Who doesn't love to talk about food?
Growing up, my mom always cooked and my dad always worked. My mom loved to cook and she learned how to do it at a very young age from her mom. I am half Puerto Rican through my mother's side and I first learned about my culture through the food we ate. My abuelita grew up in Puerto Rico on a farm and she only had domestic responsibility. She never went to school and according to her, her favorite thing was cooking for her family, because she despised the farm work. She passed on the recipes and although I was not raised in a very hispanic environment, I was able to feel my roots through her food. One of the traditions we have is making pasteles the week before Christmas. Pasteles are a Puerto Rican food that is made of ripe bananas, yuca, potatoes, pork, and many native spices. My mother, her two sisters and my abuelita would plan a whole day of cooking and preparing, and eventually my sisters and I became a part of the tradition. The women in my family are responsible for "putting on the show" that is Christmas dinner and I love it. Similar to this tradition, southern Jewish women were responsible for all the cooking all the time and there were many traditions that went along with that. A good example of this is the role of Jewish women in Savannah, who encompassed the classic southern pride stereotype in relation to the warm Jewish mother stereotype, in terms of cooking and entertaining. Marcie Cohen Ferris writes, "Jewish women wanted their families to be a part of the white southern community of the low country, and the household worlds they managed allowed them to do so." (Cohen, 39). The women would serve both low-country and traditional Jewish dishes to publicly display that they were white southerners and Jewish mothers. A women named Miriam Cohen kept a journal which shows her southern and Jewish heritage in her recipes for biscuits, cornbread, sweet potato pudding, and pound cakes. A few of these recipes include "Passover soup dumplings", "biled matzah" and "Peach sponge cake". Overall, cooking and baking food was a primary way that Jews, specifically Jewish women, expressed their Judaism in the South.
0 Comments
|
|