Wysong and Miles Co. Picnic, August 1943
Courtesy Greensboro Historical Museum Archives
Jeanette Kercado, circa 1958.
Courtesy Jeanette Kercado
Let's Eat! Food in Everyday Life
Everyone cares about food. We need it to survive, but it is
important for other reasons too. People use food to show pride
in their cultures and to affirm their identities. Eating is often a
social event; people use food to connect with other people. For
these reasons, we chose to talk to Greensboro seniors about
their memories of food. We asked about their favorite foods,
how they learned to cook, where they went shopping, and
what meals were like in their homes. The seniors memories
and insights showed that food both reveals our distinctiveness
and can bring us all to the same table.
Learning to Cook
Jeanette Kercadó learned to cook from her mother and
grandmother.
"They both cooked really good. I learned some stuff from them. When I was in my teens, I was kind of
hardheaded, so I didn't feel like learning anything, but sometimes I would go over and I would look and ask
questions. It would stay in my head. I learned a lot."
Jeanette
Kercadó
Carrie Ingram also learned to cook from her grandmother:
"All we would say was, 'What else do I need to know?' She was so sweet and so
kind in everything. She would tell us, 'I'm going to show you how to do this.'
She says, 'I want you to watch me. Pay real close attention. Now the next time I
want you to do it.' So that's what we did."
Carrie
Ingram
"Back then they didn't have recipes. They just used a little teaspoon of that, a
little teaspoon or tablespoon of that. They made their own recipe. They didn't
write out; they figured out in their head and mind."
Maggie
Townsend
The seniors taught their own children what they learned from their mothers,
aunts, and grandmothers. Carrie Ingram recalls the first time her sixyearold
daughter made a pound cake on the wood stove:
"She wanted to do it, and I told her okay. Made sure she washed her hands real good and everything. I greased
the pound cake pan and I made sure all her ingredients were out, had the butter room temperature,
everything. She did fine until she started cracking the eggs. The second egg she cracked when
it went all over
her hands, she said 'Ewwwww!' I said, 'We're going to wash our hands. You finish, it'll be all right.' She did it.
And when the cake finished cooking, it was so beautiful. She was so proud."
Carrie
Ingram
Sources of Food
When they were growing up, seniors recall, their families got food in different ways than we do today. More
people lived on farms and shopping was done in small neighborhood stores. For Montagnards who resettled
in Greensboro, the contrast from a rural to urban life has been particularly striking.
Hunting and fishing were important to Mal during his youth:
"If we wanted seafood, we'd just go to the river and get one and eat it on the spot. It's fresh, it's organic. If we
wanted meat, we'd go hunting, kill them and eat it fresh, like that."
He says times have changed in his home village in Kontum Province, Vietnam.
"Technology comes along, you know, you don't hunt anymore, you don't just go to the river and get those
things."
Mal,
translated by Snow Rahlan
“I didn’t even see a frozen dinner or this, that, and the other until later on. Everything was fresh.”
Annie
Kinion
Jeannett Kercadó, who was raised in Puerto Rico, remembered:
"[In Puerto Rico], they sell fresh coconuts. Somebody just climbs up the tree, knocks them down. You cut it
off and then they put a straw in there, and you drink the juice from it. It's really good."
Here in the United States, Carrie Ingram lived on a vegetable and fruit farm. Butter didn't come in a plastic
tub.
"Now I never did learn how to milk a cow, but I would churn. You know we had these oldfashion
churns with
the butter and everything. A lot of people say it's hard, but it wasn't hard. We knew we had to do it."
Carrie
Ingram
Due to segregation, Carrie Ingram avoided the nearby hot dog stand, where AfricanAmericans
were only
allowed window service while whites ate inside.
“If my money is good enough to go in there to buy a hot dog, why can’t I?”
Carrie
Ingram
Gloria Powell lived in Harlem. The store owners knew her
and they would put groceries on the family's account.
Gloria and her sister would go to the store to get cornmeal
for the fungee, a Caribbean dish that her mother made.
“The man would take a shovel and there was a bag and he
would weigh how much of the yellow meal you had.”
Gloria
Powell
"We always had vegetables. That's what we snacked on. We
would go in the garden and get carrots and cabbage and eat
it right out of the garden."
Bedelia
Hargrove
Picnic in Greensboro's Nocho Park, circa 1950.
Courtesy Greensboro Historical Museum Archives
Food and Family
Whether a holiday dinner, a church social, or simply an everyday meal with family, food allows people to
connect with each other. Friends and family can make even a humble meal taste like a feast.
Lue Ella Mitchell remembers family meals at her home:
"We enjoyed it. Sit there and talk and laugh. Whatever happened that day at school or whatever, we'd sit down
and talk about it and laugh." Lue
Ella Mitchell
Mal, a Montagnard immigrant from Vietnam, remembers
grilling watercress and rau dan, a Vietnamese vegetable,
in bamboo:
"The best part of it is when you open it and lay it out and eat
it as a group." Mal,
translated by Snow Rahlan
Many of the seniors associate food with family and happy
memories:
"We sat at a long table. Our grandmother would always sit at the head. [She] would always bless the table. She
would pass food around and everything. It was just so joyful. After we had went out and picked the vegetables,
get the apples to make the pies and everything, just to sit down and just taste the food, the goodness and
everything in the food after our hands had prepared it. It was so good."
Carrie
Ingram
"At Christmastime, we had fruitcakes and cookies and candy and fruit and different things to eat. I was just
happy, that's all."
Betty
Taylor
"My grandmother made chicken and dumplings. She was a
good cook. She was a Southern cook, and I just loved her
dumplings 'cause they was nice and floaty, like they were
dancing."
Gloria
Powell
"I loved going to eat out. They take you to eat and get you a
little hot dog and a little soda. Oooh, that was a good time."
Lue
Ella Mitchell
"Going out to eatIt's
nothing like a good homecooked
meal. When you have the homecooked
meal, you got all
your vitamins, just the love and everything that goes in it.
You just enjoy it."
Carrie
Ingram
"We almost didn't know what New Year meant back home,
because if you can't even live that daily life, how are you expected to eat all that cuisine that other people are
having for that particular holiday? [But here in the United States,] if you have a balance in your bank account,
Gloria Powell and Hellen
at Lincoln Hospital, circa 1930.
Courtesy Gloria Powell
go and buy it—but make sure you withdraw lower than what your deposit is!"
Mal,
translated by Snow Rahlan
"When I had to make biscuits and all the dough would get on my hands, I would go wash my hands and then
have to put 'em back. [My grandmother] said, 'No need of washing 'em, you got to put 'em right back in
there!'"
Maggie
Townsend
"When it was time to help clean up, we'd know we were supposed to go and help and clean up. And it wasn't
like, 'Well, I did it [last] time.' We all worked together. That's the way it was."
Carrie
Ingram
Not Having Enough Food
Gloria Powell spent the first eleven years of her life at a residential hospital. At the hospital, punishment
might be going to bed without food. At one point, another child kept throwing food under the table.
"They would call me out: 'Who threw that bread up underneath the table?' 'I don't
know.' 'OK, go to your bed!' And I would go to bed. 'And you're not getting nothin' to
eat!'"
But Gloria was clever and hid her bread under her arms. Unfortunately, the adults
caught on.
"'Stick your hands out.' You know what happened. The bread would fall on the
floor."
The next time it happened, they told her to hold out her hands, but no bread
appeared. When it was time to go back to the dorm,
"They was up there grinning 'cause they thought I was walking so funny. Yes I was
walking funny. I had the bread between my legs."
"I know what it is to be hungry and by knowing what [it is] to be hungryit
doesn't
matter to me what food is. I like lookin' at food. I like the way it looks, you know."
Gloria
Powell
Many of the seniors who lived on farms fared better.
"Yeah, we really had enough to eat. Our aunt saw to us having enough. Even sometimes I think about the times
if she didn't have but a little meat she would give it to us and she would tell us that she didn't want no meat. As
I got older, I realized she was doing it for [my brother and I]."
Maggie
Townsend
In Vietnam, Mal's family fished and hunted, but things were still difficult.
"In Vietnam we went hungry daily. Even though God said, 'you work, you eat.' And I did work, but I didn't eat.
The reason is lack of land and garden for us to plant all the food we needed." Mal,
translated by Snow Rahlan
Gloria Powell's mother, Jean Dotten
Courtesy Gloria Powell
Unique Foods
What makes food unique or special? We have access to so many more foods today than we did even
twenty years ago. A typical American prior to World War II would have been unfamiliar with foods we take
for granted, like Chinese food, pizza, and tacos.
"With a large family, you would think that we [would know]
about spaghetti, but I really didn't until my church in
Pennsylvania. They would have spaghetti dinners on
Saturday and that's when I found out about spaghetti."
Bedelia
Hargrove, reminiscing about her first experience
with spaghetti as an adult.
Immigrants, though, brought their special dishes with
them. Jeanette Kercadó remembers her mother's flan and
a dish called pasteles.
"It's made out of plantain and bananas, green bananas. And
you put in one potato. You grate them all, make the batter out of it, and it's really good because you have this
special kind of paper. It looks like wax paper. You flatten it down and then you put this pork meat that you cut
and cook separate. Then you put that in there, and olives and stuff, and then you fold it over and wrap it up
with a special kind of string. Then you cook it for an hour and that's it."
Jeanette
Kercadó
Gloria Powell's Caribbean mother made a medicine of broth from chicken feet,
which Gloria cleaned.
"I had to take that yellow part of the skin off of the chicken feet, then chop his
nails off."
"The strangest thing I found is that American food involves sour and sweet at the
same time and in Montagnard cuisine, we separate those. If we want something
sour we eat it on the side. If we want something sweet we eat it on the side, but it
wasn't part of the food."
Mal,
translated by Snow Rahlan
What is normal in one type of cuisine might be strange in another.
"They would boil [the cleaned chicken feet and water], boil it, boil it and then
they would strain it and that was good for colds. And they would put other things
inside of it, you know, because they was from the Islands."
Gloria
Powell
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