Smells and Bells

My grandmother has always made the best mac and cheese. She starts with the elbow-shaped macaronis and she adds milk and a bunch of shredded cheddar cheese. Then she puts it in a casserole dish and covers it in a layer of bread cubes and bakes the whole thing in the oven. She always uses the same casserole dish, a deep, square one with a glass lid. The resulting mac and cheese is a delicious combination of textures, with the dry, crunchy toast cube on the top and the gooey, stringy macaroni and cheese beneath. This mac and cheese has always been my favorite food, but not too long ago I realized it wasn't just because of the taste or the texture.  Its like this, but with more pieces of toast and its in a square, ceramic casserole dish instead.  When I started reading Religion in the Kitchen , I began thinking about what makes certain foods important, even when they probably wouldn't win any competitions. Don't tell any of my family members, but I do think...

In “Kitchen, Food, and Family”, chapter two of Elizabeth Perez’s, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions, she talks about the emphasis on feeding the gods in Black Atlantic traditions and that practitioners “use food as a medium of exchange with their deities” (61). Reading this made me think of a similar practice we do in my family, but instead of feeding the gods, we feed our ancestors. My family’s participation in the religion that we’ve been following has diminished over the years, but my mom continues to be an active practitioner. There is an altar (butsudan) in the room upstairs of my house for our ancestors. Most, if not all the families in the church we belong to have an ancestor altar, and the responsibility of each family is to maintain cleanliness of the altar and make daily food offerings, as well as pray to their ancestor spirits. My mom will take small portions of the dinner that we have prepared for the family to eat tha...