Traditions

What makes food ours?

Warning: this letter mentions racially motivated violence.

Dear Bread,

What makes a food traditional? Do you, bread dear, feel attached to the habitual ways we make and use you?

As I grew interested in writing about food, I felt guilty that I couldn’t mine a deep vein of family food connections. I am an American mutt with indistinct links to my Irish and Polish heritage, and this made me feel like I didn't have anything authentic to say.

These feelings came front of mind when my son Francis turned 25(!!). He requested a Lunar New Year cake, Nian gao, as he and his brother have for many years. This puzzles me. Shouldn't my kids want a standard yellow cake with chocolate frosting, which I often made when they were young? I’m way into wheat, right — so making a cake with glutinous rice flour seems odd. Plus, I feel strange because we have no Asian legacy.

Yet we do have a family history of celebrating Lunar New Year. My mom taught at a cooperative nursery school on the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and many of the families involved were Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese. With the kids, my mom made a long paper dragon and after each year's school celebrations, she brought it home for us.

When I had my own family, she continued the tradition with her grandchildren, who loved to smack pans with wooden spoons and march around the first floor of the house. At the library, I was excited to find The Runaway Rice Cake, a picture book with recipes for baked and steamed Niangao. I loved to read the book with Francis, and pretend chase him through our apartment as if he were the cake in the story, trying to escape the family that’s made him.

The cover of ‘The Runaway Rice Cake” features three Chinese boys chasing Niangao.

Cakes seem generational. My dad always wanted war surplus cake, which is the same as wacky cake — a chocolate cake that has no eggs or butter — and he only ever wanted white icing. Any kind of riffing was off limits for his birthday. My mother always wants a yellow cake with chocolate frosting, and she is not strict about the recipe. It just has to be good.

I thought I would pass a taste for her cake on to my children, but the boys love Niangao, which is a single, dense spongy layer, served without frosting. I used rosewater this time, and we saluted Francis with a breakfast picnic at Radix, the sustainability center where he works.

A long-haired Francis & his bearded dad hug as they sit eating quiche on a green tablecloth.

Thinking about how attached my kids are to this cake, I realize that our experiences with food build our traditions — not necessarily our bloodlines. I’m still conscious about appropriation, but I don’t want to doubt the strength of my kids’ personal ties to this cake, or other foods they affiliate with home.

I got another lesson in this making cookies this weekend. The Glo bar was named by and for Gloria, who ran a restaurant in Troy 35+ years ago. She was a nurse who had always dreamed of opening a little lunch spot, and after a bout of cancer went into remission, she did just that. This was one of the first places I worked, and it was only open for lunch on weekdays. I can still picture making the tuna salad with grapes, and the chicken salad with apples and walnuts. I can feel myself standing in the kitchen, reading the handwritten index card recipes, measuring the mayonnaise and yogurt mixture for the dressing, stirring in salt and pepper.

I chose this recipe for an event with YWCA of the Greater Capital Region. We — poets D. Colin, Marci Nelligan and I — have been working with the Y on a presentation about Troy’s Black Past, Present and Future. I wrote about Troy’s Draft Riots, when a mob of 2-3000 white people thronged the city, raging against conscription in the Union Army. Troy’s African-American residents were terrorized, but no one died here, although many were killed in New York City’s Draft Riots.

This horrible history is not often recalled, yet it is part of our fabric. If we want to put our architecture and industries on a pedestal, I think we need to remember the mistakes we’d rather forget.

I made cookies to sweeten the night, and decided on the Glo Bars because they were very Troy to me. This city introduced them to me, and I’ve woven them into my life, remembering them in new ways as I’ve grown. Last year’s raspberry jam and applesauce made a sweet pillow between the shortbread crust and the caramelly eggy-nutty topping. So does peach butter, and stewed rhubarb. The crust takes whole grain flours nicely — I made one batch with cornmeal/rye and another with einkorn/whole wheat.

Recipes are pieces of history we adapt to current moments. I’m sure there’s a lesson here about adapting memories and remembrances to serve everyone, not just the story we want to tell, but I can’t yet articulate it.

We are making the zine about the Draft Riots into a PDF, and I’ll let you know when that is available to read.

In the meantime, I encourage you to think with me about food traditions and how you come by them, and how the recipes change in your hands.

Yours,

Amy

Upcoming grain & baking events:

Two virtual classes offered by the Bread Bakers Guild of America really appeal to me: Joe Bowie’s class about how to use your body as a baker tomorrow night, May 11, and June Russell’s panel about millers — including Jill Brockman-Cummings of Janie's Mill, Jennifer Lapidus of Carolina Ground and Emma Zimmerman of Hayden Mill on June 6. Register for them here.

The Kneading Conference July 26-28 in Skowhegan, Maine. I’m really excited for this! Don Guerra of Barrio Bread is keynote, and lots of flour all-stars are coming: miller Emma Zimmerman, baker Tara Jensen, Lost Bread’s Alex Bois, Wordloaf wonder Andrew Janjigian, Modernist Pizza’s Stephanie Swane & Jacqueline Eng from Partybus Bakeshop. I wanted to be with them so much that I invented a class called THINKING ABOUT BAKING: a study of ingredients that explores how changing types and quantities of the basics play out in quick bread variations running from sweet to savory. Breakfast cookies will get a tour, too.