Mennonite soul food -- fit for the gods

In my childhood home food was always something more than nutrition.  It was the heart of our home. We began the day with breakfast.  Dad had left earlier to tend to the store so Mother read us children a short story from Egermeier’s German Bible storybook.  Then she prayed.  We children glitched over our table prayers, eager to get to the food, but she spoke slowly, deliberately, as if she was actually speaking to someone.

It took many years for me to realize that the war years in Russia followed by anarchy, famine, and flight to Canada were still vivid in her memory, less than decade behind her.  She had known real hunger, so food was something to be thankful for, always. Too many people did not have enough. You always prepared and ate food to avoid waste. Waste was wrong. 

Dinner, our noon meal, was the main meal of the day; Mother spent time preparing it.  It was a coming together. We children rushed home from school and Dad joined us, often with stories about what had happened in the store that morning. Sharing food and stories forged family ties.  This small group of people around the oilcloth-covered table belonged together. And eating together made the bonds strong.  I will never forget the joy of knowing a  large pot of chocolate pudding  made with whole milk was nestling in a snowbank until we were ready to eat it – with real whipped cream. 

Supper was always a simple affair, later on the responsibility of us girls:  fried potatoes with eggs, boiled eggs, peanut butter sandwiches and milk,  fresh vegetables from the garden in summer, leftovers from noon. Mother had done her share of food preparation for the noon meal. 

Factory-produced snacks were  few  because they were out of our budget. After school I rushed home to be the first to grab the leftovers of the morning’s porridge Mother set aside for me.  How can I explain how good these crusty scrapings of oatmeal tasted. In summer, if we were hungry between meals,  we pulled up new carrots in the garden, dusted them off on a shirt-sleeve and ate them. In the evening we found our way down the rickety steps into the dark cellar with its dirt floor to pick an apple from the box. Sometimes a between-meals snack was home-made bread and jam  while wishing it was store-bought sliced bread.

Meals changed with the days of the week, seasons of the year, and in time, with the culture in which they were a part of.   Wash-day we often had bean soup, easy to prepare. Saturdays, at noon, we had pancakes, which could be made one at a time as we girls ate and then went to the store to allow Dad to come home to eat. Food for Sunday, day of rest, was always prepared on Saturday. We learned to expect these rhythms to our food and meals and  to accept them as part of the natural flow of life.

Mother showed her love and expressed her creativity with her cooking and baking. A meal was always a gift to those who shared her table.  It was always her food (“They sure liked my crumb cake”). Women had little to do with the public world so she shone in this private one.  I recall my brother standing on the woodpile and shouting to the world, “My mother is a Royal cook,” both in reference to her use of Royal yeast and her skills as queen of Mennonite cuisine.  She relished seeing family and guests enjoy her wonderfully light rolls.  

When I was working on my book My Emigrant Father I  struggled how to  include this reverence and joy of Mennonite food into the book, for it played an important role in my parents’ early upbringing in Ukraine and mine in Canada. It became a major concern when famine conquered the land.  So I added  a recipe to each chapter  of some significant Low German  food I had mentioned and explained how it was used in early times, how it had changed with the culture, and, especially, how cooking in early homes was always eye-measured and taste-tasted.  Measuring cups and spoons and intricate recipes were not needed. You cooked with the heart, not the mind. This was Mennonite soul food, not a scientifically concocted dish.

In good times the Mennonites enjoyed  abundance,  especially foods made with grains,  eggs, cream and fruit from their orchards.  Many dishes were borrowed from the neighboring Russian people.  During the famine, people resorted to Water Soup, which was just that – water with whatever greens they could glean from gardens and fields. Sometimes there was very little.  Some  households made “beggar’s gravy”  with only cream or milk and onions when meat was unavailable. 

Later on, after Mother could read English and had mingled with neighbors,  her cooking repertoire enlarged to include such foods as a glorious Lord Baltimore cake and  lofty Angel Food cake. I don’t think she ever made a casserole.  Something in a combination of foods was beneath her.

I  hope that readers of  my father's story, My Emigrant Father (Kindred Productions),  will enjoy the glory of  Low German soul food  as I explain how it was  eaten in Russia, in my early home, and later on in my own home. Shipping is from Winnipeg or Kansas. 

My Emigrant Father: Jacob J. Funk, 1896-1986. A Memoir

I knew I had a right to my memories about my father. It took a while to acknowledge that I had an obligation to share them with others. 

As I write in My Emigrant Father: Jacob J. Funk, 1896-1986,  A Memoir, I grew up at the intersection of life and storytelling.  My father was a storyteller. His mother was a storyteller.  They told stories not just to entertain but to release joys and sorrows.  They told stories because life was better with stories. 

I wrote my first article about my father in the 1960s.  It took a while to realize the gold lying buried deep in his life, so I kept researching and writing. I launched into a lengthy essay about him in my book Good Times with Old Times: How to write your memoirs. 

I continued with another about his searching for my mother’s family lost in the Russian Revolution of 1917-19. She had not seen or heard from them in about three years.  That story, “Peter had come home,”  which took me to Russia, Germany and research libraries was published in an academic journal.

Another  was published in The Storekeeper’s Daughter: A memoir.

But  I knew I wasn’t finished.  I stopped my work from time to time to pursue other pursuits like the  translation of my aunt Aganeta Janzen Block’s letters about her eleven years in forced labor in the northern regions of Siberia after World War II.  I was thankful my parents had escaped that fate, having left Ukraine in 1923 for Canada.  Two families—one left and one stayed behind to endure Stalin’s harsh brutality along with thousands of other German-speaking citizens of Russia. That book is A Strong Frailty available from Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas.

But, finally, I knew it was time to get Dad’s story done.  I found a publisher and an editor who was a joy to work with.  Last week my book My Emigrant Father was published in Canada by the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission with Kindred Productions.

I tell my father’s story through the prism of world events affecting thousands of German-Russians at the time.   My father was easily upset by religious posturing, unfairness, injustice, and violence.  I show in the first chapters some of the cultural baggage he brought with him to the new land.  I knew I had to include something about the family “witch.” 

I give a picture of the Funk family living in the valley of Rosenthal in Ukraine in a “forever summer, forever Sunday” life before the Russian Revolution. They never expected this idyllic life to end. But it did. So Dad and his family knew the terror of opposing revolutionary forces stationed on each side of the ravine and their home in the middle. I write about his political imprisonment and experiences as a medical attendant during  World War I.

A story he told often was of having to bury four close family members who died of typhus fever. That memory was sometimes too painful to talk about, but he did.  My sister Anne wrote me she remembered these stories as well. “I remember how upset Dad would get when he remembered this time in Russia—and yet he couldn’t just ‘leave’ it. It was part of his psyche, his innermost being and it was in a way, cathartic for him to speak about it. Now, as an adult, I look back and realize the pain, the hurt he carried with him.  I wanted to weep for Dad and the hurt he carried with him.” 

I wanted to convey to readers the pain, suffering, and turmoil that happens because of war and its aftermath – disease, famine, homelessness.Only readers can tell me if I achieved that goal.

I carry the stories of his life to Canada and the Depression years,  through church turf wars, and into my parent’s  journey into the land of aging.

In this book I have included a map of Rosenthal, other maps, photos (lots of them), a brief family tree, and a chronology of events that affected both the Funk family and the world at large. 

The book is available from Kindred Productions at 1-800-545-7322 with shipping from either Goessel, Kansas, or Winnipeg, Manitoba.  

I like my book and its stories. I hope you do too.