Food History

Kosher Cooking Carnival

Today’s post is a little different to usual. (I want to add “I say this all the time, but this time I mean it” except it wouldn’t be true.)

This month I’m hosting the Kosher Cooking Carnival, source of lots of kosher recipes and information about kosher food and anything else that anyone has posted which might fit. Close-off for submissions to get to me through the Carnival management website is 22 May, which is today. Today is earlier in Australia than many other places, though, so some of you can still get your blog entries in through this webpage. Or you can email them to me by Sunday afternoon. There’s a contact link somewhere on this page. On the right, near the top, just under my bio-thingie.

I rather like it that the Kosher Cooking Carnival has a sub-title on the page you put your entries and that the title says “I’m not forcing you to eat.” It was the title of the very first KCC, back in 2006. It makes me wonder how much that actually applies to Jewish families and in what contexts.

My context (from my childhood, so Australian, 1960s) was when there was a food I didn’t like. It was never my parents who said that, though. They would say “If you don’t like it, don’t take any.” Or “Eat everything on your plate.” It was visitors, especially friends of family who had European or American accents. It was my grandmother, too, whose accent was pure Strine. She said it sometimes in a tone that declared we had no right to wonder why we were being fed boiled potato after dessert. (Her meal timing sometimes was a bit awry, and she if cooked it for us we would eat it.)

My other context is from US movies. There aren’t many Australian movies that have Jewish characters, and I can’t think of any that have enough pre-digested Jewish family culture to set up this particular stereotype, much less enforce it. Mostly, food remains out of Australia’s media representations of Jewish culture, though Ron Elisha wrote a play once that had a rather allergic character who made big fusses about not eating dangerous food.

Mostly, here, our pre-packaged views of Jewish food and the attitudes that surround it are really East Coast American. People like me have an alien stereotype layered over our very real foodways.

Where am I going with all this? That minorities don’t see their foodways reflected in majority culture. Instead of bonding them to the world, they can help isolate them. Or provide them with rich secret traditions. Not all the food history you read is actually going to deal with the group you’re looking at or the slogan that catches your eye.