Storytelling and Social Geography Through Food: Developing a Personal Menu

Final Evaluation

Final Presentation Slides

“I learned the most about food when I had the least amount of money to spend on it. The years were not romantic. I had no choice but to draw on the tradition to get me through.” (pg. 265)

In chapter fourteen Adam in the Garden, Twitty opens by describing the years in which he had little money for groceries and how he combated that with his “victory garden” in which he grew southern heritage seeds to combat his hunger. He describes strategically laying out his space, sometimes sacrificing a plant he loved for one that may better feed him over a long period. I very much felt the quote above, I have learned the most about food while I have had the most limited access to it, and I have fallen back on many long-time traditions and traditionally cheap foods to survive. The way he describes this garden is with reverence and fondness, he describes the many lengths he went through to take care of his garden.

“Shifting cultivation, the uses of animal manure and ashes as fertilizer, using vegetable scraps to enhance a garden’s fertility, multiple turnings of the soil, and the modeling of garden spaces after the plant communities of nature — all tips out of the permaculture handbook– can hand-in-hand with the Africans to the South” (pg.267)

Twitty connects this to historical black gardening, going back to slavery times and the small pieces of land available for enslaved people to grow their plants on. He explains how lifesaving these gardens were, with many meals being consisted of soups and stews of whatever was available. Black gardening and farming has always been a means of survival but these smaller, family gardens were passed down as tradition through generations after slavery ended, as Twitty describes the gardens and practices of his family members.

“History did not let the historical black garden go unremarked. These spaces were little landscapes of resistance: Resistance against the culture of dehumanizing poverty and want, resistance against the erasure of African cultural practices, resistance against the destruction of African religions, and resistance against slavery itself.” (pg.269)

He later highlights the reduction in Black land ownership, especially in Black agriculture, noting that the ancestors of people once forced to work the land, who learned how instead of the colonizers, are becoming more and more disenfranchised from it. As we seemingly move into worse and worse economic times, this takes away the accessibility of historical means of survival for one race of people due to government interference and Western colonization. Twitty connects this with the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement and the preservation of history and culture through food and land practices.

“When you look at the traditional power objects of many West and central African peoples, like the Congo, the belly of the object is where the medicine is kept. One of the more devastating losses in the transmission of African food ways to the New World was eating as a form of healing” (pg.279)

Chapter fifteen, Shake Dem ‘Simmons Down, is a much more narrative-based chapter than most before, almost exclusively following stories from Twittys child and adulthood with history sprinkled in. I really enjoyed this chapter and its flow, and it also opened my eyes to the places in my own writing where I am feeling disconnected and why that might be. As we get to the end of the quarter and I start to shape my project for next quarter, I am really trying to take Twittys lessons and my own reflections on his writings to heart.

This chapter’s running theme is Persimmons as the title suggests, but we also get background on the colonial practices that brought fruit trees to most all colonial plantations. Many of these fruits were already occurring wild, though some were brought over from Europe, but Twitty explains the passage taken from pre-colonial wild fruits to the orchard style seen on plantations. These sections make me think back to a book review Michael Pollan did for The Atlantic, entitled Review: Capitalism’s Favorite Drug, in which he reviews Augustine Sedgewicks’ book Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug. His review article highlights the way in which the Native people of rural El Salvador were cut off from their food source, a similar story to the one Twitty describes with the wild fruits of North America. When large coffee plantations moved in and “purchased” the land the native people were living on, they had no choice but to work for the plantation as the colonizers would persecute the natives for “poaching” fruit off their land. This not only enforced dependence on the invaders but also destroyed their farmland with monocropping and bad farming practices.

“Plants were not just plants to us; they were homes of spirit; they were parts of our familiar makeup; they were part of our genealogy.” (Pg.285)

Persimmons become relevant with the telling of a story from Twittys childhood, gathering persimmons with his father. Twitty tells how his father was both afraid of falling and of being caught trespassing, but would push through for the delight of his son and his mother, who upon seeing the bounty brought to her by her son and grandson would divide and make use of their finds. I enjoyed the descriptions of the many ways they were utilized, especially the variety of medicinal practices they were used in. Food and cooking as a means of survival has been a theme this quarter but I was really interested to see food and cooking as a means of survival via medicine. I’m not sure if “cooking medicine” is a common phrase but when I say it in my head I can see a hot steaming pot, strong smells and comfort.

“Persimmon beer became my social lubricant of choice, even with a whole troop of Confederate soldiers.” (pg.291)

Twitty reiterates the search for familiar foods that went on among enslaved communities upon their arrival to the United States, as well as the story of a slave owner who would import plants from Africa and the Caribbean for his enslaved labor force, bringing over many plants that were then integrated into Western cooking. It is these many patterns of slave labor commercialism and the increased need to have survival techniques that created and preserved many of the wild foraging, medicine-making, and food preservation techniques still utilized today.

“I’m not cutting down these huckleberry bushes–that’s gallons and gallons of doobie [berries cobbler], there are persimmon trees and pomegranates and peaches growing all over this property, we don’t cut those down. My folks always said look before you cut, don’t just cut things down unless you know what they’re good for.” (Matthew Raiford to Micheal Twitty, pg.287)

Chapter sixteen is entitled All Creatures of Our G-d and King. It focuses on meat and livestock and the traditions stemming from and associated with Native foodways and enslaved populations of the colonial era.

“The food world today is populated by people who find themselves both conservators and consumers of domestic and wild animal life. A new archetype has emerged for the nurturing omnivore both petting and stroking something he (it’s usually a he) hopes will later make the perfect ethical, compassionate entree. Ecology and biology come into play — enthusiasts make passionate arguments to preserve and protect the land and seascapes from whence their calories come, Calls are made to reserve the rush to pollute, spoil, cut, and deface the planet. And rarely are these faces of color, and by color I really mean black.” (pg.300)

Soon into this discussion Twitty points out a relevant detail that very well identifies the strong ties between native people and all other living creatures, listing the many animals that were named after the homelands of native people, as a sign of their view on the tight interconnectedness between themselves and the living earth. Twitty discusses how slavery and colonialism have affected the ability to pass on traditions and way of life to the next generation, highlighting fishing as an ancestral practice taken from his due to the long-term effects of Western interference.

“Fish are as seasonal as birds or fruit. Their world is invisible to us unless we are on intimate terms with it, I feel nauseous writing about this part of the foodscape because unlike my father and ancestors before him, I had never spent any measurable time “gone fishin'” in my life. I felt deprived of a harmony robbed of me by pollution, fear of nature, overpopulation, and poor stewardship of water and air, but something in me felt healed knowing the explorers of the next generation could identify bream and its habits, getting knowledge passed down from the generations gone fishin’ before.” (pg.298)

A big distinction between Twittys descriptions of Native animal foodways and modern Western practices seems to be in the respect given to, and the remnants of the animal. Native communities held a deep respect for other living beings, each of them holding a spiritual place in their society, many representatives of deities or passed-on loved ones. For this reason, animals were not hunted past their need for survival, their naturally occurring livestock were well taken care of, and the remnants of each animal held their own place in food, medicine, or spirituality. The bones of animals especially were worn as a symbol of sexuality, fertility, and abundance.

Twitty also explores barbeque food, both in its respective cooking techniques and its roots in colonial history and enslaved peoples’ survival. He discusses the words roots in Western Africa, before diving into the many variations of animals and spices roasted to be what we now consider barbeque flavors. While barbeque flavors and cooking methods have notable roots in many places across the world, Twitty identifies enslaved Africans as the carriers of this tradition through generations, again linked to adaptation and food as a means of survival. While most people will think of Texas, I will now always think of its many passages to modern day BBQ throughout many points of origin but passed down in history by African Americans.

“Biting into the chicken, I inhaled all the rustic sweetness and peppery goodness in a day that for the lack of sports drinks would have killed me. The meat tasted incomparable to anything else I ever had or ever would have, and this was satisfying, but not as satisfying ass seeing us all come together, as family.” (pg.317)

Personal Menu Project

As the quarter is almost over I am not making any changes to what my completed draft will look like, but I did spend a lot of time this week restructuring how I would like this portion of my project to look next quarter. I am hoping to incorporate some poetry, images, and other elements into my final project next quarter, and while I will use some of the text I am not planning on going in the same story telling direction. I will still have story telling elements, but I want the narrative to really be about the food itself and evocative memory. I did finish my final story section, and over the weekend and the beginning of next week I will format it with the recipes. I also worked on making my final presentation for next week!

This week I wanted to dedicate more time to my menu project, so I did the same amount of reading but cut my writing down to shorter summaries. I used the extra time to work on gathering more family history information and writing my narratives.

In chapter twelve Chesapeake Gold, Twitty explores the agriculture and food history of his ancestors in the colonial Chesapeake region and the Tobacco Belt. He gives an explanation of the involvement needed to grow tobacco, a “thirteen month crop” that gained popularity among Americans due to it’s prevalence as a plantation crop in what is now Maryland and Virginia. Growing tobacco is described to be an involved and multi-stepped process, involving burning the ground, sowing minuscule seeds (10,oo to a teaspoon), covering the growing seedings, plucking and transplanting over and over, work done by thousands of enslaved people in the Chesapeake region.

Twitty also describes the nutritional access of the enslaved people working these plantations. How does this parallel to the germination and seed transfer of plants? How about the transfer of genetics horizontally vs vertically?

“Freedom comes in as many forms as resistance; each garden, animal, or fish trap, and hidey hole, represents a fight against a monotonous diet mean to instill a sense of inferiority and difference. No human could live on that kind of diet and survive, let alone pass on a culture to the next generation. Yet nearly every enslaved person in the Chesapeake was faced with the plebeian corn-based ration system in one form or another. Without their creative ingenuity and the flow of food and recipes from the Big House and the slave quarter, the world of Southern cuisine as we know it would not have existed. As they were forcibly moved across the Upper South into the northern parts of the Cotton Belt, food ways born in the Chesapeake went with them.” (pg.227)

In Twitty’s thirteenth chapter The Queen, I got to learn the history behind rice agriculture and its ties to slavery in the United States. The aforementioned queen is the rice crop, as Twitty describes; “If cotton was the king of the antebellum South, rice was her queen for the three centuries of her engagement with slavery.” (pg.241) Twitty explains the role of enslaved Africans in the rise of this crop, the nearly 9000 estimated enslaved people brought to South Carolina between 1720 and 1730 to accommodate the rise in this very intensive and dangerous crop venture.

“The landscape around here has gone deeper into interpretive education and further away from romance. Sugarcane, guinea hogs, water buffalo– yes, water buffalo, Sea Island cotton, indigo; it’s all here. So are the beautiful African-inspired sweet grass baskets that fanned the rice, and the standing mortar and pestles. I try my hand at it; I have a lot of broken rice but I fan it and separate out the chaff. I would have been a poor worker, but as Jeff says to me “The middling [broken pieces] would have been your dinner” (pg.241)

The two main dangers in the rice fields were illness from venom and illness from infection, the layer of water atop the soil of the field hiding the many animals lurking (including gators, snapping turtles, and venomous snakes), and venomous or not the parasitic, bacteria-filled water often lead to disease and death. Yellow fever, malaria other insect-derived illnesses, and skin conditions from standing in field water ran rampant amongst slave populations on rice plantations. The high-intensity work needed for this crop also meant that more enslaved people were being brought to the South, this increase in population created even closer quarters, making diseases easier to pass amongst each other. Twitty also highlights Colonel Joshua Ward, the richest slaveowner to ever live who’s plantation held 1130 enslaved people and produced 3.9 million pounds of rice per year. Ward lived in Georgetown County, the hotspot of the rice plantation industry, notably producing 44.6% of South Carolina’s rice crop and 33.3% of the nation’s rice crop in 1850.

Throughout this chapter, there were many references to African women’s role in rice plantations, agriculture, and cooking, and with the title being The Queen I knew that there must be some underlying message of femininity and feminism within the lessons on rice history. Duties relating to the rice crop were split by gender, with the men being responsible for clearing the fields, women being responsible for selecting seeds, planting, and weeding the fields, and everyone participating in harvesting. This schedule places women at the forefront of rice production, becoming responsible for the lifecycle renewal of rice varieties, the selection of seeds in part determining the results for the year as well as the constant defence of the plants. Women are also described as having a leadership role within men’s duties of preparing the fields, providing “constructive criticism”, speaking as those who hold the knowledge actually about growing the crop. It blows my mind that while men prepared the fields and harvest, women were responsible for the actual seeding, growing, and cultivation of the plants. And they harvested!

“Contemporary food media have celebrated this renaissance without ever acknowledging the 360-degree change from the roots of rice culture in the American Southeast. At its birth it was all black and depended on the skill and knowledge of black women — women like my sixth great-grandmother and anonymous Mende woman“ (pg.241)

Twitty also highlights the cooking element of rice plantation history, including the act of pounding rice, another of an enslaved woman’s responsibilities, and many of the dishes common in the South during the height of rice plantations, things like Jollof rice, and many variations on rice and beans; as Twitty says “Every culture seems to have their answer to rice and beans — a cheap and filling meal.” (pg.247)

Food for thought: a comparison between nature and nurture in food, cooking, and taste; and vertical vs horizontal gene transfer. Our nature being what we are born with, what is unchangeable about ourselves, is comparable to our verticle gene transfer, the genetic material passed down to us from our biological parents. Nurture being the traits and characteristics we have developed through interaction and experience, being comparable with horizontal gene transfer, a method of gene transfer outside of reproduction (often through the exchange of bacteria) between two living organisms. Horizontal gene transfer is a topic in agriculture due to its ramifications in GMO crops, notably the risk of a gene in Monsanto Groups GMO corn known to prevent its non-GMO counterparts’ seeds from reproducing.

Personal Menu Project

Inspired by Twitty who spends a lot of his book tracing ancestral bloodlines, I spent several hours this week talking to my mom about her side of the family. This was the most in-depth talk we’ve ever had about family history, and I decided to put it together into a family tree. After all of this, I still haven’t finished adding my mother’s cousins, their partners, and children, and I haven’t even started my father’s side of the family. There is also a section of my mother’s cousin’s children (I don’t know what to refer to them as) that the software I am using condensed for space, I am trying to find a way to either link it or upload it with all the sections. This probably took six or seven hours (I also collected and recorded maiden names and birthdays that do not appear in the screenshot) and I am planning on finishing it by the end of the quarter. My Grandma Heather has studied family ancestry, so I’m hoping to speak with her as soon as possible to find out more.

I also spent more time than usual on my writing this week, I’m planning on making that the norm as I get to the end of the quarter. I definitely want to keep this project going so I’m trying not to pressure myself to be perfect in my writing, I’d rather work on getting more writing on the page.

This week I continued reading The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty, as well as two sections of The Taste Culture Reader. I left off The Cooking Gene in week four after finishing chapter nine, so I am picking up at chapter ten and probably staying with this book for the next few weeks.

In chapter ten, Mother of Slaves, Twitty explores the geographical relationships that influenced the creation of southern food, via the arrival of enslaved Africans to America. The chapter begins with a breakdown of when and where enslaved Africans arrived on the coast of America between 1619 and 1860, and citing the two largest regions to receive enslaved people were the Chesapeake region, and South Carolina and Georgia. Twitty also notes that ninety-two percent of enslaved Africans were brought to the Southern U.S, a number that makes sense when looking at historical and cultural events, as well as modern food scapes, but was much higher than I expected.

In exploring his family’s arrival to America, Twitty also begins to explore the ways in which cultures and races blended and adapted through food and cooking, pointing out specific examples in which there were strong parallels between indigenous, European, and African foodscapes, even going as far as saying;

“It is unlikely that enslaved Africans found themselves in a food environment that was incomprehensibly exotic or impenetrably alien; they would become allies, inheritors and stewards of indigenous ways, and harbingers of the Atlantic world, as pioneers and frontiersmen in their own right.” (pg.165)

Twitty lays out his family’s landing point in the colonial Chesapeake region, with the largest regional group of enslaved people brought to this landing point being from southeastern Nigeria. He reflects upon how due to central Virginia’s high density of tobacco and cotton plantations, would go on to be the central hub for African-American communities and culinary prowess.

Twitty presents another example of parallels between different regional foodscapes, discussing the arrival of the Igbo people from the Bight of Biafra. The Igbo believed “the yam to have sprung from the bodies of the children of the ancient divine king – yams were part of the family tree of the Igbo people.” (Pg.173) When the Dutch brought yams from Europe to be grown in America, the Igbo people would replace the American tradition of Thanksgiving with that of Iri-ji.

Near the end of the chapter Twitty explores the way language was adapted for both cooking and survival purposes, with Americans creating new words for ingredients and dishes unfamiliar to them. Words like “gumbo”, “okra”, and “yam” are the Westernized versions of “kingumbo”, “okwuru” and “nyambi”. Colonizers also used the names of enslaved peoples’ homelands to describe foods, like e”guinea squash” and “Angola peas”.

“The men and women of the Kongo-Angola who permeated South Caroline life were in some ways quite culturally removed from the Atlantic Creoles from central Africa who came in during the early period to the Chesapeake. However, there were certain affinities owing to the interactions with the Portuguese. They had much in common with their West African neighbors. If the Akan brought memories of kenky and fufu, the central Africans had their kwanga (cassava loaf) and infundi or funji, the soft porridge or mush eaten as a base to the daily one-pot soup.” (pg.188)

The chapter Alma Mater follows the journey and role of corn in the transatlantic slave trade and worldwide agriculture. I enjoyed this chapter, especially for the way I was able to connect it to one of my four credit classes Teosinte to Today: Exploring the History of Corn in which we are exploring a very similar subject matter. I will also be pulling information I have learned in that class to add context or ideas where relevant.

Part of the genius of this chapter is the way corn is used in multiple parallels at once, running seamlessly through the chapter. By starting with an explanation of the connections between African and Native American culture, with a highlight on food, Twitty relives the same point from the previous chapter about food parallels across the world, this time taking a focus on the journey and adaptation of corn, which will later lend itself to another metaphor between people and plants. Twitty explores his own heritage within multiple southern tribal communities, including the pre-colonizer names for their homelands, their journey across the southern U.S., and their food and agriculture practices.

Corn is perhaps the most diverse and controversial crop on the planet, perhaps excluding select pharmaceutical plants. Europeans originally did not believe that corn could not be the relative of Teosinte, a similar crop that produces smaller and harder-to-harvest seeds, which we now know to be the mother of the modern corn plant. Native tribes that grew Teosinte had perfected the art and process over generations and were able to selectively breed out the Teosinte glume architecture, which created the hard outer seed case, making them harder to harvest. Through this process, domesticated corn was cultivated, and by the time the first colonizers landed in the 1400s, corn had spread from its origin point in southern Mexico all the way to Canada. When the Spanish brought corn back to Europe, it quickly adapted to the new climate, spreading fast, as it did when introduced to Africa by the Portuguese.

It is here that I find another of Twitty’s parallels, as he explores the similarity between corn and crops already growing in Africa, stating that the similarity in taste and texture of commonly made meals made the change less jarring and helped it to become a quick staple, as well as exploring the meals made as a means of survival, to imitate familiar meals with unfamiliar ingredients. With his explanation of Corn’s journey and adaptation across the globe in mind, you can easily connect the forced removal, relocation, and adaptation of people from Africa and the same journey of Corn.

Twitty also explores the relationship between corn and femininity, a topic we have also been exploring in my four credit. While the origin story of corn differs from tribe to tribe, the story of the three sisters, corn, beans, and squash, is the most widely known due to its relevance in farming and soil preservation. Other origin stories of Corn depict her as a motherly character, but the spirit of the divine feminine runs throughout.

“Food is not just a food to those who grow it, any more than yams or rice or wheat are mere sustenance to cultures of which they have been part of for centuries. The Corn Mother is life itself. Food was often expressed not as a thing in these cultures of which they have been a part for centuries. The Corn Mother is life itself.” (pg.204)

Twitty also explores the double-edged sword of corn’s wide reach across the globe. As he explains, corn was introduced by the Portuguese to induce a population spike within African communities that would go on to be the majority homeland of the transatlantic slave trade. It is hard to come to terms with both the evil and the devastating sadness that comes with the weaponization of such a plant.

“Corn was not just going to revolutionize how Africa ate, but along with other crops, in particular cavassa, it would become just the fuel needed to spur on the prolific population growth that would be ample fertilizer for the transatlantic slave trade.” (pg.205)

Twitty also demonstrates the fate of those dependent on corn for sustenance, and the many lives lost because of it. As slavery was ending, many recently free people were still in poverty, without means of stable or profitable employment were living on “meat, (corn) meal, and molasses -the 3M’s” (pg.216). This diet over a long period of time caused mass outbreaks of Pellagra, killing many who had survived slavery and leaving others permanently sick.

“Corn was our mother, and sometimes she committed infanticide.” (pg.216)

I also read a chapter from The Taste Culture Reader entitled The Breast of Aphrodite by C. Nadia Seremetakis. The namesake of this chapter comes from the nickname of the authors favorite peach, a fruit they grew up with called Rohákino, also known as “the breast of Aphrodite”. Seremetakis describes how the taste of these peaches became associated with home and the season of summer, making use of colorful descriptions and visual language.

“It was well rounded and smooth like a small clay vase, fitting perfectly into your palm. Its interior was firm yet moist, offering a soft resistance to the teeth. A bit sweet and a bit sour, it exuded a distinct fragrance.” (pg.297)

Seremetakis describes how through the years and her many trips back to Greece, she noticed the graduate disappearance of her beloved Rohákino, now replaced by a hybrid between the Rohákino and the Yermás peaches. She mentions how, when asked about the peaches, her friends and family assumed that the Rohákino were still out there, just not around in the market, instead focusing on how tasteless the new peaches were, stating “Nothing tastes as good as the past” (pg.297). She draws clear connections between these peaches and the self, describing the loss of these familiar tastes, scents, and textures as “sensory displacement” and weighs different meanings and applications of nostalgia as a way to understand the social and agricultural transformation. By defining the differences between the Greek and American ideas and definitions of nostalgia Seremetakis is able to offer a new way of thinking about our food timelines.

“Nostalgia, in the American sense, freezes the past in such a manner as to preclude it from any capacity for social transformation in the present, preventing the present from establishing a dynamic perceptual relationship to its history. Whereas the Greek etymology evokes the transformative impact of the past as unreconciled historical experience. Does the difference between nostalgia and nostalghía speak of different cultural experiences of the sense and memory? Could a diabolical encounter of the terms offer insights for an anthropology of the scenes?” (pg.300)

As well as enjoying the story, I also very much enjoyed Seremetakis’ storytelling. Her wordplay and train of thought were poetic and almost lyrical in places, and I want to highlight some of my favorite quotes.

“The younger generation, whenever present, heard these stories as if listening to a captivating fairy tale. For me the peach had been both eaten and remembered, but for the younger generation it was now digested through memory and language.” (pg.298)

“The disappearance of Aphrodite’s peach is a double absence; it reveals the extent to which the senses are entangled with history, memory, forgetfulness, narrative and silence. That first peach of my childhood carried with it allusions to distant epochs where the relation between food and the erotic was perhaps more explicit, named, and sacralized; a relation that although fragmented and gone underground, was carried over through the centuries by the Rohákino, a fruit bearing myth in its form.” (pg.298)

“Is memory stored in specific everyday items that form the historicity of a culture, items that create and sustain our relationship to the historical as a sensory dimension?” (pg.299)

“A French cheese is excluded because it is produced through a specific fermentation process, one that market regulations deem a health risk. What is fermentation if not history? If not a maturation that occurred through the articulation of time and substance? Sensory premises, memories and histories are being pulled out from entire regional cultures and the capacity to reproduce social identities may be altered as a result.” (pg.299)

“When new forms and items of an emerging material culture step in between a society’s present perpetual existence and its residual socio-cultural identity, they can be tasteless because people no longer have the perceptual means for seeking identity and experience in new material forms. Because the cultural instruments for creating meaning out of material experience have been dispersed with the now discarded past sensory landscape.” (pg.302)

Writing Prompt #1 Taking inspiration from the style of C. Nadia Seremetakis, describe taking a bite of a beloved food.

For the longest time the only fruit I would willingly eat were apples, specifically the Red Delicious variety. Their exterior is a dark ruby-red, often with patches of light pinks, reds, and greens and speckled with a light white. We would buy them in plastic bags from the grocery store, each apple never much bigger than my first and sprinkled with grocery store rain, and my mother would put them in whichever ceramic fruit bowl currently held her fancy.

I’d serve them to myself sliced on a plate with a helping of cream cheese, the first bite loaded up with enough savory and sweet to satisfy my afterschool hunger. The Red Delicious is in my opinion the perfect apple texture, crisp yet still giving, making your teeth push for just a second before allowing them to pierce the skin. The flesh is notably sweet, making it the perfect pair for the savory cream cheese, the bite of the apple couples perfectly with the smooth and creamy nature of the cream cheese.

Personal Menu Writing

This week I spent most of my time interviewing my family about family ancestry, specifically asking questions about country of origin, family and maiden names, and sibling relationships. Talking and then summarizing better notes took me longer than I expected so I will pull back my reading next week to spend more time next week on writing and getting use out of these interviews.

“When it comes to our dining habits, there is a giant mismatch between thought and deed, between knowledge and behavior.” (pg.xx)

This week I am reading from First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson. One of my ILC objectives is to explore the nature versus nurture aspect of taste development, or as it applies to me, to find out if I was born a picky eater, or did I learn to be? In Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene it is said that Twitty’s palette was “ruined” by the introduction of fast food, making me wonder how foods play parallel to each other while ones taste is developing, and how our human evolution influences what we seek as children. First Bite was highly recommended to me as a tool for answering these questions and has the bonus of being endorsed by Nigella Lawson

Introduction

“We think we are being clever when we smuggle some beets into cake. Ha! Tricked you into eating root vegetables! But since our children are not consiouse that they are consuming beets, the main upshot is to entrench their liking for cake. A far cleverer thing would be to help children learn to become adults who choose vegetables consciously, of their own accord.” (pg.xvi)

This quote captured me early on in the book, I identify with it very much although the child I am tricking is myself. I am always hiding vegetables in my own meals, trying to disguise them in sauces and making them generally undetectable to myself. Can I teach myself to enjoy these vegetables at this point in my life? I have tried virtually zero methods of trying to make vegetables I don’t like taste good, although I have a playbook of ways to overpower their flavor and hide their form. Could I not use the very same flavors but keep and try to enjoy the vegetables?

“When it comes to our dining habits, there is a giant mismatch between thought and deed, between knowledge and behavior.” (pg.xx)

The introductions sets up several of the topics explored in the main sections of the book, hitting on many questions and ideas I was already hoping to explore. She references the way evolution has influenced human taste buds, how pre-historic eras taught us to seek sugar as a high-calorie food source as a means of survival, as well as the chemical process of our brains and dopamine’s role in eating and enjoyment. She goes on to discuss the nationwide obecity epidemic and the role of manufactured foods in human health, and questions how our early exposure to these foods effects our taste development.

Chapter One ~ Likes and Dislikes

In chapter one Wilson begins by exploring different possibilities for our unique palettes, looking at both genetics and social reasonings. I particularly enjoyed the way she explained her thinking early in the chapter, through this story about her children.

“There is no such thing as a food that will please everyone. My oldest child- a contrarian- doesn’t like chocolate; my youngest- a conformist- adores it. It’s hard to say how much of this has to do with chocolate actually tasting different to each of them, and how much of this has to do with the social payoff you get from being the person who either likes or loathes something so central to the surrounding culture. The one who loves chocolate gets the reward of enjoying something almost everyone agrees is a treat. And he gets lots of treats. The one who doesn’t like chocolate gets fewer sweets, but what he does get is the thrill of surprising people with his oddball tastes. He fills the chocolate-shaped void with licorice” (pg.2)

Looking past messages surround health and weight, do children receive cultural or social messages/rewards from food? How much is the brain able to decide that it enjoys a certain food, and how much is out of its control? Wilson goes on to share the findings of scientists over the years, notable Kent Berridge who brought to light the difference between wanting and liking a food (the first being motivation to eat, the second being motivation to enjoy) and that the taste impact differes between the two.

Wilson spends a good deal of time explaining the findings and conclusions of a study conducted by Dr. Clara Marie Davis in 1926, which studied the effects of food choice freedom in young children aged six to eleven months. Each day they were studied the children were offered a selection of whole foods, of which they could have unlimited amounts every day. Dr. Davis’s hypothesis contradicted scientific beliefs at the time, but within two years was proving to have positive effects on the health of the children, many of whom came into the study underweight. Within six years she was also discovering new facts about child taste development.

“The results, which have been hotly discussed by doctors ever since, were dramatic. Without any preconceived notions about what foods were suitable for them, the babies showed enthusiasm for everything from bone marrow to turnips. They didn’t realize they weren’t supposed to like beets or organ meats. All of them tried all of the thirty-four foods, except for two who never attempted lettuce and one who shunned spinach.” (pg.6)

Wilson later determines that “The main way we learn to like foods is by trying them” (pg.19) and references Robert Zajonc’s term “mere exposure” as a means of explaining how one area of the world will develop a taste for what another region dislikes or does not use. She discusses neophobia in food and how our aversions to the unknown can create the earlier referenced social messages conveyed through food, as well as how food fears are socially created, limiting what a child will try. Her section on neurodivergent children’s development of taste hit close to home, I was a very picky eater as a child and I grew up to have a pretty unusual brain. I am curious if I will learn some things about myself as I read this book.

“Maybe it is the sense of achievement in having conquered an aversion that makes adult beet fans flaunt their enjoyment so overtly. Foodies trumpet their love of the hated vegetables of childhood: cauliflower and Brussels sprouts join beets as dinner-party favorites. But beet-eaters are not just showing off. It is possible to reach a point where those complex, bitter flavors deliver more pleasure than the simple blandness of mashed potato. (pg.35)

Chapter Two ~ Memory

“Memory is the single most powerful driving force in how we learn to eat; it shapes all of our yearnings” (pg.40)

Chapter two explores the role of memory in taste development, and the many ways memory plays into the social role food takes in our lives. Wilson takes the reader back through their lives, explaining how they had the capacity of nostalgia as a baby, and even in the womb we are developing with our mother diets. She proves this by the results of a study, which found adults who were fed vanilla breastmilk as a child would later in life still enjoy that familiar taste, even when in something as contrasting as ketchup.

Wilson takes a large interest in smell and the human olfaction process as she explores food and memory. She opens the chapter by telling stories of people with anosmia, the inability to smell and therefore taste most foods. These stories included the diagnosis of a four-year-old who rarely seemed hungry and struggled at mealtimes, and a woman whose marriage ended quickly following the accident that caused her anosmia.

“Her relationship could not survive her inability to share her husband’s continuing pleasure in food. Before the accident, they had both loved throwing dinner parties, and her husband couldn’t understand that elaborate cooking now did nothing for her. Every meal was a cruel reminder of what she had lost. The predicament of those who are born with anosmia is that they can’t share the pleasurable food memories that the rest of us have. The predicament of those who develop anosmia later in life is that they have the memories, but no means to access them. They are cut off from their own past.” (pg.38)

The way Wilson wrote this chapter makes it hard for me to summarize, while she is supporting a cohesive message throughout it is sometimes hard to understand or explain why each pieces of her writing are relevant until you’ve finished reading. Overall she is trying to get through the message that smell and the human olfaction system create and therefore drive the nostalgia and connection we feel with certain tastes and smells, and that this connection to memory drives taste development as both a child and an adult. She continues to use the words of anosmia patients combined with an account of scientific discoveries related to human smell capacity to paint this picture, and by the end of the chapter it feels very powerful and well put, but the writing style causes me to struggle with my summaries.

“Among memoirs by World War II prisoners of war, a common theme is not just hunger, but the fevered memories to which it gave rise, consisting of all the things the POWs would eat again once they were free. Very seldom did they build these dreams about the grown-up foods of sophisticated restaurants; it was the food of childhood and of home that came to mind: stodgy, filling, and safe. One British ex-POW remembered dreaming two nights in a row about “omelets and treacle pudding.” He also remembered his bitter disappointment on waking up, since “either was as obtainable as a slice of the moon” (pg.52)

I was particularly interested in this section in which Wilson discusses the food cravings and desires recorded by prisoners of war in World War II. These deep food longings were not isolated to the British prisoners, prisoners from the Americas, Australia, Europe, and Japan all experienced this “food obsession” to the point that they began hallucinating about sugar. She pulls a quote from food historian Sue Shepard, stating that the men in the Japanese camps “regressed to a childish state” throughout these withdrawals. I wonder how much of this is the evolutionary craving for sugar as a high-calorie source, when your body is hungry will it begin to crave things it knows will keep it alive so sugar has become the evolutionary “good” taste. But they weren’t craving purely sugar, they were craving the baked goods and sweet treats they grew up around, seeking a feeling of comfort in the memory. Historically, oppressed people have in some way recorded the foods they wished they had, but this is also a pattern observed most often in tandem with famine.

Throughout this chapter Wilson stresses the importance of “homeland” foods, and tastes that induce nostalgia and memory. I am curious how one could test the way we taste in different contexts, different frequencies, how much of flavor is our own life experiences influencing our taste buds. How does place impact the way we eat, our emotions and memories while we eat?

Chapter Three ~ Children’s Food

In her third chapter, Children’s Food Wilson gives a detailed timeline of the debates surrounding children’s food, specifically what food is suitable for children, and how much say children should have in their own diets. Throughout the first half of the chapter she explores the many phases and fads that have passed through the realm of children’s nutrition since the Edwardian era, explaining their views on children’s food needs to be similar to the food needs of a young animal, they should be fed by what their parents and guardians gather and determine is good for them. She touches on many foods that were at some point in history considered unfit for children consumption, mainly focused on communities in the United Kingdom, highlighting their rationale and impact. Standouts included bread as being too tempting and hard to digest, spinach as it came out whole in babies stool similar to corn, and fruit, somewhat for for the fear that its seeds and pulp were causing harm to children, but mostly because it was considered “the candy of its day” as Wilson says, stating that there was a suspicion that anything beneficial to a child diet could be something so highly desired by children.

Of all of these stories I was most interested in the rice pudding debates, as I have personal experience with English school lunch rice pudding. Wilson shines light on the prevalence of rice pudding in children’s school meals in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and children’s overwhelming dislike for it. During this time the general thinking surrounding children’s food did not take into account any of the child’s own preferences for food, or in fact any well known food preference patterns children. As Wilson points out and I can distinctly remember, rice pudding is a warm, slightly sweet, milky mush of a desert. I have never liked it and honestly I don’t care to try it again at this moment, just the memory makes me feel a little sickly. It is compared to risotto but I would argue that in most schools it is much more liquidy, the rice is mushy and still notably more savory than the sweet milk soup it sits in. The referenced debated pulled in many school and community leaders, many of which attested that oftentimes students will turn down rice pudding even if food insecure.

The general of this chapter seems to be centered on whether we should be catering children’s diets to their taste preferences, or if children’s bodies require such a rigid set of rules to nourish themselves. Wilson looks at the shift in food manufacturing and marketing that took place in the 1990’s, when corporate marketing began to shift to directly marketing to children with the goal of “entertaining and amusing children with food” (pg.87). This also lead her into a discussion about the kinds of foods you find on a children’s menu at a restaurant, the common presences of fries, chicken fingers, Mac and cheese. While I love all of these foods, they’re definitively not the ideal food for children to be eating all the time. We know that children can and do develop a love for healthy foods but that it is often a matter of exposure. I see a direct link between direct-to-child marketing of these foods and a childs tastes developing a positive association with them. I think there is a middle ground to be found between allowing children and children’s food to fall within this plain and ill-nutritious food, and the expectation that we can convince or compel children to like rice pudding.

Personal Menu

This week I am working on writing about the years after moving the United States and the cakes my mother would make that marked celebrations. It is not finished yet but I would say it’s 70% there and I know where I want to take it next so I am very happy with my progress this week. I also talked to my mom about my first foods/meals.

So far in my ILC I have mainly focused on the first of my two learning objectives; To explore examples of food used in and as storytelling. My first four weeks were devoted to reading and reflecting on The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty, a narrative account of Twittys journey through time and place as a means to explore his ancestral connection to food and people. Twittys descriptions of his own family and their traditions both reminded me of important meals within my own family, but also served as the inspiration for my first weekly writing prompts which I continue to use as guidance for my menu project.  

The Cooking Gene explores Twittys ancestral, religious, and personal history, giving the reader a look into how food tell stories when traced throughout history and the many important aspects one must look at when trying to paint a full picture. In the time of slavery in the United States one must consider who grew the food, who harvested it, who cooked it, and what the chef was given for dinner. When discussing food and Jewish heritage, we must consider the inherent danger that has historically been associated with cultural or religious ties to Judaism. Twitty searches through the historical experiences of his identities to understand or explain foods important to him, ending each chapter with at least one recipe.  

Using this book I created the outline for my personal menu project, which I aim to be the final product of my project. I started by brainstorming foods I remembered eating as a child, writing down everything I could remember as well as reaching out to my parents, grandparents, and younger sister. I started to separate my list into sections as I was able to make distinctions with time and place, and I spoke multiple times with my mother about specific family meals and traditions. Each weeks writing prompts were written to help me begin writing about these foods and memories, and from them I started writing longer pieces that correspond with the items on my list. By week four I had the first draft of my menu items and a corresponding piece of writing detailing a Christmas memory I shared with my father. I was unsatisfied with where the piece went after my opening vignette, finding my wiring too messy and harshly comparing myself to Twittys chapters. Reading from The Taste Culture Reader helped me past this block, especially the short yet enticing writings by M.F.K Fisher in The Pale Yellow Glove. Fishers more poetic writing style helped me tap into a more artistic side of myself, helping to create a cohesive and more colorful narrative for my first menu section.  

Moving into week 6 I will begin to explore more surrounding food and taste developments, hopefully speaking to my parents about what my first foods were and the way my taste preferences have changed as I have grown up, as well as reading from First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson and Taste What You’re Missing: The Passionate Readers Guide to Why Food Tastes Good by Barb Stuckey. I did use Stuckey’s book in my Sophomore year class, but I lost some credit due to issues with my health, and it’s also been a few years so there are defiantly a few sections I really want to revisit. Now that we are at the mid-point of the quarter I am pretty sure that this is a project I am going to continue at least through Winter quarter so I am trying to decide what I want to be finished by the end of fall. I am thinking that having a rough draft for each section that I could continue to make small changes to throughout winter would be a good place to be in, and then I can spend winter cooking through menu items, and writing an ILC project guide. I wrote a greenhouse project guide for my summer ILC, but for some time now I have wanted to dedicate a large chunk of project time to creating an ILC guide that could help a larger variety of students, as well as creating a few completed ILC proposals that could be available to first time ILC students, as could include a reading list for the first five weeks and then offer a research guide that encourages students to explore campus resources for their last five weeks of research.  

I am happy with where this project is headed, it seems like it has a lot of potential and many different forms it could take but so far each of my readings has been so enjoyable that I am exited for whichever direction it takes. I am curious what I will find as I explore the nature vs nurture and development aspects of food histories over the next few weeks and how I will envelop it into my final project, and my search for answers about food and self.  

This week I read three chapters of The Taste Culture Reader which is a collection of essays edited by Carolyn Korsmeyer. I chose to read Feasting with Dead Souls by Elizabeth Carmichael and Chloë Sayer, Synesthesia, Memory, and the Taste of Home by David E. Sutton, and The Pale Yellow Glove by M.F.K. Fisher. I am hoping that these texts can help me as I try and refine writing my own food stories.

Feasting with Dead Souls gives the reader a look into the roots and activities of Días de Muertos (Days of the Dead), the Mexican celebration of the dead which coincides with the more global Catholic tradition of All Saints’ Day. Carmichael and Sayer explore the possibility that All Saints’ Day originated as a Pagan celebration but acknowledge that little is known about its introduction other than it was started by Pope Boniface IV in the seventh century, and that it was moved from May to November in the eighth century by Pope Gregory III.

The authors describe the religious climate at the time of the Spanish invasion of the New World, while the church had recognized All Souls’ Day as it was then called, they were still reluctant to support any practice that may make them seem akin to Paganism, holding a general dislike for anything regarded as cultic or superstitious. Feasting and large meals to honor the dead, however, were “refocused” as a part of All Saints’ Day and therefore traveled with Spanish colonizers as they reached the Americas. I’m going to use a direct quote to explain the last part because they expressed it so clearly.

“The European customs of making food-offerings and feasting with the dead found fertile ground in Mexico where superficially similar ceremonies were an important aspect of pre-Hispanic religious ritual. Because of this and other apparent similarities between the two religions, it is often extremely difficult to determine the origins of particular aspects of celebrations such as the Day of the Dead. It is nonetheless quite clear that in Mexico, the observation of this feast is a deeply rooted and complex event that continues to be of great significance for many people.” (pg.186)

Most commonly Días de Muertos spans from the evening of October 31st to the evening of November 2nd, although there are differences region to region most seem to fall between the end of October and the end of November. The ofrenda is the offering given from the living to the dead on their day to return during Días de Muertos. It is believed that children will return first, so on the first night family and friends will gather to offer gifts of food and toys to their deceased loved ones. The foods are made to the taste of the one who has passed on, with Carmichael and Sayer detailing a gravesite laid out with junk food for a young child and describing toys and clothes left for them to play with.

The adults return on November 1st and the ceremony is much the same, with the living offering up feasts, as well as decorating the table with photos and mementos of the deceased. When the dead have enjoyed the food, the living also partake in a family meal, often sharing leftovers with family and friends or leaving some as offerings at gravesites. The authors describe many of the traditional foods made for Días de Muertos, beginning with loaves of bread made in a family bread oven by the head of the household or another male relative. They also talk about dulce de calabaza which is candied pumpkin flavored with piloncillo and cinnamon sticks, chicken and turkey mole, tamales, chalupas, and enchiladas. These were served alongside a variety of beverages, milk and sodas for the children, coffee, drinking chocolate, and a variety of liquors for the adults, all of course, made to the preferences of the deceased.

“‘Paths’ of marigold petals are strewn from the ofrenda to the door of the house to guide the souls to their feast. Sometimes the flower-path also leads from the door of the house out into the roadway in the direction of the cemetery. This is to ensure that the souls will not only find their way to the offering, but also back to the cemetery; should they loose their way, they might remain in this world to trouble the living.”(pg.188)

Synesthesia, Memory, and the Taste of Home by David E. Sutton explores the relationship between synesthesia, our sensory and memory foodscape, and Xentia, the feeling of grief of or absence from home. Sutton begins the chapter by describing Xentia, having spoken with Greek students studying at Oxford University about the food their families send from home and the emotions it had evoked from them.

“..one woman, who had lived in London for ten years working various jobs while taking courses in art and design (with hopes to become an ico painter), told me about the olive oil that her father made from the family trees in Crete, and that the olives were good for oil because they were”t watered, but raised only on rainwater. She said it had zero percent acidity; that it sometimes became more acidic if you let the olives fall off the tree, but that her father used a stick to knock them off the tree, and you had to knock in a certain direction, otherwise the olives would not grow again.” (pg.306)

Sutton highlighted the sensory aspects of Xentia by recounting the words of a student whose father would send her eggs from the family farm, she compared egg shells in England to plastic and found their smell unpleasant compared to those from Greece. He then moves on to another woman who found herself laughing and crying at the same time upon receiving a package of Kalymnian honey and other products local to her home. The honey was used to make donuts which she stated “soothed her insides” while she struggled day to day.

Sutton also shares his own story of food memory, “one trip I came back from Greece with a 10-Kilo tin of Feta cheese, which I preserved in brine. . . I would cut a little piece with my meal every night. It was like ‘white gold’ to me (laughing).”(pg.307) This one hits close to home, I have never left England without as much as I can carry since I have left, and everyone who flies over has to bring stuff as well. It is rationed like we will starve when it runs out.

When discussing synesthesia Sutton uses the phrase “Listen to that smell!” to convey his ideas surrounding food and sensory memory. He compares the evocation of emotion through metaphors rather than through literal expressions, and reflects on how this conveys to our sensory experiences while we eat. He cites Christopher Tilley in Metaphore and Material Culture saying “A vivid metaphorical image, such as saying ‘they cooked the land’ is likely to be remembered far longer than a statement such as ‘they burnt down the forest.’ In so far as metaphors can evoke vivid mental images, they facilitate memory” I really enjoy the idea-building going on in this chapter and I honestly wish it was longer, because I feel like it was just getting started as it concluded.

The Pale Yellow Glove by M.F.K. Fisher was an interesting yet confusing read that leaves you wanting more. Split into three short stories with a brief introduction, the author take you through three instances of gastronomic satisfaction. While hard to summarize, I want to use elements of the poetic writing style and theme collaboration as is utilized here, and I would encourage anyone interested in some beautiful short examples of edible imagery to give it a read.

“Once at least in the life of every human, whether he be brute or trembling daffodil, comes a moment of complete gastronomic satisfaction. It is, I am sure, as much a matter of spirit as of body. Everything is right; nothing jars. There is a kind of harmony, with every sensation and emotion melted into one chord of well-being.” (pg.325)

Writing Prompt #1 Write about a food tradition or meal that you associate with a major holiday and family.

My grandfather (my mother’s father) would make curry almost every time there were more than two guests over, including our annual Christmas Eve family get-together at their house. Always red with some kind of meat, spicy but with a container of plain yogurt and mint sauce to cool it down for the children. I recently spoke to my grandmother, in hopes of getting the recipe or at least a guess at the base he used. All I got was that he used whatever spices were available, and usually chicken, but my hope is that they will video call me next time they make it and I can write down the general outline. We would sit around a huge table, usually with all the kids on a long wooden bench along the wall with the window, and the adults in dining room chairs or chairs pulled from around the house to make room for everyone. Christmas crackers were a must, and so everyone ended up in a colorful tissue paper hat with a plastic toy and a bad joke, laughing and eating curry on Christmas Eve.

Writing Prompt #2 Describe the cooking process and first bite of a food that invokes a specific emotion and memory. Use descriptions of multiple senses and how they relate to the memories they bring up.

Meatball Sub Sandwiches

To make my meatballs I combine ground beef, an egg, soaked breadcrumbs, minced onion, minced garlic, salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, mustard powder, dried parsley, dried rosemary (I crush mine into little pieces), and oregano with my hands until fully mixed, and then rolling them into meatballs.

To make my sauce I mince half an onion and half a bulb of garlic extremely fine, and sautee them with olive oil. I add in tomato paste and allow to cook off before adding in canned tomato sauce, frozen spinach, dried parsley, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, and MSG. I let this simmer for a few minutes before removing from the heat.

I place a large shallow pan on the stove on medium-high heat and when hot add olive oil. After searing the meatballs I pour the sauce into the pan, and allow the sauce to simmer on high heat for a moment before turning it down to medium-low. I cover the pan and allow the meatballs to cook in the sauce, time will vary based on the size of my meatballs and how many you have I the pan, so I tend to use my meat thermometer.

While the meatballs cook I mix minced garlic with softened butter and put the sub rolls into the oven on the broil setting. I take them out after a minute and they are crispy on top but not crunchy or browned yet, and I spread the garlic butter on top before placing them back into the oven to brown. When I remove them I add another layer of garlic butter and allow it to melt in slowly. When the meatballs are about to be done I lay slices of mozzarella on top of the sub rolls and put them back in the oven one more time for the cheese to melt. Since each time they have been in the oven up until now has been shot, when the cheese is done melting the bread is also perfectly crunchy by this point.

Spoon your meatballs into your sub roll, drizzle with a little extra sauce and enjoy!

When I take a bite I am taken back, I can see a long street ahead of me, dark with night yet lit up by lights of every kind, neon signs, brake lights, the comforting interior light shining the few stores still open creeps onto the sidewalk. I’m eight, maybe nine, the details of this memory are hazy, we may have been in Seattle, we may have been in San Francisco, all I know is we had come from England and we were tired, the sun had barely set here but for us it was reaching dawn, our bodies fighting against us to stay awake.

It was our first meal here, whether our first meal ever or our first meal after moving I’m not sure, but I’m sure it’s not what any of us had expected to be having for dinner that night. Wherever we were headed next we knew the chances of finding somewhere open for dinner was higher in the big city than whatever outskirts hotel we would be staying at, and I’m sure my parents had hoped to find somewhere more exciting for our first experience in this new country but here we were in the window booth of a Subway that looked exactly like the ones in England, eating sandwiches that tasted just as they did in the subway back home. Subways across the world will always smell the same, like fresh baked bread you’re not sure you believed they really fresh baked, and of cheese and fragrant umami. In that moment of discomfort and confusion, thousands of miles from home and unsure of what would happen next, a meatball sub sandwich calmed my worries and took me out of the real world for a couple of bites.

For years I associated those sandwiches as the loss of my life in England, the last moment before my life really changed. It wasn’t until I moved in with Kristopher that I even learned how to make them myself, but at their request after seeing them on an Instagram food account I set out to make them for myself. Bittersweet would be the word to describe the feeling of taking a bite if I had not already chosen the description “gooey, cheesy, and delicious”, may they be both the end of a chapter and the representation of many new beginnings.

Personal Menu Challenge

This week I focused on finalizing the dishes I want listed on my personal menu, as well as writing the first section. My aim is to create a narrative piece for each menu section that doesn’t just focus on the foods I am highlighting but also the general time period I am writing about and how the people and general circumstances worked to shape my personal foodscape. I am not finished with the first section but I like it a lot more than my last draft and I think once I get one right the others will be much easier.

“Scientists say all humans are 99.99 percent genomically identical, but it’s that tiny 0.01 percent difference that can be used to pick us apart by ethnicity or race and biogeographical region. But how do you unscramble a scrambled egg?” (pg.119)

This week I continued The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty. After these chapters I have decided to put the book down for a few weeks to explore other texts, before returning to it at the end of the quarter. As much as I am enjoying it I want to make sure I make it to everything else on my list.

Chapter seven, “White Man in the Woodpile” is Twitty’s exploration of his white ancestors and living relatives. He details his trip from Washington to what remains of Oak Forest plantation in North Carolina, the ownership of which Twitty had traced back to his fifth-great grandfather, a white slaveowner named William Bellamy. Twitty reflects on the grounds and the way of life that would have existed in the 1840’s when he believed his ancestor lived, using the probate record to learn about the livestock, crops, and four dozen enslaved people that once resided in Oak Forest. What struck me most was the way in which all evidence of the slave cabins had been hidden, not only the cabins themselves were gone but Twitty describes the foundations as being removed also leaving nothing “to look at, meditate over, or imagine life in.” (pg.104)

The other stories in this chapter detail other circumstances of a similar theme, as Twitty explores the white members of his and other family’s ancestry and the historical trauma surrounding why they are there. While he makes a point to discuss sexual abuse amongst all genders, Twitty spends much time reflecting on the gendered aspects of sexual abuse in African-American family trees and the trauma and stigma surrounding black women and sex. I don’t want to go into too much detail but it was a difficult yet powerful read that I would recommend if you feel safe to do so.

“I have often wondered whether the white people who know we are kin actually see us as family. It’s critical for me to think about the possibilities of every Southern white family connected to African Americans on DNA tests truly reaching out and vice versa, to create a dialogue. Would we be better off if we embraced this complexity and death with our pain or shame? Would we finally be Americans or Southerners or both if we truly understood how impenetrably connected we actually are? Is it too late? Maybe I’ll just invite everybody to dinner one day and find out.” (pg.116)

I don’t have much to say on chapter eight, I found it mildly interesting but it was a lot about DNA and how the DNA testing process works. I did enjoy learning about Twitty’s experience with it and how he was able to use it to determine maternal and paternal relatives and geographical history. I would definitely take a DNA test if possible, I think it would be a great addition to my ILC work but I would need to look into getting a grant of some kind to cover it and I’m not sure if that’s the kind of thing they give grants for.

Chapter nine, Sweet Tooth, details the journey of sugar across the world and its impacts on food consumption, global economies, and slavery. Highlighted within these lessons is the foodscape of the Caribbean and the enslaved people who resided on the islands colonized by the French and British. Some of the foods I knew such as allspice, plantains, parrot, allspice, yams, musk melons, watermelons, crabs, shrimp, turkey, oranges, and coconuts. Other dishes such as “duckanoo”,“dokono” and “tum-tum” I had to look up. Twitty discusses how the influence of the Caribbean reached the U.S through French colonization, and the influx in sugarcane farmed by enslaved people in Louisiana following the Haitian revolution against enslavement by the French.

Twitty dedicates several pages to quotes from Solomon Northup, author of Twelve Years a Slave. These quotes detail the processing of sugarcane so create the sugar syrup, as done by enslaved people across the world. Twitty then explains that this way of processing sugar cane was created by the son of a white plantation owner and a free woman of color, and never received his due credit for his creations, as Twitty puts it “Norbert Rillieux is the household name that never was.”(pg.154)

I really enjoyed Twitty’s focus on molasses later in the chapter, he starts with a story about being gifted a jar of sorghum molasses by his grandfather as a child before explaining the sugar cane belt and sorghum cane belts of the southern U.S and how each region would make molasses differently according to the location and time of year. Twitty traveled to a Mennonite farm in Tennessee where a farmer allowed him to watch him make sorghum molasses. I really loved reliving his experience through his writing, he described the air as “like being in a taffy sauna, very sexy for a bear who appreciates sweets” (pg.157) and even better the sorghum poured over pound cake “It is sexy, it is overkill, it is soul-making, it was so good I bought more and ate them before G-d gave me two more days of life”. (pg.157)

Writing Prompt #1 Write about a food or meal you make that makes you feel more connected to one of your important identities or relationships. Are the ingredients significant or sentimental in any way?

Shepards pie appeared somewhere in the United Kingdom in the 18th century, and I have known it my whole life. It is one of my favorite things so make and women in my family have been making it for me for as long as I can remember. There are small changes to the recipe family to family but this is my general recipe. You start by sauteing a minced onion until translucent and then adding in your ground meat, traditionally it should be lamb but some people will use beef. Once browned throw in minced garlic, rosemary, thyme, frozen peas, and diced carrot. Allow to combine for a minute Add tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce, red wine if you have some and red wine vinegar if you don’t (not too much!) Cook down for a minute, add chicken stock and cook down again. Season to taste. You’ll pour that into an oven-safe dish and make fluffy mashed potatoes with salt, pepper, milk, butter, cheese and two egg yolks mixed in to lay on top. Create straight parallel grooves on your mashed potato crust and sprinkle with more cheese.

Place in the oven at 400 degrees for 19-21 minutes. Once baked, the mashed potatoes and cheese will form a golden crust on top of the filling and the vegetables and meat will be soft and flavorful. Your silver wear will make a scraping sound if run along the top and you should hear a muted crunch when you break the surface. One year when we decided to have Christmas dinner on the 26th, our family unanimously agreed to Shepard’s pie for Christmas day dinner. The best part is you can cover and freeze it to defrost later!

Ground lamb is available in America it’s just less common and a lot more expensive. It’s definitely one of the things I miss, lamb chops are killer, and a comforting lamb Shepard’s pie can heal the soul like you wouldn’t believe. It’s one of the only things I came to college knowing how to cook, I learned how to make it the summer between 11th and 12th grade for the end-of-season bike coach party, but I don’t make it as much as I should. It’s one of those things that is so stereotypically English but I can’t really argue with it, and I wouldn’t want to to be honest, it’s delicious. My grandmother has her own recipe that adds one more key ingredient and I won’t lie it’s delicious but it’s pretty much sacrilege so I won’t be revealing what it is.

Writing Prompt #2 Write about a food or meal you learned to make or add to your diet because of a preference or important identity of someone in your life. Does this food or its ingredients have significance now that it did not previously?

My best friend likes a lot of the stuff I cook, but they become a drooling-from-the-mouth, heart-eyes cartoon when I talk about pot roast. My mother never called what she made “pot-roast” but I remember her making stews similar to what I make now, usually in the slow cooker, and I’ll admit that I wasn’t a fan of many of her slow-cooker recipes. I didn’t particularly want to make pot roast the first time I did, but I find so much joy in cooking for people, especially Kristopher, that I was willing to make an exception this one time. I had decided to make it in one pot style, searing my meat and cooking it low and slow in an enameled cast iron dutch oven pot.

The night before I salted my chuck roast all over and sealed it tightly in a ziplock to marinate until 1 pm the next day when I would take it out and set it on the counter to drop in temperature while I roughly chop an onion, create a pile of minced garlic and a shot stack of halved garlic cloves, and heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in my pot. I sear each side of the meat for a few minutes and it creates a beautiful golden-brown crust, sometimes I pull off a corner and give it a little taste, the crunchy edges are delicious. I take out the roast and set it on the cutting board, and I cook the onions and garlic in the drippings for a few minutes before adding in tomato paste and cooking that down too (I think too many people forget to cook down the tomato paste but it’s a really important step for getting that rich flavor). Add the roast back in on top of the onions and pour in beef stock and red wine or a splash or red wine vinegar, leaving at least two to three inches of the roast exposed. Cover with the lid and place in a 300-degree oven for two hours.

Right before those two hours are up you will want to wash and evenly chop your potatoes. Pealing them is totally up to you, I prefer skin on but Kristopher likes skin off so that’s what I tend to do. Peal and chop carrots into baby carrot size or just grab a handful of baby carrots, as well as some whole cloves of garlic. Remove the pot from the oven, being careful not to get a face full of steam when you remove the lid, and drop in the potatoes, carrots, and garlic. You still want the roast to have at least two inches exposed so push veggies under the roast if you need. Taste the broth and season to your liking, I usually use onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, oregano, salt, pepper, bay leaves, rosemary, and thyme. You can also add more red wine vinegar or other base liquids if you need just be aware of not drowning your roast.

Put the roast back in the oven for another 2-3 hours, the meat should fall apart and the potatoes should be fork-tender. The broth will be a variation of red, orange, or brown depending on how you seasoned, and you can either eat the broth as is or strain the meat and veggies out and reduce to create a gravy. You can thicken the gravy with flour or a cornstarch slurry, but letting it simmer on high heat should do the job just fine too. The larger pieces of garlic will become soft squishy bombs of garlic marinated in other flavors and the onions will become soft and slurpable. If you can’t tell by now, I have changed my mind on pot roast. The ingredients are simple, the cooking process is simple, the flavors are simple, yet it is still hearty and bold. It was the first thing on my list to cook when fall came and started to cool our apartment down, I missed it’s comfort and its strength but there is a reason stronger than that. My reason for learning to cook pot roast is with me for another pot roast season, and seeing them anticipate and enjoy my cooking tastes better than any meal I have ever made.

Developing my Personal Menu

This week I continued to brainstorm meals from my past and present, as well as making a rough draft of what my menu would look like and beginning a rough draft of the writing. I don’t actually think this is the story I want to start on but it was good writing practice and I think I will use parts of it later on in the section. I expanded my list to include foods I cook regularly or have cooked regularly while at college, and I spoke to my grandmother about foods my sister and I liked as children which I have to the list in their own section.

My goal is to have selected my final menu items by the end of week 5 so that I can focus on my writing, cook through at least one item from each menu section, and format my menu and picture to my liking before my final presentation. The foods listed right now are all definitely options but I know there are a few changes I want to make after speaking to my family, and I think using this last bit of time to really think about and notice my cooking and eating habits right now will be really valuable.

Chapter four is focused on stories surrounding Twitty’s conversion to Judaism and his discoveries of food and community within. He tells a story of himself at the age of seven having seen a movie that led him to decide he was now becoming Jewish. He tells of how his mother scared him away from the idea at the time with the threat of his re-circumcision, but this only furthered his curiosity and he converted as an adult. His curiosities lead him to discover recipes and dishes he quickly began learning to make, and he clearly has a deep love for the Jewish foodscape.

“Jewish food is a matter of text expressed on the table. Entering the Jewish foodscape changed my life. Jewish food and black food crisscross each other throughout history. They are both cuisines where homeland and exile interplay. Ideas and emotions are ingredients – satire, irony, longing, resistance – and you have to eat the food to extract that meaning.” (pg.70)

Throughout the chapter Twitty examines the intersections of black and Jewish culture and foodscapes, citing examples of both persecution and togetherness through food and examining his own line of questioning. He later shares about a conference he attended and presented at in an Alabama Synagog. His presentation on kosher soul food sounds mouthwatering, not to mention the foods he prepared with volunteers. But it was his reflection on the conclusion of the conference that really stuck with me. He met a Scotish-Irish lesbian who was also a convert, and the keeper of her family recipe box. He described the feeling with her as “immediate familiensinn“. He then meets two sisters from Germany one of whom calls him “mishpocheh” which is a Yiddish term for a large family comprised of blood, marriage, and close friends. These intersecting identities seem like they created an unusual feeling of safety among strangers. The chapter closes with a really amazing-looking recipe for West African Brisket.

“Compulsory illiteracy damned many of us. We couldn’t write down our own stories. We had to tell them to others, and this caused facts and words to be bent. I wonder what history would have looked like if every man and woman could have written down or passed down a written account of their lives. This is not in our treasure trove.” (pg. 84)

Chapter five is entitled Missing Pieces and it highlights the ways in which slavery and the traumas and experiences of enslaved people effect the prevalence of written black history and general recollection of people’s enslaved ancestors. Twitty discusses the challenges of tracing the ancestry of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, noting how names were often left out of census reports and other records. He discusses looking through records in the Library of Virginia, how enslaved people where recorded by their sex, age, and color, “The dehumanization never ends” (pg. 82)

Twitty also focuses this chapter on identity in general, and where we draw our identity from. The way in which enslaved people were named by white captors is as Twitty says, a way of marking them as property, ensuring the removal of identity and individualism. I find names to be a huge part of our identity, perhaps not even because we have some historical attachment to the name but because it is our foremost representation of ourselves. In person, on paper, online, wherever we are our name follows us. We are in a day and age in which a person can change their name if they so please, and I’d like to think that we are also moving into a time in which that is more widely accepted. Names promote ourselves and therefore our individualism, they’re the title of our story, and the removal of them by force takes not only that piece of identity but also their descendants’ access to their history.

“What is in a name? Certainly something of a face but not really a full identity. Cudjo and Phibba, names based on names of Akan origin from what is now Ghana, tell us a narrative of persistence or resistance, or even of white accommodation to the folkways of the enslaved. If you’re enslaved, your name can change at any time.” (pg. 83)

Twitty closes the chapter by discussing the usability of DNA testing for tracing African ancestry, and how recent advances in genetic testing have allowed people to access information about their genealogical history in a level of detail that was nearly impossible before. But what was more interesting to me was when he talked about the pushback he’s received about wanting to access his history, when people asked him “Why can’t you just be American?”. I understand wanting to hold on to that part of yourself, and wanting to know about the people who came before you. We are each made from egg cells that our mother developed a week before her own birth, we are connected in an unbreakable way to our ancestors in that way. No one is obligated to seek out that part of themselves, but should we not all have that right?

“We have become a nation within a nation of passionate genealogists and heritage fanatics. The curse of not knowing more has been turned upside down by the desire to know all.” (pg. 89)

The sixth chapter was Twitty’s account of an interview with his grandmother about stories of her father, Joe Todd. This chapter is hard to write a summary about without retelling most of the stories, but it made me very emotional and I would definitely recommend this chapter to people wanting to write about their own food histories. Intertwined with his grandmother’s account of her father defending her mother in a courtroom, and building stilts with his son Nathan, were stories of the food he and his family made and enjoyed together. Joe was known for his southern BBQ and blackberry cobbler, and Twitty’s grandmother remembers how he made gravy from sausages his own mother had made. I would love for my writing to feel something like this, both a narrative of my life and my food history.

Writing prompt #1 Where do I see my personal identities present in my food?

I can divide the most common meals of my life by the places I have lived, so a lot of my foods hold identities relating to location. I grew up in England, giving me a menu of English foods or foods common to my English family that hold that identity regardless of the origin of the dish. Food from England are things like my mom’s chicken broth soup, leftover turkey and ham pie, boiled eggs and toast every Monday because we have to get to girl scouts by 5pm. While some of these foods are things we would still have in the U.S, we transitioned them out of the regular menu as we adapted to living in America.

I also live with an eating disorder, which is a controversial thing to put in my identities list but it feels relevant and this is about me so screw it. There are foods I wont eat anymore because of the time in my life in which my eating disorder was most present (14-17). I am choosing not to disclose these because I think that putting your E.D meals on the internet is generally unhelpful, but I will say that foods that were restricted in our house were for obvious reasons my favorite, and therefore caused a love-hate relationship with food and eating.

I have autism and ADHD, which has always made it hard for me to try new foods, and I struggle with unfamiliar textures, as well as some I just try to avoid. I have a list of “safe foods” that I know I can almost always eat, but if I eat it too much I can’t eat it anymore. I used to love these crunchy rice crackers and they make me nauseos now. I am fearful of new foods, and I’m worried I’ll eat something I don’t like and throw up or embarrass myself.

I am a food studies major and a cooking enthusiast, I really love to try new dishes and cooking techniques. I feel so accomplished when I have learned something new, but the best feeling is seeing someone enjoy my food. I want to learn how to cook duck, rabbit, venison, boar, I want to learn how to make marshmallows and puff pastry crust. I would love to just create food all day for people.

Writing Prompt #2 Where do I see my personal identities intersect in my food?

My fear of food combined with my love of food is the most prevalent intersection of identities for me. My fear of food stems from both my eating disorder and my neuro-divergency, I fear food for its calories and for its unknownness. A prime example of how they intersect with my love of food and cooking is seafood. The ocean holds a cornucopia of flavors, textures, potential cooking techniques and amazing dishes. I desperately want to cook amazing shrimp, salmon, snapper, oysters, crab cakes, I could go on. But the thought of tasting them genuinely scares me, I want to like them but I am scared to let them pass my lips.

I also think my adult life passion for food intersects with my childhood identities of food and family, I feel most satisfied when cooking for someone I love, I want my food to be its very best when I am cooking for a person who feels like family. Meal time with my best friend is a tradition I would never want to lose, I have always found food to be most enjoyable in the company of people who’s company compliments the meal.

My current cooking also represents a mishmash of the places I have lived and the times of my life that have changed my diet. Much of my cooking takes the parts of my childhood meals I enjoyed the most and made them mine, the same way I assume most family recipes are handed down when there is no family cookbook. Sometimes I email my mom for a recipe because I want the flavors but not the texture, I create something of my own from my mothers creations.

Personal Menu Development

This week I focused on talking to my immediate family about foods we ate when I was growing up. I created a working list of the things I came up with while talking to them and doing my own brainstorming, I’ll probably keep adding for the next few weeks and pick out my menu items around week 5 or 6.

This week I am reading from The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty. I’d like to get at least halfway through this book over the next ten weeks so my goal is to make it from the introduction through chapter three this week, through chapter seven next week, and through chapter eleven for week four. This book is the ideal way to start this ILC as it dives directly into looking at not just a personal lifetime history of food but also an ancestral view of how these feelings, ideas, and habits came to be.

In the preface of the book Twitty vocalizes the unspoken truth of ancestry in the Old South, which he defines as “the former slaveholding states and the culture they collectively birthed from the days of contact through civil rights.” (Pg. xiii). Twitty points out how traditionally African features such as curly hair and dark gums are explained away through some European line of genetics, despite history making obvious the origin of these things being the presence of slavery in these regions. Twitty explains how he embarked on a tour of the Old South looking for sites of culinary historical significance, and how returning to the Old South is an act of mixed reactions to those whose ancestors were enslaved on those lands.

The first chapter begins with Twitty painting a picture for the reader as he prepares to cook on a plantation, donning what he calls his “transformative historical drag” at five A.M to begin making his meal. As he continues to describe how he recreates this scene of his ancestors, he also discusses how singing became a necessary part of cooking for enslaved people, how songs were used to tell or keep time, and how the music itself became a mixing pot of language and culture.

While reading the pots, Twitty explains that his meals span from 1730-1880 to follow the experience of the majority of his family as he traced them from their arrival in America. He reflects on the Westernization of the modern kitchen, and his writing has a tone of nostalgia as he talks of his grandmother’s three stone and pot setup.

“The little hearth- located under heaven or a thatch structure or building used during the rainy season- was itself a ritual space, an altar, a face of spirits, usually a female entity representing motherhood and nurture, the pot itself a kind of womb.”(pg.13)

In chapter two Twitty shares his dislike for his culture as a young child, stating that while his first non-milk food was cornbread mashed in potlikker, fast food tuned his taste buds away from soul food and his ancestral cooking. His mother is a recurring character in his stories, so masterfully written as an overbearing mother you learn to be grateful for I felt like I knew her. Later in the chapter Twitty tells the story of how his grandmothers would make chitlins, specifically how they were served every holiday, despite the majority of the family detecting them. He explains how he didn’t understand why anyone would willing eat chitlins, that he avoided them at all costs and that no one explained their history until he was much older. I want to ask him more questions about this, though he states that he will still never eat them, I wonder if he would ever cook them. This book has the qualities of a riveting memoir with the addition of an in-depth lesson of generational trauma and how it both survives and heals through food.

In chapter three I found myself going back to the same story over and over., it opens with the line “When I was six Daddy took me to discover the South’s past in an empty jar.” (Pg.51). The innocence of this line combined with the age of Twitty in the story immediately brought me deeper into his writing as he told of a car ride to his family homestead in South Carolina during which he desperately had to pee. Instead of taking him to a gas station, his father pulled over to the side of the road and sent Twitty into the field to pee in a jar. His dad explained to him that when his father, Twitty’s grandfather, had taken him to South Carolina when he was a child that neither of them were allowed to use the gas station bathroom, explaining segregation to a child who heard “colored” and thought of crayons. Twitty reflected on what the rest of that drive was like, as a six-year-old who had just learned there were people who wished him dead because of the color of his skin, unsure that he was going to enjoy the South, unaided by his dismay at his first meal of unfamiliar foods. This chapter overall had a very strong message of keeping memories alive for the sake of future generations, and his exploration of the past for the sake of his own life and identity.

Writing prompt #1 What are the memorable kitchens of my life? How did they coincide with monumental life events or changes? Did their physical location impact the way I interacted with it? Is there one meal or memory that stands out, and how did it impact my relationship with food and cooking?

The first kitchen I remember is in my childhood home in Reigate, England. It wasn’t the first place I had ever lived but the first house I have any memory of, on a narrow street very near my primary school. The kitchen was narrow, a straight walk through to the back door and the garden. I don’t remember what color it was but I think the walls might have been blue. Both my parents worked, and over summer break they often devised activities to do with us when we got antsy, my favorite was decorating cookies (biscuits) with tubes of icing from the store, usually just blue and pink (two kids, two colors of icing, makes sense). Nothing was homemade in that activity, but I loved standing up on the chair with my mom or dad over my shoulder to look at the smiley face I had drawn in pink sugar. This was my kitchen aged 2-10, it was probably ground zero for many fights with my sister, many delicious meals and good times, unfortunately it was just too long ago for me to remember in detail. I am hoping to get more details from my parents.

The second kitchen belonged to my grandparents, specifically on my dads side. Unfortunately neither of them are with us anymore, but they were some of the most amazing people I have ever known. My sister and I would spend most Friday nights with them in Caterham when we lived in Reigate to give my parents a night off and it was only thirty minutes or so in good traffic. My grandmother made a traditional roast dinner that could have been served in the palace, and every night away was a treat getting to help her cook. Help was a loose term for make the instant gravy while she does the cooking, and then making box mix cupcakes with her right before she was done with the oven. I can remember the smell of her deep freezer when she showed me that she had stocked up on our favorite snack, frozen hashbrown potatoes shaped into a smiley face. They were so common in England I think I probably cried over the shock of not having them when we moved. This was also my kitchen from ages 2-10, less frequent but that just adds novelty for a child.

The third important kitchen was in Walnut Creek, California from ages 10-13. I hated that kitchen, it was weirdly shaped, smelled bad, and had no microwave. Food was a contentious subject at the time, as my parents poorly handled a conversation about weight gain and food began to feel like a rebellion for the wrong reasons. Our Halloween candy was kept on top of the fridge, we were allowed two pieces after dinner every Friday, a rule that drove me to seek out sugar at every turn. Food became a reward or a punishment in this kitchen, also driven by our change in location. In America the portion sizes were noticeably bigger, and in California pretty much every kid we knew was on a swim team, so naturally our parents put us on one too. I don’t want to go into too many details but kids are cruel, and swimsuits leave no way to hide.

The fourth kitchen was the last before I left for college, in Issaquah Washington. This was my kitchen for the last three years of high school, it saw me in and out of my eating disorder and through many many fights with my mother. The kitchen wasn’t usually named as the cause of a fight, but food and eating was a contentious subject I never felt they understood until I got to college. Despite this, this kitchen still held some respite from the rest of the world for me, as an underage overachiever I found myself eating in parking lots between activities far too often, and when we could make it through a conversation there was almost nothing as reassuring as my moms falafel. I tried to learn to cook here, and looking back I can do most of the things I attempted then with relative ease now, I just lacked patience and maybe the common sense to just look up the answer sometimes.

The fifth kitchen is my current kitchen, and it is the first that has felt fully mine. Staples of my kitchen include baked mac and cheese, pot roast, chili, and tater-tot nachos. I have only been here since June but this is my learning kitchen, I am not afraid to try new things here. The kitchen itself is far from the best kitchen I have ever used, it constantly breaks, it’s too small for all our things, and these apartments seem to attract fruit flys no matter how often you clean, but it is where I can put my heart into my food, I feel no fear or judgment. The physical kitchen is not what makes it my favorite, but the people I share it with and the love it has allowed me to cultivate for my food.

Writing Prompt #2 What food rituals does my family keep, and how did they impact my relationship with food/cooking?

1. On Christmas eve or Christmas day every year my dad would take me to the butchers a few streets away to pick up our reserved turkey. They could have gotten one earlier and frozen it, or bought one frozen, but my parents liked to get fresh ones to cook and it was worth it to them to spend holiday time getting up early for it. Like my parents, I want the best for the best, if any day is worth getting up for fresh poultry, its Christmas. The best part is we didn’t usually eat Christmas dinner on Christmas day, we waited for Boxing Day so my mom didn’t spend Christmas cooking and my grandparents would come over.

2. Every year my mom would make the most insane birthday cakes, from scratch, and decorated with our current interest. I remember my princess-themed party (I think I was six?) she made a cake that looked like Cinderella’s shoe on a pillow, the shoe was made of sparkly blue fondant she had to color herself. She has did this every year until we moved out, and I think she would keep doing it if we asked. My first birthday cake was a ladybird, which she recreated for my 18th birthday. I now will not let a friend’s birthday pass without making sure they had a cake.