The Food Voice Emerges in an Ethnography of Polish Americans

Food is, arguably, an anchoring aspect of group identity for Polish Americans, with certain foods like kielbasa and pierogi "speaking" Polish in this country.1 It is significant that Polish Americans' ways with foods speak for them, often without words. This paper utilizes the food voice, a term that I originated during a qualitative study conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Polish American families. During ethnographic fieldwork, I intensively observed, coded, and analyzed their foodways, and in a dynamic reframing of collected data, I saw how foodways serve as channels of communication and avenues for expressions of individuals' identities for, in this case, members of Polish American families. Shedding light on aspects of ethnic identity, agency, creativity, health, economics, gender, the food voice sounded in a wide range of chords for individuals, in families, within communities and in their surrounds.In the later 1980s, while pursuing a doctoral degree, I searched for a dissertation topic in food studies. My background includes Polish roots, and sustainable foods and ways influenced by my mother's homeland upbringing laced our diets and our practices. With this familiarity, I planned an ethnographic study on the practice of Polish American foodways, an area that had received mostly superficial attention in the academic and lay communities. Still, a detailed study of foodways among urban Polish Americans of like ethnic heritage and different lengths of time in the United States was relatively absent from the literature. As a point of background, one study of food practices of immigrant women in two ethnic groups found that the longer the women were in the United States, the more they assimilated to new local foods.2 Folklorist Henry Glassie said that although this may eventually happen, homeland food traditions would still form a quiet but persistent "language" in the new land.3With these works as some of my influencers, I aimed to document foodways in the New York City Polish American community more specifically.Preliminary research took place in several Brooklyn Polonias; neighborhoods where people of Polish ancestry concentrated after immigrant waves in both the early twentieth century and again in the 1980s. Inquiries, participation, and observation in these communities about daily and holiday food practices in homes, churches, and businesses yielded an overview of the growth and cycles in communities peppered with distinct Polish flavors. These urban Polonias supported ways that expressed Polish identity through food. However, beneath common characteristics, there were both subtle and obvious variations; the differences that I observed in "Polish American" food expressions offered a compelling lure to go beneath the surface to explore additional influential factors here. The interplay of foodways among well-established and newer Polish Americans shaped my approach to research questions for this in-depth study.The main ethnography during which the food voice emerged was organized to study food-centered life activities among members of Polish American families. Symbolic interactionist theory—where "people act toward things based on the meaning those things have for them; these meanings are derived from social interaction and modified through interpretation"4—provided a framework to describe and analyze the gathered information on food's meanings for participants in the study.Nuclear members of three families committed to the research project. Working intently with a small number of people over an eleven-month period offered a "setting for the emergence of deeply detailed, rich information that is a crucial component in qualitative research."5 As a participant observer visiting homes regularly, I started by initiating broad conversations about food; daily, holiday, procurement, preparation, history, traditions. Using Michael Agar's sequence funnel approach, I moved our discussions toward greater depth and perspective. We also shopped, cooked, and ate together, mostly at home but also out in their surrounding communities, working together for a period of just under one year.6Further, in the Polonias, I attended church services and community events and interviewed shopkeepers, restauranteurs, clergy, and residents. These "contextual interviews" helped to fill in a picture that was being painted of the foodways in the lives of my ethnography participants.Based on information gathered from my previous research, I hypothesized that the degree of "Polishness,"—that is, Polish foods, customs and traditions—would be evidently impacted by the length of time that my participants were in the United States.To that end, participants were purposively recruited for the potential for information comparison. They were selected to represent three strata of Polish Americans in New York City: a family where the parents had spent their childhoods and adolescence in Poland and whose children were born in the United States, a family where all members were born in the United States, and a family of recent immigrants.To find this cohort, I tapped into resources within Polonias; community centers, churches, singing groups, and word-of-mouth. People helped with leads and contacts, which were followed religiously. I experienced some difficulty engaging families of second-generation Polish Americans; understandably, hosting regular visits by and conversations with a researcher in one's home over an extended period of time could be wearing. Finally, though, all categories of predetermined Polish American families were secured and home interviews started.I visited each family about once every week or week and a half. We usually sat around the kitchen table and started talking about general food practices. I asked family members to describe foods in their daily lives in Poland and in New York City: where and how they got food and how they prepared and served it; the ingredients, tools, and methods that they used; and the dishes that they cooked. Questions about holiday foods flowed from this: what were their major holidays, how were they celebrated, what foods and traditions were part of events, and what were their meanings? As the study progressed, participants often cooked during my visits; I lent a hand, as allowed, while we continued our discussions. We sometimes shopped for daily, holiday, or other special-event foods, and then prepared them. My participants invited me to attend relevant community events and to share meals, including on some holidays. Depending on the family, I either jotted notes during visits and elaborated on them while sitting in my car immediately after leaving their homes, or I recorded the interviews and transcribed them verbatim into a log, along with contextual notes and questions for further inquiry.Mr. and Mrs. Teal, an elderly couple in my study, spent their formative years until their early twenties in Poland, then the rest of their lives in Brooklyn, where they raised a family. Both their recollections of foods, flavors, and practices in Poland were sharp—Mrs. Teal's especially, as if half a century hadn't elapsed since their arrival in the United States. The couple agreeably described taking grain to the village mill, how coarsely it was ground, and the bread baked from it that was a mealtime staple. However, they differed markedly in recalling its taste. Mr. Teal said the bread gave him a full feeling and that it "stuck to the ribs," but when comparing feeling full after eating a steak dinner in the United States, he said the steak gave him a different kind of full, that it was a "better" full. Mrs. Teal fondly recalled perceiving varying degrees of sourness in both bread and soup from a yeast starter that aged from one use to the next. Fermented barscz was a breakfast soup staple in Mrs. Teal's childhood home. In her Brooklyn kitchen, she added lemon, sauerkraut liquid, or sour salt to re-create degrees of sourness in her recipes. Of the soups that she cooked, she would proudly say, "When I make a soup, I make a rich one." During a visit, she made a chicken soup, demonstrating her various "tricks"—it was delicious. In Mrs. Teal's life in the United States, she was known for caring for people, which included feeding them. She was a celebrated cook at her childcare jobs, for her family, and for the community, in which the couple was active. Although she accepted certain kinds of help, she mostly was a solitary cook, receiving praise from people that looked forward to and ate her food.One day while the couple conversed with me, they offered to make coffee. When they opened a cabinet, I saw many styrofoam cups of instant soup as Mr. Teal took out a jar of instant coffee and powdered "lightener" to prepare the hot beverage for us.The Blonskis were a family of recently arrived immigrants from Poland who joined the study. They moved to Brooklyn from a city in eastern Poland. Head of the household, Jaja Blonski was a single parent and a deeply religious woman. In Poland, she held an office job, cooked all meals at home before and after work, procured and preserved seasonal foods with her family, and supported a social network among family and friends where food was a key part. Jaja worked hard to establish herself and her family once in the United States; she coordinated their activities and engaged their participation and help. A community center in the Blonski's neighborhood was a resource for housing, employment, education, and other services. Jaja was well connected there. She and her family benefitted from employment and other opportunities: Jaja and her daughter cleaned homes and offices, and Teddy, her son, learned about summer jobs through postings there. Within her new community, Jaja created a reciprocal "helping network" that engaged her family and neighbors; she was a force in it, and food was a vital element in her daily, work, celebratory, and community life in Brooklyn. Jaja was highly regarded for the quality and quantity of "Polish" foods she prepared and was often asked to make dishes like pierogi and bigos for events. On the Easter Sunday during the study, I was invited to their family breakfast; we followed a ritualized sharing of food, prayers, and wishes. Teddy Blonski obediently helped his mother with dinnertime preparations. When he was with his school friends, he favored fast food hamburgers, French fries, and Chinese and Japanese take-out dishes.The third family in the study, Sue and Wes Jurek, a newly retired wife and husband, were both born in the United States. They lived their Polish American heritage through the medium of song and were very active in female and male Polish singing choruses. For most of their adult lives, they did very minor cooking; more typically, after each workday, Sue stopped at her mother's house for a visit and continued home carrying an evening meal, prepared and packed by her mother.When Sue and Wes welcomed me into their home, they said that as new retirees, they were just starting to actually cook themselves. They were very happy to share their histories and views of food. Sue's were about traditional Polish foods and traditions as she experienced them. Wes's were about a childhood of poverty and now about optimal nutrition and admiration of (male) chef's skills. For my visits, they planned meals that they thought conveyed a sense of "Polishness" and we cooked together while talking. The meals included varied combinations of commercially packaged Polish soups, kielbasa, kishka, cakes, vegetables chopped with fancy knives and cooked with creative utensils, and Jello desserts.All families observed Christmas and Easter, their major religious holidays, with foodways that they each practiced with tradition-based guidelines.Wigilia, the historically meatless Christmas Eve meal, illustrates the variability of food expressions. Each family was clear that there was a prescribed number of dishes and each family's number of dishes served was different; one cooked thirteen dishes; another, twelve; the third, any multiple of seven. When I asked why these numbers, people seemed to speculate: Maybe it was for the twelve Apostles? Or those twelve plus Jesus Christ? They weren't sure; they just followed their respective tradition. The Christmas Eve meal came to include meat for one family that reported hearing that the pope lifted the meatless ban; however, wigilia stayed meatless for others.Within the lay literature, the number of dishes served at Wigilia also differ. Wikipedia cites the number at twelve. The Polish American Cultural Center sets it at seven, nine, or eleven. In my extended family, Wigilia was marked by the presence of oplatek on a bed of straw and a white starched cloth with a sharing of wishes while breaking the wafer. In my nuclear family's wigilia, I cook barscz that includes dried mushrooms imported from Poland eaten after Grace is said by the youngest family member; meat is part of the meal. Gretchen Kurtz's wigilia must include cookies called Christmas Rocks.7 Both the soup and the cookie for us call on our respective food voices in expressing our Polish American identities.The Teals invited me to their home on the day before Easter Sunday. On the kitchen table was a Swienconka basket filled with symbolic foods and decorations that had been blessed in a church ceremony. The basket was lined with a white linen cloth, was decorated with green-leafed twigs, and contained a smoked ham, dyed Easter eggs, bread, salt, and a hard sugar lamb turned golden from years of storage and holiday use. At the Easter meal with Jaja's family the next day, their Swienconka basket held the same symbolic elements but was comparatively more restrained, except for the eggs, which were encased in a "shrink-wrapped" decoration mimicking the pisanki style of beeswax-drawn decorations but achieved quickly in a plastic sleeve.Data analysis started from the outset of the study. After each field visit, a set of notes, and tape recordings were transcribed into a log. I read the log, coded, and wrote notes in the margins and formulated questions for future interviews. Analytic memos came from rereading and thinking about the data. Relevant material was culled from the data and "channeled" into charts to create category and theme headings.Examples of headings included: Food in everyday and holiday life; Ingredients, techniques and tools used; Food-related tasks and assignments; Gendered activities; Food symbolism; Food meanings.Initially, when I observed things like an abundance of instant soup packages in the Brooklyn kitchen cabinets of a participant who spoke highly of Spartan sour breakfast soup in Poland and rich soups from scratch that she cooked at home in Brooklyn, or when I saw Easter eggs decorated with "shrink-wrapped" pisanki designs in the basket of recent immigrants instead of those made using beeswax and a stylus, I thought of this as "untraditional."Similarly "untraditional," the sixteen-year-old, quite new in the United States, said his favorite foods were "hamburgers and Chinese take-out."8 One man said how much he admired and aspired to "the skills of the chef to make nutritious meals that are beautiful" while we shared a meal of packaged powdered Polish soup, kielbasa, and Jello.9 Each of the women cooks added powdered chicken and vegetable flavors to their soups and other dishes. All of the families observed the Christmas Eve wigilia with varying numbers of prescribed dishes.With these seemingly conflicting observations, I was frankly confounded. Certainly, there were "Polish" foods, recipes, and traditions evident in each family's homes and lives, but the similarities did not align under categories with the previously drawn headings. The differences around each family's "Polish" foods, forms, meanings, and traditions derailed my train of thinking to that point. I was at a logjam with the data. With reflection during this period of bafflement, I shifted my focus to observe and consider food's roles and meanings more intensively for each individual in the study, freeing the data to be analyzed no longer in terms of adherence to traditions and to, instead, illuminate the messages, agency, fluid or fixed forms of food, and their meanings. While recalibrating my approach and considering the change, a pivotal insight occurred: I realized that food is a voice for my study's participants and put the words together into "food voice."10 With this view, I saw how the women in the study valued resourcefulness and the "Polish woman's ability to make something out of nothing" and conversely, that the men used "non-Polish" meals to express status and a better life in the United States. These findings formed a category of similar meanings by gender.All participants had been active in their communities, where food figured importantly, and I followed each participant's food voice here, thinking about how some of the women used their cooking to gain power, prestige, and reciprocity. For example, Mrs. Teal was raised in an overcrowded contentious home in Poland. In the United States, she cooked alone, and she added butter and powdered soup mixes—her "secrets"—to bolster flavor in her different recipes. The praise that she received fueled her identity as an outstanding cook in her community; this food voice conveyed her strength. During the study, her daughter's marriage ended, sadly, and Mrs. Teal retreated to home, knitting in front of the television for days on end. Her cooking and her weight dropped noticeably; soups reconstituted from powdered mixes and packaged cookies replaced her home-cooked meals. Her doctor was pleased with Mrs. Teal's weight loss, thinking that she was following diet prescriptions to combat her hypercholesterolemia and hypertension. However, her food voice more accurately spoke to the depression that she stated she was in.11Jaja Blonski "never said no" when her community asked her to prepare hundreds of pierogi and trays of kapusta to be served, along with the ubiquitous kielbasa, at community events that celebrated weddings and holidays or that marked deaths. When deeply engaged in the study, Jaja told me about her casual food perceptions of pierogi and kielbasa in her home country. There, pierogi might have been made after a summer walk for gathering berries, and kielbasa was considered equivalent to hot dogs or cold cuts in a casual open sandwich spread. To Jaja, if these foods appeared on a celebratory table, guests would think that the host was cheap. This shocked me, since a special smoking and service of kielbasa had been part of my own recent wedding menu. When Jaja told me about being asked to make pierogi and serve it with kielbasa in her community celebrations in New York time and time again, even though her personal value system internally disagreed with these foods' presence in festive and milestone settings, she said, "they want, I make," her food voice solidifying her position as a key member in her helping network.In conclusion, each individual used food dynamically to express aspects of their identities. Here, the food voice was a channel of communication and a ready tool to interpret an individual's perspectives on community, ethnic identity, economics, gender, and nutrition.