past: my grandmother’s 3-ring binder, bursting with stained and annotated recipes from her Depression-era honeymoon days, spent in an ethnic Chicago neighborhood, through the many homogenizing forces reaching to the century’s end.

Flipping through these recipes – clipped from newspapers, and typed or hand-copied from family and friends – I have a view not only of my family’s Czechoslovakian immigrant history, but also of the nation’s historical move from a melange of strongly distinctive flavors to the bland, chemicalized, and often immorally produced fast food that perversely marks our industrial success. I hear a professor’s voice echoing from my sophomore history class: “Remember: every moment in history is about ‘Encounter and Incorporation.’” This cookbook reminds me of the strong tastes of those encounters, and how much can be lost through incorporation.

Most of us, I’ll bet, could reach back in memory to lost family flavors, whether they are strongly bitter greens spiked with vinegar, pungent black breads, or pickles and horseradish relishes that would curdle the palates of American children who’ve been coddled by Kraft and those damnable Keebler elves.

The opening pages of my grandma’s cookbook are all Bohemian pastry recipes – a half-dozen versions of Hoska, a braided bread heavy with ground almonds, dried fruit, and the musky old-world scent of mace. Other recipes unfold the mysteries of yeast-raised “Kolacky” – wobbly palm-sized tarts daubed with fillings that would make my own daughters gag – brackish prune jam, lumpy barely-sweetened cottage cheese, and poppy-seed paste that looks like it’s been processed through a bird. My sister and I used to crowd into my grandmother’s steamy kitchen, decorating the pastries with fans of slivered almonds or trios of golden raisins. No Twinkies, these – I can still feel the firm chew of these pastries and the sticky grit of the filling; you could taste the earth and the work that went into such food.

We might all do well to cook from our family histories this holiday – to savor the strong tastes of the past, and to remember how our ancestors lived close to the land, eating roots in wintertime, and shoots only in the spring, mixing savory and sweet with sharp-edged caraway or anise seeds, spiking cookies with black pepper, and warming mouths new to the English language with ginger and spirit-soaked fruits.

How radical would it be, in our culture that both fetishizes and stigmatizes food, to feed ourselves as our ancestors did? I’m not talking about “chicken soup for the soul,” but – imagine! – food for the body itself. Food that warms us and fills us, made of resilient dough imprinted by strong, familiar hands, and invented with what was in season, spiced with inspiration.

And while we’re at it, why not focus our generosity this season on those without enough food, by donating to our local food banks, or the Feed the Children fund, or Heifer International, where even small amounts of money can jump-start a sustainable food supply for a family or a village?

For those of us who suffer from too much food, it can be disorienting to reconsider calories as life-sustaining. I confess I cringed at the slender World War II-era pamphlet my grandmother had tucked away in her recipe binder titled “Delicious Rabbit Recipes,” featuring sepia photos of marcel-waved women touting the “high calorie count” of “domestic rabbit.” The fading images of splay-legged and flattened critters on crockery look like a nightmare version of that era’s classic picture book, Runaway Bunny – only here, it’s “Run-over Bunny.” These practical, cheap, and filling dishes evoke another war time, when sacrifice was shared and folks made do with what was on hand and seasoning from a different homeland.

These heavy, homey recipes, I find, are a reminder that calories are not enemies, they are energy ... for making change, making love, and making merry in a season when every body should have a place at the table – because we all hunger for justice, and we all have a taste for joy.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on December 01, 2006
Books & Films • Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Food • Permalink • Printer Friendly
Google
WWW Michiana Chronicles