First, spread the dough thinly across the breadth of the table.
Something that has become familiar to me in the past few months is casualness with food preparation –
1) stretching homemade dough across a table, healing any breakages or holes that may develop,
2) grinding up beef with diced onions, or instead shredding cheese, and
3) layering these contents lazily to and fro across this large pattern of bread, followed by
4) rolling it all up into one long cylindrical tube of stuffed bread and
5) winding it into a spiral shape in a circular pan to bake for one estimated hour.
My Croatian family calls this pita. These are all the details I have ever received to make it: use either hand-shredded cheese (never told what type of cheese) or “well-seasoned” ground beef (ambiguous) with diced onions, followed by layering the contents across the stretched bread, and so on. Never mind that the recipe for the actual bread – the foundation – is not included!
Recipes have been realized in a more abstract – or at least vague – form, in both of my families. My biological family is a mixture of cultural heritages – what many Americans would call a “mutt” – consisting of, but not limited to: Irish, Native American, Dutch, German and Greek. Of the chosen five (the five greatest percentages in my blood), the two greatest are, calculably, Irish and Greek (though I am the only in my family to really strive to seek out my Irish heritage). My mother refers to herself as Greek, though the last to know the language was her grandfather, as the traditions, too, probably died with him. What is even more interesting, of what we have left to define us, is the food that we eat. For a Grecian family, we eat and prepare a lot of Italian food. Though it cannot be matched by every family tree source, there is expected to be some Italian heritage within my mother’s bloodline; but whether or not there actually is a bloodline streaming from Italy in my family, whether or not many foods carry their similarities between Greece and Italy, the foods we eat are distinctly Italian. I believe this may be a tradition started and continued purely by my mother and myself, however. That I can find, both my mother and father’s sides of the family keep very little contact and certainly do not share recipe cards. Much of what is created within our household can only be repeated by memory between the two of us or if one of us thinks to have the gusto of writing down the recipe as we create it.
This is very similar to my new family’s traditions. My husband, Dragan’s, family is much more “consistent” in their heritage. His mother’s side of the family is half Croatian and half Bosnian, while his father’s side of the family is half Croatian and half Italian (so, his Italian roots are obviously very happy with my cooking choices). Even with the disparity of four cultures in their bloodline, there is still much consistency to be considered. Bosnians and Croatians share not only a country border but many similarities in their cultures and languages (the two practically identical in most ways); and Italians and Croatians have many similarities in their cultures and values – particularly familial values – and some of their food choices, much the same as overlaps in Italian and Grecian foods.
What has been a difficult obstacle for me, however, is their recognition of their heritage and my family’s lack thereof. Dragan’s family remains very close-knit when it comes to family and food. When it comes purely to experimentation when my mom and I do not write down recipes, it is a choice within his family to not write down the recipes but instead rely upon oral tradition. In spending time with his family, I can see how the choice to rely strictly upon oral tradition is a bonding mechanism between family members. In order to learn the recipe they want to use at their next dinner, Dragan’s sister and sister-in-law have to approach his mom, ask her, and then create the meal with her before they can make it themselves. It also acts as a mechanism to maintain privacy within the family, as a form of hierarchy. At family dinners, family members will automatically ask after Dragan’s mom’s pita if she does not prepare it, for they do not know how to make it themselves. I, myself, only know the steps after the dough is made but do not know how to properly prepare the dough (beyond the fact that it is not made in the same fashion as typical bread). Jack Goody, in his essay, “Recipe, Prescription, and Experiment,” describes this as “the mode of preparation [being] deliberately hidden from the outside world…[as] a deliberate way of concealing the secrets of the trade” (85). Though this may have a negative connotation for those outside of recipe-holder’s family, it creates a surprising amount of closeness and safety within the family. While I do not know all the steps yet for the recipe, only knowing a few other recipes at this point, I know that I will continue to learn in steps, to create dishes and meals with Dragan’s mom, which will create stepping stones of encouragement within a less-than-structured means of recipe-keeping.
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Goody, Jack. “Recipe, Prescription, and Experiment.” Food and Culture: A Reader. Eds. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York: Routledge, 1997. 78-90. Print.
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~McKenzie Lynn Sanders
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