Part 1:
My history and knowledge of family is relatively fractured with big chunks missing. I have an extremely small family tree that has basically made it’s own history in the past generation, discarding tradition and blazing it’s own trail rather than preserving artifacts or a comprehensible storyline. I think a lot of this has to do with how early many of my relatives have passed away. I had very little interaction with anybody down my family line further than my parents. Even my grandparents were relatively removed from my life as a child, and all of them had died by the time I was twelve. Both of my parents were kind of on their own and very independent from their parents. As a result I feel that I’ve never really experienced an authentic passing down of cultural tradition. My family usually remembers particular people, places and events mainly through pictures. Oftentimes these pictures represent ancestors whom we know very little about. Despite the lack of background associated with these pictures, it still feels good to have that proof that you came from something with a defined culture that has culminated with you. Apart from pictures, my parents usually use word of mouth to remember things. The dinner table is where these stories usually come out. I remember watching the news during dinnertime and listening to my parents relate current events to the events of their past, highlighting differences and similarities and letting me give my own input. There aren’t very many objects with stories related to them that have circulated within my family. The one I can think of is an old sword from the civil war that has been passed down through my father’s side, but we don’t even know how it came into our older relatives’ possession and how it was used. Many of the objects with stories related to them have only entered our familial sphere in the past two generations. One object that comes to mind is a photograph of a sculpture made by an old family friend and teacher of my parents when they were in college named Bruce Rod. He also mentored me during my final year of high school. He died of lung cancer in 2008 and left a fair amount of his artwork to my parents. Bruce was a great person and very important to my parents from a very young age. I realize that the photograph of his doesn’t quite carry the same historical and cultural impact of an object that has been passed down from generation to generation, but it is nonetheless a reminder of the type of person he was and the things he created, as well as the influence he had on my life and ideas about art. One of the few familial oriented objects that we have is an old letter written by some of my relatives concerning the selling of a pig from the 1600’s. My family uses photos a lot to remember things. My father is a professional photographer, and therefore we have thousands of photos boxed up in the storage area of my parents’ apartment in Portland. He is the primary photo taker, and takes care and consolidates almost all of them. Every once in a while he will take a huge chunk of them, scan them and archive them digitally on his computer. A good deal of them are physical photos, but at this point I believe the majority of them are stored on a hard drive or on CDs. The oldest photos we have are a few of my great grandparents on my father’s side from the early 1900’s and a picture of my great great grandparents on my mother’s side from the late 1800’s. We usually look at these photographs on holidays when all of us are together in one place. Christmas time is usually the primary holiday that we break out the photos because we keep a lot of them in the same boxes we keep the Christmas ornaments and decorations.
Part 2:
A Cherry Pie Baked By My Father
I chose this picture more as a symbolic reference to this idea of developing your own culture. It is a picture that my father took of a cherry pie that he made about 3 days ago. I actually hate pie, and the only kind I’ll eat is pecan pie. However, some of my earliest memories of my father are of him in the kitchen baking cherry pie, which is his favorite fruit, and flavor concerning candy. Despite my dislike for pie, it’s become something that has kind of defined my family. My parents are known for making great pies for potlucks and gatherings. There isn’t a singular story that I can remember relating to my father’s cherry pies, but I can recall numerous occasions during an annual 4th of July neighborhood gathering in which I was told by almost everybody that it was delicious. I find it interesting that something I don’t like the taste of evokes fond memories of everything from Fall and Winter holidays to school-free, warm summer days in my old neighborhood in Eugene. I think that the cherry pie is a perfect representation of my family’s culture because my parents have essentially created their own culture within their own generation, being largely independent from a very young age. There is a popular saying, “As American as cherry pie” that perfectly sums this up. The picture is a great representation of the cultural attitude that America is a country that encourages independence and living your life any way you want, which I believe my parents are an excellent example of.
Part 3:
If the last section was any indicator, food has been and is a very important part of my family. The main staples of foods passed down through my family are principally Scandinavian and German, although my dad really likes to experiment with everything from Italian to Asian. The distinctive foods that my grandparents and great grandparents ate were extremely Scandinavian. Lutefisk was a favorite of my ancestors. It is a Nordic food, gelatinous in texture that consists of aged stockfish that is salted and placed in lye. I’ve never had any, but I can say that it smells absolutely terrible, which is why I’ve never partaken. My mother said that coffee has always been an integral part to my ancestral diet, which is interesting because it’s one of the things that I cannot stand. As far as Scandinavian foods go, butter and tuna casseroles have always been a family favorite. In my experience, my father’s side of the family has always been dominated by my grandmother’s cooking sensibilities, which consisted of what she always referred to as American/Southern. She would cook pies, pulled pork sandwiches, barbecue, collard greens, cornbread and all sorts of what many would refer to as Southern comfort food. One of the things that my aunt just revealed to me was that my grandmother loved to make cucumber sandwiches with cream cheese. Over the past year this has become one of my favorite meals and I eat one almost every day for lunch. Strangely enough, I didn’t know that it was a staple of my grandmother’s diet until this assignment!
A favorite family recipe that I absolutely love and is attached to a lot of great memories with my loved ones is my grandmother’s silver dollar pancake recipe.
Here’s the recipe:
1½ c. white flour
3 Tbsp. sugar
1½ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
1½ c. milk (we use skim)
3 Tbsp. butter, melted
2 large eggs, beaten
Heat a large non-stick skillet over medium heat with a small pat of butter.
With a whisk, combine all ingredients in a large bowl, mixing until they are just combined. (If batter seems too thick, add cold water by the tablespoonful until it is corrected.)
Drop batter onto the pan in small circles (about 2-3 inches across), and cook until the tops start to bubble. Then flip and cook another couple of minutes, until the bottom is browned. Take the pan off the heat in between batches, adding a new small pat of butter each time. Serve immediately.
This particular recipe is one of my favorites because it always brings everybody in my family together. Family gatherings usually consist of my, my mom and dad and my aunt. We have an extremely small, but close-knit family and when it comes to cooking the pancakes, we all contribute in some way. We usually have the silver dollar pancakes on a Sunday or a holiday, usually a time when we’re prepared to lay around the house and just enjoy each other’s company and relax. My mom always gets all of the ingredients out of the cupboards and measures them out for my father who begins to mix and prepare them. My aunt usually prepares bacon and washes either grapes or apples to be put on the side. My role is almost always setting the table and helping to clean up after we eat. While the pancakes are being prepared, my family members usually bustle around the kitchen trying not to get in the way of each other. I never really have to do anything until it’s time to eat, so I kind of just sit at the table and listen to my parents argue about who does what. It’s unpleasant but enjoyable at the same time to hear them bickering because they always do it and it has become a kind of ritual associated with the pancakes, or any other type of cooking that they participate in together. Another thing that really sticks in my mind about the pancake preparation is that the radio is always on in the kitchen, usually tuned to NPR or playing some sort of blues or jazz. There’s something oddly relaxing about the radio playing lazily over the smell of the bacon and gentle hiss of the cooking pancakes as they are dropped onto the griddle.
I believe that a good meal consists of a collaborative effort between all those involved. I enjoy being a participant in the creation of the meal and being able to see exactly how it is made. A good deal of this enjoyment also comes from observing my parents cook and how much care they put into it. Knowing that this is something that they are preparing for me to eat and enjoy makes the meal that much better. I don’t care much for dainty serving of meals. I like to have a big portion of food plopped down on the plate, nothing skimpy or over elaborate, just something that looks substantial and good.
Part 4:
If I were to make a documentary concerning the information above I’d choose to focus more on my immediate family and cultural traditions because that’s what I’m most comfortable with and most familiar with. I wouldn’t totally neglect my heritage further back in the past, but I’d certainly be more inclined to focus on the traditions that have come into existence within my family within my parents’ generation.
The documentary would most likely focus on how my parents broke away from many of their traditions and developed their own unique ones. I would want to really emphasize the fact that they grew up and shaped their lives as independent people from a very early age and essentially let the culture around them form who they are today. At the same time I would also highlight the aspects of their primarily European traditions that they chose to keep, consciously or otherwise.
I have an extremely small family, so the characters in the documentary would have to be limited to my parents and possibly my aunt. Other than that I don’t really have any relatives older than 64. I would want a good amount of interview footage featuring my father concerning cultural foods within our family. I suppose if I wanted to include some sort of scholarly source I could feature a historian at the University of Oregon or elsewhere that specializes in Scandinavian and German culture to confirm whether the traditions carried through my family align with the documented cultural norms. The characters would all be the people I would interview on camera. Other characters that I would not include in interviews would consist of my grandmother, Gladys, since she is the only grandparent that I have any memory of, and I have a better idea of her history and background through my aunt and father.
I would love to make a documentary highlighting cultural traditions within my family primarily through food. It figures very heavily into my life and I have countless memories of traditional meals from my father’s side of the family to dip into. I believe that making a documentary exploring my familial values and tradition would yield the most informational value and be the most enjoyable to make. Therefore the activities featured in the documentary would include the preparing of a variety of traditional dishes by my father that were introduced to him by my grandmother. Interviews would accompany these activities that would explain how he learned these recipes and any changes he may have made to them that deviate from his mother’s recipes. I’d definitely want to capture the atmosphere created during the cooking of these foods as there is often a lot of dialogue exchanged between my mother and father while they are preparing the food. I think this would be interesting in showing the relationship between my mother and father and show the intertwining of their unique cultural traditions to create brand new ones that have been instilled in me. Keeping the aspect in mind that I am the result of this cultural mixing, I think it would be appropriate to have me as the narrator. I’d want to include narration as it may be kind of confusing showing footage and images sans informational value.
I’d try to stray away from traditional music in my documentary as neither my parents or I really know how strong my ancestors’ musical interests were. I think it would be much more appropriate to include a soundtrack that applied to my strongest sonic memories of my parents, which is miles away from what my older relatives’ (granparents’) tastes. Therefore I would include the music that I’d hear being played at Christmas time and holidays, during morning breakfasts and during dinner and in the car. My father pretty much dominates the record player whenever music is on, which usually means a lot of Blues, Jazz and Soul. Also, it isn’t necessarily music, but I was forced to listen to A LOT of public radio growing up, and I think this would be a great thing to include as a kind of ambient noise at certain points throughout the film.
As far as photos or historic video footage go, I think that photos would be a must for my documentary. My family has a goldmine of old photos from the late 18th and early 19th centuries of my ancestors and it would be a shame not to use them, even if we don’t know the stories behind many of them. I would also try to use historical footage of major global events that may have been relevant to my ancestors just to provide a little background and give a better idea of the passage of time in relation to them. This may include footage from major wars, the civil rights movement ect.