Describe a moment and analyze: “Write about a single experience or moment, and ask: how does this moment, experience, or encounter relate to my essential question?”

Essential Question: How can I learn about tradition and heritage through cooking?

 

When I visited my grandmother on Wednesday, I learned that I wasn’t the first one in the family to record these recipes. My grandmother, before immigrating to the United States wrote down these recipes in a notebook. The recipes in the notebook where from her mother, my great grandmother. My grandmother told me that this notebook was one of the only things she brought with her to the United States.

When she showed me the notebook, I was extremely surprised. The notebook very much looked its age. It was a bunch of pages that were tinted from age bonded together by just a few strings. This made me realize just how old these recipes are, and how long the tradition of making them has gone on. This notebook was written 72 years ago by my grandmother which means the recipes are at least double that age. These recipes are from a time that has long passed. They reflect a Greece that was much poorer and much less modern. I think the notebook is a metaphor for this.  Despite the massive change in Greece over the past 150 years, these classic recipes have remained the same.

I asked my Grandmother why she didn’t rewrite the recipes when the notebook first started to fall apart. She told me that when she immigrated to the United States this was one of the only things that represented her Greek identity, “this notebook was like bringing apart of the island with me.” That response really stuck with me. At one point, these recipes were the only reminder of her heritage and what her life used to look like. It made me realize that these recipes don’t represent a tradition, they are the tradition.