Because we all eat, food is too often taken for granted. We prepare and eat foods in culturally prescribed ways. The foods we eat say a great deal about our social, cultural, and economic circumstances and what our aspirations might be. The traditional foods we eat can say who we are and where we came from.
Michigan’s traditional foods, prepared and eaten in the context of family and community, are as diverse as the state itself. The recipes for many foods were brought from the Old World by immigrant generations and have been perpetuated by their descendants. The Upper Peninsula pasty (pronounced PASS-TEE), a meat and vegetable turnover introduced in the nineteenth century by Cornish miners and later adopted and adapted by other local ethnic groups, has become a regional specialty. Muskrat of southeast Michigan—long associated with the region’s Native Americans and French—is a Downriver area and Monroe favorite, where it is served at community dinners, restaurants, and family gatherings.
Family and home are primary sources of our notions about food, including the manner of preparation and consumption and the symbolism and meaning. Most traditional foods come to us from our parents and to them from theirs. Some traditional foods are also linked to region. However, patterns of personal food consumption are not static. We may change our diets temporarily, but at special times we consciously revert to the traditional foods called for at ritual and celebratory events. Turkey, with its symbolic historic signi&Mac222;cance, is a must at Thanksgiving. We extend best wishes to birthday celebrants by eating a piece of the birthday cake. Fourth of July for many means picnics with barbecue, hotdogs, and hamburgers. On brisk autumn days, we make our pilgrimage to the local cider mill for apple cider and doughnuts.
Food plays an important role as an af&Mac222;rmation of identity and belief. Pierogis are served at many Polish-American wedding feasts. Lute&Mac222;sh is present at Swedish-American, babka at Ukrainian-American, lebkuchen at German-American, and tamales at Mexican-American Christmas celebrations. As symbols of good health, luck, and prosperity, whole&Mac222;sh, noodles, pudding cake, and dumplings are some of the foods Chinese-Americans include in their New Year’s banquets. At Passover, observant Jews all over the world partake in a feast of the same symbolic foods.
Vendors invited to participate in A Taste of Traditions Food Court offer traditional foods closely linked to their ethnicity or region. This list gives us a glimpse at just some of the treats available at this year’s festival.
Arab Foods
Juice Because, East Lansing, MI
Woody’s Oasis, East Lansing, MI
Outside of the Middle East, Michigan is home to the largest Arabic-speaking population, comprising many religions, nations, ethnic groups, and regional cuisines.
Great value is attached to cooking and good food in the Middle East. It is a sensual kind of cooking, generously using herbs, spices, and aromatics. Most local cuisines include rice and wheat dishes, stuffed vegetables, pies wrapped in paper-thin pastry, various methods for roasting meats, meatballs, thick omelettes, cold vegetables cooked in oil, scented rice puddings, nut-&Mac222;lled pastries, fritters soaked in syrup, and a variety of fruit and vegetable juices.
Some areas are known for a highly developed cuisine. Lebanon, for example, is one of only two Middle Eastern countries to have developed a restaurant tradition. Lebanese emigrant cooks and restaurateurs brought Arab cuisine to the attention of the world. In Michigan, the majority of restaurants and bakeries offer Lebanese foods.
Armenian Foods
East Lansing, MI
Food of the Armenian minority in Azerbaijan is not well known in Michigan. In the 1980s some 40 to 45 Armenian families from this region of the Caucasus settled in the East Lansing area. Representatives are eager to share their foods.
Caucasian Armenian food has its roots in antiquity and has both in&Mac223;uenced and been in&Mac223;uenced by Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, Central Asians, and Turks who passed through. The cuisine is varied, exotic, and delicious, using herbs and spices, fresh and dried fruits, walnuts, pine nuts, honey, and rose water in many dishes.
Asian Indian Foods
Sindhu, East Lansing, MI
The Asian Indians of Michigan come from different regions of India. They are from different cultural and social backgrounds, representing different religions, classes, and languages. They are Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, Parsees, and Jews, speaking 16 languages or one of 225 dialects. This diversity is also re&Mac223;ected in their foods.
One of the most distinctive aspects of Indian food is the preparation and combination of spices that make this cuisine unique; cooked with meats or vegetables, the dish is memorable. Vegetables are an extremely important part of the Indian diet. People rely heavily on vegetables whether they are or are not vegetarians.
In mid Michigan, the majority of Indians are professionals who came in the 1960s or later. At that time, a kind of generic Indian food was available in restaurants, which often served foods that proprietors believed Americans wanted. Today, however, more and more restaurants serve the foods of their regional origins.
Barbecue
Turkeyman, Lansing, MI
As the eldest child, Craig Harris helped his mother by assuming much of the cooking responsibilities. Even then his specialty was barbecue. He regards his catering business as a natural progression. From his memorable smoked barbecue turkey comes his nickname "Turkeyman." Harris began as a street vendor in 1994, serving smoked barbecued turkey on street corners and at ball parks. Today, in addition to providing barbecue to hungry crowds at sports arenas in the Lansing area, Turkeyman donates food to missions, volunteers in school kitchens, and feeds families in need.
Dutch Pigs in the Blanket
First United Methodist Church, Holland, MI
The&Mac222;rst large Dutch immigration to America began in the 1840s, arriving in western Michigan in 1847. Within two years, despite malaria, smallpox, dysentery, insuf&Mac222;cient food, and other impediments, a steady stream of Dutch immigrants had established Holland, Zeeland, Vriesland, Drenthe, and Graafschap. Subsequent immigrations in the 1880s and after World War II scattered Dutch throughout the state, although the highest concentration still is in western Michigan.
Dutch-Americans have made major contributions to American culture through politics and government, education, industry, and foodways. Today’s all-American foods, such as cookies, pancakes, waf&Mac223;es, doughnuts, pretzels, and coleslaw, were originally brought to this country by early Dutch settlers. A Dutch-American food not yet widely known is "pigs in the blanket" (saucijzenbroodjes), a popular treat offered by the United Methodist Women of the First United Methodist Church of Holland.
Greek Foods
Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, Lansing, MI
Ethnic churches in America are very important in maintaining culinary traditions, a role they do not usually have in the countries of origin. Cornish-American churches hold pasty bake sales, Serbian-American churches hold summer lamb roasts, and Armenian-American churches hold regular bazaars at which a wide range of Armenian foods are sold, both to take home and to eat on site. The Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church of Lansing is no exception. Among other food events, the congregation hosts a fundraising luncheon featuring Greek cuisine prepared by the Greek Orthodox Ladies Philoptochos Society.
Church members are now second- and third-generation Americans and include a number of other ethnics united by eastern rite Orthodox faith, as well as converts in marriage. The food, however, is steadfastly Greek.
Jamaican Foods
Bev’s Caribbean Kitchen, Ann Arbor, MI
Beverly Taylor-Glaza, from Jamaica, and Michael Glaza, from Michigan’s Thumb area, met when Michael served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica. He taught shop at the school where Beverly taught home economics. In the early 1980s Michael returned to Michigan with his wife Beverly. They eventually settled in Ann Arbor where they have had the restaurant, Bev’s Caribbean Kitchen, since October 1993. The restaurant is primarily take-out, as are many Jamaican-American restaurants, but it also has&Mac222;ve stools for those who prefer to eat there. The menu includes jerk chicken and jerk pork (Jamaican barbecue), curried goat, patties (the Jamaican version of a pasty), black beans and rice, fried plantains, and a variety of Jamaican soft drinks.
Mexican Foods
Celaya, Bath, MI
Thirty years ago, Maria Aguilar left Mexico and now lives in Bath, Michigan and is an active member of the Cristo Rey community in Lansing. At church and Latino festivals, she prepares and sells Mexican foods, some from her hometown, Celaya, Guanajuato. For more than 20 years she has been making tamales, both the savory variety with pork, which most Michiganders know, and the sweet variety, which Mexican-Americans favor at Christmas and other festive occasions. For nearly as long, she has made and sold gorditas, thick shells made from masa that are &Mac222;lled with meat, potatoes, and vegetables or vegetables or cheese. Another of her specialties are &Mac223;autas, a form of taco found in northern Mexico: a tortilla is&Mac222;lled with beef, generally, then rolled and fried. Maria cooks the real Mexican food, the same as she prepares for her grandchildren and very different than anything you are likely to&Mac222;nd at commercial establishments.
Native American Foods
Anishnabe Meejim
Robin and Eva Menefee, Lansing, MI
Native American cookery consists of the oldest foods and the oldest cooking methods in North America—a food and cooking tradition based on things gathered from the ground, plants, and fresh and salt waters. Like the Native Americans themselves, their food and cooking have changed and adapted greatly since&Mac222;rst contact with Europeans. Nonetheless, the Native foods that were once associated with ceremonial life remain so today. Certain things are still eaten in certain seasons only by certain people. What is eaten is central to being Native, and nothing is eaten without a prayer.
Many New World foods have enriched the cuisines of other nations. What would Italian food be, for example, without the tomato? Native peoples grew and preserved a wide variety of corn, which European traders took to all corners of the world. Corn is still an important ingredient in the Native American diet and is eaten in a variety of ways.
Some foods closely identi&Mac222;ed
with Indians are the result of European and other Native American in&Mac223;uences. Frybread, for example, evolved because of access to European wheat and lard, and today frybread is associated with all Indians. Through fairs, festivals, and pow wows, the southwestern version of frybread—
the Indian or Navajo taco—has been adopted by Native Americans of Michigan and elsewhere.
Polish Foods
Kowalski Sausage Company, Hamtramck, MI
Hamtramck, a small autonomous city within the metropolitan Detroit area, was once the home of the Dodge Main auto plant and a major employer that attracted many to settle here. Although today Hamtramck is home to many ethnic groups, it is still predominantly a Polish community as evidenced by the many Polish bakeries, butchers, and grocers; churches and social halls; and ethnic gift and book stores.
In 1920 Zygmund and Agnes Kowalski started a grocery store. Very soon the demand for their sausage became so great they abandoned the grocery store and, in May 1920, established the Kowalski Sausage Company in Hamtramck where it is still located. Today the fourth generation of Kowalskis runs the company, providing a wide variety of Polish specialty foods and meats, including their great-grandfather’s sausage made according to his secret recipe, sauerkraut, pierogis, and stuffed cabbage.
Potato Pancakes
Old World Foods, Cleveland, OH
When most Americans hear "potato pancake," they think&Mac222;rst of the Jewish-American latke. Ashkenazim Jews prepare latkes, especially during Hanukah, and associate the cooking oil with the miraculous oil that is a part of the Hanukah legend. In fact, potato pancakes are widespread in Central and East Europe. In Poland, they are known as placki karto&Mac223;an and sometimes include chopped bacon, cheese, or poppyseed. Russians call them oladyi and sometimes add fresh or dried herbs. Germans, who know them as either Kartoffelpuffer or Reiberdatschi, have a variant that includes grated apple. Czechs call them bramborak; Lithuanians, bulviniai blynai. Byelorussians, who make their potato pancakes with sour milk or yogurt, call them draniki.
Andy Emrisko, who comes from Cleveland, one of America’s greatest multiethnic communities, and who is himself Slovak and Hungarian, faithfully uses his mother’s recipe for potato pancakes, which he makes and sells through Old World Foods, Inc. He also provides haluski, fried cabbage and dumplings, another eastern European favorite.
Thai Foods
Lamai’s Thai Egg Roll Kitchen, Lansing, MI
The cuisine of Thailand is a very special combination of the bite of Szechuan Chinese, the tropical&Mac223;avor of Malaysian, the creamy coconut sauces of South Indian, and the aromatic spices of Arabic food. Situated at the crossroads of Asia, many cultures have played a role in the development of Thailand’s cuisine. The people of Thailand take pride in the harmony of tastes, colors, and textures of their food.
Lamai came to Lansing in 1970 from Bangkok, where she gained her restaurant experience helping in her sister’s restaurant. She opened her own restaurant in Lansing in 1992. With a varied and traditional menu, including pad Tai, fresh and fried egg rolls, crab ragoon, fried rice with vegetables, and chicken curry, she devotes herself to teaching others about Thai food.
Upper Peninsula Pasty
Finnish Cultural Center, Farmington Hills, MI
The pasty (pronounced pass-tee) was introduced to the Upper Peninsula during the nineteenth century by Cornish mining families who immigrated to Michigan’s copper- and iron-mining regions. This portable turnover of pie-like crust&Mac222;lled with meat, potatoes, rutabagas, and onions—a complete meal in itself—was carried underground and often reheated by placing it in a miner’s shovel that was held over a candle&Mac223;ame. The pasty became popular throughout the ethnically diverse Upper Peninsula and today is a regional specialty. Some even say pasty is the U.P.’s contribution to American cuisine, forgetting pasty’s origin.
Many members of the Finnish Cultural Center resettled in southeast Michigan from the Upper Peninsula, where they still maintain close ties. Twice a year their pasty sale is a very popular fundraiser, and the center offers this regional treat at the National Folk Festival.