Thoughts on Thanksgiving dinner menus
Jun. 19th, 2021 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brooksmosesI know it's not the right time of year for this, but this is something that's been bumping around in my head for a couple of years and came up again when I was driving home for a half-hour this afternoon.
The general idea is to do with the Thanksgiving menu something like Passover does with the dishes traditionally explained in the Haggadah: for each item, there is a meaning and a story. Thanksgiving is one of the main holidays in my family culture; now that I've moved away from that (sub)culture it feels important to consciously preserve the meaning, and it also feels important to engage with the aspects that are problematic.
This is tied into a lot of pondering at who one considers ancestors. Most of my genetic ancestors are North Carolinians of European descent, primarily English and perhaps Welsh -- names like Scarborough and Upchurch and Wicker have obvious heritage, and Moses was a name taken by English and Welsh religious dissenters against the Anglican Church. The ones I know of have been in America for generations, and so perhaps there is someone Black or Native American in my genetic ancestors, though since I have no knowledge of them, I'm not sure that would matter. It seems to me that it matters more that my ancestors in the 1700s lived in a world with many interactions with Native Americans (and since then in the land that they shaped), and my ancestors in all of their time in America lived in a culture tightly interwoven with Black culture in complicated ways. Culturally these are also my ancestors. But pushing back against this erasure is fraught with the need to take care to avoid cultural appropriation, especially since much of this cultural interweaving was coerced rather than consented-to. It's a complicated issue, and I don't have good answers, but food seems like a place to start.
Menu ideas
This is all pretty rough, but here are the general ideas I am poking at. Commentary and thoughts welcome!
First, the holiday itself. Many cultures have a harvest festival of thanks for the harvest and preparing for winter; this one is ours. This particular date is ours because at the end of the Civil War, Lincoln proposed a national holiday of Thanksgiving to bring the country back together. We come together to share food, both physically and metaphorically, in recognition of community and unity.
The turkey is the traditional meat of Thanksgiving, and we eat it as a reminder of the myth of Thanksgiving -- the myth of the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Native Americans having a harvest celebration meal together, with mutual respect and peace, and the myth that the Wampanoag brought their food as a gift to the settlers to help them through the first winter. We acknowledge that this is a myth, and that this peace and respect was soon replaced with destruction and broken treaties; we mourn that some of our ancestors discarded it so completely, and we also hold it forth as an ideal to return to. And with the turkey, we remember the land and the people of it.
We have stewed okra and tomatoes -- which have never been part of my traditional Thanksgiving, but I think I'd like to add them. The okra is from Africa, and this dish is a reminder of the Black culture and people that are part of our history; we eat this to remember and honor them. Also, it's a dish my father liked (and I got the basic recipe from him), so that has personal meaning. And we might put in something here about tomatoes, and how they are American, and about the Black slave experience of being brought to a new world.
We have sweet potato pie (or perhaps casserole), because that recipe is one that I found in almost-identical forms in recipe boxes from both my mother's family and my father's family, and pie is a recipe that comes from the European heritage -- again, embracing the native sweet potatoes.
I'm still pondering at what else should be here, because objectively we need more vegetables. Biscuits are a necessity, because no meal in my traditional culture would be complete without biscuits, and also because of Suzanne's grandmother who cooked breakfast biscuits at the Red Roof Inn almost every day of her life for many years. Green beans, because they are a vegetable that was always there at Thanksgiving and similar large family meals in my family, and because of the way that my grandfather would always cook them as a point of pride and my mother would say that was because hers were better and he didn't want to admit it. Possibly a casserole of some sort, because it is the food of sharing with neighbors at church potlucks and at funerals and at moving-in and such things, and there is a lot of "who we are as people" tied up in that food-sharing. And cranberry sauce seems necessary though I don't have a good story with it -- but perhaps not every food in the meal needs a story.
So, that's what I have so far. Still very much a work in progress, and lots of handwaving, but I figured there was enough to share as the seeds of an idea anyhow.
The general idea is to do with the Thanksgiving menu something like Passover does with the dishes traditionally explained in the Haggadah: for each item, there is a meaning and a story. Thanksgiving is one of the main holidays in my family culture; now that I've moved away from that (sub)culture it feels important to consciously preserve the meaning, and it also feels important to engage with the aspects that are problematic.
This is tied into a lot of pondering at who one considers ancestors. Most of my genetic ancestors are North Carolinians of European descent, primarily English and perhaps Welsh -- names like Scarborough and Upchurch and Wicker have obvious heritage, and Moses was a name taken by English and Welsh religious dissenters against the Anglican Church. The ones I know of have been in America for generations, and so perhaps there is someone Black or Native American in my genetic ancestors, though since I have no knowledge of them, I'm not sure that would matter. It seems to me that it matters more that my ancestors in the 1700s lived in a world with many interactions with Native Americans (and since then in the land that they shaped), and my ancestors in all of their time in America lived in a culture tightly interwoven with Black culture in complicated ways. Culturally these are also my ancestors. But pushing back against this erasure is fraught with the need to take care to avoid cultural appropriation, especially since much of this cultural interweaving was coerced rather than consented-to. It's a complicated issue, and I don't have good answers, but food seems like a place to start.
Menu ideas
This is all pretty rough, but here are the general ideas I am poking at. Commentary and thoughts welcome!
First, the holiday itself. Many cultures have a harvest festival of thanks for the harvest and preparing for winter; this one is ours. This particular date is ours because at the end of the Civil War, Lincoln proposed a national holiday of Thanksgiving to bring the country back together. We come together to share food, both physically and metaphorically, in recognition of community and unity.
The turkey is the traditional meat of Thanksgiving, and we eat it as a reminder of the myth of Thanksgiving -- the myth of the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Native Americans having a harvest celebration meal together, with mutual respect and peace, and the myth that the Wampanoag brought their food as a gift to the settlers to help them through the first winter. We acknowledge that this is a myth, and that this peace and respect was soon replaced with destruction and broken treaties; we mourn that some of our ancestors discarded it so completely, and we also hold it forth as an ideal to return to. And with the turkey, we remember the land and the people of it.
We have stewed okra and tomatoes -- which have never been part of my traditional Thanksgiving, but I think I'd like to add them. The okra is from Africa, and this dish is a reminder of the Black culture and people that are part of our history; we eat this to remember and honor them. Also, it's a dish my father liked (and I got the basic recipe from him), so that has personal meaning. And we might put in something here about tomatoes, and how they are American, and about the Black slave experience of being brought to a new world.
We have sweet potato pie (or perhaps casserole), because that recipe is one that I found in almost-identical forms in recipe boxes from both my mother's family and my father's family, and pie is a recipe that comes from the European heritage -- again, embracing the native sweet potatoes.
I'm still pondering at what else should be here, because objectively we need more vegetables. Biscuits are a necessity, because no meal in my traditional culture would be complete without biscuits, and also because of Suzanne's grandmother who cooked breakfast biscuits at the Red Roof Inn almost every day of her life for many years. Green beans, because they are a vegetable that was always there at Thanksgiving and similar large family meals in my family, and because of the way that my grandfather would always cook them as a point of pride and my mother would say that was because hers were better and he didn't want to admit it. Possibly a casserole of some sort, because it is the food of sharing with neighbors at church potlucks and at funerals and at moving-in and such things, and there is a lot of "who we are as people" tied up in that food-sharing. And cranberry sauce seems necessary though I don't have a good story with it -- but perhaps not every food in the meal needs a story.
So, that's what I have so far. Still very much a work in progress, and lots of handwaving, but I figured there was enough to share as the seeds of an idea anyhow.