[Sca-cooks] liver dumplings

[Alex Clark]

At 09:02 AM 2/13/2004 -0600, Margaret wrote:
>. . . My grandmother is the German
>one, but her father was from Danzig and environs (and apparently one did
>*not* mention that it was now Gdansk in his hearing). So is this really a
>Polish recipe, not a German one, and is there anything like it in period?
>
>Margaret, discovering that much of what I grew up with *isn't* German
>after all

But then again, maybe it really is German after all. Distinctions between 
ethnic groups tend to be artificial and exaggerated. Some people will 
disown things belonging to their own ethnic group for fear that it might 
suggest that they associated with another ethnic group.

For example, there's a Croatian dance-song named Hopa Hopa. A folklorist 
named Dick Crum learned the dance and the song from an ethnic Croatian 
community. A few years ago he was teaching the dance to some 
Croatian-Americans, and they indignantly insisted that it was not Croatian 
because the song uses the word "popadiju" which means priest's wife. I 
don't know what it's like now, but before the war in the '90s there were 
lots of places where Roman Catholic Croatians and Orthodox Serbs lived as 
neighbors, so there was no reason to assume that the people who first sang 
the song didn't have a popadiju in their town or village.

Alex Clark/Henry of Maldon