Heritage

Thursday is Heritage Day at Young Man's school. What this means for us is we prepare something yummy to eat for Young Man to share with his schoolmates. Every year we try to come up with something that reflects our heritage and will also be considered edible by children. Considering that between Mr. Engineer and me, we do not exactly share exotic or often even palatable cuisines. Let's face it, there are a whole lot of German, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, and East Prussian foods that would not be recognized as food by your average school-age American kid. Most years, we settle on Irish Soda Bread or cookies. This year we are making soft pretzels. For some reason, carbs seem to be high on our list of foods that we think of when we think of our family histories.

This whole question of heritage and how to celebrate it is an interesting one. Our families have definitely managed to blend into the melting pot. My family is a mix of fairly recent immigrants and multi-generation American. On both sides, I have great-grandparents who emigrated (from Germany and England) and great-great-great grandparents who were born in the United States. Some quickly adapted to their new home and others strove to keep their birth country languages and cultures in tact. Eventually, all blended in and nearly all of the "old country" ways (and recipes) were lost. Now we have to hunt through cookbooks to find remnants of the recipes that we remember or wish that we remember.