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People in nearly every culture around the world cook.
In fact, it's one of humankind's most distinctive traits.
The museum's special exhibition "Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture"
explores cultures and cooking,
historic meals and markets,
and the moments in our lives we mark with food. In all,
taking visitors on a journey of growing,
transporting, cooking,
tasting,
and celebrating food.
During Luna Fest, a two-day festival that took place at the museum in early twenty
thirteen,
the museum hosted a team from "Kitchen Conversations," a
project to document storytelling about food
and asked visitors to offer personal reflections about meals and cooking.
Monique Scott,
Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology
and Assistant Director of Cultural Education
says that in these stories visitors continue the museum's long tradition of
collecting and sharing oral history.
We at the museum want visitors to not only be spectators of exhibitions, but
to actually contribute their own stories to the exhibitions
and contribute their own cultural stories to the anthropology they see on
display. We're very excited because these cultural stories breathe new life, not
only into our permanent
anthropology exhibitions, but
also to our amazing special exhibition,
"Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture."
Glimpsing in other culture's food traditions
raises questions about one's own, as
Glenn Walton of Dallas, Texas explains: I've had the chance to go
to Mexico several times and experience that culture
being that my wife is Hispanic and her family is from Mexico.
Getting to go there was a
huge eye-opener
and see how people live with foods, especially going from a small village to the
big cities and
eating in cafes and restaurants.
I got to experience a
family function. Her grandfather's the hierarchy of the family and we were
there for his eightieth birthday. We had a big
family gathering. They
slaughtered a sheep while we were there and cooked it and
lots of people came.
Before that we had gone to see where her aunt lives in a small city
where they live as very much of a unit.
Across the street was the man that was the butcher.
Someone would butcher a cow and it would spread among lots of different families
instead of everybody having to
live on their own.
Her grandmother had a milking cow and she milked her cow and
gave milk to other people and other people gave her tortillas. My wife's
great grandfather started co-op in that area
almost
probably eighty years ago.
Everybody would work the fields and then everybody got paid by
working it and what they put in is what they got out.
I thought that was very neat.
The sense of community hadn't gone away there.
Where we live there is no sense of community. It's you
don't know the people that really
live next door to you
Just how much the love of food
was there. it
wasn't just about going in and eating a fancy dinner. It was about being a
society and being a part of the community.
Everyone is born with some taste preferences.
For instance, enjoying sweet foods is coated into most people's genes,
but many other factors are also at work: anatomy, genetics, evolution,
culture, marketing, and memory.
Memories connected to food can be especially powerful. Recalling perhaps a
lost connection to one's homeland, as in this story from Kaylee Navarett of
Maspeth, New York:
I work at a Bolivian restaurant
in west side Queens. It's all Bolivian food, which is a lot of potatoes, a lot
of corn, steaks, you make empanadas. We have that things called
Saltenas,
which is like a soupy meat stew
inside an empanada.
There was a woman who came from California and
she was literally crying, like tearing, because she hadn't eaten our food in so long.
It was really moving.
While people have been cooking for hundreds of thousands of years,
cookbooks a relatively recent.
Until the 1800s, widespread use of cookbooks was rare.
Many people including cooks couldn't read
and recipes are traditionally passed along by word of mouth, often from mother
to daughter.
Verda Krapf from New York City grew up in Slovenia and learned a number of recipes
from her mother.
But as she explains mastering these dishes after her family moved to the United
States took hours of practice even with a kitchen full of modern cooking
utensils at her disposal.
I've watched my mother
make all kinds of things baking and cooking,
and I've learned from her,
and I've also learn from my mother-in-law.
They're both fantastic cooks
with no written recipes,
no electric beaters, no electric, you know, just wood-burning stoves. They
made the most wonderful food
for us children.
I've learned that i still make those same
recipes,
but with a lot stuff helped with all these
electric appliances,
and knives, and pot, and pans that you
wouldn't believe.
Our parents had one pot and
hardly any dishes, maybe a couple forks.
We survived and that's what I remember,
and it's wonderful memories.
My mother was very good at making apple strudel. Slovenia, this was like the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire,
and they cooked
wonderful meals with a lot of paprika and
and apple strudel and doughnuts.
All kinds of things that
are not really very popular here in this country.
For example, blood sauce, or
blood puddings
and sausages
fresh from freshly killed
pigs,
cows,
chickens.
It was just very, very tasty maybe it was because we were so hungry that it tasted so good.
All the food that we had in Slovenia was grown by
our father and he was a farmer. We were farmers only.
We had cows. We had chickens,
and cats, and dogs, and
fields where we would
plants vegetables,
and pigs.
And when we came to this country we settled into area in Queens where there
were lots of
our own people
and they had the butcher shops just like over there.
You couldn't
get away, so that was very wonderful to live in Queens like that
where we had all the things that we had on the other side.
My mother's cooking did not change.
She was so happy. She says, "Look,
look. I just turn this *** and there's a flame.
I don't have to put wood in the stove.
And look at this water. I can have cold water and hot water.
I don't have to go out to the well."
So I'm from that era.
Everything got easier and easier as the years go on.
Now I make the same kind of food,
so we enjoy it very, very much. I still make the strudel
that she made,
and nut bread and the doughnuts.
Whenever I bake apple strudel,
it makes me feel closer to my mother.
I almost cry
because she's gone now. She's gone from our lives
and she taught me these things and she says,
and she taught me, you know?
And I finally, after about ten tries about fifty years ago,
I finally got the dough so thin that you could read the newspaper
through
the sheets of dough,
just like the finer dough now,
that's what I make.
I make it that fit and my strudel, you cannot compare
to the strudel that you know.
My strudel is altogether different.
It has layers. In between each layer there's fruit
My strudel,
each layer is like a jelly-roll type layer with
very, very thin layers
Each layer is filled with the fruit.
The blueberries, the apples, the strawberries. Everything that you want to put in there
and it's so unique.
It's so very unique.
You've never seen that and it just tastes absolutely magnificent.
As time goes by, traditions are tested
and some links weaken as Verda Krapf has come to understand. I have gatherings in
my house
on holidays
and my relatives and my cousins, they come.
They say, "Where is the potato salad? Where is the apple strudel?"
So
if they ever come and I don't make it,
they'll say, "What's wrong with you?
Where is this?
That's why we came here," you know?
Because they themselves,
their mothers did the same thing.
They didn't want to learn.
They didn't want to learn it
because it takes too much
concentration
and doing and it takes from
beginning to end a good
five to six hours to
complete that.
I have a daughter.
She loves to eat it, but
this is a five
hour project.
None of our nieces or nephews, they love it and are interested, but they don't
want to spend five hours or all day sometimes
because they have all their careers now. They're all
college educated
and I was not, so I had the time
to learn these things.
When I was raising my daughter, my mother taught me. I had all the time
Not easy on the children, which is wonderful that they have their
careers. They don't
time to do that.
You know what I'm saying?
So that's the unfortunate because I think I'll be the last one in our
family who does this.
For some families passing down recipes through generations is simplified
by the fact that they're easy to adapt.
Nolen Ku of Hanoi, Vietnam shared a recipe from her mother and a tip that
improvising.
The recipe that I have been
passed down by my mother is the spring roll.
That is traditional Vietnamese food.
There are tons of ingredients in the spring roll.
My mother just
made it so good
that I just wanted to ask her for the recipe
and she just told me that,
"Well, first you just have to think about
who is the one that you make the name for.
The name on the spring roll is Vietnamese.
Second of all, you just go to the market and then think about them,
like if they'd like
more seafood or more beef or pork, and then you just
increase the amount of that ingredient into the
spring roll.
If you just
put a lot of love
in that spring roll, it's going to taste good."
That is the recipe I learned from my mother,
During the course of kitchen conversations,
visitors shared many stories about mothers who relish passing down recipes
to their children.
Marianne Ayelo of Westbury, New York has a different story line.
She grew up in a large Italian-American family that gathered at her grandparents'
home every Sunday for dinner,
but while her own mother loved sharing favorite dishes with her family,
for most of her life she held back the secrets of how she prepared them.
Over the last few years my mother's gotten more and more willing to share
the recipes with us because she's 84.
Up until recently she didn't want to share them. Now she's worried that when she dies no one will know
how to make them, so she's showing us how to do some of the recipes she never showed us to do
before. And I actually have a lot of cookbooks. For years I made her tomato sauce
and I never came out
the way
her's did and finally she
told me that she puts a little vermouth in her sauce, but she only told us
that very, very recently.
So she has all these little tricks that she's finally sharing with us, but
nothing's written down and the only way to really learn is to do it with her
because even if she tells you orally,
sometimes she skips a step.
But when she's actually doing it, she doesn't skip the step.
Cooking is a dynamic expression of human creativity.
We transform ingredients,
giving rise to a fantastic diversity of recipes, tools,
techniques, sense, and cuisines.
Even so-called signature dishes may come in hundreds of varieties.
Stephanie Rothchild of New York City tells a story about her brother's
revelation about chicken soup.
I'm Jewish, and
chicken soup traditionally in Jewish lore is yellow.
In my family, the chicken soup is red.
So my great grandparents came from Lithuania.
My grandmother made
her family's chicken soup recipe, which was red, which had tomatoes in it.
When my brother was at Harvard, he belonged to, I guess it was Hasty Pudding
Cooking Club,
and they took turns doing
traditional meals. And so he wanted to do a
traditional Jewish meal. He was in the middle of exams or whatever, he had
papers to write and so my mother suggested that
she'd tell him how to make the matzo balls, but that he could go
to a Jewish deli to get the soup.
So he made the matzo balls and went to the deli.
He called my mother
hysterical and he said, "Something's wrong. I went to serve it and the soup was yellow."
He had never seen yellow chicken soup before.
Throughout time various spices and foods
from chili peppers to citrus fruit have been used as medicines.
Kisrahm Turat, a museum employee, who
grew up in Trinidad
shares here go-to remedy.
I'm excited to share this recipe with everyone because it works very
well
for the flu,
cough, and cold.
This is the turmeric. You boil
half a teaspoon
with about
this amount of
ginger. You shred it. You shred the ginger
and you put half a teaspoon of turmeric,
you put
like half a gallon
of milk.
Then I put this,
which is an Indian spice, cardamom.
You put it in the milk. You get everything ready in the milk before you put it on like for
the boiling process.
You know, nutmeg,
I take the grater and grate the nutmeg,
only so much because it's
so high in flavor.
Then I put
cinnamon sticks.
I drop one or two.
You know, clover?
And you bring it to a boil. You boil it at medium-heat.
You have to stand by the pot because you know it rises
and can make a mess all over the stove.
You boil it down for 10 minutes.
It clears your sinuses.
All the nasal drip is like
you need to go
to the sink and blow your nose.
You know? Because you start with this nasal drip.
It clears your sinuses. It works very well for the sinuses.
All these stuff work very well for the cold and the cough.
If you have the cough and it just started, it's gone after you drink this.
It's works very well. You don't need to go to the doctor.
It is like a local medicine.
If you have a sore throat, it works very well for the sore throat also.
If food soothes the body, it also speaks to the heart,
evoking strong memories of feeling loved.
Michael Epps, a security guard at the museum, tells of the strong associations
of one particular meal.
It's a childhood memory of my mother.
She cooks my favorite dish, which was chicken and dumplings.
From my childhood all the way up to my
older years, every time when I went to visit her, I always knew she was going to have it
for me whenever I came to visit.
It's my favorite dish.
My aunt's make it and a
cousin makes it,
but nothing tastes like my mom's chicken and dumplings.
It's a stew chicken.
It's stewed and then it gets that little gravy in it.
Then you put the dumplings inside. That gives it that flavor.
And I always liked it.
My mother's not with us anymore, but I knew,
if there's a heaven and I got there,
she would have a pot of the chicken and dumplings waiting for me as soon as i
got there.
Thanks for joining us for Kitchen Conversations,
the special exhibition for Global Kitchen:
Food, Nature, Culture is open at the American Museum of Natural History
through August 11th 2013.
If you'd like to share an image of what food means to you, whether it's the
strangest meal you'd ever had
or remembering your family gathered around the dinner table,
post your photo to Instagram
with the hash tag celebrate food
and include a brief caption.
Your photo could be selected to be featured in the exhibition.
For more information about the exhibition
visit amnh.org