Chapter 12

Adapting and Adopting: The Migrating Recipe

Marina de Camargo Heck

This last essay demonstrates the relevance of thecultural context of the recipe to those widerfields of study that consider human experience:anthropology, the study of migration, contemporarysociology and oral history. The results of asociological survey and oral history projectconducted in 1997/8 have raised complex questionsabout the social and psychological significance orrecipes and meals in the collective consciousnessand memory of the immigrant populations of SãoPaulo. The ‘Food and Memory’ research projecttook as its underlying premise the suggestion thatamongst different forms of collective memories,one of the most persistent is culinary memory. Theresearch which I discuss here involved a socialgroup where food and culinary habits could be seenas a distinctive category: immigrants and theirfamilies settled in the city of São Paulo from theturn of the nineteenth century to the 1950s.1

Discourses about food are present in almost allmemory work. The reminiscences of culinary

2 Reading the Recipeexperiences are rich of aromas, colours and tastesthat resist not only the impact of time andtechnology but also cultural and geographicalchange. This research has already resulted in theproduction of a cookery book which describes theadaptation and retrieval, through memory, ofparticular recipes and meals that evoke memoriesof personal, familial and social significance(Heck and Belluzzo, 1998).

This essay will discuss how cultural values canbe transmitted through food memories, focussing onhow immigrants have preserved their foodrepertoire and adapted their recipes to the newingredients found in the host country. My researchraises the general question of how immigrants haveexperienced the acculturation process. This is notto say that looking at acculturation in andthrough food habits has precluded looking atchanges that have occurred inside the host nation.The host nation does not so much prompt or enforcea change in immigrant habits as itself adopt newhabits brought in the country by the immigrants.This adaptation/adoption of eating habits hasconsequences in the food of the immigrant familiesbut, at the same time, it intervenes in the hostcommunity, mixing and modifying both culinarycultures.

Food is absolutely central to our sense ofidentity as we are constructed biologically,psychologically and socially by the food weincorporate into our bodies (Fischler, 1988). Muchresearch has been done showing how food exchangesdevelop sociability and express bonds ofsolidarity within communities. Throughout history,cookery has always had an eminently ritual

Adapting and Adopting 3character, following the cycle of seasons and thereligious calendar. Very often the history ofpopular diet is linked in profoundly importantways with the history of folklore (Camporesi,1998). And, indeed, a sense of the symbolicsignificance of food and how it is used to expressties of kinship, solidarity and difference hasunderpinned and informed this study.

In terms of the transmission of culture fromgeneration to generation, culinary habits arecrucial to the process of understanding andperpetuating national mythologies. Roland Barthes(1972) has explored ways in which food is able totransmit so much about culture and daily life. Heshows how strongly rooted the consumption of wineis in French society and how shocked the Frenchwere when President Coty: ‘having allowed himselfto be photographed ... sitting at home before atable on which a bottle of beer seemed to replacethe familiar litre of red wine’ (60). Wine herebecomes an issue of national identity andcohesion, a raison d’État.

At the same time, tastes and feelings, rulesand recipes have reflected not only social changesbut also technological developments such as theintroduction of new forms of energy. Theevolution of manners at the table and forms ofmanipulating food are as important as thedevelopment of human knowledge and hierarchysystems in society (Elias, 1994).

Equally, we may observe that sex and food havealways been linked together in our everydaylanguage. In particular the discourse of love

4 Reading the Recipecleverly conceals a good deal of reference to foodvocabulary in almost every language: ‘honey’,‘mon chou’, ‘mon poulet’, ‘il a devoré avec lesyeux’. Love is full of eating fantasies, ofcannibal desire (Zeldin 1994; De Certeau et al.,1998). We may consider people’s expectations atthe table or in bed as part of a same process ofimagination that prepares the way to thesatisfaction of unrealised personal appetites. Atthe same time, Elias’s study suggests that the‘civilising process’ begins with the individual’stalent for concealment, for being able to controlemotions and to disguise the spontaneous andunruly. Food thus becomes a ‘civilised’ andaccepted way of satiating desire.

Essential to the promotion and control ofdesire is the visual presentation of food. Foodphotography has created a culinary practice basedon glazed surfaces, coatings, trimmings and

1

Notes

? The work described in this essay was part of a larger Food and Memory project. The sociological survey was conducted by the writer and Rosa Beluzzo in 1997-8 as partof our research work for the Department of Law and SocialSciences at the Getulio Vargas Business School of Sao Paulo, together with the Brazilian Centre for Latin American Studies of the Memorial of Latin America, The survey was edited and published as Heck and Belluzzo (1998), Cozhinha dos Imigrantes: Memorias e Receitas. A second part of this research (the analysis of the interviews in relation to immigration) has been undertakenby the writer as a post-doctoral study under the supervision of FAPESP, the research funding institution ofSao Paulo.

Adapting and Adopting 5ornaments which disguise the nature of dishes thathave not been made to be eaten but rather tonourish dreams and alibis (Barthes, 1972). Recipebooks, meanwhile, have left the kitchen shelves tocompete with art books and landscape photographyfor a place on the coffee table of trendy sittingrooms.

However if food has played a part instrengthening ties of solidarity and arousingdesires and dreams, it is also true that choicesof food, etiquette at the table and the wholesavoir-faire of gastronomy have throughout historyserved to intensify social segregation. This is anissue that has preoccupied the contemporary socialsciences. Elias evokes that segregation in a‘conversation’ between the poet Delille and theAbbot Cosson: the poet questions the Abbot on hisbehaviour during a dinner at the court inVersailles: how he ate the bread, what he did withhis napkin, how he drank coffee, and so on. Afterlistening to all the answers he concludes:‘everyone must have noticed that the Abbot camefrom the provinces.’ The Abbot’s response is toproclaim that he had only done exactly what was‘normal’ (84).

Food also speaks to class difference. PierreBourdieu (1979), with his sociology of socialdistinction, assigns ‘goûts de necessité’ to theworking classes and ‘goûts de luxe’ to thebourgeoisie. In essence he argues that socialclasses face their socio-economic reality atmealtimes. The working-class meal ischaracterised by foodstuffs that include soups and

6 Reading the Recipesauces, pasta and potatoes in almost every meal.These are usually dishes that are served withlarge spoons or ladles avoiding too muchmeasuring, and, for Bourdieu, such practicesexpress the rebelliousness within differentiatedsocial groups.

The art of eating and drinking remains one of thefew areas in which the working class explicitlychallenges the legitimate art of living. In the faceof the new ethic of sobriety for the sake ofslimness, which is most recognized at the highestlevels of the social hierarchy, peasants andespecially industrial workers maintain an ethic ofconvivial indulgence (179).

A strong allegiance to foodways is, of course,very marked amongst immigrant populations. Thecustoms and practices that immigrants bring withthem from their native land are habits, however,which soon have to change in the host country.While they may often hold very strongly to theirfood culture, they are forced to adapt to newforms of culinary culture. Yet culinary habitsmark a strong resistance to a completeacculturation, so that old and new culinary habitsare mixed and modified in ways that affect thecuisines of both immigrant families and indigenousgroups. The adaptation of their native culinaryhabits, as well as the adoption of new eatinghabits, has consequences regarding the food of theimmigrant families but at the same time, itintervenes in the host-community, mixing andmodifying both culinary cultures. Theintervention of ethnic cuisine, particularly for

Adapting and Adopting 7example in America, whereby foreign foods havebeen domesticated and incorporated is becomingmore and more evident. The present discussion aimsto observe that process, especially the changesand resistances that have transformed these habitsand consequently the recipes.

The immigrant has, in his or her ethnic food,the symbolic larder that guarantees the autonomyof his identity and subjectivity. Culinarypractices represent an intricate system ofidentities which do not break down in contact withother cultures, but rather maintains thealterative tension of multicultural cohabitation,a tension that resists the pasteurising effects ofglobalisation. I am not suggesting thattraditional ethnic food can be safeguarded fromindustrial ‘fast food’ and the effects of a so-called ‘postmodern global gastronomy’characteristic of the globalisation of diversity(Hall, 1991, 31-33). Nevertheless the desire topreserve tradition and to protect ancestralfeelings through tastes and odours belongs to agroup of sentiments, which find their bestexpression in countries where immigration playedan important role. Ethnic food which was‘regional’ back home comes to represent an ethnicnational cuisine in the new country. The need tomaintain a traditional identity within a foreigncountry is so strong that food may develop amythical status, a ‘more authentic’ flavour, thanactually found in the country of origin.

The immigrants selected for this study came toBrazil for different reasons and at different

8 Reading the Recipeperiods of time. Some intended to stay, othersthought they would go back to their home countryone day. Some fled from wars, others from famine;they were seeking a better life in America. Oncethey arrived they had to re-adapt their socialrelations and work out a means of participation inthe new society. Very often they had to adapttheir skills and work, but they were also obligedto adapt their cultural and religious habits and,above all, their foodways.

The history of immigration into Brazil in thenineteenth century is a complex one: a process ofattraction of and resistance to migrantpopulations. After Brazilian independence fromPortugal and even before slave abolition,landowners were anxious to replace the slaves intheir farms and great efforts were made tostimulate immigration. Between 1881 and 1915,around 31 million immigrants arrived in theAmericas. The United States received around 70per cent; in second place came Argentina whichreceived 4.2 million followed by Brazil with 2.9million immigrants.

The incorporation of free immigrant workers inthe Brazilian coffee farms was complicated in thebeginning. The food habits of the Europeans werenot consistent with what was on offer in Brazil.The immigrants were seen as ravenous and wastefulfor expecting to eat delicate dishes and to drinkalcoholic beverages. The ‘delicacies’ to whichthey referred were cheese and bread, and thebeverages were wines and ales.

The range of ethnicities was considerable.According to Immigration Census, between 1819 and1939, almost 5 million immigrants came to Brazil.

Adapting and Adopting 9Amongst them 1.5 million were Italian and 1.4million were Portuguese; these were followed byalmost six hundred thousand Spanish and almost twohundred thousand Japanese and Germans; after thiscame Jews, Turks and Syrians (Alvim, 1998).Immigrants mainly from Christian communities inSyria and the Lebanon arrived more or lesstogether from the Ottoman Empire mostly withTurkish papers, some with Greek passports. Inactual fact this demographic research wasundertaken exclusively in the region of São Paulotherefore it was very influenced by the immigrantgroups present in the Southeast region of Brazil,particularly in the city of São Paulo. Theimmigrants represented in this study are mainlythose who came to work in the coffee plantations.It is important to bear in mind that São Paulo is,above all else, a city of immigrants. The historyand memory of immigration has served to define andconstruct the identity of the inhabitant of SãoPaulo. Old traditional families, descendants ofthe coffee-farm owners, are the ones who havetoday to distinguish themselves from the immigrantdescendants, calling themselves ‘paulistas’ of 400years’ standing, meaning they have been theresince São Paulo was founded by the Jesuits in1554. Immigrant-related families constitute alarge majority of the population of São Paulo, andsince the 1950s there has also been a largepopulation of internal migrants from the Northeastof Brazil. The choice of studying immigrant foodhabits in São Paulo is justified further by thefact that gastronomy in the city has, in the last

10 Reading the Recipetwenty years, generated considerable economicactivity and a large range of restaurants ofdifferent cuisines.

The immigrants interviewed for this projectwere picked from the files of the São PauloImmigrant Hostel archives to reflect both therange and size of different immigrant communities.In selecting testimonial data we also looked torepresent the range of class origin and work, abalance of gender, and different kinds ofinteraction with the mainstream of Braziliansociety. We worked with the life stories ofimmigrants told either by themselves or sometimesthrough relatives: sons, daughters, orgrandchildren. Tape recordings of unstructuredinterviews were made with 35 immigrants and theirkin. The life stories were put together innational groups: Italian, Japanese, Armenian,Syrian, Lebanese, Spanish and German, and acomposition of national groups united by theirJewish identity. The Portuguese were alsoconsidered immigrants since so many arrived withthe timespan selected (while Portuguese who cameduring the colonial period were excluded). Otherreferences were also used in the choice oftestimonial data such as class origins, professionand work skills, gender and actual insertion inthe Brazilian society.

By drawing primarily upon life stories as atestimony, taped interviews were analysed andtranscribed. Testimonial data was written downexactly as it was collected in conversation withthe subject. Incorporated within it were theinterventions and the prompts, and thus thesubjectivities and imagination of the

Adapting and Adopting 11interviewers. In such a situation the researcheris, in any case, entirely involved. His or hervalues and world view should not be seen asobstacles, but rather as the condition forunderstanding differences and apprehending theessence of what is expressed by the subject of theinterview. Unlike some oral histories analysed byconversation analysts and ethnographers whichfocus on the exotic aspects of their subjects’lives, our attention was mainly oriented to theeveryday routine of the immigrant families. It istrue that qualitative interview must first of allbe regarded as a situation in which all theparties to the conversation use their‘sociological imagination’. They all becomeactive producers of the research material. In-depth interview can be compared to many otherforms of data collection, however the actualanalysis of the material remains the job of theresearcher who is no longer just one party in theconversation but becomes the interpreter of themeanings expressed.

The interviews were first edited in thenarrative style of a personal memoir, having inmind the editorial project of a recipe book. Wetried to preserve not only the discourse and thestory, but above all the ‘colours’ and‘atmosphere’ present during the interview. Theinterviews were conducted in a very open way inorder to allow each life-story to flow freely andrandomly. Despite this, interviewees remainedconscious that my preoccupation was food andculinary habits, and they were happy to talk about

12 Reading the Recipetheir childhood memories, ancestors and country oforigin. It would be overly simplistic to suggestthat interviewees use only one narrative framewithin which to portray their life story.Certainly these interviews were very heterogeneousin form.2

Two main themes shaped the interviews:adaptation and preservation of culinary habits.Life stories evoked reminiscences that wereexplored in the sense of how these memories hadcontributed to build a new ‘way of eating’. Foodreminiscences form a patchwork of memories. Onceassembled they may be harmonious or traumatic,depending on how people preserve them in theirminds as well as how they transmit them throughthe preparation of food. Thus we often found astrong presence in the interviews of a Manicheanresponse of like and dislike feeling towards foodtastes. Food memories can bring back dreams ofpleasurable tastes. Alternatively, traumaticculinary experiences may lead to a violent disgustfor certain foodstuffs and thus be fixed in eatingbehaviour for the rest of one’s life. Foodmemories are always about love and hate, pleasureand disgust.

In the case of Maria, for example, whoemigrated from Greece in the early 1950s, recentlymarried and not intending to stay longer than afew years: she and her husband went directly fromthe ship to the Immigrant Hostel in São Paulo,2 The comments quoted in the following pages derive

both from the published research (Heck and Belluzzo, 1998), and from further interviews conducted for the purposes of the present essay.

Adapting and Adopting 13where she was separated from her husband and givenblack beans to eat. ‘They tasted awful… I hadnever eaten anything like it before. Still today Icannot eat them. And to think that I live in acountry where rice and beans are the main dish. Mychildren are Brazilian and they love it.’ Anotherexample is Yvonne, born in Yugoslavia in a Jewishfamily, who came to Brazil in 1951, having spentpart of the War in Switzerland: ‘ My first contactwith America was in Trinidad when the ship stoppedand the only thing I can remember was that I wasfascinated by the enormous bananas I saw. No onetold me they were cooking or frying bananas, and Iate them raw. I almost died.’ Marisa, however,had fond memories of certain foods. She was bornin São Paulo but her mother was Italian fromPiemonte: ‘My grandmother did most of the cookingat home but she was very strict, even in hercooking. My mother was the one who did the lovelythings. I still remember how much I liked to beill, with the flu, because I would stay in bed andshe would bring me a sabayon with little almondbiscuits. I loved to get the flu.’ Memories offood can recover all these moments; they areprivileged moments that are remembered either as apunishment or as the ultimate reward.

In several interviews the immigrants talknostalgically of certain ingredients that theymissed and found essential to maintain theirculinary habits. Many of them hesitated to usesubstitutes and went to great efforts to get theauthentic ingredient. Diva, for example, was bornin Brazil but her very large and extended family

14 Reading the Recipehad always lived in a Syrian community in a ruralarea of São Paulo. Showing us the garden whereher grandparents planted most of the foodstuffsfor the preparation of Syrian food, she pointedout a particular plant: ‘Look … this leaf. It iscalled ramaida. The first seedling came fromSyria. We use it a lot; in soups, in the tabboulehand in all sorts of fillings.’ She went on toexplain that: ‘My grandfather came first with myuncles. When he sent for my grandmother and mymother and her sister, he wrote saying that thisvegetable didn’t exist here. So when mygrandmother came, in the ship, she brought aseedling of it in a little box with earth and shewatered it during the trip until they could plantit here. It is similar to the Egyptianmulokhiya.’

Other interviewees had found it easy to adaptlentils for beans, beef in place of lamb and wouldrewrite their recipes according to the newingredients they found. Fatala was seven yearsold when he arrived in 1929 from Antioquia: ‘Mymother tried to carry on cooking her kind of food,but it all tasted different. We never ate beef,only lamb or mutton, and here we could only buybeef. This was the only difference. I alsoquickly replaced the lentils for black beans, butI wasn’t used to eat so much rice as they didhere, we used to eat rice only on Sundays. Therest was just the same’.

Tastes, liked or disliked by different membersof the family, are not the only memory that stayspresent in people’s minds. Strong odours and theaspect of certain foods are also recollected. Asmentioned before, the perception of tastes and

Adapting and Adopting 15smells may not have the same cultural value indifferent contexts, and different contexts andspecific sensations remain attached to lifeexperiences. Acculturation may reverse tastes:what was acceptable in childhood becomesunacceptable when new criteria are brought intoplay. Mary, a young woman born in Brazil, livedwith her grandparents as a child, speaking onlyJapanese until she was seven years old. Sherecalled her Japanese grandmother staying longhours in a dark room preparing ‘miso’ (this is abean paste seasoning made by fermenting soy beanswith grain carried fungi and salt):

My grandmother would go into the room, she wouldstir something in there, would cover it and wouldtell us not to go inside. No one should go inside ortouch anything. I didn’t know what it was, but theroom was dark and had to remain dark and there wasan awful smell. (…) There was also something called“natto”, I think it is soy beans… you leave it infermentation wrapped in the straw of the corn, fordays, the colour is horrible and it gets gooey. Alittle like okra, but drier. I used to eat it whenI was a child but I don’t think I would any more.

Even though Mary spent her childhood eating andobserving the preparation of very traditionalfoodstuffs, she confesses that she has‘Brazilianised’ her cuisine. ‘My mother-in-lawsays that in Japan they don’t have to usedetergent to wash up their pans and dishes becausethey cook with no fat at all. But now I sautéedeverything before I add water… I think our

16 Reading the Recipegeneration needs to fry the onions a little bit.I also don’t think we like to make fish like theJapanese and I tend to eat more meat than fish.’Significantly, Mary mentions that it is not only aquestion of keeping the national tradition butthat changes occur from one generation to another,implying that such acculturalisation andadaptation happens in a range of ways.

For Taeko, whose mother married in Japan andcame to Brazil in 1932, the adaptation of hermother’s food habits was not a question of age andgeneration as Mary suggested above. What pushedher to adopt Brazilian foodstuffs was the beliefin a necessity for feeding calories to the men ofthe family.

Basically my mother cooked in Japanese style,however many dishes depended on certain foodstuffsthat she could not find here. We had lots of fishand at night usually fish soup; everything wasseasoned with shoyo and sometimes some ginger. Butwhen my brothers started to grow up … you know…Japanese cuisine is not very strong on calories, andmy brothers needed to be well fed, because theyworked all day. So then she started to introduceBrazilian foodstuffs: rice and beans and meat. Shewould even cook meat barbecue style!

For most of us the first images through whichfamily is first remembered are those of thekitchen and the table at which the daily mealswere consumed. It is around this table that onerecalls the unity of the family. The food and theritual of the meal are alive in the memory ofevery individual (Muxel, 1996). Often thenarratives we recorded started with a description

Adapting and Adopting 17of this ritual and how it was organised:hierarchy, respect and routine are the maincharacteristics of this ritual. For Natale, sonof Italian immigrants:

We had an absolutely religious schedule in mygrandfather’s house. There was a kind of liturgyproper of lunchtime. My grandfather had lunch atmidday. He wanted to listen, by the radio, the belltoll at São Bento church when he sat down for lunch.And all the family should follow the same schedule …nobody would answer the telephone if it rang, Iremember it irritated me to hear it ringing but mygrandfather would say that the mealtime was sacred.We were twelve, sometimes fourteen at the table andthe Italian homemade bread had to cut by mygrandfather. That was his function at the table; hesaid there was a way of cutting bread, one shouldknow it in order to do it.

The dishes and recipes also followed a pre-established order and routine:

For dinner we always had soup, the weather could behot or cold we would invariably have soup fordinner. Soup was absolutely essential and my memoryof these soups is very vivid, even being Italian,pasta is not so important as soup for me. We wouldeat pasta every Thursdays and Sundays, the otherdays it varied, but soup we had every single night.

Food memories do not only bring back recollectionsof the ordinary daily meal, the everyday routine,but also the pleasures and the constraints of thefamily relations. Memory retains a strong and

18 Reading the Recipevivid picture of everyday life but it also canrecall the exception (Muxel, 1996). Intervieweesalways brought up memories of exceptional meals;the food prepared for celebrations, annual partiesand family gatherings. Food is an important issuein religious celebrations such as Christmas,Easter and Pessach. Sundays are also special inthe regular weekly routine. For example,Melanie’s parents came from Bessarabia. They areJewish with an extended multi-ethnic family. Manyof them have married non-Jews and the family isnot particularly observant of religious ritual.Thus Melanie’s food habits are very eclectic:

My family is completely integrated culturally inBrazil, my sister is married to a non-Jew and hersons too; my brother is married to a Jewish woman,their daughter married a Jew but separated and nowis married to a non-Jew. My sons, only two of themare married to Jewish girls and they never had a BarMitzvah. But they all love Jewish food and thereligious parties. For Pessach I prepare exactly thesame traditional food every year. The Seder ceremonyis performed with all the symbolic foods thatcelebrate Moses’ crossing of the desert. We don’teat bread nor anything prepared with wheat, but alot of horseradish with beetroot sauce. …When I wasa little girl I remember my mother and her friendspreparing the food for the neighbour’s Bar Mitzvah.We were a community, we had somewhat of a ghettorelationship where neighbourhood was important andstrengthened the links between people.

Christmas is of course the apotheosis ofcelebratory food festivals and certain Christmasdelicacies are eagerly anticipated and then

Adapting and Adopting 19recalled over the rest of the year. Christmasfood, characteristically prepared several days orweeks in advance, must be abundant and differentfrom the ordinary. Edith came from Romania toBrazil in the early 1950s and for her the culinarymemories are an experience of parties andabundance:

In my father’s farm, not far from Bucharest, theywould bake a sweet bread (kind of a panetone) madewith 200 eggs. It took hours of preparation, a lotof work. For each child there was a baking traywith their name engraved on, and in it the doughwould be put and baked in an enormous oven. In themorning when we woke up and there was the breadbeside the bed; the bread of each one of us. Here,I have simplified this tradition, I make a breadthat is called ‘cozonac trandfir.’

In a similar way, Maria Jose rememberedChristmas in her village in Portugal. They werepoor but the simple delicacies prepared forChristmas were thought of as very special: ‘AtChristmas Eve we would go to Mass at midnight andwhen we came back home we would have rice puddingand rabanadas (a kind of French toast) and filhós(a wafer-thin pancake). The rabanadas could bemade either with milk or with a mixture of water,sugar and wine.’

There are many traditions that have imprinted aparticular message in the memory of all of us.These memories often are linked to a certainsmell, taste or eventually, as Diva recalled, bythe delivery of a case of Port wine and a sack of

20 Reading the Recipewalnuts. Her Syrian grandfather would havewalnuts and Port wine sent to her house when hermother was pregnant. The wine was for themother’s diet and the nuts were for the tea thatwould be served to visitors. It was a veryfragrant repast, with fennel, star anise andcinnamon sprinkled with chopped nuts. When thechildren saw their mother in the kitchen breakingthe nutshells, they would whisper among them:‘It’s time for the baby to come’.

The transformation and adaptation of recipesfollow strange trajectories and the origins ofcertain foods becomes, at times, difficult topinpoint. The style of cuisine fixed in therecollections of some of the interviewees has beendifficult to reproduce. New ingredients, thedaily contact with another food culture, theevolution of the family embracing other ethnicgroups creates a peculiar style of cuisine.Traditional recipes and food habits are oftenmodified through this process of negotiation andincorporation. Often the legacy of an immigrantcuisine is a pot-pourri of cuisines encountered bythe family during their collective history andtheir recollection of the trajectory of theirexperience in settling down in a new country.

Maria Jose was nine years old when she arrivedfrom the Portuguese countryside in 1927. Herfamily’s cooking habits were rustic. They lived ona small farm and her mother would slaughter a pigevery year, prepare sausages and smoke and drymeat for the winter. In São Paulo all this wasfinished and the family bought food in the marketlike everyone else. Consequently her food habitstoday are very eclectic:

Adapting and Adopting 21

I am married to a Spaniard, for the last 62 years,so now I cook either Spanish or Portuguese food andeven Brazilian. My mother-in-law was from Granadaand she taught me a lot of things. Today I can cookboth kinds of food very well. I open my fridge andI look inside and depending on what I find there Idecide the kind of food I will cook. They come fromthe Mediterranean and they eat a lot of fish, but inmy village there was no fish to buy except forsardines.

Other Portuguese interviewees told us that theykept quite a few rural habits even in the urbanlandscape of São Paulo. Portuguese communities inBrazil and elsewhere are well known for keepingchickens, ducks and rabbits in their backyard andcultivating green kale in any tiny patch of landthey find.

However, culinary habits do not only changebecause they have to adapt to a new geographicalsituation. Food may be made more elaborate whenadapted at the hands of an upwardly mobileimmigrant community. In this way, when aparticular ethnic community settles down andascends socially and economically, it will promoteits own gastronomic background to a gourmetstatus. In this upgrade process expensivefoodstuffs are added to the basic recipe. Thishas happened with the Italian polenta, with thePortuguese acorda, with the Jewish knishes and somany other dishes that remind the immigrants oftheir poor background. Thus funghi porcini orwhite truffles are added to polenta, shrimps and

22 Reading the Recipemussels to acorda, smoked salmon to knishes and soon.

Alongside this sociological survey, a parallelresearch project was conducted to produceaccurate, usable recipes for these ‘memoir foods’.Bearing in mind the project of a recipe book thatwould combine testimonies with recipes, we pickedout particular dishes that were mentioned in theinterviews. From this starting point, weconducted a bibliographical search as well as apractical cooking workshop on the recipe itself.It was rarely possible to use exactly the samerecipe as given to us by the interviewees. Inorder to make the final recipe practical andoperational it was necessary to adapt themeasurements and timings of the originalinstructions. Nonetheless, even with suchadaptations to the method, it was a strictcriterion that the final dish should look andtaste precisely as the one evoked during theinterview. There were cases where the dish namedand remembered by the interviewee was quitedifferent from the one stipulated by the recipebooks that we consulted. The process oftransferring a dish or ‘memory food’ fromrecollection to a usable recipe was an intricateone. Realising smells, tastes and appearances thathad been stored in memories into actual dishesinvolved much trial and experimentation. At adifferent level, relating much-reinterpreted‘standard’ dishes back to their original recipebook forms revealed how far new methods andingredients had in fact changed dishes stillperceived to be authentic.

Adapting and Adopting 23

‘Esparregados’ of Portuguese cookbooks andoften on the menu of Portuguese restaurants, is acase in point. This is a dish of finely choppedcooked spinach which is sautéed until the greenshold together and pull away from the pan as anomelette (Ortins, 2000); this liaison is sometimesachieved by the addition of a creamy ingredient toact as a thickening agent. However for Alzira whocame from Portugal in the 1940s, esparregados issomething quite different:

My mother called it ‘esparregadas’ and she wouldstart as if she was doing polenta, with corn flourand water, but a very smooth and thin polenta. Thenshe would chop finely some green kale or mustardleaves and mix it together with the creamy mixtureof corn flour, immediately taking it out of theheat. Just before serving she would grill somesardines directly over the coal fire, the sardinesjust like they come, with scales and all. This wayit won’t break or stick in the grill. Then she wouldserve the creamy cabbage mixture, and we would makea little hole in the middle and fill it with oliveoil. We would take the sardines with our fingers,dip them in the oil and then the ‘esparregadas’ andeat it.

This is a typical example of the adaptation of arecipe. Alzira´s mother certainly invented these‘esparregadas’ on arrival to this new countrywhere spinach and cream were not easily found, andher children have perpetuated her recipe in spiteof the fact that something quite different ispresented today in Portuguese restaurants andrecipe books.

24 Reading the Recipe

Ultimately, then, culinary traditions and foodmemories define us, offering solidarity with and asense of distance from our familial, social andethnic groups. But, in keeping and adaptingfamiliar recipes, we are able to create practicesthat, even as they recall the past, initiate newtraditions, new identities, new selves.