When the Party is Over

 

"The party is over," declared CNN Business last week. ABC News chimed in: Tupperware "lifts the lid" on its financial woes as it voluntarily initiated Chapter 11 proceedings on September 17. Known for its "once iconic" plastic food storage containers, developed post-World War II to "help war-weary families save money on costly food waste," the company has faced a combination of financial downturns through dwindling sales and rising costs of raw materials and shipping. 

While readers of A Family Tapestry may not be so interested in the latest financial news, those of us fascinated with family ephemera and material culture may pick out a useful strand in the theme of passing traditions once held dear by our more recent ancestors. How many of us can recall a mother or grandmother who attended a Tupperware party? Or taught us how to "burp" a Tupperware lid? While we are not talking about long-forgotten culture of our great-great-grandmothers, this, too, belongs to the collection of items of day-to-day living that are, before our eyes, passing into the heap of forgotten historic trivia.

While we are chasing those elusive brick-wall ancestors of prior centuries, we can't forget that we may be the missing link to passing along the minutiae of life familiar to the "ancestors" we, ourselves, knew personally. I'm encouraged when I see bloggers like Sheryl Lazarus intent on not only sharing the writings of her own grandmother in her blog, but delving deeper into the day-to-day details of that grandmother's life, surroundings, and culture.

Take, for instance, her focus on a devil's food cake from her grandmother's diary and an updated version, compared in her February 27, 2012, blog post in A Hundred Years Ago. Taking a magnifying glass to the details of our near ancestors' lives may be enlightening—possibly even helping us understand them a little bit more. After all, can you, for instance, name all fifty seven of Heinz's "varieties"? If your life was filled with versions of this Heinz advertisement a hundred years ago, perhaps you could. Surely your grandmother could.

These are the too-little-to-notice details which filled our near-ancestors' days, the ephemeral traces of what life was like for them. Too quickly gone, spotting such details, for the ones who lived them, would bring back memories just as surely as hearing a strain from one of the top-forty hits from your high school years might flood you with an avalanche of reminiscences.

So, yeah, while Tupperware may be having its financial woes—not to mention detractors of plastic manufacturing in general—what we are seeing before our very eyes might be the passing of an era, an institution so familiar to our own parents and grandparents that it became almost invisible for its ubiquity in their lives. While clutching a Tupperware bowl would certainly not bring back to life a cherished grandmother, we can at least vicariously live a small part of her reality through these now-fleeting tokens which once made her life's everyday routine what it was.

Sticking With the Traditional

After spending the past two months pondering over my Polish roots, the thought occurred to me: what are the traditional Polish foods that I've been missing out on? After all, most "hyphenated" Americans still talk about the comfort foods of their childhood. All the Italian-Americans I've known since growing up in my neighborhood wax rapturous about their grandmother's top-secret recipes. The same seemed to go for any of the other neighbors from recent immigrant status. My family? Not a peep about favorite foods from their childhood. Of course not; they were flying under the radar, trying to look like traditional Americans.

So for my childhood, despite having an undercover Polish-American father who loved to cook, events like Thanksgiving were, well, traditional. Taking great care to prepare a delectable turkey dinner, my parents included the dressing, the gravy, the cranberry sauce, the mashed potatoes, the candied yams much like I suspect all our neighbors did on that same day.

This year, after delving deeper into my Polish roots, I began wondering just how a Polish-American might put a twist on the traditional meal, so I took a look online for suggestions. There were indeed others whose musings on the same topic translated into interesting recipes. One online source provided some "Polish-inspired ideas" for a twist on the traditional Thanksgiving meal. Another writer who actually is Polish, but married an American, was inspired to introduce her relatives back home in Szczecin, Poland, to the American custom—then thought of fifteen different recipes which would "Polish" the traditional Thanksgiving fare.

Though the photos accompanying such articles make me hungry to try them, as for this most traditional of American holidays, I think I'll remain close to the same recipes I've repeated year after year. These, too, have become a tradition of their own as we re-invent them to suit our own purposes and taste buds.

No matter which way you choose to celebrate this day of giving thanks, I hope you enjoy it with loved ones who bestow meaning to the season for you—and in remembrance of those whose choices have brought you to where you are today. Whether we ever learn their full story or whether they kept the secret to themselves until the end, they are part of what makes us what we are.

The Food Less Eaten

 

Our travels are not over yet. Less than twenty four hours after landing at the San Francisco International Airport, we were back to pick up another traveler. During rush hour. Wonderful.

Anyone who has been stuck on the road during the commute hour knows the only way to avoid stop-and-go traffic woes is to pull off the road and enjoy an early dinner. So we did. 

On the menu was something so pedestrian, a lesser man might have passed over the suggestion, but not my husband. He noticed a slight twist to the usually-mundane details of a pepperoni pizza, and asked: is it any good? Our waitress, a jovial and energetic spokesperson for her enterprise, had no idea, so the only option was to give this less usual option a try.

There wasn't much to be said for the proposed addition of "hot honey" to a flatbread rendition of a pepperoni pizza. The honey wasn't hot by virtue of spices, just due to a warming process. It didn't seem to detract from the dough—nor, for that matter, for dipping the pepperoni slices directly into the honey—but let's say it didn't really augment the experience, either. I'd wager this will become one of the foods less eaten on that restaurant's unique menu offerings.

The experience served to shove my mind down a rabbit trail of thoughts about food and family. After all, it is the holiday season, a time rich with regional food traditions. I couldn't help but recall author Gena Philibert-Ortega's comments that we can often discern our family's roots simply by observing some of the traditional foods served during holidays.

While that may be helpful advice for some, it certainly does no good for someone in my shoes. One of our family's favorite treats for Christmas is a pastry known as struffoli. Hint: unlike our family, those sweet honey balls don't come from Poland. They don't even come from Ireland, the place my paternal grandfather tried to convince everyone was his family's homeland. But they did come from my neighbor's kitchen during the Christmas season. At least I can guess where her family originated.

Now that I do know where my patriline once resided, I thought I'd review some articles on just what might have shown up on the dining room table during the Christmas season in Poland. Thankfully, there are some helpful online resources out there to fill me in on just what I've been missing for dinner that my Polish distant cousins still get to enjoy. Clue: other than Pierogi—a dish with a name recognized by many in North America, whether Polish or not—none of those recipes sounded familiar to me.

I did pick up the article's hint that not everyone in Poland ate exactly the same traditional foods. Aha! I thought: maybe the reason those dishes don't sound familiar to me is that my grandfather didn't just come from Poland, he came from Pomerania. Maybe the Christmas treats were different up north.

Nope. Nothing from at least this one overview of Pomeranian Christmas traditions rang a bell—at least, not a dinner bell. All it did was remind me of how much I'd love to find a shop close by that sold struffoli, but the closest store I could find was located—as you may have guessed—in New York City. 

True, I know my sister will take on the labor-intensive job of mixing up a batch for her Cuban-born husband and their family and friends. And maybe two or three decades from now, the fallout from that annual venture will be descendants and kids of family friends who will wonder why the pastries of Naples feature more prominently in their holiday traditions than do the treats of their own ancestors' homeland. 

Maybe it will be that the foods less eaten in that special season turn out to be the cabbage rolls of family food history's cluster genealogy, and the new favorites will be the ones we adopt from the "Neighbors" part of the genealogical F.A.N. Club. If I don't know anything else about why my paternal family chose to ditch their Polish holiday food traditions, at least I can now tell you what part of Italy my neighbor's grandparents once called home.

Leftovers, Anyone?

After a day like yesterday—Thanksgiving Day, for those of us in the U.S.—perhaps you are already turning green at the thought of a week yet to come of turkey leftovers.

I'm not, at our home. Though we definitely overcook—a twenty pound bird for only three of us—we have finally found a response to the dilemma of leftovers. My husband, whose immediate family history put him growing up in restaurants—working, not dining—has a tradition of cleaning the bird immediately after dinner, then saving it for the stock pot the next morning. He roasts the bones in the oven with some vegetables, then sets up his gigantic stock pot and begins the simmering process of making turkey broth.

We freeze multiple containers of this broth for soups throughout the winter, of course. But over the years, we've also discovered that we can chop up all that leftover turkey and freeze a good portion of it in each of those soup containers. Makes for some hearty soups and helps us avoid dry turkey leftover syndrome.

Maybe at your house, you do things differently. I know some people pull out, at the other end of the feast day, feeling somewhat like their next step should be this:

Dietotherapy? Maybe that's not for you. Maybe your approach is to grit your teeth and persevere through one hundred iterations of turkey leftovers. Pretty soon, though, you'll get desperate enough for that new variation on the theme that makes you wish you could have found a recipe book like this, only for turkey instead of oysters:

In case you're wondering, I would never recommend considering Turkey à la mode—nor oysters. But I suppose everyone needs to find her own path. I hope your sensible plan for recuperating from yesterday's feast suits you just fine, and you are now on to a sensible plan for avoiding today's madness at department stores everywhere.

And if you are just the type to be curious as to how our ancestors used to prepare their feasts—whether fancy or fulfilling—you might be interested in the trove of thousands of old cookbooks assembled at Internet Archive. Old church recipe books, even. It proved to be a fascinating diversion for me the other afternoon—though I have yet to find that church cookbook with all the wonderful treats my mother baked when I was growing up. Who knows, maybe someone will upload even that little paperback ladies' fundraiser to the Internet, eventually.