by Sullivan Jordan

( A.N.) The following are excerpts from Sullivan’s Foodways During COVID-19 WordPress website. If you’d like to see the rest of their work, check out their site!

Week 1 Assignment for Foodways During COVID-19 Collaborative WordPress Website Project

Choice Cut from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China: chapter 9, page 164

“Posters hung all over the city, as they had done during the Cultural Revolution, this time warning not of ‘capitalist roaders’ but of the need for vigilance against coughs and fevers.”

Eating Memoir Writing Prompt: (by faculty Sarah Williams)

Who are you as an eater and how has your eating been shaped by your travel experiences? Who in your family lineage of immigrants most shaped your eating? What historical factors shaped their migration?

Food Lab Prompt: Spanakopita & Authenticity (by Chef TA Stephen Garfield)

     In her introduction to Kanella “Nelly” Cheliotis in Heirloom Kitchen:  Heritage Recipes and Family Stories from the Tables of Immigrant Women, Anna Francese Gass says that Nelly “graciously and enthusiastically taught me how to make several Greek staples, including two kinds of spanakopita…the spanakopita we are familiar with in the United States and real Greek spanakopita.” (65-66)

     Then, in the intro blurb to the recipe, Gass writes: “Through adaptation and migration, the recipe has been altered from its traditional preparation.” (66)

     As an introductory “lab” this recipe introduces many of the ideas we’ll be working with, as far as reflection and transformation of tradition, and what authenticity means. This recipe is from a Greek immigrant grandmother, yet does not use traditional ingredients.  Does WHO is making it grant authenticity? Or is WHAT it’s made of do so? Both? Neither?

Week 1: When a Jew Isolates

For my eating memoir this week I was particularly interested in the second prompt offered (excerpted above) about who I am as an eater and the ways my travel, family, and history have influenced this. In general my origins and family have been two of the biggest influences on how I behave in regards to food and eating (the only other huge one being my health). I’m personally a very simple eater. My last roommate once criticized me coming back from the grocery store saying that I had only gotten, “40 different kinds of bread and cheese.” I come from an interfaith household in Tennessee which my rabbi always said was some sort of testament to the power of love and community, but really just meant we couldn’t put up our Christmas decorations up until after the family Hanukkah party had already happened, which I found inherently very frustrating. The Christian side of my family, my father’s side, is a very traditionally Southern ranching family, conservative and very close knit loud, and passionate about biscuits. My mother’s side, the Jewish side, is a bit wilder, scrappier maybe, huge, and welcoming, but not without judgements to pass on whoever they happen to be welcoming. My grandmothers are the leaders of all the food in my family. My paternal grandmother, I would help in the kitchen always making casseroles or one time salmon croquettes, but most often bacon and eggs for my grandfather before he left to move the cows. She taught me to fish using our leftover bacon fat. A lot of my actual taste in food aligns more with the flavors of my granny’s cooking. My maternal grandmother on the other hand is strikingly Jewish. She makes brisket and kugel and we have challah for Shabbat dinners. She stops in the middle of cooking (burning the brisket) because another woman from her synagogue is calling with some really good gossip about Marsha’s son’s Larry’s new wife (you can’t miss that call). From my grandmother, I learned a lot about what Jewish eating means. And though my grandmother’s latkes or matzah balls echo in my mind with every meal I make or eat, more than that is the philosophy surrounding them. When she cooks she cooks to feed her family and anyone else who could possibly come. Food is meant for sharing and consuming and filling ourselves up, hopefully creating communities as we do. My philosophies around food line up more with hers passed down to her from her mother and her mother’s mother, who came over on a ship from Poland around 1914.

Through my own travels out of Tennessee and living in Portland and now Olympia and living with people who have had such different experiences with food has changed the way I eat quite a bit, to include a lot more things I truly have no idea how to make, foods my mother at some point during her health kick deemed unhealthy, and dishes that are not in Southern Living or the local newspaper and thus my grandmother does not make them.

I like to give myself time to bake when I know I’ll eat it or a special time. I remember I baked constantly as a kid, and no one would eat it, so I would eat as much as possible, but eventually watch my beautiful creations get stale and gross with time. I was constantly baking cakes and pies and sweets when I was younger, but as I got a little older, I got into making bagels and more bread-y things (pizza) which was so fun. My grandfather always used to bake bread as well, which was always fun and strange. I looked through all of Heirloom Kitchen looking for a fun bread-like food to make for this week and was struck by what an even mix of bread-y things there are throughout the book. Everyone has this thing in their culture. We all have the grain that becomes a staple to the food we eat.

I chose to make Emily’s Apple Blinchiki from Heirloom Kitchen. The decision ended up being pretty easy, because I just went through every bread-y recipe and found the ones that didn’t have anything I couldn’t eat in them. I’m pretty sure it ended up just being 2 or 3, so I went with this one, because I love pancakes and I love apples and it had everything in my house!!

It wasn’t really until I started cooking that I realized that it probably would have been helpful to have a grater, because it says to, so I ended up chopping two apples up so so tiny which took a long time. But worth it I would say!

In the process of actually making this recipe, I came to realize how similar it is to latkes (which also stood out to me when they called them “Apple Pancakes”). I have been making hundreds of latkes every year with my grandmother since I was maybe 10, for our big family Hanukkah party. It takes an entire day to make them all and you spend most of it grating potatoes and onions and you leave like drenched in the smell of latke. You can smell it for miles I swear.

It was so so nice to make this recipe and have this reminder of home and family. I even stumbled into some trouble with them not sticking together and when making latkes, you squeeze them in a paper towel to get all of the extra juice out, so I realized that might help with this recipe as well, and I had a lot of luck.

This is all to go next to the fact that they were absolutely delicious. Sweet and savory and enough of home while also being something exciting and different!

This week reflecting on the prompt, I chose to make a meal that came from my grandmother’s Shabbat dinner arsenal. I originally was looking for something more traditionally Jewish that reflected the immigrant experience of my family the way I had been conceiving of it. I realized that the immigrant experience we’re studying is the interaction between cultures and the way movement changes food. With this thought, I realized that the most regular of my grandmother’s Shabbat dinners was perfect. Our Jewish roots are highly represented in it, but there are also the clear influences of Southern food and the sort of American-Jewish way of life my whole family lives in. Of the four recipes I made, only one is a very Jewish dish, and even the method of making kugel is simplified and Americanized. My grandmother has made this kugel exactly like this my whole life. She has always been very busy, active in several communities, an executive at a company, with a PhD and three kids. I could write essays about the inspiration I draw from my grandmother and how meaningful it is to cook the food she has cooked for me. The foods are a combination of Jewish recipes and then recipes that have gotten passed around from her clique of Jewish grandmothers making Shabbos dinner every Friday for their own families. They clip recipes from the newspapers and cans and Southern Living and old family cookbooks, and send them to each other to keep Shabbat dinner fresh.

The experience of actually eating this meal was a bit tough for me. I made the whole thing and felt very connected to my family and the Friday nights we have together. When I finally got all the food on the table, I lit the candles and started crying. I could barely get through the prayers before eating, because it was just such a real experience of being alone and being apart from not just my family but everyone I know. I sent pictures to my grandmother and my mother and then ended up watching some tv while I ate, to keep me a bit of company.

Afterwards when my grandma realized I had carved an old potato to hold Hanukah candles, because I own neither Shabbos candles nor candlesticks, she started packing a box to send me with both. But, the meal pushed me over the edge a bit, and I’ve decided to go back to Memphis and be with my family for a while.