Myths and Folklore: Folk Foods

Another way of approaching the folklore of food is to explore the foods traditionally associated with specific groups of people. Historically, folk foods were thought of as peasant foods. Since peasants in the European sense of a close-knit kinship group with generations tied to the same land did not exist in the United States, folklore scholars considered folk groups to be groups that were set apart in some way from the mainstream culture. This isolation could be created by region, ethnicity, race, religion, or even occupation. Each of these groups then had its own folk foods. The Amish and the Pennsylvania Dutch had scrapple, shoofly pie, custard, and apple butter; New Englanders had boiled supper, lobster rolls, and clambakes; Cajuns had crawfish and jambalaya; Southerners had grits, biscuits and gravy, salt-cured ham, fried chicken, and pecan pie; Southern blacks had fried chicken, mashed potatoes, turnip greens, and cornbread; Appalachian mountaineers had cornbread, leather britches (dried green beans), and moonshine (corn whiskey); lumberjacks of the northern United States had “mooseturd pie”; cowboys on the ranges of the Southwest had chili and beans. Popular culture stereotyped groups of people negatively by the foods they were thought to consume that did not fit within the mainstream, British-based model: Italians were called “spaghetti-eaters,” French ate frogs and horses, Asians ate dogs and cats, and Mexicans ate tacos and tortillas filled with beans and questionable animal parts.