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| Festival
Foods Introduction Festivals are universally celebrated and unite the whole of humankind in its desire to honor, worship, thank or just enjoy life to the fullest. These holidays follow the cycles of nature and the cycles of humankind from the cradle to the grave and are subsequently wrought with symbolism and tradition. Because food is critical to the survival and growth of all people, it was only natural that festivals and celebrations centering on food and drink developed to keep the group or clan bonded together. The vital team effort to hunt, gather, prepare and preserve food long ago set the social conventions we fondly refer to as holidays and began the long history of festival food traditions. Festival foods are generally characterized by sweets, meat, foods being harvested or produced, foods that store well, a rare expensive ingredient and/or time consuming preparation. Whether the food is hard to obtain, plentiful and in season, a type that stores well out of season or just requires a lot of effort and ingredients, the typical festival food is anything but your everyday fare. People from most cultures regard sweets as special foods set aside for enjoyment, energy or excellent occasions. The Chinese New Year is celebrated with a sweet sticky rice cake, the sober Ramadan fast is broken with a sweet date, sweets accentuate the wild excess of Mardi Gras carnivals before the repentant fasts of Lent and some sweets are named after certain holidays like chocolate Easter bunnies, Mooncakes, Christmas cookies and Halloween candy. Sugar, also, plays an important role in the preservation of a number of foods such as candied fruit, sugar cured bacon or sausage, pickles, fermented drinks, marzipan, syrups, jellies, jams and any type of candy. Expensive ingredients grace Spinach Florentine, originally made for the king’s court with specks of gold leaf, or Bird’s Nest Soup, served to impress guests with its rare and difficult delicacy of bird’s nests. These sweet tasting swallow’s nests are gained by risking the lives of its gatherers on the high cliffs where these nests were constructed. Saffron, the pollen of a crocus generally grown in Spain, is the fragrant ingredient of kulich, Russian Easter bread, and saffron rice is served to impress guests on any special occasion in Europe and India. Caviar, foie gras, pate, game meat, salted quail and duck’s egg, as well as, the best quality wine, cheese, liquor, preserved food or most exotic and rare ingredients show that the host is truly a person of power, wealth and, of course, good taste. For the more modest or poorer host, it merely shows generosity and graciousness to one’s invited guests and the willingness to impress or honor the occasion and its deities. Foods that store well out of season and foods that are plentiful in season have a lot in common because they are usually different forms of each other. For example, beer production festivals, like Oktoberfest, celebrate with Marzen beer for a month to clear out the old beer in storage to make room for the newly produced supply. This new beer is used in vast quantities at almost any future celebrations. Grape and olive harvest celebrations run freely with new wine and new oil. Fresh fruit and vegetables are eaten cart blanche and shown off in regional “fairs,” while the plentiful supply forces a mass preservation party to can, dry, candy, pickle, ferment into liqueurs or otherwise “put up” provisions for the harsh winter when the harvest is no more. Beer, wine, cheese and smoked, dried, sugared or salted meats are storage foods that appear at both production and other types of feasts. Wine and cheese production festivals will offer a sample of the new products, like new wine, fresh buffalo mozzarella or farmers cheese. These celebrations will also “show off” or test the cheese or wine that has achieved perfection after the right aging period. These festivals fall generally in the autumn season. Meat, fruit and vegetables share a similar preservation processes in that they are dried, smoked, salted, fermented or aged, fatted, candied, spiced, made into a pepper and/or oil paste, canned or pickled for a future date. Lutefisk, pickled herring, most alcohol, salted duck or quail egg, plum pudding, umeboshi plums, plum wine, miso, beer, sausage, amsaki, natto, chipped beef, bacalhau, dried or candied fruit, liqueurs like brandy or fruit cordials, cheese, fruit leathers, noodles or pasta, hominy, smoked chubs, pate, confit and pickles are examples of preserved foods that may show up on the festival table. Other foods that do not need much preservation, but just a cool dry place are potatoes, onions, herbs, nuts, seeds, hard squash, yams, honey, legumes and dried grains like corn, wheat or rice. These “natural” storage foods usually show up in some form at winter festivals where fresh foods are not available. In addition to the complicated processes of food production and preservation en mass, more specific festival foods requiring extraordinary preparation and/or several ingredients are traditional for celebrations. A few of these foods are marzipan, a sweet almond paste popular in Europe and South America, mooncake, a pastry filled with lotus or bean paste, tamales, a masa dumpling filled with meat, gnocchi, an Italian potato dumpling, Mexican mole, a sauce with a gigantic list of ingredients, plum pudding, an English brandied dessert requiring a year’s preparation, Peking Duck, a complex recipe calling for 10 hours of duck hanging, Pithiviers Epiphany Cake and other puff pastry delicacies. Most cultures celebrate the following holidays: Spring Planting, Equinox or Solstice, Dead Ancestor, Harvest/Food Production, New Year, Religious Days, National Events and Lifetime Events. Miscellaneous holidays celebrated by food include national commemorations such as the Fourth of July or Cinco de Mayo, worker days like Labor Day and personal lifetime events such as weddings, christenings, birthdays and funerals. Spring Planting festivals include Mardi Gras, Lent, Easter, Islamic New Year, and Midsummer’s Eve and generally honor God or the gods, in hopes of a good crop at harvest time. The Jewish, Muslim and Christian religions all have major holidays celebrating life, whether it be the angel of death “passing over,” the start of a new year or Christ’s resurrection defeating death. Pagan druid beliefs worship Gaia or the earth and the birth of nature at this time. Celebrations reflect these beliefs and the spring season, with foods like eggs, lamb, veal, peas, new potatoes, young garden vegetables, butter lettuce, fresh herbs, sprouts, yeast breads baked with eggs, sweet desserts and candy made in fertility shapes such as chicks, rabbits, birds, flowers and eggs. Pastel or multi colored foods, such as lemon meringue pie, decorated hard-boiled eggs and candies mirror the brilliant and varied colors of flowers so necessary to attract the pollination of a fruitful harvest. |
Dead Ancestor Days are usually celebrated in the autumn and remember, honor or worship ancestors with offerings of food, candy, flowers, tomb sweeping, parades, music and/or prayers. Halloween, All Saints Day, Day of the Dead, Quing Ming, Bon or Obon and Chung Yuan are a time for families to spend time thinking about their heritage and their own inevitable death. Foods generally coincide with harvest or food production festivals, with the exception of foods shaped like death and harvest symbols. Harvest time can symbolize the entrance of Death, the “Grim Reaper” in the way it is a reaping, an in gathering or an end to the growth cycle. Some of the most interesting Harvest or Food Production galas are Thanksgiving, Moon Festival, Bun Festival, The Matsu Festival, Radish Festival, Homowo and Oktoberfest. These festivals are centered on gathering and preserving food. This is vital to prepare for the food scarcity of a cold winter or the final cycle of nature. Celebrations also thank and honor God and nature for the bountiful harvest needed to survive through the coming “death” or hibernation of life giving forces. Foods appearing on the harvest table tend to be mature game or poultry, storage foods like nuts or root vegetables, hearty and warming dishes and preserved foods. If there is a production or hunting festival such as Matsu or Oktoberfest, the food being produced or hunted are served. If harvest celebrations anticipate the end of nature, most New Year celebrations begin with a bang, their bravado belying the persistent lack of food and evidence of growth. A notable exception is the Islamic New Year, which shouts about sprouts and baby animals in the spring when they can see it. Jewish New Year or Rosh Hashanah, paradoxically, is held at harvest time with harvest foods, but because it is a precursor to Yom Kippur, a time of repentance and fasting, there is recognition of winter’s death and the subsequent redemption of a new cycle. Indian, Asian, Greek, South American, European and American New Year festivities are celebrated with expensive banquets and boisterous behavior. Religious days, like Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, are among the greatest influences on holidays, actually making commonplace the name “holy day” to mean a day set aside or separate from the other days. The three largest religions in the world are Jewish, Islamic and Christian, which without the former, the two latter would not exist. The most important Jewish “holy days” are Passover, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, Rosh Hashanah and Succoth. Muslim religious obligations include Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr (Breaking of the Fast), Islamic New Year and Eid-ul-Adha or Aid el Kebir (Feast of the Slaughtered Lamb). Widely observed Christian festivals are Mardi Gras (ends Shew Tuesday), Lent, Easter, Christmas and Epiphany. Hindu festivals generally revolve around a deity or deities because of its polytheistic beliefs. Important celebrations include Diwali or Deepavali, Festival of Lights and Vishu, Hindu New Year. (Yahoo! Directory Holidays and Observances 2002) (The Worldwide Holiday and Festival Site 2002) Asia’s holiday practices are similar to the India in that they honor multiple deities, but they tend to focus on ancestor worship. Interesting to note, ancestor worship is avidly practiced in the Hispanic holiday culture, although it is restated as honoring Christian saints. Examples of this are the Hispanic All Saint’s Day and Day of the Dead and the Asian Quing Ming or Tomb Sweeping Day. Ancient pagan or Druidic religious beliefs have also had a great influence on festivals that persevere in most European or European colonized cultures such as Spring Equinox/Winter Solstice celebrations, May Day, Midsummer’s Eve and Celtic New Year, which honors Samhain, the Celtic Lord of the Dead. - Elizabeth D'iAmico Copyright© 2003-2006 DrewMCA, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Related
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