Episode 34: Food Lore | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/foodstudies/chapter/green-bean-casserole/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodways
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fyqvRw5epvyYKIfr6FphbcEp3Hu5Tbm4/view
https://roadtrippers.com/magazine/kentucky-haunted-distilleries/
https://unbound.com/books/folklore/
https://unbound.com/books/a-gothic-cookbook/
Food! Ok, so my research for this one was a little convoluted and as is the case with most of my poor life decisions, it started with a book.
I checked out The Best American Food Writing Anthology - 2019 edited by Samin Nosrat from the library and have been slowly working my way through and the essays inside got me to start thinking about food as a reflection of culture rather than trying to find individual food folklore stories. And I know the stuff I found is probably 101 level anthropology or sociology stuff but I didn’t have the vocabulary for this idea before my research and maybe some of our listeners will also learn something today. Can’t know what you don’t know before you find out, right?
So first I want to define a new word I learned that is hitting on something in my brain so I feel like we may have brought this up in a previous episode and my brain decided to just not put in the effort to build the long term memory, “foodways”. Per the wikipedia article because that’s always my jumping off point, foodways are “the cultural, social, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food.” The term is often used to discuss the intersection of food in culture, traditions, and history.
So with that in mind, I found two articles by Lucy M. Long titled “Green Bean Casserole: Commercial Foods as Regional Tradition” and “Green Bean Casserole and Midwestern Identity: A Regional Foodways Aesthetic and Ethos”. These essays discuss the logic behind the tradition of the green bean casserole at the Thanksgiving table, specifically through the lens of cultural relativism, that is judging a practice by the function and meaning given to it by the culture it’s a part of, not judging based on the morals and values of your own culture.
Ok, so what I loved about this is the examination of why the midwest gravitates towards industrial food products and ease, in contrast with food traditions in, say, the American South that prioritize everything being made from scratch. So when you think about the midwest, sure once the swampy land in areas like northwest Ohio were drained in the 1800s the resulting available land was rich and fertile. But the midwest is home to some truly gnarly weather. Think cold cold winters, hot hot summers, and enough tornadoes to give the name “tornado alley” to a section of the midwest. So Lucy M. Long posits that this leads to a cultural view of nature as something to be tamed and controlled rather than worked with.
Enter canned foods and convenience foods. Not only are these the perfect example of “we controlled and contained the nature around us for our own use”, it plays on the Calvanist values of the dominant settler culture in the area. Consistent, easy foods that keep in the pantry guarantee that all food will be eaten rather than wasted.
There are more details and examples in these two articles so I highly recommend reading them if you are at all interested in learning more. This is just one of those topics that I am so so happy I found and learned more about because I don’t think I would have ever made the connection between canned foods and cultural views on weather, but now I have a rabbit hole I can’t wait to dive down in the free time I don’t have.
And of course, because I’m me, I had to find something a little on the creepier side. So to end my food in folklore segment I want to talk about bourbon distillery ghost sightings. Specifically today the reported ghost sightings at Buffalo Trace distillery here in KY. Author Liz Carey.
Buffalo Trace was founded in 1792 and claims to be the oldest continuously operating distillery in the United States. Colonel Albert B. Blanton was president of Buffalo Trace during Prohibition and kept the distillery in business by doing his best to corner the market on “medicinal” bourbon production. Remember, during Prohibition you could get a prescription for bourbon from your physician. And if you believe several staff members and visitors, Colonel Blanton never left.
Visitors and staff have reported hearing mumbled voices and sounds of people moving and milling about concentrated in the area where Blanton’s office was located. And when the show Ghost Hunters came to film they identified the ghostly presences as Blanton and several of his former employees.
Tour guide Lindsey Brewer recounted a tour she gave where she encountered something. She says she was leading a tour group of about 30 people in the rickhouse and discussing the reported ghost sightings when she heard a voice from behind her say the word “rye”. No one was behind her, she and the tour group were the only people in the rickhouse. And to make it even creepier, at least to me, the group agreed they heard it too.
So like, we’re going to go on a tour right? Frankfort’s not that bad a drive, my aunt used to commute every day. Let’s go share a drink with a ghost!
And since we are discussing food in folklore, there are two books that I am super excited for that I want to mention here so that we can all read them and talk about them together. Like a Graveyard Gals book club.
The first is A Feast of Folklore by Ben Gazur. The second is A Gothic Cookbook by Ella Buchan and Alessandra Pino with illustrations by Lee Henry. Both have been fully funded on Unbound and I am SO READY to read them. Man, if we ever do get our butts in gear and start a patreon I think a book club is 1000% in order.
Corinne’s Notes:
https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type1626.html
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/food-myths-from-around-the-world
https://www.terriwindling.com/blog/2014/12/the-folklore-of-food.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolobok
https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/10rdzlf/hungarian_mythology_meets_urban_fantasy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barleycorn
https://www.arcanum.com/hu/online-kiadvanyok/Lexikonok-magyar-neprajzi-lexikon-71DCC/k-72CDA/kenyer-panasza-a-72E4D/ (i ran this thru google translate)
I will be wildly honest, I had ZERO idea of where to start on Food Folklore. While I recognize the role of food in folk culture, it’s not really my thing? Which is a weird thing to say as someone who enjoys cooking and eating food from other cultures. BUT! About a week ago, I saw a tumblr post referencing “Bread magic” in Hungarian folklore. It was an extremely lyrical and evocative post and I knew I was gonna have to see if this was An Actual Thing(™). So I started searching, and while I found A LOT about folklore and folk traditions surrounding bread, I could not seem to find anything regarding this Hungarian bread magic. Thankfully, I’m stubborn as hell, and eventually found the tumblr post being discussed on a reddit forum (i never use reddit, so this was a surprising turn of events), and while some Hungarian members of the forum said they weren’t immediately familiar, some of the phrasing rang a bell. Someone linked to a Hungarian page that I had to run through Google Translate because I don’t read Hungarian, and the page referenced The Bread’s Complaint and The Devil and the Bread. Basically bread complains a ton about its lot in life. First its seeds are BURIED IN THE GROUND! The horror! When it sprouts, it’s cruelly cut down, threshed, and ground. It gets punched about (kneaded) and then thrown into a hot oven, and then it’s eaten. But worst of all, sometimes it gets baked TWICE! In the bread’s complaint, the bread is telling all of this to Jesus, who takes pity on the bread, and this is why some cultures don’t toast their bread. In the devil and the bread, the devil wants to take a poor person (or possibly that person’s child), and the person uses the bread as his spokesman. If the devil can endure all of the shit the bread endured, then sure, the devil can drag the person off to hell. To quote the way the Tumblr post ended it, “Until you do all these things and survive, you have no power here.” which is just. Chef’s kiss, really.
Interestingly! The same Reddit thread introduced me to a similar story in English and Scottish folklore- John Barleycorn. Though our buddy John Barleycorn is best known from poems and ballads, and instead of being about bread, he’s booze. Which. I love it. Scottish poet Robert Burns has one of the better known versions of the poem, and there are many, many recordings of the ballad and its variants.
