Funeral Festivals in America

Rituals for the Living

Jacqueline S. Thursby

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813187525
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Customs & Traditions
• Index: Social Sciences

When Evelyn Waugh wrote The Loved One (1948) as a satire of the elaborate preparations and memorialization of the dead taking place in his time, he had no way of knowing how technical and extraordinarily creative human funerary practices would become in the ensuing decades.

In Funeral Festivals in America, author Jacqueline S. Thursby explores how modern American funerals and their accompanying rituals have evolved into affairs that help the living with the healing process. Thursby suggests that there is irony in the festivities surrounding death. The typical American response to death often develops into a celebration that reestablishes links or strengthens ties between family members and friends. The increasingly important funerary banquet, for example, honors an often well-lived life in order to help survivors accept the change that death brings and to provide healing fellowship. At such celebrations and other forms of the traditional wake, participants often use humor to add another dimension to expressing both the personality of the deceased and their ties to a particular ethnic heritage.

In her research and interviews, Thursby discovered the paramount importance of food as part of the funeral ritual. During times of loss, individuals want to be consoled, and this is often accomplished through the preparation and consumption of nourishing, comforting foods. In the Intermountain West, Funeral Potatoes, a potato-cheese casserole, has become an expectation at funeral meals; Muslim families often bring honey flavored fruits and vegetables to the funeral table for their consoling familiarity; and many Mexican Americans continue the tradition of tamale making as a way to bring people together to talk, to share memories, and to simply enjoy being together.

Funeral Festivals in America examines rituals for loved ones separated by death, frivolities surrounding death, funeral foods and feasts, post-funeral rites, and personalized memorials and grave markers. Thursby concludes that though Americans come from many different cultural traditions, they deal with death in a largely similar approach. They emphasize unity and embrace rites that soothe the distress of death as a way to heal and move forward.

CHAPTER FOUR

Funeral Biscuits and Funeral Feasts

Foods for Hope and Comfort

Throughout the world, funeral rites and associated foods—even feasts—have been a traditional part of behavior associated with responses to the spiritual and sacred nature of death. With elements common to all cultures, foods affirm identity, strengthen kinship bonds, provide comfortable and familiar emotional support during periods of stress, and gently introduce outsiders to lesser-known culinary worlds. There are emotional and socially significant meanings of food, and common foods of the everyday table translate into cultural expectations and markers at signal meals. A common example of that relationship would be the bread and wine present at the lunch and dinner tables of many southern European Roman Catholics, Greeks, and derivative American cultural groups. These are ancient foodstuffs with deep, spiritual meanings that have assumed the Christian associations of sacrifice and atonement. In many of these southern European cultures, for example, Italian, French, Basque, or Spanish, during the pre-funeral mourning period and then at the funeral dinner following the burial, the presence of bread and wine is expected. For many who have come to America from those parts of the world, the sacrament of Communion is taken at the funeral Mass, and the presence of these symbolic elements as part of the funeral meal is simply assumed. Their absence would present an alien, disconcerting message.

In the first three centuries of the United States, Europeans, Africans, Asians, and American Indians shared culinary ingredients, ideas, and techniques. In America Eats: Forms of Edible Folk Art, William Weaver states that “the ‘classical’ folk cookery of early America was based on connectedness, and affiliation with place, a direct link with nature, and a strong bond between people. These are qualities that go beyond time and cultural boundaries” (Weaver 1989: xv). Funeral ritual and folkways, including foods, have often become culturally synergetic, even commodified, but in spite of acculturation and syncretism, there remain distinct food and ritual traditions practiced by various religious and ethnic groups in the United States. Many of these have been reinforced by the large influx of immigrants since the 1960s. These distinct traditions traverse regional boundaries and remain culturally specific in the midst of American intermingling.

Americans are familiar with regional foods such as clam chowders from New England, hearty chili from Texas, the Mexican American flavors of Arizona and New Mexico, Key lime pie, and foods that represent the tidewater or coastal South. In the late twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, themed fast-food restaurants have appeared in every city and state in the Union, and one can obtain foods ranging from fresh lobster to seasoned game in better restaurants with very little effort. The foods served are not necessarily authentic representations of regional foods, but because they are generally what the public thinks the foods should look and taste like, the patrons fill the tables.

On the other hand, religious and ethnic groups treasure and even guard some of the recipes that have been used for generations in their cultural milieu. The post-funeral feast, or banquet, present in some form or another in nearly all of the American traditional groups, is provided in part to meet the needs of the funeral guests before they depart for their various destinations. Though varied foods may be served, there are symbolic meanings to many of the dishes, and like the bread and wine in the southern European tradition, their presence is simply expected. The traditional foods, further, may ultimately serve a variety of purposes.

For instance, in the Utah County region, south of Salt Lake City in northern Utah, the tradition of serving a potato-cheese casserole at post-funeral dinners has become a symbol and folkloric practice in the last decade or so. Nicknamed “funeral potatoes,” the dish has become an expectation at the funeral meals in this region. That is not to say that it doesn’t appear in other parts of the country. I have seen a recipe book from a women’s Methodist Church group in Michigan that has a similar scalloped potato recipe likewise named “cheesy funeral potatoes.” The dish is so well known in Utah that the 2002 Olympic souvenirs included a cloisonné charm with funeral potatoes pictured on it. (There was another enameled souvenir charm that featured a likeness of Utah’s popular green Jell-O.) Several articles have been written about the potatoes in local newspapers and magazines, and many Utah cooks have a variety of different recipes for this expected, traditional dish. Because they are a filling and mild food, at least one large LDS (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) family has begun a tradition of including the cheesy potato recipe at all family baptisms. (Children in the LDS faith are usually baptized by immersion when they are eight.) Accordingly, this family has renamed the potatoes “baptism potatoes” (Young, personal interview, January 24, 2003). The dish has become a tradition for the living, and many people just smile when funeral potatoes are mentioned.

That food somehow aids the departed is an ancient belief. From the earliest evidences of human behavior, from pyramids to stone tombs in caves, food has been left at the burial place for the sustenance of the dead in their spiritual state. Perhaps the belief was that these substances somehow became transformed from material to spiritual in order for the dead to partake, and in many cultures (Mexican, Eastern European, Italian), the practice of leaving food offerings at the graveside continues. On the other hand, in some cultures of the world, such as Islamic, the ritual practice of leaving food on or beside the grave was and is strictly forbidden. Most American cemeteries have strict rules about what may and may not be left in the cemetery in tribute to the dead. Engaging and provocative differences in response to death emotionally, spiritually, and materially inform us about beliefs and behaviors people value. It has become a priority in this increasingly interactive and multicultural society to become respectfully informed about one another. More than ever before, many Americans work, play, grow older, and eventually die trying to understand one another and one another’s cultural and ethnic differences.

In Early America

In eighteenth-century colonial America, Euro-Americans lived in small villages that dotted the rural, eastern countryside, and their traditions reflected Old World funeral practices. This was also true for the African Americans who brought with them ritual customs born in their homeland, familiar traditions that they believed must be faithfully preserved. Both groups carried rites and ceremonies as links with the dead—and they instituted them believing that the dead watched to ensure that the ancient traditions were continued. In ancient New England forests, tribal Americans practiced prehistoric ancestral traditions of leaving foods and various artifacts near the graves to assure the dead of continued respect and to keep their spirits from intruding on the living. Varied use of food was part of the death ritual in all of these traditions, and food continues in contemporary times to provide comfort, symbolic communal expression, and ritual links between the mourning and the deceased.

The Europeans in early America would have been familiar with a funeral custom practiced both in Great Britain and on the Continent: the simple one of passing out a funeral token, often a molasses cookie called a “funeral biscuit,” to the people attending the funeral. Though many funeral tokens were used as reminders to the mourners of the deceased (white mourning gloves, a broadside, a copy of hymns sung at the graveside, elegiac verses, and religious pamphlets), the most common token was this small cookie stamped with various symbolic motifs such as hearts or cherubs. A more focused discussion of this tradition will be included later in this chapter, and it will explain how the funeral biscuit offers evidence of crosscultural connectedness among Europeans in the early colonies. Yet for whom were these traditions established? I believe these were customs for the living. The customs reminded the living of the honored dead.

African Americans in the North and South represented other evidence of transmitted and synergetic mourning rituals. Performed separately and privately—even secretly for the protection of both the living and the dead—the forbidden sounds of drums beat out ancient rhythms from their homeland in honor of the dead; and African American spirituals from that time such as “I’ll Fly Away” reflect sadness and yearning for another life. A common belief threading through the African culture in young America was the hope of turning into birds, even buzzards, at death so the slaves might “fly right back tuh Africa” (Brewer 1968: 309). The belief provided hope. “‘Flying away,’ signifies a yearning for freedom which has permeated African-based culture over the last four centuries. Also called ‘stealing away,’ it is the desire to escape to a better place” (“Fly Away” 2, 3). Other African American spirituals, including “Get Away Jordan,” “Now Let Me Fly,” “You May Bury Me in the East,” and “View the Land,” reflect this same desire, and need, to escape to freedom.

Foods used by the African American people began to carry deep communal meaning for both the living and the dead. In early Louisiana, for instance, some blacks believed that if they placed rice on the graves, it would keep the dead from catching their hoe and spoiling their rice (Brewer 1968: 298). Today, foods used in the deep South since the earliest days of the country still evoke nostalgia for the strong ties of black communities before the African American diaspora to the North. At traditional African American funerals, there remain many expected and featured foods deeply rooted in southern flavors, such as greens, fried chicken, corn bread, and yams—staple foods that helped the people survive and also bound them together in comfort and familiarity.

Native Americans in early New England, mostly displaced and dwindling in numbers, also had ancient patterns, foods, and mourning rituals related to their dead. There were large populations of Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan-speaking tribes in the Northeast Woodlands, and they all practiced both hunting and horticulture to one degree or another. Game was the staple food for all, but in addition there were prominent foods called the “three sisters”—beans, squash, and maize—which were celebrated and praised in ceremonies throughout the year. Cremation was practiced by Native Americans, and feasts, where game and the “three sisters” were served, were arranged in honor of the dead. There are between five hundred and six hundred registered American tribes in today’s United States, and the decent and respectful treatment of the dead is various, but the gathering and feeding of family and friends continues. Though most tribes respond quietly to death, many have traditions of providing food for the gathered family. Corn is usually present as well as fry bread and beans.

In the American West, the Hopi used maize as the dominant symbol of their spiritual life. Discussing this tradition, anthropologist Peter Whiteley wrote: “Two perfect ears of white maize are given to a newborn child as its ‘mothers’; when a person dies, ears of blue maize similarly accompany him on his journey beyond life. Maize seeds, ears, tassels, milk, pollen, and meal all serve as sacramental elements in differing contexts” (Whiteley 1989: 56).

The funeral biscuit, the sprinkled rice, and the ears of blue maize served as part of a code representing understood messages. Mary Douglas wrote that “if food is treated as a code, the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed” (Douglas 1972: 61). The early American funeral biscuit crossed boundaries of ocean, culture, and time, and created a commonality, a code, so common as to be almost unnoted and forgotten. The commonality of that little biscuit was not unlike the use of the American flag; they are both symbolic representations of valuable memories. The biscuit became a symbol to keep and to remind the living that a valued member of their circle had died. The deceased may have been a parent, friend, or a child, but the memory of that life was worth keeping. Symbols such as familiar foods, behaviors, and even material items like the flag serve as affirmations of identity, security, and belonging. At funerals and memorial services across the nation and across creeds, familiar rituals and nurturing elements provide the clan with purpose, bonding, and impetus to move forward in life.

Though a funeral banquet is not exactly the same as eating in church, it is close, and one of the best comments I have ever encountered on that topic was written by Daniel Sacks, who stated, “Christians have been eating in church as least since the Last Supper; these meals have served a variety of purposes” (Sacks 2000: 62). Food, associated with one’s religious center, is a part of the life of the congregation. There are many mores and folkways inherent in the religious and ethnic traditions of the American people, and they vary widely according to the representative group; however, as Charles Camp stated, for many the first dish offered for comfort at the death of someone’s loved one is the casserole.¹

Americans who offer casseroles as a comfort at the time of mourning may be unknowingly repeating a food tradition that has been popular for over three thousand years (or more). The early Romans “were also fond of casseroles, something taught them by the Greeks, and [also] pies filled with all sorts of things” (Smith 1989: 76). Contemporary Italian Americans and others with origins in the Mediterranean region often serve beans with their meals throughout the year as a matter of course. Yet Betty Fussell, regional foods expert, wrote that before the Spanish explorers returned from the Americas with their pockets full of beans and other seeds, fava beans were the only broad beans known in Europe (Fussell 1986: 50). Some classes of Romans (early Italians, of course), “believed that the souls of their ancestors resided in [fava] beans, so beans were eaten at funerals” (Duyff 1999:11). The upper-class Greeks and Romans, however, “had an ambivalent attitude to beans which some believed to contain the souls of the dead and others blamed for causing defective vision” (Tannahill 1989: 157).

The tradition of eating fava beans in Mediterranean cultures continues, but it is not necessarily attached to the ancient belief that their progenitors are residing in the beans. Jeff Smith wrote: “this is the strangest practice, but a practice loved by the Romans. When the fresh fava beans arrive in the springtime, people come to the market and purchase them, shell them, and eat them raw, some of them eating these right in the middle of the market. They dip them in a bit of salt and pepper mixed with olive oil” (Smith 1989: 422).

Church dinners and ethnic food events serve a variety of purposes, and eating either in the church or elsewhere as a community is a custom practiced by every group from American Indians and Asian Americans to African Americans, Mexican Americans, and European Americans. Further, food beliefs, taboos, and rituals related to mourning and funerary celebrations have often become intercultural and reflect both synchronic and diachronic boundary crossings. Consider the funeral dinner of my husband’s aunt held in her honor at an Italian restaurant. Neither she nor any of the family is Italian. That didn’t matter. The dinner was more about pleasing everyone with popular Italian food than anything else. That she was Protestant, a nondrinker, and of English heritage really didn’t make any difference.

Ancient European, Asian, and American food traditions and taboos, interesting yet largely forgotten, are nonetheless related to contemporary practices of mourning rituals associated with death. Our contemporary behaviors and traditions are often rooted in legacies from the past, and we perform them ritually without recognizing the origins. In this chapter, the discussion begins with a few of those old beliefs and practices and then turns to more recent developments in food and mourning practices in the contemporary United States.

Salt, Chopsticks, and Traditions

Many Americans enjoy foods with the flavor of China, Japan, and Indonesia. Eating the often salty food Asian-style has become common, and using chopsticks is popular in the United States among people who have never traveled in the Asian part of the world. Even my grandchildren (ages twelve, ten, eight, and five) have become adept at using them. In Japan, there are several taboos regarding the handling of chopsticks at the meal table. Some of these strong mandates are associated with the use of chopsticks in Buddhist funeral rites. According to Buddhist custom, after cremation, the bones and ashes are separated by mourners, who then pass the bone fragments from one set of chopsticks to another and place them in a columbarium. The fragments are collected in a specific order: legs, arms, hipbone, back bone, teeth, and skull, with the Adam’s apple being retrieved last by a person who is the closest kin of the deceased. Because of this ancient practice, foods are not to be passed from one set of chopsticks at the table to another set of chopsticks. Further, chopsticks are never to be stuck upright in a bowl of rice at the meal table because that position denotes death. This position of the chopsticks is reserved for honoring the deceased. It is common to place the dead family member’s own chopsticks upright in an offering bowl of uncooked rice positioned either at the family altar or beside the body of the deceased after it is prepared for viewing.

Salt—which carries many symbolic uses and meanings ranging from food preservation to a simple flavoring to a preserver of life—is used by many cultures in association with death, mourning, and rituals. One Japanese funerary tradition is to give a small packet of salt, as well as rice, sugar, onions, and garlic, to the Buddhist monks as they leave to return to their home or temple after a Japanese burial service. The gifts, which may also include a robe, are donated to the monks in thanksgiving for their presence and prayers on behalf of the deceased. Other guests are also sent away with a small sachet of salt, which is to be sprinkled in each corner of their home to drive away any evil that may be lurking. Sachets of salt are still passed out at contemporary Japanese funerals in the United States. The Buddhist Japanese also hold a traditional religious service seven days after a death and conduct a purification ceremony that involves the sprinkling of salt dissolved in water. Salt appears frequently in their various rituals.

During the mourning period in some Hindu sects, family members are to subsist entirely on sacrificial foods or foods donated by others for the period of mourning, and they are not to eat or use any mineral salt or ordinary salt in honor of the transition of the deceased. In Gaelic Ireland, in the nineteenth century, “watchers,” that is, people attending a wake, “were expected to carry salt in their pockets, from which they ate from time to time. . . . [T]he use of salt may be thought in the circumstances to have been merely an encouragement to drink the liquors generously provided, but we find it constantly used for strictly ceremonial purposes in funeral rites” (Puckle 1926: 64).

One of the most unusual services performed for the dead was that of the sin-eater. In the Irish tradition, the belief was that the sins of the deceased could be taken over by a sin-eater—someone willing to perform that ignoble role in return for a low fee and a scanty meal. The process, which took place outdoors, involved the corpse being placed on a bier, after which the sin-eater was to perch on top of the deceased and eat a loaf of bread to be washed down with a large basin of beer. The sin-eater was paid a sixpence (the pay might vary) for the vicarious assumption of the deceased’s sins. The belief was that since the sin-eater now owned the sins of the deceased, the deceased would not be restless or walk after death. Some scholars suggest a connection between the sin-eater and the Jewish scapegoat of the Old Testament.

The sy...