Happy Sunday, One Potato Community! Today we’re bringing you an essay from our Community Voices – authentic stories relating to families and food, especially highlighting and sharing the diversity in our world – how we can all come together over those shared values, memories, and experiences. Jess Hooks shares their reflections on the connections their grandmother made between cooking Jewish stuffed cabbage and Chinese egg rolls.
We would love to have you contribute your family stories as well and foster building this community – please send us a DM or email hello @ onepotato.com if you’re interested in sharing 🥔
In September and October, Jewish members of our One Potato community celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year; Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; Sukkot, the harvest festival; and Simchat Torah, the end of the annual Torah reading. Jewish holidays and festivals follow the dates on the Jewish calendar, which is a different length than the Gregorian calendar, the calendar followed by most of the world; that’s why these Jewish holidays, and upcoming Hanukkah, fall on different dates of the Gregorian calendar each year.
During these months of Jewish High Holidays and times of reflection, Jess Hooks shares their grandmother’s way of making connections: showing that we can all be same-same – through food.
Stuffed Cabbage Egg Rolls
By Jess Hooks
My grandmother thought she was Chinese – my Jewish, Romanian, grandmother. She reported that there were Jews in Western China and one of her recent ancestors was descended from them, arriving in Romania near the end of the 19th century. Apparently, he spoke little Romanian or Yiddish. The clues of her connection started when the stuffed cabbage schluffed off its potato-like shape in favor of something cigar-like. Then the cabbage was replaced with a wonton wrapper and boiled, until that little cigar went into the frying pan – and it no longer resembled its southern European origins.
We are in Southern California, on the borders between LA and Orange County. It is the 1980’s. Most of the kids and families we knew immigrated to the US at some time between the 60s and 80s, leaving no ethnic majority to be found in the community, though Latino and East Asian were the most prevalent. There was a large enough Jewish community to run three synagogues, each with their own Hebrew School, a women’s and men’s club, daily minions, and a competitive market for B’nei Mitzvah’s and weddings. And there were churches of all denominations, temples for more kinds of Buddhism than I knew of at the time, and one mosque. Then there were the girl and boy scouts, cotillions, swimming and baseball teams, and the public schools most of us attended together. We each had our own cultures at home, religious practices in their spaces – but we shared all this, not just on special days at school, but at sports
events, in our clubs, and whenever we had play or study time at friends’ homes. Looking back, this was more common in California than many other places – but I didn’t figure that out until I moved out of the state in the mid-1990s.
Bearing all this in mind, it seemed my grandmother decided that the Jewish stuffed cabbage dish had its Chinese equivalent in the egg roll. There was an underlying connection not only spoken of abstractly in the form of this mysterious ancestor, but manifested in culinary practice. Before guests came over we would spend half a day sitting over a five gallon bucket filling it with shredded cabbage and carrots. My grandmother would go off cooking it down in a chicken broth, and eventually we would sit around a table wrapping wonton wrappers around the stuffing. She would tell me about her affections for China. Sometimes, this tale of transcontinental connections involved reincarnation. Other times it would involve a theory of a lost tribe.
This desire for connection and exploration through creative acts resonated between my grandparents and myself. They believed, if not assumed, ancestral connections between otherwise disparate folx. When I was over at friends houses I would see others hovering over their own bowls shredding vegetables and rolling them up with rice and wrappers. Kimbap, maki, burritos, and egg rolls were variations on the same theme. The gathering of people to create them and present to others was part of the joy of it all – the manifestation of the connections we shared. As an adult, I’ve since learned to tread cautiously around this subject of these egg rolls. Relying on my grandmother’s holocaust survivor status and an underlying survivalist desire to secure her place amongst the other members of the community with whom she now lived, I tend to emphasize the 1980s/90s attitudes around multiculturalism and global communities when I share this story. But frankly, I would not be sharing this if I had not been utterly charmed by her desire to commune over food and parties, to give us all respite from whatever news cycles make us feel like we will never find the quality of human connections that we can’t quite pin down – but that we do, deeply, desire.
I’ve no recipe. So I suggest you take your ancestral carrots-and-cabbage dish and roll it up in a different wrapper. Make it in a group and serve it at a party. Then see how you feel after and report in to someone who wasn’t there with you – and suggest they do the same.
About:
Jess Hooks is a postgraduate researcher in Inclusive Humanities at the University of Roehampton. Their doctoral project, Routes and P(l)aces, investigates walking as a method and metaphor for FLINTA* ways of knowing and being in the world (*female, lesbian, intersex, non-binary, transgender, agender). Their creative practice and research broadly engages socially-oriented, embodied, and participatory art practices related to gender and heritage tourism.
