Continuing a tradition may come with pressure, but when a habit is picked up and executed, it's because someone wants that moment to happen. Making traditional food is often driven by a desire to share something special with others. My Valentine's Day cupcake tradition helps us learn about that "want."

Is making more traditional foods one of your New Year’s resolutions? Here are some tips for getting you started on the right foot!

Recipe offer important biographical clues because they show cultural, linguistic, and family influences. Here are some steps for how to read a recipe using three versions of one of our family's traditional desserts: "Christmas Cake" aka "Advent Cake" aka "Coffee Cake" aka "Pfefferkuchen auf dem Blech." Try reading your own recipes and see what you'll discover about yourself!

Decoy foods are an important way for parents to share important cultural traditions. Pfefferkuchen is just enough like Lebkuchen that it can be used to disguise the important culinary practice of making Saint Nicholas Day cookies.

Personal and family cookbooks tells us a lot about the person who compiled the recipes and the people who contributed to the collection. Read more about the ways in which your cookbook shows your connection and distance from others.

Chow chow like so many other foods we take for granted, has the power to show who we are. When I serve this for guests, they learn about the area, and we compare different regions of the province and even the world. This food has the power to show us where we’ve come from, what matters to us today, what possibilities exist, and which don’t.

Studying traditional food? Autoethnography may be one of the elements in your researching toolkit. This post explains some of the pros and cons of autoethnography, giving examples from my own researching experience. It also offers a list of key texts to consult to help you with your own project.

Defining what is and is not a traditional food is not easy. Traditions are complex. They have origins we may or may not know and they are part of stories that evolve over time. Yet, a working definition of "traditional food" is something I've developed.

In many ways, food is as political a project as building roads or erecting buildings. We create major events around food and a closer look at how food can be used to identify a person or a group is an important aspect of studying culture. Peache, pies, and picnics may not seem political, but they are ways that groups establish and maintain cultural norms.

If you’re reading this blog, it’s likely because you’re interested in how food makes you feel. You might want to know more about how food connects individuals or you’re curious about your own food habits or traditions. If you’re here, it’s that you likely already recognize that we all speak a food language: an internalized repertoire of what constitutes good and bad food. Just like any other language, we all have our own accents and dialects.

If you’ve gone berry picking in the wild, you know that doing so is like embarking on a magical journey that you are the hero. You start on the edge of that liminal space between the sunny, open field and the thick, shoulder high bush. The first berries are small, but you can see the next ones, just a few steps in. The clumps are thicker there. You move slowly, tentatively so you don’t knock them all down. Each new step shows you more and more fruit that always seem bigger, riper, redder from far away than they do when you get there. Urged on by the quest to get the best yield, you move toward the next clump and the next one, sweeping aside thorny stalks, side-stepping spider webs, dodging thistles, and battling mosquitoes and deerflies to triumphantly fill your bucket. Before you know it, the maze you’ve created has erased your starting place. You have to follow your path back out, careful that you don’t accidentally tip your bucket over as you itch at the shallow scratches the bushes have left on your bare arms. You meet up with the others who have all taken their own routes and compare your journeys: the quantity and size of the berries, the objects that you discovered that had been lost to the invasive plants like rusty, old farm parts or discarded household items. You create stories about what the objects could be, who used them, why they were left to rot, who lived on this property, what they did, where they could be now.

When I think of “tradition” I think of Fiddler on the Roof and my mom. I think of decorations, people, noise, and, always, food. Pretzels, Lebkuchen, tourtière, cipaille, pies... How did I get into studying traditional foods? Why should anyone care about traditional foods? Join me as I share my origin story into the creation of Franglisch Foods.