General Information about Item:
- Genre: Material Lore – dish; Customary Lore – celebration
- Language: Spanish
- Country of Origin: Mexico
- Informant: G.P.
- Date Collected: November 7, 2020
Informant Data:
- G.P. is a ~60 year old woman living in New Jersey. She was born in Tlaxcala, Mexico and has spent over 20 years in the United States, where she lives with two of her siblings and her two nephews and niece, up until they started university. In the US, her family usually celebrates Christmas by inviting over more family members, preparing food, and partaking in some religious traditions.
Contextual Data:
- Cultural Context: Salads in general are popular in Mexico since most of the population cannot afford certain items on a daily basis. This leads to many families depending on their crops and fruit trees for both food and supplemental income. Luckily, since it doesn’t get cold, crops can be grown year round.
- Social Context: Many families eat this dish during the midnight dinner on Christmas Eve into Christmas day, and, while the orange makes it a bit more tedious to prepare, a sufficient amount is always made. It is mainly eaten after the main dish, almost as a dessert, but with the main purpose to balance the spicy main meal with something cool and sweet.
Item:
- The “Christmas Eve Salad”, as it would be known in English, is a sweet fruit salad typically composed of beets, bananas, lettuce, and oranges. It is mainly served at Christmas time due to its festive, flashy, purple color, as well as its cool refreshing taste since it is typically served chilled and with peanuts. The most common procedure involves peeling and boiling beets in about a liter and a half of water, then cutting it into cubes and placing back into the water it was boiled in. While it is boiling, you cut bananas in slices, cut lettuce, and peel oranges so only the juice sacs cut into cubes remain. Once the beets are ready, you wait until its room temperature and then add honey and sugar, cool it, then add the rest of the ingredients. It is typically served in clear glass to complement the colors, as well as with optional peanuts.
Translation of Interview Clip:
C.Y.(collector): Do you make this salad every Christmas?
G.P.(informant): Yea when a lot of family comes over. Due to Covid though, I don’t think I’ll be making it this year. It’s only going to be my close family and I, so I think we’ll probably stick to something simpler and smaller.
C.Y.: What about making a smaller portion?
G.P.: Come on, you should know this. We don’t scale things down. Not in this house. If we do it, we go big. So unless you want to drive a two hour round trip to drop some off to your cousins…?
C.Y.: Haha, I’ll err, get back to you on that.
Collector’s Comments:
- My family tends to eat this both during the holiday and outside the holiday during the warm months. We typically don’t tie much traditional value to it, aside from the light homeopathic magic belief that something cool will also help cool the stomach down to prevent stomachaches and indigestion since, once accustomed to it, its quite easy to go overboard on spicy foods.
Collector’s Name: Carlos Yepes