Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Mennonites and garlic?
To my recollection, garlic was not really a part of Mennonite food culture—at least as it developed in the Ukraine. My grandma cooked with plenty of onions, but that distinctive flavour of garlic was pretty rare. I guess we had garlic bread sometimes and I remember that the spice cupboard had a jar of garlic salt (that lasted at least a decade), but I don't think we ever cooked with fresh garlic. If any of you are food anthropologists I'd be interested to know your thoughts. When did garlic first make its way into your cooking? Is there a "garlic generation gap" of sorts between those who grew up second or third generation? Or maybe I'm out to lunch here and garlic played a bigger role in Mennonite food than I think.
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Interesting. The only food I can remember my Oma making for us was vareneki and buttasupp... not much call for garlic there. It was very different in my family, though... garlic was our version of Windex - it apparently cured everything. We had to eat a clove of garlic every morning before heading off to school (might explain my dearth of friends...)
ReplyDeleteI have a feeling, though, that the "garlic generation gap" was more wide-spread than just the Mennonites. I think it probably covered most of North America during the post-war era.
I think you're right and I wonder if it is a bit of a Protestant/Catholic thing with the more Mediterranean cultures being both more Roman Catholic and adventurous with flavours. I always think of the scene in It's a Wonderful Life where someone (Potter?) criticizes George's new housing units as catering to "a bunch of garlic-eaters."
ReplyDeleteTo WASP-ish new-England types, newly arrived immigrants (like Italians) must have seemed not only to have crazy religious ideas and cultural habits (like unseemly large families), but to also just be weird-smelling. It makes me think of the way many Mennonite attitudes here in the valley toward Indo-Canadian people can pretty much be boiled down to the foreignness of the smell of curry.