Food is an inextricable part of culture, history, community.  Sometimes we learn about culture, history, community as it is expressed in food when we look at cookbooks, or food memoirs.  Sometimes, those stories will never be told on a large scale; sometimes they are best (or only) told by word of mouth. Oral histories are, I believe, as important a piece of literature to examine as anything we can find in print.  Some of my favourite family stories have to do with food.

When my dad tells us about how his family once ate their pet rabbit, I learn a bit about what rabbit tastes like (chicken, unsurprisingly), a bit about his family, and a bit about Boy Scouts (though I've never thought to ask if "breed/raise/kill/eat rabbits" is still a badge to be earned, or if it was phased out sometime between the seventies and now).  When my mom tells me about the time our dog ate all of my grandma's pies, except the rhubarb, I learn about our dog, my grandma, and that people bake rhubarb into pies (seriously? People eat that?). When we tell the story about the time my sister found a bullet in her boar stew, we remember Italy, the people we met there, the stories they told us.

I love looking at the difference between what we write and what we speak.  If I were to write down any of the stories above, they would read the same way every time someone visited them.  I would tell the story in a specific way; maybe I'd forget to add a detail here, maybe it'd be a bit dull to anyone who doesn't know me or my family.  When we tell these stories orally, our audience can ask questions, someone else may jump in to tell it themselves for awhile, we may go off on a tangent about some glancingly related aspect.  Every time the story is told, it's a little bit different. Yet we get into a habit of telling stories the same way every time.  There are some stories from my dad's childhood that I can—and do—quote back to him.

Similarly, recipes are passed down differently when they are written than when they are spoken.  If you read a recipe written on a card or in a cookbook, you'd be able to bake an angel food cake.  When my aunt tells me the recipe, she explains each step every time.  This is the best way to separate an egg, this is how you know when the egg whites are ready for the flour, this is how you properly fold in the flour so the egg whites don't lose their fluff.

In my previous post about the angel food cake, I tried to convey that sense of oral history, even though it's been written down.  I wanted to show that learning how to bake this cake is more detailed when it's not from a recipe card. I wanted to include my own experiences with the recipe (seriously.  EVERY DAMN TIME, the top of the cake falls off while it cools.  We have yet to figure out what I'm doing wrong.). I wanted to glancingly reference other cooking stories (because tangents are an integral part of my oral storytelling process).  I wanted people to ask "wait. What happened with the melted Christmas cookies? How the hell did you manage to melt cookies?" I wanted to encourage interactivity, because that's the part of storytelling I love best.  Orally, I love when a story becomes more of a discussion than a lecture, when you meander through experiences and "oh, yeah, I did something like that…" and eventually you get back to the original point, but maybe you don't, and that's okay, too, because you shared so many stories in the meantime, and you can tell the rest of the original one another time. Maybe.  In print, I love when an author leaves so much out of the story, and the only thing you can do is fill in the blanks on your own.  I love when the author leaves—intentionally or otherwise—parts of the story for me to write myself.  I think one of the most important aspects of literature is that it's not the transference of a story from one person to another, but an interactive experience wherein the story grows and changes with each retelling and is told as much by the reader as by the writer.

This interactivity is especially present when we talk or write about food, because it is a universal and universally diverse experience.  Everyone has experiences with food, and everyone's experiences with food are different.  So the story flows, eternally, back and forth between the tellers.