The Marriage of Black-Eyed Peas and Sauerkraut

“Eat it. Eat now. It is just one bite,” said the Garbageman’s Wife.

“No. The smell is killing me,” I replied.

“Now! You need it for good luck,” insisted the Garbageman.

“No. I am good with bad luck,” I said.

“Now. Your brother and sister already had theirs. You’ll sit here all day,” he said.

Three hours later, I held my nose and swallowed the sauerkraut in hopes that my newly digested good luck would come in the form of a boyfriend, front-page placement in the school newspaper and an “A” in math class. This tradition continued every year until I graduated from college and moved far enough away to not smell the annual stench of rotten cabbage that wafted across three state lines.

Living in Texas where they eat black peas and cabbage (the non-kraut, non-rotten still edible variety) on New Year’s Day, I no longer had to engage in the Pennsylvania Dutch Tradition of sauerkraut, pork, mashed potatoes (yet another food with a bizarre unappealing consistency that caused me to sit hours at the dinner table) and dumplings. Finally, I could eat pork and dumplings without them being tainted by lumps and putridity. Or, so I thought until my then boyfriend now husband decided that he wanted to go Pennsylvania Dutch for the New Year.

So for the past fifteen years, I have been stinking up my kitchen for my Texan and my half-Texan, half-Pennsylvanian children who mostly love sauerkraut. This year will be no different; I will throw two pork roasts into a pan loaded with lots of sauerkraut. Once the pork becomes tender and juicy, I will toss a Bisquick mixture over the bubbling juices to create fresh dumplings. Potatoes will be loosely mashed and mixed with butter and heavy cream on the stove-top. A small pot of black-eye peas will be warmed for the Texan by marriage. Much like the amalgamation that occurs when cornbread dressing and bread stuffing both appear on our table on Christmas Day; our New Year’s Day meal is truly a unification of cultures and childhood traditions.

After the New Year’s Day feast is complete, the family will commune at the table in a stench-filled dining room for a lucky meal. My boys will beg for more sauerkraut and mashed potatoes, and once again, I will hold my nose and digest a mouthful of stinky, rotten good luck. If sauerkraut is the taste of good luck, what is the taste of bad luck?

Family History

A big thank you to the Mancini family in Wilmington, Ohio for fastidiously detailing your family’s heartrending and inspiring story of emigrating from Italy to the United States. Thank you Simple Mom for your blog on unique family traditions. Thank you Google for indexing 650,071 recipes called “Grandma’s Lasagna.” Thank you Library of Congress for your American Memory Project and your many pictures of immigrants, especially that one where the man and his five daughters have cheekbones and almond-shape eyes that resemble my daughter’s.

With a little piece of family history from this URL and a little piece of family history from that URL, my daughter has an interesting, thorough, and earnest family history that fulfills the requirements for her third-grade assignment. Sure, not a word of it is true. But, isn’t that the American way? Immigrants came here to rewrite their pasts and to create new stories for future generations—exactly what I did with the help of Google. Since my ancestors squandered their American Dreams and didn’t do much other than drink and breed, I took it upon myself to re-imagine my heritage in relation to a four-point rubric that would get my daughter the highest grade possible. With my innovativeness, I prevented my daughter from telling her classmates: “Our strongest family traditions include: Watching grandma drink too many Bellini’s while she tosses the Christmas ham into the garbage disposal because no one appreciates how much she does for the family as well as driving to Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, each summer, not to learn about history, but to spend all day at the horse races striving for upward mobility.

Silly birthday hats, the preparation of seven fish on Christmas Eve, family charade nights and multigenerational scrapbooking play well to an audience of eight-year-olds. Plus, her information comes from a trusted source—the most trusted source, her own mother. Her project is interesting and based on facts as they were told to her—completely worthy of stellar grade. And, really shouldn’t I be praised for my creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and meticulous research?