Has Food Shaped Your Identity?

Food helped shape my childhood identity. My parents were the children of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Hungary, and England. Before gift giving moments, like birthdays, Bar Mitzvahs, Bat Mitzvahs, and family weddings, my mother always used to make us five kids help her carry down the largest wooden cutting board from the attic. It had a lip which made it grasp the edge of the table. She would use it for making Hungarian pastries. Mama Hilda learned this from her mother and grandmother. The pastries were like rugalach or Hamentashen, some small Jewish flaky pastries filled with nuts, jams, or poppy seed paste. I used to love helping roll out the dough on the giant weathered wooden board. The flour would fly, we would put loud jazz on the radio, and have a ball! Then we would spread the fillings out and make the scroll shaped pastries. Ah, the aroma the whole house was consumed in! Mama Hilda always said that baking was a science and cooking was an art. She used to put club soda and 7-up in the dough to make it rise and be flakier then the other mothers’ pastries. That was her secret for winning the baking contests at the school fundraisers during the years. People came to donate to the school just to enjoy the baked goods my mom provided with love.

My identity as a young girl was intertwined with my mother's baking and cooking. She held great pride over her cooking and baking and would not sit down herself to enjoy the foods unless we said it was delicious, marvelous, great, the best we had ever eaten. Otherwise she would get upset and leave the kitchen and retire to the back porch with a cigarette. This instilled in me a need for being approved of by others, and a sense of perfectionism. So, thinking back, Hungarian pastries are the food that defined my childhood identity.

I hope this blesses your readers with some memories of their own!
Sincerely,
KJ Landis
-Author and Creator of the Superior Self series
-CPT, CFI
-Nutrition Educator 

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