Category Archives: Chicago Foodways Roundtable

Matzah, The Bread of Faith: Making Model Shmurah Matzot

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Under Supervision of Rabbi Yosef Schanowitz

(Please reserve to assure enough flour and water. Bring an apron.)

When the Children of Israel left Egypt, they were in such a hurry that there was no time to wait for the dough to rise. They therefore ate matzah, unleavened bread. With only this food (but with great faith), they relied on the Almighty to provide sustenance for the entire Jewish nation—men, women and children. Each year, to remember this, Children of Israel eat matzah on the first two nights of Pesach, thereby fulfilling the Torah’s commandment, “Matzot shall you eat . . .” Continue reading →

Food, Family and Tradition: Hungarian Kosher Family Recipes and Remembrances

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Presented by Lynn Kirsche Shapiro

For centuries, Jewish families celebrated their religious traditions throughout Europe, traditions that were integral parts of the culture in many great European cities. All that changed with the Nazis’ program to exterminate European Jewry in World War II, killing six million. Only a small remnant survived. It has been 70 years since the destruction of Hungarian Jewry.

Lynn Kirsche Shapiro, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, chronicles the story of one Hungarian-Czech Jewish family whose survivors emigrated to the U.S. where they created new family traditions and stories, woven through with threads from the old, to celebrate afresh the spirit of Eastern European Jewish traditions.  Continue reading →

The Impact of American Indian Boarding School Education on Great Lakes Indigenous Foodways

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A Case Study of the Lac du Flambeau Reservation

Podcast

By: Amelia V. Katanski
$3000 Recipient of an American Midwest Foodways Scholar’s Grant

The US has a clear history of limiting Indian people’s abilities to harvest, hunt, fish for, or access their traditional foods in order to assert control over Indian communities and advance national policy objectives. Indian boarding school education is one significant way federal actions attempted to subvert native foodways. Students spent half of their time in the classroom and half working on the school farm, learning mainstream agricultural practices in the context of a boarding school curriculum that devalued indigenous knowledge and supported allotment, in which tribally-owned reservation land was broken into homesteads intended to be owned by individuals and run as family farms, producing food that mirrored European-American dietary norms and supplanting endangered traditional foodways. Continue reading →

In Remembrance of Me: Feasting with the Dead in the Ancient Middle East

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In Remembrance of Me: Feasting with the Dead in the Ancient Middle East, shows how the living cared for the dead and how the ancients conceptualized the idea of the human soul in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant.

The show is built around two themes: the offering of food and drink on regular occasions to nourish the dead in the afterlife, and the use of two or three-dimensional effigies of the dead, often made of stone, to preserve their memory and to provide a means of interaction between the living and the dead. Continue reading →

Duncan Hines: The Man Behind the Cake Mix

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Presented by Louis Hatchett, Biographer

Duncan Hines (1880–1959) may be best known for the cake mixes, baked goods and bread products that bear his name, but most people forget that he traveled across America discovering restaurants and offering his recommendations to readers in his best-selling compilation Adventures in Good Eating.  His biographer, Louis Hatchett, will explore the life and legacy of a savvy businessman, American icon and an often-overlooked culinary pioneer.  Continue reading →