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The Acceptance and Rejection of Culture Through Food in Pears on a Willow Tree
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Caroline Schoneweis
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Food can be a powerful symbol of identity and evidence of the acceptance and the embracing of a particularly ethnic culture. Conversely, the rejection of the preparation and consumption of a particular ethnic food can be a powerful symbol of the denial or rejection of one's culture. "Foodways can be charged with emotion and significance," so the rejection of the foodways associated with one's ethnicity is not simply a rejection of tedious and time-consuming cooking methods, it is the rejection of an entire culture.1 It is typical for children, at some time in their lives, to reject (usually temporarily) the lifestyle, values, and mores that their parents have tried to instill in them; however, for the senior members of ethnic groups, their children's rejection of tradition can be especially painful or disappointing, intensifying any feelings of isolation or insecurity with which they may already be wrestling. |
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Leslie Pietrzyk's novel Pears on a Willow Tree focuses on the lives of four generations of Polish and Polish American women who struggle both with being female and with being Polish American. Throughout the novel, there are food-related scenes that serve as a venue for the older generation to pass down their culture to the younger generation. The value of sustaining the foodways of Poland is mostly strongly felt by Rose, the matriarch, who emigrated from Poland as a young newlywed. Rose's daughter, Helen, values her Polish heritage, but her "Polish identity" is not as strong as her mother's. Helen never overtly rejects her mother's culture, but she often falls short of her mother's standards, standards that are inextricably tied to being Polish. Pietrzyk often uses food references to illustrate, what are in her mother's eyes, Helen's cultural short-comings. In one scene, Helen, who is expecting her first child, is entertaining her sisters and forgets to turn the oven on to bake a cake she has planned to serve them. When she discovers her mistake, her sisters re-assure her that it's nothing to worry about, assuring her that she will learn to take care of such things with time, but Rose sees it as an ominous sign. When Rose, who had not been at the gathering with Helen and her sisters, comes to the house later that day, she senses that something is not right and asks Helen what is wrong. Helen tells her, "I just forgot to turn on the oven ... that's all." Rose does not see forgetting to bake a cake as a minor oversight. Helen recounts her conversation with her mother, seeing it as an indictment of her future as a mother and of her lack of "Polish-ness":
"And if it's the baby you forget next time?" she asked ...
"But it was just a cake," I said.
"So you're lucky now," she said, nodding. "There is only so much luck to last one life time. And not much of that."
" ... Ma, I said, "this isn't Poland. Things are different here."
"Some things are," she called after me.2
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Leslie Pietrzyk.
Courtesy of Ms. Pietrzyk.
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Rose's message to her daughter is that a mother's important tasks, such as preparing food for her family, are also quintessentially Polish. You may live in the United States, but you must stay connected with your roots to be a complete person. She is not exactly saying that American culture is inferior, but she is definitely saying that Polish culture is superior when it comes to the "important" things in life. |
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Pears on a Willow Tree also uses food to illustrate the dire straits in which characters are living or have lived. In response to the modern "plenty" in which Rose sees her children and grandchildren living, Rose remembers the anxiety she felt as a young mother when her husband was on strike for over six weeks. Her husband was not able to provide for his family because there was simply no work to be had, but Rose had "options" that her husband did not. She states, "A chicken foot for no charge is a matter of asking in the right way."3 As her desperation to feed her family grows, Rose goes beyond just "asking" in the "right way" to get food for her family, seemingly (or at least as interpreted by Rose) with her husband's approval. She describes what she sees as her husband's expectation that she must somehow save them:
My husband wouldn't look at me across the table as we went from threemeals a day to two, and it was because he was ashamed. I know, but every turn of his head, each flicker in his eyes told me to do something, to feed our children, to find a way.4
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On one visit to the butcher, Rose cannot concentrate on anything but the food that she wants to prepare for her family and that admittedly she also wants on her own plate.
I looked at ... the hams I wants to boil and serve with horseradish and tiny peas, ducks that should be roast brown, crispy skinned, and overflowing with Sauerkraut stuffing; and the pork loin to bake slow and crusty with applesauce and sugar.5
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Rose does not admit outright that she sleeps with the butcher to secure food for her family, but she does tell us that, "when [his] hand touched [hers, she] closed [her] eyes to see pork chops and sizzling strips of bacon."6 Her "payment" to the butcher is surely more than just a touch on the hand, something, Rose tells us, that her own mother had been willing to do years before when her family had also been near to starving. In a kind of defense of her actions, Rose remembers how when she was a child, her father and siblings had never questioned its origin when her mother brought home a chicken "because it was food, because we wanted so bad to eat it ... we were hungry then, too, and my mother knew we were."7 The juxtaposition of Rose's memories of helplessness and near starvation as a new immigrant with the comparatively prosperous world she lives in as a middle-aged woman, who plants gardens that produce an abundance of fruits and vegetables year after year, might be seen as a way of seeing just how far Rose and her family have come and that poverty is just a memory; however, there is more to the images of want than to show the family's attainment of comfort and security after younger years of scarcity. In a way, Rose's life, or at least her view of it, has not altered. |
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Her descriptions of canning all of her garden's produce are hectic ones involving "stirring and peeling and pitting and shucking."8 Although Rose, in her middle age, is no longer fearful of letting her family starve, most of her existence is still centered upon providing food for her family, and she regularly devotes a great deal of her life to providing it. Only when Rose is alone does she have the time to contemplate, "Why isn't there something more than this?" For Rose, there is no answer to this question, no decision to leave it all and try to find fulfillment elsewhere. Her answer to her own question is "I suppose that is how it's always supposed to be."9 Rose's identity is wrapped up in food and its preparation and serving. She is unable to separate herself from it, and, in a way, suffers little conflict over it. Whenever she questions the mundane repetitiveness of preparing meal after meal for her family, she simply fixes supper again. |
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Rose's devotion to her family and the great amount of time she spends preparing meals for them is part of her identity as a Polish American woman, but her willingness to prepare time-consuming food for her family and friends is not uniquely "Polish." In his essay "Why Migrant Women Feed Their Husbands Tamales: Foodways as a Basis for a Revisionist Family Life," Brett Williams describes several Mexican American family structures that are reminiscent of Rose's. In Rose's family, only the women, often working communally, spend endless hours working in the kitchen preparing traditional food year after year. In the families Williams describes in his essay, only the women prepare the all-important tamales. The production involved in preparing the tamales sounds very much like the efforts that Rose and her mother and sisters make in preparing pierogi:
They cooperate to do so with domestic fanfare which stretches through days of buying the pigs' heads, stripping the meat, cooking the mash, preparing the paste, and stuffing wrapping, and baking or boiling the final tamale. They gather around huge, steaming pots to cook together as well. Tamales are thus labor-intensive food items which symbolize and also exaggerate women's routine nurturance of man.10
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The women in Williams' essay are not unhappy, unfulfilled slaves, chained to the stove. They may be submissive to their husbands, but they are also partners with them. The woman have a kind of power that is not always recognized by those in our modern culture who are so ready to "stamp out" inequality among men and women wherever it is evident. Many members of current American culture "tend to equate power and influence in the family with freedom from routine family tasks."11 While the "ancient archetype" of maternity as the source of "limitless, irresistible authority" still exists, there is great "ambiguity" surrounding the role of mothers.12 Women who nourish their families are seen as "overwhelmingly powerful, but at the same time are socially and domestically disempowered by their nurturing, serving role."13 The women in the Mexican American families Williams studied were usually completely in charge of their family's food preparation but did not necessarily see themselves as burdened by that fact. Most of them found fulfillment in their roles and strength through their interactions with other women in their families. The family structures are described as "networks" in which women do, in fact, have significant influence, and in which marriage does not "uproot or isolate" woman but widens the number of people upon whom they can depend.14 |
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Although her daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter feel the ambiguity, in varying degrees, that American society has toward motherhood and the tasks associated with it, Rose finds the same kind of fulfillment in her position as caregiver that the women in Williams' study appeared to have found. Her greatest source of fulfillment is the process of preparing traditional food for her family. Her daughter, Helen, who embraces many of the Polish cultural traditions that Rose has handed down to her, still does not always see the point of "wasting" hours and hours in food preparation when there are so many short-cuts to be had. In one scene, Rose castigates Helen for not understanding the importance of the process of food preparation itself. She tries to explain the intimacy that she felt with the food as she prepared it and her appreciation for it, knowing that it would nourish her family.
I held a duck in my hand, its heart pushing against my skin, and I knew my family would feast on its blood in czarnina soup, and its body two days later with red cabbage. I knew I'd boil down the bones for broth. There would be moments I'd love that duck more than I could love any living creature.15
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While the younger generation of Rose's family wants short-cuts, trying to save time wherever they can, Rose tells them, "This is what I did for my family, I made their food with my hands."16 For Rose, food preparation is akin to a religious experience, a time-honored obligation whose importance can never be equaled by sticking a pre-packaged item in the microwave. She is unable to understand food in any other way than associated with time-consuming labor. She considers the time spent preparing food as evidence of her love for her family. |
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If Rose and Helen are sustained by the Polish traditions often embodied in both communal and individual food preparation, Helen's daughter, Ginger, is disquieted by all activities that tie her to her Polish heritage. She suffers constant conflicts over her identity as a daughter, woman, and mother, and as a Polish-American. On multiple levels, she does not want to be a part of her family. Many of her conflicts with her mother can be seen as stereotypical mother/daughter conflicts, having nothing to do with her ethnicity or cultural heritage. On the other hand, for Helen and even for Ginger, all aspects of life have to do with being Polish American. Ginger's extended family is sustained by their regular get-togethers, which are invariably centered upon the preparation of traditional Polish food. Consuming and preparing ethnic food gives them a feeling of "inclusion" or "belongingness."17 Ginger, however, sees the cohesiveness of the family as a trap to escape rather than a source of refuge and strength. There are countless scenes illustrating Ginger's rejection of her family, the most prominent being the fact that she lives in Arizona, only comes to visit her family once a year, and has little contact with any of them at any other time. Not surprisingly, when Ginger does visit her mother, the entire family expects to celebrate by preparing traditional dishes and eating together. It is in these scenes that Ginger's rejection of the type of life and traditions that have sustained her grandmother and mother becomes undeniably apparent. "Food, clearly, is a signifier of belonging," and Ginger does not want to belong.18 Ginger does not always overtly reject her cultural traditions, but she rejects them, nevertheless. In one scene, Ginger' mother and grandmother are preparing pierogi, filled Polish dumplings. Ginger, who has certainly seen and, though probably begrudgingly, participated in this time-consuming activity innumerable times throughout her life, is irritated at the quick pace her mother and grandmother are keeping because she wants to copy down the recipe. Her grandmother responds to Ginger's question as to how much flour to use in disbelief. Ginger's daughter, Amy recounts her great-grandmother's reaction to Ginger's obvious ignorance of something that Rose believes should be integral to her very being:
"Cups?" My great-grandmother looked as if she'd never heard of such a thing. She held out her palms. "Use your hands to introduce yourself to the dough. Four handfuls, five, six. Enough to give a good greeting. We did not need measuring cups. We used our hands; we felt what we were doing instead of always thinking it."19
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Rose, whose "Polish-ness" is innately tied to knowing how to prepare Polish food cannot understand that her own granddaughter can be so clueless and, in Rose's eyes, recalcitrant. Ginger and Rose's conversation continues to show Ginger's rejection or lacking of understanding of her mother and grandmother's values. After her grandmother's "vague" answer to how much flour to use, Ginger simply writes down, "four cups." She has no intention of letting herself "feel" how to make pierogi. Ginger further shows her failure to understand the deep meaning behind painstakingly preparing traditional food for the family when her mother, Helen, tells her, "I saw they've got ready-made pierogi at Kroger—in the freezer case yet."20 When Rose interjects that no one would be interested in buying them, Ginger does not understand why that would be if they taste good. Amy, who repeatedly seems to have more insight into the values of her grandmother and great-grandmother than her mother does, recalls her mother response to the idea of "instant" pierogi:
"Maybe they're easier than all this." My mother gestured around the kitchen, at the bowls and spoons and the film of flour coating the counter and the dishtowels and the mushrooms I was chopping into tiny bits and the sauerkraut soaking in water and my grandmother lighting the stove with a match.21
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Pierogi are just food to Ginger, a source of nourishment and perhaps a few memories. She sees them more as a source of frustration and mess than as something to enjoy and from which to gain strength. Ginger does not embrace the significance of the painstaking process of preparing the food or the history behind it. For her, cooking is best if the cook can make use of short-cuts, better yet, if all of the cooking is already done for her. |
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Ginger has issues far beyond her inability to embrace her mother and grandmother's recipes. She's an alcoholic with a failed career and a marriage that is falling apart, and her life would not suddenly become full of purpose and direction if she were to learn how to prepare her grandmother's recipes. Still, Ginger's relationship with her family's cultural traditions does seem to epitomize the disorder and "pointlessness" of her life overall. Leaving Detroit has not caused Ginger to become an independent person, free from the baggage of her "stifling" family with its standards and "antiquated" expectations; it has simply allowed her to flounder through life far from home and her family's disapproval. When Ginger is home, especially in her mother's kitchen, her aimlessness and alienation become even more apparent. Pierogi are far more than little potato dumplings; they are a part of a heritage that has given strength to Ginger's mother and grandmother through times of want, sorrow, and abundance. Nothing shows Ginger's disconnect from her family more than her inability to recognize their power and to internalize how to prepare them. |
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For Ginger to use food, even inadvertently, as a means of denying or rejecting her culture would not come as a surprise to most social scientists who study culture and food. In her essay, "Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and the Performance of Identity," Susan Kalcik quotes Hortense Powdermaker about the relationship between food and group:
The communal eating of food and customs concerning it may be said to have a double social function: (1) to maintain the cohesion of the society and of groups within it; (2) to determine, in part, the relation of the individual to the society and to the small groups within it.22
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Helen and all of her sisters are Americans, but they are also uniquely Polish American. They are a part of the Detroit Polish community, and they exhibit their unity and keep their group cohesive by having gatherings that center upon the preparation and consumption of their culture's traditional food. Ginger's rejection of her mother and grandmother's food traditions has the function of showing Ginger's alienated relations with her family and even from the Polish American community in Detroit, which also could have been a source of affirmation for her. |
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Scenes depicting Ginger's tenuous relationship with the food that she grew up with serves as a source for much psychological speculation. For most of us, the food of our youth is a "powerful emotional [trigger]," usually evoking feelings of comfort and security.23 Patricia Harris, David Lyon, and Sue McLaughlin, the authors of The Meaning of Food discuss at length the powerful effects of the "tastes of home."
The food of childhood is the food of home—not just "the place where they have to take you in," as poet Robert Frost once put it, but the place where the returning Prodigal Son is welcomed with feast, even in a time of famine.24
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Ginger's struggle with her ethnicity is not about not liking certain foods. "Comfort" food provides comfort only if one wants to return to his or her childhood, if only for a short time. For Ginger, there is no solace in returning to childhood. While there is no hint that Helen is anything other than a caring, though stereotypically domineering mother, Ginger wants to get away from her, from Detroit, from endless family get-togethers and from being a Polish American. |
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Ginger never experiences reconciliation with her family. It is her daughter, Amy, who serves as a "proxy" for Ginger, reconnecting through the thing that kept her grandmother and great-grandmother fulfilled—the preparation of Polish food. Amy has always been open to the culture that her grandmother and great-grandmother have cherished so ardently. When she leaves home to teach in Thailand, she asks her mother for the addresses of her family members in Detroit so that she can write to them. Ginger, who is drunk, shows some hesitance, but Amy responds by telling her mother, "They're my family too."25 Ginger returns to Phoenix when Ginger dies in a drunk driving accident and spends her first night back home in her mother's home. Amy rummages through her mother's kitchen cupboards, finding them full of random "American" cooking utensils: a cappuccino maker, a pasta maker, and countless bowls and measuring spoons and cups. Along with these items, Amy finds a "knotted produce bag from Kroger's, [her] grandmother's grocery store in Detroit."26 Inside the bag is a "lifetime supply of poppy seeds," a staple of Polish baking. Amy remembers her aunts and grandmother sending countless Polish items to Ginger over the years: "rye bread, three-pound jars of sauerkraut ... homed canned tomatoes."27 She also remembers her mother throwing all of these items away. Finding poppy seeds in her mother's cupboards is a surprise to Amy, considering Ginger's attitude about her heritage. Amy decides to bake poppy seed cake, indicative of her desire to embrace her Polish heritage and to create a connection between the grandmother and great-grandmother, who she only saw but once a year. She calls her grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer's, and asks her how to make the cake.
It was what they ate with their coffee, my grandmother and her sisters sitting around the table in the kitchen.... I never much liked that cake, just as I never liked the coffee either, but I always asked for some anyway, just so I could hear my grandmother say, "This one knows that good Polish food, remember how it was Ma's favorite?" My mother [Ginger] wouldn't eat the poppy seed cake, she said she was on a diet, or she'd take a piece but pick at it, either thinking no one noticed or not caring that they all noticed.28
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Throughout much of Amy's telephone conversation with her grandmother about the poppy seed cake, her grandmother does not recognize who she is, but she remembers Ginger and laments to Amy that "[Ginger] thought she wasn't like the rest of us.... Not one of us."29 Somehow Gingers' life-long rejection or fear of being swallowed up by her close-knit, traditional family still is unfathomable to her mother, even in her diminished mental state. Helen sees Ginger's rejection of her culinary traditions as the cause of her abandonment of her family. Helen tells Amy, "I prayed for a daughter who would cook with me in the kitchen, but Ginger wasn't that kind, and that's why she went away and never came back."30 Amy's often disjointed conversation with her grandmother shows yet another example of the power of food. Throughout most of their conversation, Helen's responses to Amy's questions are stilted and only marginally coherent. Having long suffered from Alzheimer's, Helen does not even comprehend that her daughter, Ginger, is dead or know who Amy is; however, when Amy asks her how to make poppy seed cake, she gives her a fluid, detailed explanation of how to prepare it. She even interjects asides while giving her the recipe, easily returning to her detailed instructions, all the while still not recognizing Amy.
My mother said I made the best; of all the girls, mine was the one she liked most. Never too dry, never too sweet.... Always whip your egg yolks with salt first to keep them yellow. And my Ginger ... you know Ginger? I showed her strucla. Chicken fat with the butter was what I showed her to keep the cake moist. Or listen—goose fat is better....
But butter alone is good. A piece of soft butter as big as one finger folded over. Mix that into the sugar, about half a teacup. Two eggs out of the icebox half an hour before you start, all you need is the yolks. Put the whites aside to slip into tomorrow's scrambled eggs; salt the yolks and whip so they turn the color of lemons, mix into your sugar. Are you listening?
Heat your milk almost to boiling, about a teacup, let it cool down to warm; why not just heat it only to warm? I don't know, but this is how you do it....31
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Helen's lucidity brought about through her granddaughter's questions about something that was so elemental to her very being was short lived. When Helen is finished reciting her recipe, Amy still has to tell her grandmother who she is: "I'm Ginger's girl. I'm Amy." Finally, Helen responds, "My Amy? Then you know strucla [poppy seed cake] because it's in you, in your veins."32 It is the mention of strucla that enables Helen to temporarily break through the "fog of her memories" to momentarily recognize Amy and to remind her that she had made strucla during one of her summer visits to Detroit.
I showed you how that summer ... what summer was it? You mixed the egg yolks and salt with a fork in the little white bowl from the set Ma got with the green stamps. We made the braid; the poppy seeds on top were like snow, you said. Remember that? Remember that summer?33
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Helen's coherence does not even last until the end of their conversation, but Amy has her recipe and a source of connection to her past, her grandmother, her great-grandmother, and even to her mother. It is the recipe for old-fashioned poppy-seed cake that provides that connection. |
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After Amy has prepared her strucla, according to her grandmother's instructions the connection that she had been looking for is complete. Being in possession of the recipe, preparing the recipe, and finally eating the finished product allows Amy to commune, in a sense, with not only her immediate past, but with the "women in [her] family [who] had been braiding bread for centuries."34
... the kitchen smelled like a house I knew, like a house I'd recognize immediately—in Thailand, in another life, anywhere. This is what I wanted to come back for, and I sat at the table and ate big pieces of my warm cake, and it was almost as if they were all there with me—I honestly think I smelled coffee, though I hadn't made any.35
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No passage could epitomize the evocative power of food more. Certainly, many readers of Pears on a Willow Tree are inspired to try out some Polish cooking, to prepare a "kolache" recipe, perhaps, and to experience the satisfaction of sharing their discovery with family or friends; however, the author, Leslie Pietrzyk, is not trying to convince us that we should prepare and share Polish food. Her intent is not to extol the virtues of ethnic cooking. She is extolling the virtues of family and tradition, and food is simply her medium for doing that. |
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Amy's experience in preparing a family recipe in Pears of a Willow Tree is uniquely ethnic in one sense, but in another, it is universal. Individuals who do not have a strong ethnic identity also have "food memories" that can be brought about by an endless array of foods: chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter sandwiches, or chicken noodle soup perhaps. A bite of chocolate cake may take a person back to one's childhood more powerfully than any photo album. Still, for those with an ethnic identity, the power of food to connect or reconnect to one's past is multiplied, perhaps even taking a person back to a country she has never seen but still feels connected to. Sceats discusses this desire that some women have to feel connected to their past, calling it "the desire to be reunited with the block off which we are a chip."36 The definition of the "block" can be defined narrowly, as in the case of Amy, who practically feels the older women in her family sitting with her, eating the stracla she has prepared. More broadly, the "block" might include all women who have ever prepared food for their families. In her book, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances, Laura Schenone discusses food as it has impacted her personally as well as in "the larger scope of history."37 She describes the feelings she experiences while living on an isolated farm with her husband early in their marriage. After months of growing vegetables and preparing them each evening for her husband and herself, Schenone "began to look over [her] shoulder for the ghosts of women before [her]," women who had also prepared meals from the vegetables grown in the same soil she was tilling. It didn't take long, however, for this broad connection to be narrowed to a connection with her own foremothers. Food, "the eternal thread through women's lives," allowed Shenone to "examine the women of [her] own family line."38
From the stench of grapes fermenting in the living room (homemade wine, of course) to bread lunches, excessive holiday tables, first communion feasts, Crock-Pot dinners, and take-out food, I could trace immigration, poverty, marriage, children, work love, and death.39
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Experiences like the ones described by Laura Schenone exhibit why ethnic novels like Pear on a Willow Tree are so powerful. Although they allow the reader to explore uniquely ethnic experiences and traditions that may be unfamiliar to them, they also contain universal truths with which everyone can connect. |
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1 Susan Kalcik, "Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and Performance of Identity," in Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, eds., Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984), p. 44.
2 Leslie Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree (New York: Avon Books, Inc., 1998), pp. 19–20.
3 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 173.
4 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 174.
5 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 174.
6 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 176.
7 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 175.
8 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 179.
9 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 180.
10 Brett Williams, "Why Migrant Women Feed Their Husbands Tamales: Foodways as a Basis for a Revisionist View of Tejano Family Life," in Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, eds., Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984), p. 113.
11 Williams, "Why Migrant Women," p. 113.
12 Sarah Sceats, Food, Consumption, and the Body in Contemporary Women's Fiction (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 11.
13 Sceats, Food, Consumption, and the Body, p. 11.
14 Williams, "Why Migrant Women," p. 115.
15 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 6.
16 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 6.
17 Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, eds., Ethnic and Religious Foodways in the United States: The performance of Group Identity (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), p. 48.
18 Sceats, Food, Consumption, and the Body, p. 139.
19 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 5.
20 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 4.
21 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 5.
22 Kalcik, "Ethnic Foodways in America, p. 47.
24 Harris, Lyon, and McLaughlin, The Meaning of Food, p. 12.
25 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 227.
26 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 256.
27 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 256.
28 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 258.
29 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 257.
30 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 260.
31 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 259.
32 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 261.
33 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 261.
34 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 265.
35 Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, p. 266.
36 Sceats, Food, Consumption, and the Body, p. 5.
37 Laura Schenone, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003), p. 11.
38 Schenone, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, p. 10.
39 Schenone, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, p. 11.
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