Food Heritage Analysis
It’s the holiday season and nothing screams Christmas quite like gathering with your family in the kitchen to recreate some of the classic family recipes that have passed down through generations. Food has, for many people, been a way to celebrate and stay tied to their ancestral heritage and culture as well as a way to dive into other people’s cultures. It’s a way to have a better understand of one’s own family and the importance of food and culture in each other’s lives.
For my food heritage project I chose cardamom bread for the recipe I was going to research. This dish was brought over from Norway by my great- great grandma in 1893 and has been passed down to the females of the Storlie family ever since. I was interested in researching this dish because my aunt won the Betty Crocker Bake Off with it in 1960 and she won the opportunity to study at the U of M where she eventually finished out her entire career. So it is quite a significant dish in my family.
In Scandinavian cultures, Christmas is a popular food season where people whip up their best dishes to share with family and friends. Traditionally, “The Christmas season is characterized by two kinds of food: meat and sweet breads and cakes.”[1] This is true for my family as well. Our table at Christmas consists of turkey, ham, a variety of salads, potatoes, buns, and a variety of Norwegian and Swedish cakes and breads including cardamom bread and lefse.
I began my research by looking into popular Scandinavian ingredients and dishes. I interviewed my grandma who has been preparing cardamom bread for many years. I ask her if cardamom bread was a popular Norwegian dish. Her response was that at one point it was, but she believes it is becoming less popular as it takes a long time to bake and certain ingredients are not readily available. She also discussed how many people think its dessert bread but in actuality it is served with the main meal. I found that breads and bakery items are popular in Scandinavian cultures and “traditional spices for baking are first of all cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, and cardamom. .. Many of these ingredients are only available dried and ground into powder.”[2]
As I continued my research on cardamom bread, I noticed that it is categorized as a predominantly Swedish dish. I found this very interesting as my grandmother was full blooded Norwegian. When I interviewed my grandma I asked her about this and she stated that it is I nfact a Norwegian dish, but as I continued researching I discovered a possible answer in Henry Notaker’s book, Food Culture in Scandinavia. Notaker describes that, “Many foreign types of bread have become more popular and are imported or baked locally based on foreign recipes. This means that there are certain tendencies toward uniformity in the area as a whole, even if a significant national and even regional difference in bread consumption still exists.” [3] Cardamom bread truly is a Scandinavian bread not predominantly Swedish or Norwegian.
