Le Goût de la Famille

    My uncles like to say that to be a Chaffiotte means that cooking is in the blood. They trace it back to our ancestor Antoine who, in 1911, immigrated from France to work as a butcher in New York City. He spent the first few years alone in this new country, working in hotels and butcher shops to save up so his wife, Elise, and young sons could cross over and join him. In his diary, he wrote that the time apart was an impossibly lonely experience, made only worse by the vast differences in language and culture.

    Food meant something very different in the United States than it did back home in Autun. Americans valued quantity over quality. Comfort over the joy of experimentation. Recipes were strictly followed to avoid the risk of not presenting the promised experience. It seemed that only the bourgeois class could enjoy “fine dining” and have the opportunity to savor the true value of a meal. 

    

    So, like any good Frenchman, Antoine refused to engage with this. Once he was reunited with his family, he began a tradition of Sunday repasts. Every Sunday, after the pilgrimage to mass, the Chaffiotte Clan would gather for lunch at the family home and eat, drink, cook, and talk, until nightfall, never once leaving the dinner table. Staples of home — beef tongue braised in Burgundy wine, dandelion salad with lardons, unpasteurized cheese, fresh bread, and sweet nonettes — filled the table as my ancestors recreated the salty, fatty, fruity flavors of their past. These tastes stayed on Antoine’s tongue as he, Elise, and sons Roger, Marcel, and Maurice negotiated their identities as immigrants. And as the years passed and the family grew, this repast became a ritual: a moment where each member could return to the “Old World” and revel in tradition.  

    

    Now, nearly 100 years later, the Chaffiotte connection to our French heritage is weak. We lost the language around World War II, we universally lapsed as Catholics around the 1980s, and we’ve grown so big and spread out so far that we can no longer host everyone in the same place (seriously, for reunions, we have to rent out a hotel just to fit everyone). Yet, we still continue to cook. The recipes have changed, and the ingredients we use are more diverse, but the desire to taste and re-taste — home, tradition, identity — still remains, even if we’re not entirely sure what we’re connecting to.

    

    In this sense, I’m reminded of Elizabeth Pérez’s book, Religion in the Kitchen, where she examines the micropractices of food within another immigrant community: the Caribbean and Latin American practitioners of Lucumí residing in Chicago. Towards the end, she writes that one of the fundamental ironies of Lucumí is that “a vast majority of practitioners have been initiated as adults and could be categorized as converts…[yet] many say that they made ocha (the initiation ritual) without wanting to do so” (144). Within the context of my relationship with my cultural history, I can’t help but feel similar. I had no say in how my family retained our cultural heritage as it was lost long before I was born, but the desire to connect with French identity through language, culture, and food, has always existed within me. Now, as an adult, I find myself in a position where I, too, can convert to my own heritage and rediscover the practices that are my birthright. While it will never replace the forgotten traditions, my “conversion” can facilitate the creation of new rituals out of the old, revitalizing the Chaffiotte legacy into a complete experience of French and American identity.   

  

    La famille Chaffiotte est mort! Vive la famille Chaffiotte!