Food is certainly an interesting one, and it's true that I largely cook and eat the food I grew up eating, though I'll gladly scoff a tatty scone if it's available and will quite readily cook and eat haggis but I draw the line at macaroni pie. I'm far more likely to serve mince and tatties as cottage pie than next to each other on the plate and I've never taken to porridge.
The first picture there is, as the text under “United States” suggests, what would simply be called “macaroni and cheese” (or simply “macaroni”) here. Traditional macaroni and cheese here is always made with eggs, milk and butter (and possibly flour and other things) and always baked, not made on the stovetop with a Béchamel or other cheese sauce. Here, that would be an “imported” way of making it.
An interesting question is when food becomes part of heritage. Foodways are often an important part of a culture, but one that can easily traverse cultural boundaries. For example, @Arethosemyfeet's "mince and tatties" are a culinary import, since potatoes are not native to either England or Scotland. Likewise for @Nick Tamen's macaroni and cheese, since dairy cows, chickens, and wheat are not native to North America. We seem to be a lot more comfortable with the cultural appropriation of ingredients, or even whole dishes, than we are with active cultural practices.
I think when it comes to foodways, things may fall more under the label of “cultural spread” that you noted upthread, @Crœsos, rather than cultural appropriation as such. And as I noted above, the foodways of the American South are a melding of Native American, European and African/African American cultures and influences.
With regard specifically to macaroni and cheese, it appears to have been James Hemings—who like his sister Sally was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson (his half-sister Martha’s husband) and who studied as a chef in Paris while there with Jefferson—who introduced macaroni and cheese to Monticello and to the United States. And he did apparently call it “macaroni pie.” Here is the webpage the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello has on James Hemings, including his macaroni pie. And this article from Essence magazine describes both Heming’s history and the place macaroni and cheese holds in African American cultures.
Hemings’ recipe doesn’t include eggs—the structure of it reminds me of German Käsespätzle (Cheese Spätzle)—and it’s interesting that he cooked the macaroni in a mixture of water and milk.
To her dying day my mother's favourite dinner would be bacon, cabbage and potatoes. I refer to this as Irish soul food - along with soda bread and potato farls.
TBH, probably at least part the reason I cook French, Italian, Spanish, Middle Eastern, Indian, Chinese, Latin American, Malay and any other cuisine I can lay hands on.
I really don't think you can 'appropriate' food, that's not how cooking and eating work.
Somewhere up thread, @Gamma Gamaliel mentioned people are not English if they landed in England after the 1600s. Using that line of reasoning, I must be a true American, since one branch of my people landed in Jamestown around 1607 and the Puritan side of the family came over around 1629 during the Great Migration.
Funny story about the Puritan side. They settled in New Haven Connecticut area. Another family settled just a few miles from them. 350 years later I met a descendant of that family and married her. Long story short. I married the neighborhood girl, 350 years later.
Also had another branch of the family come in through Savannah Georgia.
So I have deep roots in this country. But I can trace lines through Finland, Denmark, Germany, Normandy, Scotland. Yes, a bit of Welch too, and well as England.
Note to @ChastMastr. I also found a Yiddish line through my tree. Not really all that surprising though since there was some interfaith marrying back in the 1500s.
While I know of no Native American in my direct line, I have had First Nations people from Canada tell me my last name is in their tribe. Apparently, in the lead up to the Revolutionary War, one side of the family stayed loyal to the king and was forced to move to Canada. That side had some people who became fur trappers and tradesmen. They married into the First Nation people.
I didn't say 'English' I said 'British'.
I was teasing.
I was riffing with the idea that if your ancestors came over with William the Conqueror in 1066 you weren't either Anglo-Saxon or 'British' in the original sense of the word - Celtic as it were (although that's a loaded and contested term) but Norman-French.
The term British in its later sense only came about with the various Acts of Union which created the United Kingdom.
As @Crœsos says all these successive identities overlaid earlier ones.
I'm afraid I can get pedantic with US Shipmates who use the term 'England' to refer to the island of Great Britain and even more so with English Shipmates who do the same.
To her dying day my mother's favourite dinner would be bacon, cabbage and potatoes. I refer to this as Irish soul food - along with soda bread and potato farls.
TBH, probably at least part the reason I cook French, Italian, Spanish, Middle Eastern, Indian, Chinese, Latin American, Malay and any other cuisine I can lay hands on.
I really don't think you can 'appropriate' food, that's not how cooking and eating work.
Not in general, but I think foods that have specific religious of cultural significance, like challah, do need to be treated with caution.
To her dying day my mother's favourite dinner would be bacon, cabbage and potatoes. I refer to this as Irish soul food - along with soda bread and potato farls.
TBH, probably at least part the reason I cook French, Italian, Spanish, Middle Eastern, Indian, Chinese, Latin American, Malay and any other cuisine I can lay hands on.
I really don't think you can 'appropriate' food, that's not how cooking and eating work.
Not in general, but I think foods that have specific religious of cultural significance, like challah, do need to be treated with caution.
I would agree, and I think extra caution is called for when it’s not just a food, but one or more foods in a cultural context that extends further than individual foods. Don’t get me started, for example, on so-called “Christian Seders.”
Tracing my Mennonite family's movement that we know or can make a reasonable guess about, we'd begin in Friesland and Flanders in the 16th century, go to the Vistula delta, then to an area near the Dnieper River in what is now the Zaporizhzhia Oblast in Ukraine but was then Russia. Most of my forebears left the Russia for the US in the 1870s and settled in Kansas. Three of my grandparents moved from Kansas to California; one came from the USSR to California.
After a bunch of moving around, my parents settled our family near the coast in San Luis Obispo, several hours drive from the Central Velley communities with lots of Mennonites; they were by this point Baptists, as they felt being Mennonite was almost more a cultural thing than a religious thing, and they were quite devout. My brothers and I were raised with a strong sense of having a Mennonite background and heritage but not being actually Mennonite. I lived in SLO 9 years, then went to college in Los Angeles and grad school in Orange County, the next county south. SLO was where I mostly grew up but wasn't exactly from. LA was too big and sprawling to get a handle on, and I lived in five different cities in suburban Republican Orange County and never fit into any of them.
When my last roommate situation was breaking up I was 30, and I finally had a decent job and could choose my new home from a bunch of cities in southern Los Angeles County within an easy commute. I chose Long Beach, where I had already been coming to see art movies and bands, because as I drove around the city, I realized I wouldn't have to worry about fitting in, as virtually everyone lives here. There is no racial or ethnic majority. There are several different large immigrant and recent immigrant-descended populations. There are people born in Long Beach and other local cities, and there are people who moved here from all over the US. There's a sizeable gay community. There's a large range of household incomes and businesses serving people at every price point.
For me heritage is one thing and belonging very much another.
The issue with cultural appropriation is the way it's rooted in colonialism; the Indigenous Mexican roots of Dias de los Muertos (because it covers both All Saints and All Souls in Mexico) only amplify the colonialism in this instance. A lot of Mexican Catholic folk practice incorporates pre-Christian beliefs and rituals. Also, some religious practices are closed and respecting that is just about good manners - just like you wouldn't gatecrash a stranger's wedding and eat their food without being invited, it's rude to partake of a religious feast you haven't been initiated into.
Despite it being a festival that lasts two or more days, the Mexican government says Día de Muertos, as do the editors of Spanish-language Wikipedia. It's Día de los Muertos to a lot of Americans, including those of Mexican descent. Adding "los" is to Spanish speakers a more poetic way of describing the festival, with a more "this is the time when we do these things" feel rather than the actual name of the festival. But most Americans who don't speak Spanish or don't speak good Spanish say "los" is because we're back-forming from English.
Throughout the southwest US, many celebrations of Día de los Muertos are not closed private rituals. There are big public festivals, with ofrendas set up in accessible places and parades sponsored by local governments. Everyone is invited. White Americans where I live didn't appropriate this holiday. It went on the calendar when Latinos started to gain power commensurate with their numbers - they now outnumber non-Hispanic whites by quite a bit where I live. In some places they were always present in large numbers.
As more Hispanics have settled in Washington, Dia de los Muertos has become more prevalent. The largest Hispanic population is in central Washington, but even up in Northwestern Washington, where there are large dairy herds and the laborers there are more Mexican now, the celebration is establishing a foothold.
When you think of it, the usual Christian celebrations are related. All Hallows Eve begins on the evening of October 31, All Saints Day November 1, and All Souls Day on Nov 2. All four days deal with death, memory and the communion of saints. When the Spanish missionaries introduced All Saints/All Souls to the indigenous people who already had their own festivals honoring the ancestors, there was a fusion. Dia De Los Muertos is not simply a Mexican All Souls Day. It is its own tradition shaped by indigenous cosmology and Roman Catholic liturgy. One could say this is a fine example of cultural appropriation.
@Gamma Gamaliel The ancestors who brought my last name over to the British Isles did come over with William the Conqueror. Settled in the Northampton area. There is a family museum there for that matter. Fact is, about 26% of my DNA is Norman.
The Normans are generally seen as the bad guys though as I'm sure you are aware.
As an aside, I've sometimes challenged what I've taken to be far-fetched genealogical claims by Americans only to find that there was more substance to them than I'd assumed.
I'm not doubting yours but it is easy to find faux-coats-of-arms and genealogies online, particularly where people share a surname with some aristocrat or one of the gentry.
I'm also a tad suspicious of some of these DNA results but 26% is too high a percentage it seems to me to doubt Norman-French heritage.
Did the DNA test differentiate between the Normans and the Vikings? The Normans were descendents of Norsemen who'd settled in Normandy. In genetic terms there wouldn't have been a great deal of difference between them and Scandinavians who had settled in the British Isles during the Anglo-Saxon period prior to 1066.
If you were happy to share it, perhaps by PM, I would be interested to hear what the surname is in the 'family museum' of which you speak.
As you'll be aware, these ethnic identities were very fluid back in those days. An early Saxon leader, Cerdic, mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had a Celtic name.
St Chad, one of the most prominent Anglo-Saxon Saints has a name which is a shortened and Anglicised version of a Celtic one.
This doesn't necessarily prove that either man had 'Celtic Connections' as it were but neither is it impossible for them to have done.
There are people who 'look' Welsh or Irish or Scottish or as if they have Scandinavian ancestry but generally white British people will have a very mixed heritage indeed as various peoples settled on these islands.
I spoke to an Irishman the other day, with mixed Irish and Chinese heritage who told me that there no such thing as a separate Irish genetic identity.
I don't know about that but I know some geneticists did some work in a remote part of West Wales and found that the imprint remained remarkably unchanged since the Iron Age. People in that area hadn't moved around much nor had many incomers moved in.
Elsewhere of course, the picture is very different.
I spoke to an Irishman the other day, with mixed Irish and Chinese heritage who told me that there no such thing as a separate Irish genetic identity.
That's probably true, given that historically most of the long-distance "mixing" took place via sea routes rather than overland. It remains far easier to access parts of the west coast of Scotland by boat; I was intrigued to find out last year that a lot of logging is done by building a temporary jetty near the logging site and taking timber out by boat rather than trying to build and maintain roads out to every wooded peninsula in Argyll and Lochaber. At the time of Dal Riata the bias towards marine transport would have been even more acute, and the kingdom spanned Ulster, Argyll and much of the Hebrides.
I do not consider myself any more British than someone who has been here 10 year or less. If one has chosen to associate themselves with our country then I am entirely comfortable to associate with them wherever they came from.
That is all I meant by mentioning 1066, which is often a rhetorical date that racists use to "prove" their credentials to determine the "true nationality" of other people with a different skin tone.
In my experience, people who want to exclude you from their group will find some excuse to do it, even if your skin is the same colour as theirs and your family has been in the same area for generations. ☹️
Comments
With regard specifically to macaroni and cheese, it appears to have been James Hemings—who like his sister Sally was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson (his half-sister Martha’s husband) and who studied as a chef in Paris while there with Jefferson—who introduced macaroni and cheese to Monticello and to the United States. And he did apparently call it “macaroni pie.” Here is the webpage the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello has on James Hemings, including his macaroni pie. And this article from Essence magazine describes both Heming’s history and the place macaroni and cheese holds in African American cultures.
Hemings’ recipe doesn’t include eggs—the structure of it reminds me of German Käsespätzle (Cheese Spätzle)—and it’s interesting that he cooked the macaroni in a mixture of water and milk.
TBH, probably at least part the reason I cook French, Italian, Spanish, Middle Eastern, Indian, Chinese, Latin American, Malay and any other cuisine I can lay hands on.
I really don't think you can 'appropriate' food, that's not how cooking and eating work.
I didn't say 'English' I said 'British'.
I was teasing.
I was riffing with the idea that if your ancestors came over with William the Conqueror in 1066 you weren't either Anglo-Saxon or 'British' in the original sense of the word - Celtic as it were (although that's a loaded and contested term) but Norman-French.
The term British in its later sense only came about with the various Acts of Union which created the United Kingdom.
As @Crœsos says all these successive identities overlaid earlier ones.
I'm afraid I can get pedantic with US Shipmates who use the term 'England' to refer to the island of Great Britain and even more so with English Shipmates who do the same.
They know who they are.
Shame on them.
Not in general, but I think foods that have specific religious of cultural significance, like challah, do need to be treated with caution.
After a bunch of moving around, my parents settled our family near the coast in San Luis Obispo, several hours drive from the Central Velley communities with lots of Mennonites; they were by this point Baptists, as they felt being Mennonite was almost more a cultural thing than a religious thing, and they were quite devout. My brothers and I were raised with a strong sense of having a Mennonite background and heritage but not being actually Mennonite. I lived in SLO 9 years, then went to college in Los Angeles and grad school in Orange County, the next county south. SLO was where I mostly grew up but wasn't exactly from. LA was too big and sprawling to get a handle on, and I lived in five different cities in suburban Republican Orange County and never fit into any of them.
When my last roommate situation was breaking up I was 30, and I finally had a decent job and could choose my new home from a bunch of cities in southern Los Angeles County within an easy commute. I chose Long Beach, where I had already been coming to see art movies and bands, because as I drove around the city, I realized I wouldn't have to worry about fitting in, as virtually everyone lives here. There is no racial or ethnic majority. There are several different large immigrant and recent immigrant-descended populations. There are people born in Long Beach and other local cities, and there are people who moved here from all over the US. There's a sizeable gay community. There's a large range of household incomes and businesses serving people at every price point.
For me heritage is one thing and belonging very much another.
Despite it being a festival that lasts two or more days, the Mexican government says Día de Muertos, as do the editors of Spanish-language Wikipedia. It's Día de los Muertos to a lot of Americans, including those of Mexican descent. Adding "los" is to Spanish speakers a more poetic way of describing the festival, with a more "this is the time when we do these things" feel rather than the actual name of the festival. But most Americans who don't speak Spanish or don't speak good Spanish say "los" is because we're back-forming from English.
Throughout the southwest US, many celebrations of Día de los Muertos are not closed private rituals. There are big public festivals, with ofrendas set up in accessible places and parades sponsored by local governments. Everyone is invited. White Americans where I live didn't appropriate this holiday. It went on the calendar when Latinos started to gain power commensurate with their numbers - they now outnumber non-Hispanic whites by quite a bit where I live. In some places they were always present in large numbers.
This is why I would probably never live somewhere with a lot of deeply-rooted people. I would never belong.
When you think of it, the usual Christian celebrations are related. All Hallows Eve begins on the evening of October 31, All Saints Day November 1, and All Souls Day on Nov 2. All four days deal with death, memory and the communion of saints. When the Spanish missionaries introduced All Saints/All Souls to the indigenous people who already had their own festivals honoring the ancestors, there was a fusion. Dia De Los Muertos is not simply a Mexican All Souls Day. It is its own tradition shaped by indigenous cosmology and Roman Catholic liturgy. One could say this is a fine example of cultural appropriation.
I was responding to @Basketactortale.
The Normans are generally seen as the bad guys though as I'm sure you are aware.
As an aside, I've sometimes challenged what I've taken to be far-fetched genealogical claims by Americans only to find that there was more substance to them than I'd assumed.
I'm not doubting yours but it is easy to find faux-coats-of-arms and genealogies online, particularly where people share a surname with some aristocrat or one of the gentry.
I'm also a tad suspicious of some of these DNA results but 26% is too high a percentage it seems to me to doubt Norman-French heritage.
Did the DNA test differentiate between the Normans and the Vikings? The Normans were descendents of Norsemen who'd settled in Normandy. In genetic terms there wouldn't have been a great deal of difference between them and Scandinavians who had settled in the British Isles during the Anglo-Saxon period prior to 1066.
If you were happy to share it, perhaps by PM, I would be interested to hear what the surname is in the 'family museum' of which you speak.
As you'll be aware, these ethnic identities were very fluid back in those days. An early Saxon leader, Cerdic, mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had a Celtic name.
St Chad, one of the most prominent Anglo-Saxon Saints has a name which is a shortened and Anglicised version of a Celtic one.
This doesn't necessarily prove that either man had 'Celtic Connections' as it were but neither is it impossible for them to have done.
There are people who 'look' Welsh or Irish or Scottish or as if they have Scandinavian ancestry but generally white British people will have a very mixed heritage indeed as various peoples settled on these islands.
I spoke to an Irishman the other day, with mixed Irish and Chinese heritage who told me that there no such thing as a separate Irish genetic identity.
I don't know about that but I know some geneticists did some work in a remote part of West Wales and found that the imprint remained remarkably unchanged since the Iron Age. People in that area hadn't moved around much nor had many incomers moved in.
Elsewhere of course, the picture is very different.
That's probably true, given that historically most of the long-distance "mixing" took place via sea routes rather than overland. It remains far easier to access parts of the west coast of Scotland by boat; I was intrigued to find out last year that a lot of logging is done by building a temporary jetty near the logging site and taking timber out by boat rather than trying to build and maintain roads out to every wooded peninsula in Argyll and Lochaber. At the time of Dal Riata the bias towards marine transport would have been even more acute, and the kingdom spanned Ulster, Argyll and much of the Hebrides.
That is all I meant by mentioning 1066, which is often a rhetorical date that racists use to "prove" their credentials to determine the "true nationality" of other people with a different skin tone.