Passing on food traditions

Observe the concentration: rolling out the pastry for a 'treat for daddy' - circa 1964. Note the slow combustion stove in the left-hand corner.

My book club is currently reading Brick Lane, which is about Bangladeshi migrants in London. It prompted one of my anglo-Aussie friends (AAs) to comment that she enjoyed reading about the how the food traditions in that culture, and felt that these traditions were lacking in ours. I suspect a lot of AAs feel like that – it’s part of our belief that compared with everyone else we Anglo-celts don’t really have a culture.

Well, I certainly don’t feel that way about food. OK, I do feel a little envious when I see – for example – big extended Italian families cooking together on Italian Food Safari, but I definitely have food traditions that I learned from my mother, and I am actively engaged in passing them on.

These traditions are more to do with baking cakes & biscuits than with meals. I grew up on fairly predictable & plain fare: cold meat & salad for lunch, grilled chops & three veg most nights. This was dictated by time, cost & availability – we were lucky enough to grow our own meat and much of our own veg – as well as inherited English food culture. I admit, it wasn’t hugely interesting, though I was lucky to have a mother who was an excellent cook & didn’t cook the veggies to death. Perhaps that’s why it was over creaming butter & sugar, and learning the tricks for a nice light scone, that we bonded.

My Mum baked cakes, biscuits & slices several times a week to provide morning tea for the various people who visited the experimental farm we lived on, and afternoon tea for her sweet-toothed children. For many years, she did this in a slow combustion wood stove.

My Mum died last August, and it was food that inspired the eulogy I gave at her funeral. This was because I suddenly realised, as I ate a cafe meal of roasted beetroot & pumpkin salad garnished with walnuts, a day or two before the funeral, that I have Mum to thank for my love of fresh fruit & veggies, and for my appreciation of the ‘fresh, seasonal produce’ – that is now a bit of a celebrity chef cliché. My Mum – daughter of a greengrocer and wife of a farmer/green-thumbed gardener – knew all about that decades before celebrity chefs came along.

Just as one example – she instilled in me a love of that strange vegetable beetroot, because she stewed & pickled her own. With that as a benchmark, I can only tolerate canned beetroot when it’s heavily disguised on a hamburger.

So my eulogy became a series of thank-yous to Mum for what I had learned from her, or what I was grateful to her for, culinary and otherwise.

My earliest cooking memory is of making an apple pie as a ‘treat’ for Dad. It had green pastry and I seem to recall that the filling was not very traditional, but Mum had a wonderful tolerance for my culinary experiments. So did Dad, as I’m told he actually ate it. I feel sad when I hear of families were the mother rules the kitchen and won’t let the kids in to learn about food with her. I have countless happy memories of planning, cooking and talking about food with Mum. And of eating it all of course, especially when we had collaborated on Christmas day or other extended family feasts.

I have moved on and honed my skills since then, and one of the activities I particularly enjoy doing with the children in my life is baking. Most recently, some cranberry cupcakes yesterday morning with three of AM’s siblings – Abrantie, G Ketewa & Treasure. It was so much fun & the results were good too.

On other occasions we have cooked ginger biscuits (Mum’s recipe), Anzac biscuits & tried various other classic biscuits from – what else? – the Women’s Weekly Collection of Biscuits and Slices. (Well, I can tell you what else: the Country Women’s Association Cookbook, except that my 1974 edition doesn’t have any pictures to inspire; or my Mum’s own black, food-stained folder full of her collected recipes).

Looks like Abrantie is getting serious about cooking. When I spoke to him on the phone this morning and asked about his plans for the day, they included making ginger biscuits. On another call, his mum, Obaapa, consulted me about buying a mixer as she’djust seen one on special. It could be a good investment; perhaps he’ll end up as a celebrity chef.

But at the very least, Abrantie will grow up with not only his Ghanaian, but also my food traditions. As will my son AM, who at 17 is not hugely interested in cooking, but can still produce (with a little guidance) a mean cheesecake and a succulent rack of lamb. (He tells me – dear little sexist piglet – that he plans to rely on Treasure for his Ghanaian meals when his Dad & Obaapa are no longer able to provide them). Well, given our attempts at cooking Ghanaian food, he may have to.

So yes, I can confidently say that I am a link in the chain of my cultural culinary traditions. Cupcakes rule, ok!

Two’s a crowd

At least, when you’re talking about people of colour in a lot of popular TV series, it is.

This is what I have noticed over the past couple of years while bonding with AM on the couch watching many, many TV series on DVD. There will often be just one major Black or Asian character in the core group of characters, but rarely more than that.

Spooks, That 70′s Show, Big Bang Theory, Hustle, Torchwood, Angel, NCIS, Burn Notice, Sanctuary, Jericho - the list goes on.

In Spooks, which spanned nine seasons & quite a few cast changes, it was particularly obvious. There was only ever one non-white character in the MI5 team. It was kind of bizarre, as though the director was thinking “Oops, better replace the token Black!”, each time one left the series. But it also looked like the director was also trying to phase them out – as each one died a horrible death, he’d be replaced by one that was slightly less central to the action. The Black/Asian characters became more and more peripheral to the plot as the series went on. There was more equal opportunity for the bad guys, who came in a vast variety of skin tones. No surprises there I guess.

I just find it astonishing  – and depressing – that in the 21st century, tokenism still reigns supreme on television. What it says to me is that studio bosses are allowing racism to rule, whether deliberately or not. Either they don’t want non-whites on their shows because of their own racism, or they are afraid of what it will do to the ratings. Apparently the Australian soap Neighbours drew flack from viewers recently for introducing an Indian family into the regular cast. Channel 10 had to remove “angry” comments from their website when this was announced. Makes me embarassed to be Australian. But at least Channel 10 was moving with the times and recognising that not all Australian neighbours are white.

Maybe it is just a matter of time. The Slap, which recently aired to much acclaim, had a multicultural cast that resembled a bit more closely the neighbourhoods and networks in which people increasingly live, in multicultural Australia. (It even had an intercultural marriage and mixed kids!) Perhaps this is because it was based on a novel by a Greek Australian author, Christos Tsiolkas, who didn’t have the anglo blinkers obscuring his view. So let’s hope that as our multicultural society produces more actors, artists and authors from diverse backgrounds, things will change.

I’m not saying it will be easy. It’s not just tokenism that’s the problem, there’s also the phenomena of race-bending, a term I recently discovered thanks to a bunch of fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender “who were appalled by the casting discrimination that occurred during the production of the The Last Airbender film adaptation.” I haven’t seen this film but apparently characters which in the comic series were ‘dark-skinned’, metamorphosed into white people for the film. As a constructive outlet for their anger and disgust, the fans set up an organisation dedicated to campaigning against this kind of misrepresentation.

It’s an important issue to campaign on. With so few parts for non-white people to start with, to deliberately recast Black or Asian characters as white is outrageous. For example, Racebending campaigned for Asian Americans to be cast in a film based on the Japanese science fiction novel All You Need is Kill. However Tom Cruise was cast in the lead. An opportunity missed.

Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, Hollywood seems to feel the need to remake everything in its own image (e.g. Life on Mars, Being Human). Do they really think Americans are so self-centred they won’t watch anything that’s not white-Americanised? I suppose with the billions invested in the industry it’s too big a risk to take. Which neatly shows that the long-standing linkage between racism and economics is still strong.

It was greed and financial gain that set Europeans colonising the rest of the world and enslaving Africans hundreds of years ago. The same motivations are still at play in the entertainment industry, which now commands such a powerful influence in shaping our perceptions and values. It’s crucial to challenge this racist and industrial attitude to the cinematic arts, and insist on film and television that’s more truly representative of the wonderful diversity of humanity.