Family Cookbooks: Stories Worth Reading
You likely have a personal collection of recipes that you come back to time and time again: an assortment of recipe cards or bunch of random pieces of paper or magazine cut-outs or Post-it notes. You might be one of those people who has put together a beautifully scrapbooked collection or purposely purchased one of those kits with matching pages and colours. You might have a digital collection in the form of a Pinterest board, or tabs saved in your internet browser or pages that you keep open in your phone. You might have a collection of cookbooks in your home with only one or two recipes that you like but, rather than copying the recipes down somewhere else, you keep the books because you like them.
Imagine for a moment that a curious someone combed through these recipes. A culinary detective of sorts. What would your cookbooks and the recipes you love say about you? What stories would they tell? What web of connections would they be able to build? What evidence does your book hold about who you are? Your dreams? Your preferences?
In 2013, I published an article in Cuizine: The Journal of Canadian Food Culture/Revue des cultures culinaires au Canada called “Cooking Up Change: Family Cookbooks as Markers of Shifting Kitchen Politics.” In it, I analysed a cookbook I had made for my cousin’s wedding. This scrapbooky-vibed present was a compilation of recipes from both her and her fiancé’s families. I received a lot of submissions: family favourites that ranged from “Seapie Rochefort” to “Soupe à l’oignon” to “Jane’s Shrimp Dip” to an “Andrew” – a tortilla shell buttered with peanut butter and rolled around a banana sent in by my seven-year-old cousin. Family members old and young contributed to make sure the couple started with “the ‘best’ of both sides.”
The article I wrote for Cuizine discussed the ways in which family cookbooks root individual family members to a family tree. Each recipe contributes to the roots have shaped the family trees this new couple are part of. Each one shows the other what matters to members of each side. In a family cookbook like the one I made my cousin, one can instantly see whether or not ideas of good food are compatible or if they will need to be negotiated.
Negotiating food choices is precisely what happened in many of the culturally mixed homes of the people I interviewed for MA and PhD. In many cases, these families saw an assimilation of food habits whereby some foods were dropped, and others were adopted. One example that came up was kale; not a common food item in the area at the time the participant was growing up, but that the family planted in their garden because it mattered to her Dutch father. Another example was kohlrabi. This member of the cabbage family was something my German Canadian father grew up with, but that never made it onto my plate as a child. Sometimes, it’s clear, foods are adopted and other times they disappear.
Negotiating tastes is of course something everyone does when they make food for others – parents modify food for their kids and people look to please others through what they serve – but when those food choices are repeated over and over, when some foods disappear from the menu entirely, then there is something bigger happening. One’s menu reinforces culture by making it not only seen, but also consumed in the home. Even when people don’t speak that culture’s language, the food steps in to show everyone present what really matters.
As mentioned in past posts, I use the word tradition to talk about something that has become a part of a person or group’s identity. Food that has become traditional is food that people expect, long for, or dread.
My PhD research focused mainly on French-Canadian/Franco-Ontarian cultural foods because I was interested in understanding how traditional food choices were like and unlike choices about language. Much research has been done on the assimilation of the French language and culture (see below for a list of scholars and scholarly words) by a dominant, anglophone majority. Stemming from government-imposed assimilation practices like Regulation 17, French speakers in Ontario have long been fighting for linguistic equality in our bilingual country. Is it possible, I wondered, that resistance was also happening in the kitchen? Is it possible (even fair), I wondered given my own German-Canadian identity, to consider one’s self part of a cultural group when one only has a rudimentary knowledge of the language? How does food help resist against or support cultural and linguistic assimilation?
The first part of an answer to these questions in understanding the power food has to unite and/or isolate. Like me, you probably already know that we can learn about people and culture through food. It’s why people like to eat local foods when they travel. But you’ve maybe never considered the extent to which food within a family or a community could be used to include and/or exclude others.
In her study of community cookbooks, Anne Bower identifies two types of narratives (or plots) that relate to food’s ability to either resist or embrace assimilation. In cookbooks that promote a differentiation plot, authors define “themselves in some way different from other women… the difference they stress may be professional, ethnic, religious, or geographic… women using this plot give equal weight to their membership within a special ‘different’ subgroup and their assimilation into the wider society” (see p. 40 of “Cooking Up Stories: Narrative Elements in Community Cookbooks” in Recipes for Reading Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories).
In an integration plot, contributors present “a communal autobiography of social acceptance and achievement… propos[ing] a story of the authors achieving assimilation and status through their acceptance of the larger society’s conventions and standards” (page 38).
We’ve already looked at one instance where food can be used to include or include. In “Peach Pie and Pie Crusts – How Food Creates Identity,” I showed how pie was used to reinforce the picnic as a French-Canadian meal. In this instance, we can see that pie is a means to differentiate and also unite. In my cousin’s cookbook, the women, men, and children work together to integrate the couple into their respective families by showing how the recipes are connected to other family members, by showing what type of behaviour is expected of good hosts, by sharing traits and characteristics about the person being married.
We’ll look at other examples of differentiation and integration plots in future posts. For now, I encourage you to pull out your own “cookbook” and see what it says about you. Where do your recipes come from? What stories do you share when you make your favourite foods? How do the stains and wrinkles tell the reader about what you like? What recipes have you included that you no longer make?
Sources for those interested in learning more about the political struggle for French-language schools and the right to public services in French:
Bernard, Roger De Québecois à Ontarois: La communauté francopho-ontarienne (Hearst: Nordir, 1988).
Belliveau, Joel. “Cinq représentations savantes de la francophonie des Amériques – réflexions autour d’un ouvrage recent,” Minorités linguistiques et société / Linguistic Minorities and Society, No. 3 (2013).
Breton, Raymond. “Modalités d’appartenance aux francophonies minoritaires. Essai de typologie,” Sociologie et sociétés vol. 23, no. 1 (1994): 59‐69.
Cardinal, Linda et Jean Lapointe, “La sociologie des Francophones hors Québec : un parti-pris pour l’autonomie,” Canadian ethnic studies vol. 22, no. 1 (1990): 47‐66.
Dumont, Fernand. “Essor et déclin du Canada français” Recherches sociographiques vol. 38, no. 3, (1997): 419-467.
Farmer, Diane. Artisans de la modernité. Les centres culturels de l’Ontario français. Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1996.
Farmer, Diane et Jeff Poirier. “La société et les réalités francophones en Ontario.” Francophonies minoritaires au Canada — L’état des lieux, 265- 281. Edited by J. Yvon Thériault. Moncton: Les Éditions d’Acadie, 1999.
Sources for those interested in learning more about the arrival of the French in Canada and their history in Canada:
Frenette, Yves. Brève histoire des Canadiens français. Montréal: Boréal, 1998.
Gervais, Gaétan. “L’histoire de l’Ontario français” Francophonies minoritaires au Canada — L’état des lieux, 145-161. Edited by J. Yvon Thériault. Moncton: Les Éditions d’Acadie, 1999.
Gilbert, Anne. “L’Ontario français comme région: un regard non assimilationniste sur une minorité, son espace et ses réseaux” Cahiers de géographie du Québec vol. 35, no. 96 (1991): 501-512.
Heller, Monica. “Du français comme ‘droit’ au français comme ‘valeur ajoutée’: de la politique à l’économique au Canada” Langue et société 136 (June) 2011: 13-30
Heller, Monica. “Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4), 2003: 473-492.
Heller, Monica. ”’Langue’, ‘communauté’ et identité’: le discours expert et la question du français au Canada,” Anthroplogie et Sociétés 31, 1 (2007): 39-54.
Juteau, Danielle. “Français d’Amérique, Canadiens, Canadiens français, Franco-Ontariens, Ontarois : qui sommes-nous?” L’ethnicité et ses frontières, 39-60. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1999.
Martel, Marcel. Le deuil d’un pays imagine: Rêves, lutes et déroutes du Canada français: Les rapports entre le Québec et la francophonie canadienne (1867-1975). Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1997.
Savard, Pierre. “Relation avec le Québec.” Les Franco-Ontariens, 231-263. Edited by Cornelius J. Jaenen. Ottawa: Les presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1993.
Thériault, Joseph Yvon. “Ethnolinguistic minorities and national integration in Canada” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 185 (2007): 255–263.
Thériault, Joseph Yvon. “Les francophonies minoritaires: entre le fait minoritaire et la dualité nationale” Québec 2001, 186-189. Edited by Roch Coté. Montréal: FIDES, 2000.
Joseph Yvon Thériault, and E. Martin Meunier. “Que reste-t-il de l’intention vitale du Canada français?” accessed March 3, 2014. http://www.chaire-mcd.uqam.ca/upload/files/Publications/JYT/2008-Intention-vitale.pdf.
Welch, David. “La collectivité franco-ontarienne : une présence historique liée à son développement socioéconomique” Francophonie d’Amérique 20 (2005): 123-132.
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