1906388

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IntroductionEveryday

BY JU D IT H FRIEDLANDER

/ \ N T H R O PO L O G Y teaches us that there is nothing ordinary about

the ordinary, that is, if by ordinary we mean usual or norm al.

Still, members of every culture believe that their way of doing

things is normal. If we look at the world from the viewpoint of

people living in a particular society, we can easily point to the

ordinary pleasures, rituals and taboos that the culture associates

with its food.

But ordinary does not only mean normal; it also means order

or rule. In its nominal form, an ordinary refers to the same meal

served from day to day, at the same price. Order and food are

jo ined as well at the seder, or Passover meal, prepa red by Jews to

celebrate their escape from Egypt and liberation from slavery in

the days of Moses. We might therefore consider ordinary in the

tide of this section as the rules people use to order—or give order

to—what and how they eat.There was a time in Anthropology when leading figures in the

field tried to determine the rules of a culture by analyzing

detailed sets of ethnograph ic data and making ord er out of them .

For nearly two decades, for example, the French anthropologist

Claude Levi-Strauss studied what people ate and how different

cultures prepared their food, through their myths, in order to

identify the un derlying structures of hu m an thought. In every cul-

ture, he tells us in The Raw nd the ooked (1964), people put the

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(cooked). To he lp visualize the rela tionsh ip, Levi-Strauss imag-

ines a culinary triangle :

Raw

/ \

/ \

Rotten — Cooked

According to Levi-Strauss people spend most of their time in

almost every culture tu rning nature into culture, the raw into thecooked. But even when they value culture over natu re, they fre-

quen tly break their own rules, defying the ir own categories. Cul-

tures may favor cooked food over raw and still prize delicacies

that are uncooked. A French meal, for example, could easily

begin with a half dozen raw oysters, followed by a boeuf bour-

guignon, which has stewed for hours, and end with a selection of

(rotten) cheeses. Still cultures make choices: the French may eat

slimy shellfish and stinky Camembert but refuse a serving ofwhale blubber crawling with maggots.

In h er highly acclaimed study of kashrut, Mary Douglas tried to

make order out of the dietary practices of Jews, focusing, in par-

ticular, on two central concepts in Leviticus: t hv l and kadosh

Usually translated as perversion, tehvel actually means mixing

things up and confusion. Kadosh, on the o the r hand, while trans-

lated as holy, means to set apart or give the physical expression ofwholeness. Mary Douglas argued tha t Jews are horrified by what is

out of place, by what does no t fit into a proscribed category, or is

incomplete . Holiness requ ires that individuals shall conform to

the class to which they belong. And holiness requires that differ-

en t classes of things shall no t be confused. For the Jews of

anc ient Israel who tend ed their herds, clovenhoofed, cud-chew-

ing ungulates are the model of the p rope r kind of food for a pas-

toralist (Douglas, 1966, pp. 53 and 54).

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and styles, reflecting the influences of many cultures and tradi-

tions. Technically, of course, the laws of kashrut still rule, butmany Jews in the U.S. would challenge the p rohibitions, offering

exam ples of Jewish d ishes cooked by their non-kosher forebears,

by defiantly secular Jews who left East and Central Euro pe at th e

turn of the century, rebelling against their religion, but not their

ethnic identity. And as these im migrant Jews m ade the U.S. their

home, they began eating the food of their adopted country while

introducing their own Diaspora favorites to so-called American

cuisine, some of which, like the bagel, have become popularfoods, am ong Jew and Gentile alike.

Accounts describing this culinary exchange go back 100 years,

to the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the large immi-

gration of Central and East European Jews to the United States.

Among th e best sources for tracing this process are the early cook-

books, prepared at the turn of the century. In 1889, to give one

example, there appeared a non-kosher cookbook for Jews, with

the folksy tide. unt Babette s (cited in Nathan , 1979, p. 9). These

recipes offered secular Jews a way to m aintain ethnicties, while

relaxing their com m itment to Judaism.

Aunt Babette wanted to reach Jews who were assimilating into

American society. So did Mrs. Simon Kander. Publishing her

enormously popular Settlement Cookbook in 1901, the book quickly

became a favorite source of recipes, both for Shavuot (cheese

blintzes) and New Year s Day (a Virginia baked ha m ).Immigrant Orthodox Jews had litde use for American-style

recipes. As Leonore Fleischer recalls in The Chicken Soup Cook-

book , the very concep t of a recipe was still foreign. Raised by he r

grand m oth er in Man hattan in the 194O's, when she married , she

turned away from Jewish cooking and became Frenchified :

One day I found myself longing for a golden plate of my

grandmother's fat-laden chicken soup, and I wanted to

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VoosT asked my grandm other. What?

"How do you make your great chicken soup?" Nemt a ch icken, nemt vasser nemt zalts... You take a

chicken, you take water, you take salt...

"What else?"

" Zuppengrins..."

"Well, okay, how m uch water?"

"A tupfuir A potful

"How m uch salt?"

"A bisseL A litde.

"How big a chicken?"

A chicken Du vaist a chicken." You know, a chicken

It was hopeless. Nobody had ever asked my grandmother

for a recipe before and she hadn't the slightest idea that

what she did every Friday night of her adult life was a

recipe. Who has need for such a thing? Recipes, America(Fleischer, 1976, p. 12).

On a more serious note, the ordinary pleasures of preparing

food depends primarily on the availability of ingredients . In the

Mexican Indian village where I did fieldwork nearly thirty years

ago, there were no recipe books either. The basic task was to

stretch the chicken o r turkey as far as it would go. Served in a thin

broth, one chicken easily fed 20 people. As for the vegetables{zuppengrins they were less varied in Hueyapan than they were in

the soup prepared by Lenore Fleisher's grandmother. But every-

body agreed about the water. The quantity depended on how

many mouths they had to feed (Friedlander, 1975).

I would like to end these brief comments on the o rdinary plea-

sures, rituals, and taboos by returning to the theme with which I

began, one that fascinated structural anthropolog ists. Like Levi-

Strauss and Mary Douglas, Ed mund Leach also uses food as a way

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gories of those one can marry and those one cannot; and animals

into categories of those one can eat and those on e cannot. Afterreviewing the ethnograph ic literature . Leach obesrves that in vir-

tually every society, hu m ans are classified in the following way:

1. Those who are very close, like paren ts and siblings, who are

not marriageable. Incestuous taboos prevent people in this

category from engaging in sexual intercourse with one

another.

2. Those who are kin, bu t not very close (first cousins in Eng-lish society, clan siblings in many other societies). In gen-

eral, marriage among members of this category is either

prohibited or strongly disapproved.

3. Neighbors (friends), who are no t kin and are either poten -

tial spouses or enemies.

4. Distant strangers, those who are known to exist, bu t with

whom there is no kind of social relationship possible.

Leach then goes on to describe how many cultures place ani-

mals in comparable categories, ranking their edibility. The Eng-

lish, for example, group animals in the following way:

1. Pets, which are very close and a re always considered inedi-

ble.

2. Animals which are tam e, bu t are no t very close, like farm

animals. They are mosdy edible , bu t usually only when theyare im m ature or castrated. Th e English rarely eat m atu re,

sexually intact farm animals.

3. Field animals or game, with whom the English alternate

having a friendly or hostile relationship. Game animals

enjoy human protection, but are not tame. They are edi-

ble in sexually intact form, and are killed at certain sea-

sons of the year, according to proscribed sets of hunting

rituals.

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5. Vermin, a category which cuts across the othe r four an d is

loaded with taboos. Although unw anted, most vermin livein close proximity to humans and are intrinsically inedible.

I have sometimes wondered what Edmund Leach would have

made out of contemporary habits of food and sex, were he still

alive today. How would he explain, for example, the rising ten-

dency of many in Britain and the U.S. to reject the meat of every

kind of animal, while professing broad tolerance for sexual diver-

sity? What would he make of a culture in which all animals areinedible and almost anyone qualities as a spouse?

References

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: A n Analysis of the cConcepts of Pollution

and Taboo (London: R outledge & Kegan Paul, 1966)Fleischer, Leonore. The Chicken Soup Cookbook (New York: Taplinger,

1976).Friedlander, Judith. eing Indian in Hueyapan (New York: St. Martin'sPress, 1975).

Kander, Mrs. Simon. The Settlement Cookbook (New York: Simon andSchuster, 1983 [1901]).

Leach, Edm und , Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Cate-gories an d Verbal Abuse, in New Directions in the Study of Languag es

Lenneberg , Eric, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964).Levi.5tfauss, Claude, The Raw and the Cooked Weighman, Joh n and

Weighman, D oreen, trans. (New York: Harpe r To rchbooks, 1970[1964]).

Nathan, Joan, The Jewish Holiday Kitchen (New York: Schoken Books,1979).

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