For every favorite family food that you enjoy, there is a story behind it that forever links you with generations of family traditions. Every morsel of food, whether it has been measured by you just “eyeing it” or using kitchen tools, is a narrator. Food is a storyteller. A griot. Food is our relative. And every recipe is a roadmap that leads to an outpost, a front porch, or a kitchen table where memories are held in the aromas, the clanking of dishes and the carefully curated ways that the chefs in your family prepare foods made from scratch or watching how the generation of elders before them made it. Our foodways sytem began at somebody's makeshift kitchen table.
Food holds history and memory. "Food traditions transcend time, making food rituals a way of memorializing the past. Only through the volatile experience of taste is a bridge to the past created." [i] Through cooking and eating, we navigate and negotiate the family and social relations that shape our biographical selves. "Thus, food memories are not solely concerned with tastes and aromas but with people—those with whom we shared dinner, those who cared enough for us to cook us a meal—and with hospitality, trust, reciprocity, and emotional intimacy." [ii]
This contributor offers for roundtable discussion some of the ways that we catalog and document the Black, Latinx, and Indigenous cultures in our foodways systems, focusing especially on how history, through oral food narratives, is passed down in the preparation of hand-patted foods at the kitchen table. Some of our earliest sacred memories are wrapped in the nomenclature of being “tied to our abuela's apron strings” as they prepared feasts of hand-rolled tamales, a tradition that always came with a new or familiar family story. If beauty shops and barber shops are where we come of age, engage in community organizing, and hear the latest news about what is happening in the neighborhood, then the kitchen table, over hand-patted foods, is where strategies are discussed, family stories are retold, and griots are raised.
This contributor will explore how the gathering of ingredients and preparation of “hand patted foods” (i.e. biscuits, hot water cornbread, fry bread, tamales and salmon croquettes) is a form of communal storytelling and “passing down” family history through shared meals. Like Zora Neale Hurston who was a cultural anthropologist, folklorist, and ethnographer, in addition to being a writer during the Harlem Renaissance, this contributor contends that the kitchen table is the homebase where we can follow in that tradition. Here is where we can reclaim the art of oral history, of inducting new griots in the skill of passing down family stories through gathering at kitchen tables and cooking cultural food, as an act of memoralizing family history.
Some attention will be given to food storytelling through film and television, including the 1997 Black film classic, Soul Food, Norman Lear’s classic 1970s sitcom, Good Times, and the 2001 comedy, Tortilla Soup. Finally, a cursory look will be given to idiomatic and cultural expressions, like this food is so good you put your foot into it, or this food is bucklin’ or you did that! as a means of gratitude and extension of the social mores and values that are learned at the kitchen table.
This phrase, the ancestors showed up in this kitchen, suggests that food is a vehicle that transports those gathered at the kitchen table to those who are gathered in the Great Cloud of Witnesses. In this way, food evokes sacred memory. “Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was – that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared in that particular way,” suggests Toni Morrison.[i]
In Ways of Eating: Exploring Food Through History and Culture, the authors suggest that food is not just about narratives of stories and images, but “they touch what they represent.” Contrastingly in Norman Lear’s famed 1970s sitcom, Good Times, the story of a Black two-parent family living in Chicago’s 17th floor projects, food was more about making ends meet, making do and giving rise to the real lived experiences of scrimpin’ and scrapin’, a vernacular that means scraping together whatever you can muster up. (4) When the Evans family sat down together for meals at the kitchen table, the conversation sometimes revolved around James’ work or lack thereof; militant Michael’s push for Black economics; and sometimes the kitchen table doubled as the family meeting place to discuss how the Evanses were going to make it when trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents was a stretch. (5)
Socioeconomic conditions are an ingredient in the ways we engage foods dramaturgically at the kitchen table. We mimic and roleplay the lives of our forbearers, taking on their characteristics, and revisiting our familial connection. Seeing recipes written in the hand of our dearly departed loved ones, including the secret to making the coveted 40 weight gravy, a staple in a Houston neighborhood, attracts kitchen table loud-talking over a game of Bid Whist.
An invitation to the kitchen table says that you belong. As bell hooks notes: “We are born and have our being in a place of memory. We know ourselves through the art and act of remembering. Memories offer us a world where there in no death, where we are sustained by rituals of regard and recollection.”[i]
Works Cited
Morrison, Toni, “Memory, Creation and Writing,” Thought 59, no.235 (December 1984): 385.
Wurgaft, Benjamin A. and Merry I. White. Ways of Eating: Exploring Food Through History and Culture. University of California Press, 2023.
Strand, Mattias. “Food and Trauma: Anthropologies of Memory and Postmemory.” Culture, medicine and psychiatry vol. 47,2 (2023): 466-494. doi:10.1007/s11013-022-09785-2
Strand.
Blair, Yvette. Scrimpin' and Scrapin': Hardships and Hustle Through a Womanist Lens. Arpege Circle, 2022.
[i] Hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. Routledge, Taylor and Francis. New York, 2009.
This discussion explores some of the ways we catalog and document the Black, Latinx, and Indigenous cultures in our foodways systems, focusing especially on how history is passed down in the preparation of hand-patted foods at the kitchen table. Here is where we can reclaim the art of oral history, of inducting new griots in the skill of retelling our stories. Some attention will be given to food storytelling through film and television, including the 1997 Black film classic, Soul Food, Norman Lear’s classic 1970s sitcom, Good Times, and the 2001 comedy, Tortilla Soup. A cursory look will be given to Idiomatic and cultural expressions, like this food is so good you put your foot into it, or this food is bucklin’ or you did that! as a means of gratitude and extension of the social mores and values that are learned at the kitchen table.