Part of the pleasure of growing up in New York City was the variety of available cuisine. And no, I don’t mean expensive restaurants. It could be good stuff off the cart Downtown. Find a spot against the street lamp and gobble it down. Visit the delicatessens and sample the wares, or visit one of the neighbors, and get stuffed with dessert treats from Italy at Christmas time.
If you wanted to restrict yourself to one cuisine, one tradition, you had to do it by an exercise of sheer willpower. What a waste!
When I was young, my father worked as a superintendent of an apartment building in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. The building was a United Nations of cuisine. You could walk down a corridor on any floor and smell the aromas of any number of cuisines.
World World Wide
I was early on introduced to goodies from Central Europe, Norway, Germany, the Caribbean, and Asia. And no, I did not care for some of them. I was not into excessively hot stuff, and Lutefisk was never something I cared for. But my father, the Merchant Seaman who’d sailed the world, was insistent that I try it all. It was as much a part of being an educated person as a formal education, he insisted.
What sort of effects did this early exposure have on me? Well, it was wonderful preparation for my career as an anthropologist. An informal rule in our trade states that people you can’t or won’t eat with you don’t become close with. Food is an extremely important factor in creating social bonds.
I may not be able to win a trivia contest on international cuisine, but I can pretty much sit down at any table and enjoy the menu.
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The only phrase I know in Swedish (and I will now misspell it) “Nej tack. Jag vill inte ha lite lutefisk i år.” “No thanks. I won’t have lutefisk this year.”
My Swedish grandma made it and it was GOOD but hers was the only one that wasn’t just a sinister gelatinous blob of tasteless white fish on top of white potatoes with white sauce all over them. She had a cook off with our Norwegian neighbor one year and even the neighbor agreed my grandma was the best.
I didn’t mean to imply that it was bad, just that I didn’t like it. I don’t like other gelatinous foods either. Having a handy Norwegian phrase might have been handy, though my father didn’t like the rther disgusted face I pulled.
Lutefisk is gross. I ate it every Christmas Eve until I was 15 or so. That phrase is Swedish, BTW.
Well, better you than me…If I’m going to be selfish…and with regard to that dish, I’ll be selfish, but feel sorry for you, OK?
That’s sounds good. No one could do better.
You just reminded me of my own father, who encouraged me to eat different kinds of food. Not necessarily international (he was one of those that felt that American anything was vastly superior to all others), but he always encouraged us kids to taste and try things, even when we were poor and had to be strategic about it. I appreciate that he did that for us.
It’s a form of socialization, and parents who don’t encourage it set their kids up for uncomfortable situations later.