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Eating Like a Mennonite: Food and Community across Borders
Mennonites are often associated with food, both by outsiders and by Mennonites themselves. Eating in abundance, eating together, preserving food, and preparing so-called traditional foods are just some of the connections mentioned in cookbooks, food advertising, memoirs, and everyday food talk. Yet since Mennonites are found around the world – from Europe to Canada to Mexico, from Paraguay to India to the Democratic Republic of the Congo – what can it mean to eat like one?
In Eating Like a Mennonite Marlene Epp finds that the answer depends on the on their ancestral history, current home, gender, socio-economic position, family traditions, and personal tastes. Originating in central Europe in the sixteenth century, Mennonites migrated around the world even as their religious teachings historically emphasized their separateness from others. The idea of Mennonite food became a way of maintaining community identity, even as unfamiliar environments obliged Mennonites to borrow and learn from their neighbours. Looking at Mennonites past and present, Epp shows that foodstuffs (cuisine) and foodways (practices) depend on historical and cultural context. She explores how diets have evolved as a result of migration, settlement, and mission; how food and gender identities relate to both power and fear; how cookbooks and recipes are full of social meaning; how experiences and memories of food scarcity shape identity; and how food is an expression of religious beliefs – as a symbol, in ritual, and in acts of charity.
From zwieback to tamales and from sauerkraut to spring rolls, Eating Like a Mennonite reveals food as a complex ingredient in ethnic, religious, and personal identities, with the ability to create both bonds and boundaries between people.
In Eating Like a Mennonite Marlene Epp finds that the answer depends on the on their ancestral history, current home, gender, socio-economic position, family traditions, and personal tastes. Originating in central Europe in the sixteenth century, Mennonites migrated around the world even as their religious teachings historically emphasized their separateness from others. The idea of Mennonite food became a way of maintaining community identity, even as unfamiliar environments obliged Mennonites to borrow and learn from their neighbours. Looking at Mennonites past and present, Epp shows that foodstuffs (cuisine) and foodways (practices) depend on historical and cultural context. She explores how diets have evolved as a result of migration, settlement, and mission; how food and gender identities relate to both power and fear; how cookbooks and recipes are full of social meaning; how experiences and memories of food scarcity shape identity; and how food is an expression of religious beliefs – as a symbol, in ritual, and in acts of charity.
From zwieback to tamales and from sauerkraut to spring rolls, Eating Like a Mennonite reveals food as a complex ingredient in ethnic, religious, and personal identities, with the ability to create both bonds and boundaries between people.
- GenresHistory
301 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 8, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 23, 2024
Author Marlene Epp begins this impressive book by questioning the idea that there is something defined as "Mennonite food." She herself is a Canadian Mennonite scholar living in Ontario.
The concept arose in the mid 20th century as cooking and cookbooks began to move out of the realm of kinship and folklore and into a more commodified region of culture wherein various groups could lay stake to identity. Since the term "Mennonite" refers to two basic migrations in Europe (Dutch-Prussian-Russian and Swiss-German) and multiple locations where the migrations ended in North and South America) and now to Mennonites in Africa, Asia, and all around the world due to missionary activity, it would seem to be a daunting task even to try to define "Mennonite" let alone "Mennonite food."
But the author does it! Not by simplifying the concept but by complicating it. Perhaps the selection of photos and recipes in the introduction illustrates the dance: we begin with a picture of "Mennonite Sausage" packaged in Saskatchewan on p. 5, then move to a picture of Mennonite children eating watermelon in Mexico in 1955 on p. 8 and eventually end with the first recipe. Will it be verenike, shoofly pie, pluma moos? No, it is "Goi Cuon"-- fresh spring rolls with peanut sauce. Contributed by a man, Dung Manh Do, a Vietnamese refugee sponsored by the Mennonite Church in Ontario. By starting with this recipe (there are others at the end of each chapter), Epp demonstrates that she is breaking the molds of ethnicity and gender that have been assumed about Mennonite cooking in the past.
The author explores the cookbook phenomenon -- bestselling books in the Mennonite world both in Canada and the US. No one has done a better job of documenting the many different kinds of cookbooks. Future scholars will be indebted to Epp for this work.
I have described the book as scholarship, and well I should, for the careful endnotes and bibliography take up 53 pages! But don't let the documentation put you off if you are a lay reader. The author's tone is conversational, and she adds lots of anecdotes and even what I have called "stealth memoir" in other places. We learn about her, her family, and her family's history, and these stories ground the larger history.
For me, as a "Swiss" Mennonite from Pennsylvania, the last two chapters, on food trauma and faith, were most revealing. Starvation is not something I or my long list of ancestors in America have ever known to my knowledge. But refugees around the world who are attached to the larger Mennonite family, and thousands of people who left Russia in the 20th century do know food deprivation in a way that Epp makes palpable in her descriptions from diaries and other printed sources and conversations.
I guarantee that this book will stretch your palate, your imagination, and your compassion. If so, you will not only be enlightened by the idea of "Mennonite food" but also experience it as sacrament.
The concept arose in the mid 20th century as cooking and cookbooks began to move out of the realm of kinship and folklore and into a more commodified region of culture wherein various groups could lay stake to identity. Since the term "Mennonite" refers to two basic migrations in Europe (Dutch-Prussian-Russian and Swiss-German) and multiple locations where the migrations ended in North and South America) and now to Mennonites in Africa, Asia, and all around the world due to missionary activity, it would seem to be a daunting task even to try to define "Mennonite" let alone "Mennonite food."
But the author does it! Not by simplifying the concept but by complicating it. Perhaps the selection of photos and recipes in the introduction illustrates the dance: we begin with a picture of "Mennonite Sausage" packaged in Saskatchewan on p. 5, then move to a picture of Mennonite children eating watermelon in Mexico in 1955 on p. 8 and eventually end with the first recipe. Will it be verenike, shoofly pie, pluma moos? No, it is "Goi Cuon"-- fresh spring rolls with peanut sauce. Contributed by a man, Dung Manh Do, a Vietnamese refugee sponsored by the Mennonite Church in Ontario. By starting with this recipe (there are others at the end of each chapter), Epp demonstrates that she is breaking the molds of ethnicity and gender that have been assumed about Mennonite cooking in the past.
The author explores the cookbook phenomenon -- bestselling books in the Mennonite world both in Canada and the US. No one has done a better job of documenting the many different kinds of cookbooks. Future scholars will be indebted to Epp for this work.
I have described the book as scholarship, and well I should, for the careful endnotes and bibliography take up 53 pages! But don't let the documentation put you off if you are a lay reader. The author's tone is conversational, and she adds lots of anecdotes and even what I have called "stealth memoir" in other places. We learn about her, her family, and her family's history, and these stories ground the larger history.
For me, as a "Swiss" Mennonite from Pennsylvania, the last two chapters, on food trauma and faith, were most revealing. Starvation is not something I or my long list of ancestors in America have ever known to my knowledge. But refugees around the world who are attached to the larger Mennonite family, and thousands of people who left Russia in the 20th century do know food deprivation in a way that Epp makes palpable in her descriptions from diaries and other printed sources and conversations.
I guarantee that this book will stretch your palate, your imagination, and your compassion. If so, you will not only be enlightened by the idea of "Mennonite food" but also experience it as sacrament.
May 30, 2024
This was a great introduction to Mennonite culture through the focus of food. I did not realize how globalized the Mennonite community is and how this impacts the foodstuffs created.
"It is possible baking also became a political act, since flour put into baking would not be confiscated by authorities."
This line stuck with me, I think there is so much history, connection and necessity tied to food, our access to it and historically how this access has been limited due to conflict, famine and other political factors. When we collect, purchase, grow, prepare and consume food today we need to be aware of where it comes from, who is affected by its production and relearn our food sources and how food is used politically.
I really enjoyed this book, it was educational and yet written like a story being shared so I read it in one sitting. I look forward to attempting some of the recipes included!
"It is possible baking also became a political act, since flour put into baking would not be confiscated by authorities."
This line stuck with me, I think there is so much history, connection and necessity tied to food, our access to it and historically how this access has been limited due to conflict, famine and other political factors. When we collect, purchase, grow, prepare and consume food today we need to be aware of where it comes from, who is affected by its production and relearn our food sources and how food is used politically.
I really enjoyed this book, it was educational and yet written like a story being shared so I read it in one sitting. I look forward to attempting some of the recipes included!
July 4, 2024
I appreciated the author's inclusive take on "Mennonite" foods that encompassed both Mennonite groups in North America but also Mennonites in India, DMRC, and Mexico (though that said, the Canadian/Russian Mennonite experience is definitely the most discussed).
July 8, 2024
Nice crossover book - scholarly but engaging enough for general readers interested in Mennonites and food studies.
July 15, 2024
See my review at https://canadiancookbooks.ca/eating-l...
December 20, 2025
I appreciate food. Incredible insights into a way of culture and relational connections.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews