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1. David Sutton
A Tale of Easter Ovens:
Food and Collective
Memory
social research Vol 75 : No 1 : Spring 2008 157
at a time when drinks available in gas station coolers promise
exotic ingredients to boost your memory powers, my own inter-
est in food and memory meets with bemusement from friends and
colleagues.* Both the study of food and of memory are relatively recent
subjects in anthropology and social science more generally, and thus
their convergence still provokes surprise and curiosity. In the words of
one colleague, “Food and memory? Why would anyone want to remem-
ber anything they had eaten?” (see Sutton, 2001: 1) In this essay I wish
to reflect on this question, and in keeping with the theme of this issue,
pose the question in terms of “social” or “collective” memory. In what
ways does food, ingested into individual bodies, feed social memory?
Recently, a number of scholars have suggested that the topic of social
memory suffers from a lack of precision in definition, a lack of common
methodology and a lack of theoretical development (Climo and Cattell,
2002; Golden, 2005; Holtzman, 2006).
In this essay I hope to make a small contribution to clarity in
exploring what we mean by memory, how food is implicated in very
different types of memory, and how these different types of memory
relate to each other. This will not be a review of the burgeoning liter-
ature on this topic, since this has been done recently and thoroughly
by Holtzman (2006). Rather, I will draw on ethnographic examples
from my fieldwork on the island of Kalymnos, Greece to suggest

2. 158 social research
some of the ways that food and memory can be productively thought
together.
SOCIAL MEMORY
Social or collective memory, of course, emerges from the work of
Halbwachs, who argues that memory is only able to endure in sustain-
ing social contexts (see Narvaez, 2006: 61). Connerton begins his book
How Societies Remember (1989) with the claim “We generally think of
memory as an individual faculty.” Connerton, however, sees social
memory as having a crucial normative role in creating social orders
and identities. As he puts it: “It is an implicit rule that participants in
any social order must presuppose a shared memory.” This is because,
according to Connerton, divergent pasts would lead to the creation of
divergent presents: “our images of the past commonly serve to legiti-
mate a present social order” (1989: 3). One might be tempted to criti-
cize Connerton here for a lingering functionalism, even if cloaked in
the language of identity and power. In fact, Connerton, drawing from
Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, gives examples of the diver-
gence of memories between generations of “the same” social group,
which may, as he suggests, lead to miscommunication, but hardly to
imminent social breakdown. It would seem to be an empirical question
how shared any particular social memory is or needs to be.
Most societies seem to tolerate a huge divergence of memories of
all kinds: from episodic memories (Watergate, Vietnam), to bodily/habit
memories (ability to play the piano; memories associated with first taste
of sushi) to even the memories that make up the social categories that
some argue are the very basis of “culture” (some Hawaiians categorized
Captain Cook as a god, others a chief, others a plundering rogue). I raise
this point not to criticize Connerton, but to suggest that memories can
be deeply social in the sense of being shaped by our interactions with the
humans, objects, and institutions that make up society, without neces-
sarily needing to be widely shared. This is, indeed, what Proust showed
us, in describing deeply personal, embodied memories such as eating
the Madeleine cookie dipped in tea, or tripping over a paving stone—

3. A Tale of Easter Ovens 159
memories that were significant to Proust because they allowed him to
reconstruct the rich tapestry of social life he describes in the course of
his novel. What I am suggesting is that Halbwachs is in a sense right in
claiming that all memory is social (no memory is, then, asocial). But we
could also say that all memory is personal: organized through individu-
als with their own particular trajectories through the social landscape.
The same could be said for “culture,” as anthropologists have been argu-
ing for some time now (for example, Garro, 2006; Rosaldo, 1989; Toren,
1999). This also suggests a revisiting of Pierre Nora’s well-known discus-
sion of milieux de memoire (environments of memory) and lieux de memoire
(spaces of memory In some ways the notion that food is a key “site” of
memory—to a greater or lesser extent in one society or another—is
apposite. Whether, however, Nora’s larger view that traditional soci-
eties have milieux de memoire, richly layered environments of memory,
while “modern” societies must settle for lieux, particular spaces or sites
of memory, is more of a problematic issue. As I will suggest, the lack of
milieux de memoire does not necessarily preclude memories of food being
deeply social.
Within food studies much recent scholarship—well represented
in journals such as Food, Culture and Society and Food and Foodways—has
shown how food is a key mediator of social relationships, a symbol of
identity and a marker of difference, whether defined by gender, class,
race, or ethnicity. So how to bring these two strands of work together?
Different writers have suggested different schemes for dividing up
memory, which often include variations on the following: episodic
memory, semantic memory, and bodily/habit memory. I will be consid-
ering all these different categories in what follows. In a recent review
of works on food and memory, Holtzman has usefully suggested a
number of such different types of memory that this literature explores,
including nostalgia and the relationship of food to identities, “real” or
“invented”; food as the marker of epochal transformations—for exam-
ple, from “tradition” or “the good old days” to “modernity”; food and
sensuous/sensory memory; and food’s use in ritual contexts to stimulate
memory (and forgetting, in the case of some mortuary rituals). In what

4. 160 social research
follows I will be looking at all of these, and adding another category,
what I call “prospective memory” or the active planning in the present
for future memories.
But how do these categories help us analytically, besides alert-
ing us to possible phenomena to pay attention to in our research? As
noted above, I will not be arguing that there is an overall distinction
to be made between social and individual memory. Rather, and once
again picking up on a suggestion by Holtzman, we might think of the
power of food for memory in the fact that our relationship with food
“intrinsically traverses the public and the intimate” (2006: 373). As
he puts it, the ingestion of food “always has a deeply private compo-
nent” at the same time that it is publicly transacted through shar-
ing, ritual, or even shopping, musing that “One might consider . . .
the significance of this rather unique movement between the most
intimate and the most public in fostering food’s symbolic power, in
general, and in relation to memory, in particular” (373). I will argue
that what makes food such a powerful site for exploring memory
is the very fact that, unlike, say, public monuments, in producing,
exchanging and consuming food we are continuously criss-crossing
between the “public” and the “intimate,” individual bodies and
collective institutions.
This is immediately apparent if we look at some of the different
aspects of food memory outlined above. In my own work on food and
memory, for example, I argued that food plays a key role in such social
processes as gift exchange and ritual, processes that focus on creating
continuity with the past and thus on building memories. On the island
of Kalymnos, a special food called kollivo is given to friends and neigh-
bors, often literally fed to them, at memorial services for dead rela-
tives, with the accompanying words “in his/her memory.” Kollivo is even
offered to strangers by people at the ceremony, who will take some
and walk through the neighborhood, feeding anyone who passes by.
Accepting this gift, one is to remember the dead more charitably, while
at the same time the gift keeps open, strengthens, or repairs relation-
ships among the living (see Sutton, 2001: 31 ff.). This is clearly a process

5. A Tale of Easter Ovens 161
concerning memories of individuals at the same time that it shapes
communities.
Taste itself, like the body that does the tasting, is both indi-
viduated and deeply socially shaped. Bourdieu (1984) has trenchantly
illustrated this in his analysis of class eating practices, and as is under-
lined in recent television commercials for Burger King offering their
hamburgers as a rallying point for beleaguered male identities. Yet
such class or gender identities are still actuated in individuals whose
taste may diverge even while their “identities” converge, especially
in contexts where children are enculturated to develop “individual”
tastes and preferences (see Ochs, Pontecorvo, and Fasulo, 1996). My
point with these all too brief examples is simply to stress that “social
memory” is not an identifiable object, separate from some other type
of memory, but rather that there are social and individual aspects
to all memories, a point that will have implications for my analysis
below.
EASTER OVENS
The Greek island of Kalymnos in the eastern Aegean, a few miles off
the coast of Turkey, is known as the island of sponge fishermen. In
the heyday of the sponge industry, around the turn of the twentieth
century, Kalymnos counted around 30,000 permanent residents. Now,
with sponge fishing in deep decline, Kalymnos hovers around 12,000
people. However, unlike other islands whose economies rely solely on
tourism, Kalymnos does not lose the majority of its population during
the winter months. Kalymnians continue to thrive on a combination
of fishing, the remnants of the sponge industry, migrant remittances,
state and European Union projects, and tourism.
One of the many “customs” that Kalymnians see as setting them
apart from other Greeks is that of cooking Easter lambs in closed
containers that are placed in ovens instead of roasting them on spits.
There are two elements here, starting with the containers themselves.
In the past they were all made of clay, but increasingly people have
substituted large olive oil cans or special sealable stainless steel pans

6. 162 social research
for the clay containers. Second, the ovens that are used: when I did
fieldwork in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the majority of people took
their pots to bakery shops to be cooked in the baker’s oven (a common
practice for a number of dishes, particularly during the Lenten period).
A small minority had their own brick ovens in their backyards which
they used for preparing the lamb. I was told that in “the old days” it
was only the rich or shepherds who lived on the mountainside who
had their own outdoor ovens. When I returned to do fieldwork in 2006,
I found that an increasing number of Kalymnians were building their
own outdoor ovens—they were considered a “must” for new house
constructions, and were even being added in the backyards of many
older houses. As I explored this shift with many Kalymnians, I found
that it involved complex negotiations of taste, nostalgia for “the old
years,” ritual performances, and the exchange relations they entailed
with neighbors and relatives, as well as “prospective” imaginings about
what might be memorable in the future. These ovens partake, then, of
all the categories of food memory mentioned above, and thus represent
Figure 1. Lamb prepared in a specially purchased aluminum container.

7. A Tale of Easter Ovens 163
the ideal locus for the exploration of how these different memories are
tied together and feed off each other.
In my earlier work I suggested the importance of what I called
“prospective memory”—that is, people actively planning to remember
meals and how tasty they would be. I suggested that in the case of Easter
this was tied to the cycle of fasting and feasting, in which a lot of talk
during fasting days centered on people’s longing for the Easter lamb,
how good it was going to taste, even the diarrhea that would be caused
by its over-consumption. This discourse is stimulated by the presence
of the baby lambs themselves, which typically live in a family’s yard for
a week or more, are constantly bleating, and are an object of play, and
sometimes pity for younger family members before their slaughter on
Easter Saturday (see Sutton, 1997). Nor are the lambs themselves bought
from a butcher, but from known friends, people with whom one has
established a relationship of trust to provide well-cared-for animals.
What was striking about prospective memory is that it seam-
lessly connected past, present, and future as people complained of their
Figure 2. Dimitris Roditis, carrying the lamb to the baker’s oven.

8. 164 social research
hunger in the present while reminiscing about previous Easters and
looking forward to the upcoming celebration (see Sutton, 2001: 29-31).
Here, as I will detail below, I found the impetus for building ovens was
in many cases just such prospective memory, or active planning to
make Easter celebrations memorable in the future.
This view of the importance of ovens would not make sense if not
for the elaborate food-related discourse in which Kalymnians discuss
and debate the different sensory and aesthetic qualities of food and how
to produce them (see Sutton, 2001, chap. 4; cf. Adapon, 2008). This was
certainly the case when it came to techniques of lamb preparation and
their effect on the finished product. I found these discussions among
young and old, male and female on Kalymnos, and not only provoked
by my questions. People debated not only the differences in lambs
cooked in bakers’ ovens and outdoor ovens and the effects of using a
clay pot or metal container; they also commented on the use of differ-
ent kinds of wood in the outdoor ovens, and on which tree branches to
put in the pot with the cooking lamb. These differences were all said
to have an effect on the outcome in terms of the color, smell, and taste
of the meat, all of which were felt to be important in order to enjoy
the Easter feast. A discussion among several male office workers, all in
their 30s and 40s, was typical:
Yiorgos (responding to my question about what dishes on
Kalymnos were considered “traditional”): Actually, we are
losing our food traditions. No one uses the clay pots to cook
lamb in for Easter anymore and this makes all the differ-
ence.
David: What about people building ovens to cook their
Easter lamb?
Yiorgos: Yes, but using aluminum cans, you may as well
cook it in a normal oven. Because you don’t put branches
at the bottom and a little water to steam the lamb with the
scent of the grape vines. [Note: Some suggested that these
grape vines, which were moistened and twisted in a circle

9. A Tale of Easter Ovens 165
then placed under the lamb, helped keep the lamb from
sticking to the clay pot].
At this point a coworker, Mihalis, interrupts, saying that they use an
aluminum can, and they still put branches and water in it.
Yiorgos: Really? In aluminum? But the water will evaporate
so rapidly, it won’t make a difference.
Yiorgos and Mihalis continue discussing the virtues of clay
versus aluminum, Yiorgos noting the importance of the fact that the
new aluminum baking dishes designed for this purpose have lids,
whereas with the clay pots (and even with makeshift aluminum cans)
you created a seal between the lid and the pot with a flour dough.
This dough helped to circulate the heat in the oven to evenly cook
Figure 3. A variety of makeshift containers for the lamb.

10. 166 social research
the lamb. Another issue was what kind of wood to use to heat the
oven, with many Kalymnians suggesting olive and almond branches
as best, though some also had additional mountain scrub branches of
various kinds that were added for extra “scent.” This detailed discourse
among men did not simply reflect the fact that the lamb was “outdoor
cooking” (indeed, it is still prepared by women). Nor did it reflect that
Yiorgos, as a bachelor, did his own cooking. Rather, I found that men
were equally interested in, and able to discuss, the aesthetic and techni-
cal aspects of food and cooking, even when they did very little cooking
themselves (see Sutton, 2001: 26). Instead, it ensured that Kalymnians
continue to care deeply about their food, and through this very bring-
ing to mind of past meals by way of talk of technique, to ensure that
food is memorable on Kalymnos.
Easter is interesting in that men don’t simply talk, but actively
participate in the preparation through the heating of the oven. The
wood is allowed to burn for 3 to 4 hours to get the oven hot, then the
coals are removed. As quickly as possible, the men load the lambs (that
their mothers and wives have prepared) into the oven, and seal it up
with makeshift bricks and red clay for mortar. This is done quickly so
none of the heat is lost. This activity is often the opportunity for the
display of male skill in the speed with which the wall is built to seal
the oven, another factor seen to influence the outcome—that is, the
eventual taste of the cooked lamb. A number of men may stand around
watching the owner of the oven, giving suggestions on where smoke is
still escaping, or how many bricks are still needed.
Another aspect of food memories is the way that the objects
associated with cooking become a kind of “inalienable possession”
that is removed from circulation because it represents family or
community identity (Weiner, 1992). While it was not quite true that
no one on Kalymnos in 2006 still used clay pots, I found that they
were a rarity. This surprised me at first, given the stress people put
on matters of taste. I discovered that many people still had these pots,
but kept them as family heirlooms rather than using them for the
Easter celebration. This seemed odd to me at first, but a number of

11. A Tale of Easter Ovens 167
people explained that they were too valuable to expose to the hazards
of an oven (particularly to send to the baker’s oven, where they might
be broken accidently). As one woman in her forties, a shop owner,
explained to me:
Irini: I have the clay pot, but I’m trying to preserve it
because it’s very old, valuable, so I don’t use it. I have a new
aluminum casserole dish that I use instead. I don’t want to
break it because it’s old, ancient!
David: From your mom?
Irini: Keep going . . .
David: Your Grandma?
Irini: Keep going . . . three generations, four, or even more.
David: Did you grow up in this neighborhood, in this
house?
Irini: Yes, I grew up here, as did my mother, and my chil-
dren—a chain (alisidha).
Increasingly, the cooking pots for lambs were joining the ranks of
other heirloom objects, removed from circulation and meant to stand
for a past, both a past of family memory, and of island-wide collective
memory of what these pots represented. They are “objects that are valu-
able because they have been removed from the stream of commodities
and have acquired an almost totemic personal and family history so
that they could not be sold, but only passed down from one generation
to the next” (Sutton and Hernandez, 2007: 75). I would add in this case
community memory to personal and family memory, because the pots
are associated specifically with a Kalymnian way of preparing Easter
lamb, distinctive from the rest of Greece. Thus they were featured in
a recent Greek cooking show (hosted by Elias Mamalakis) highlighting
Kalymnian foods and preparation methods.
A seemingly more practical concern was expressed when I asked
Skevos, a Kalymnian civil servant, why he and his wife didn’t simply
buy new clay pots so that they wouldn’t have to risk the heirloom pots.

12. 168 social research
He explained that while it is possible to get new clay pots, they are of
low quality, and are not likely to last more than a couple of years. Here
a different fear of breakage comes into play: not the breakage that will
mean the loss of a valued heirloom, but will mean that one has to buy
a new one, an expense that many Kalymnians seemed to feel was not
worth the money. Whether or not these new pots were more friable
than the heirloom pots, here Mihalis employed a discourse where the
past is seen as superior to the present in its more lasting, less dispos-
able material objects. We will see other refractions of this discourse
below. Many people, then, were willing to go to the expense of outdoor
ovens, while presumably losing out on the taste of clay pots. In the
following section I track the relationship of ovens to sensory memories
of taste, nostalgia for past periods of island life represented by food,
and “prospective memories” or the active planning in the present for
future memories. In discussing the building of ovens with Kalymnians,
I found that they were in some ways ideal objects for memory work,
not only evocative of the past, but the site for struggles over social and
family relations in the present.
“WE WILL HAVE A DRIVE-BY SHOOTING, CHICAGO
STYLE”: OVENS AND FAMILY SOCIAL RELATIONS
In this section I explore how the past and present are woven together
in one woman’s story of building an oven. In it we see how different
kinds of memories—social, sensory, memories of “the good old days”—
are seamlessly woven together. These are memories thick with the feel
of embeddedness in a community that shares many of the reference
points of the teller. Eleni is a woman in her mid-forties, married with
3 children ranging from 14 to 26. She lives adjacent to her mother and
father in the typical Kalymnian matrilocal pattern. The two households
are in some ways indistinguishable: they share a courtyard, and there is
constant movement back and forth between them by the various family
members. It is in the shared courtyard that they have recently built an
outdoor oven. Eleni begins by explaining what they used to do before
they built their own oven.

13. A Tale of Easter Ovens 169
Eleni: At first we used to go to my brother’s. We were happy
to be all together like that, family and friends together; we
had a steady yearly count of who would come, and we went
as if it were a holiday; some would bring cookies, the owner
(her brother) would provide the oven, some would bring
beer. But we gradually lost patience with each other and
animosities developed among people; children would mess
up the garden, some relatives would complain, the house-
wife always had to have the place clean and tidy, always
be prepared to serve coffee . . . so it was a tiresome thing
to own an oven in your own home. And then they decided
to get us to leave—not out of meanness or anything but
they told us that since they had decided not to make lamb
anymore, that we would have to go the next year. I didn’t
care. But is it not easy to go to a bakery and use their oven,
because although you have to pay €50 the end result is that
it does not smell like Easter, like the natural smell of burn-
ing wood the food should smell like.
Here Eleni describes what they used to do in the “old years” (cf.
Sutton, 1998), a practice repeated over many Easters, a memory in the
imperfect tense. Because the parents had built the brother a house
on the outskirts of town, they had enough land to include an outdoor
oven in the backyard (prior to the recent rage for such ovens). Note that
Eleni’s memory doesn’t actually extend back to the period of 20 years
earlier, when they had to use one of the public bakeries for their Easter
lamb, but to a relatively recent past since the building of the brother’s
house. Like all memories, memories of food are prone to this kind of
telescoping in which the idealized aspects of the past are what are best
recalled. Indeed, the brother in the story had married a tourist woman
from Scandinavia, and the relations this couple has with the rest of the
family have often been rocky.
It is interesting that Eleni claims that everything was initially
harmonious. In doing so, she draws on a discourse about the past as

14. 170 social research
a time of easy sociality and generosity, of closer-knit social relations
that have been lost in the present, what I have referred to elsewhere as
“memories of gemeinschaft” (Sutton, 2001: 53 ff.). Eleni then shifts to a
different memory register, the sensory memories of taste, to talk about
why she couldn’t imagine going back to using the bakers’ ovens, exag-
gerating the cost, but stressing the fact that in order to celebrate Easter,
you must taste the tastes that have become Easter’s familiar, recogniz-
able signature. These kinds of embodied taste memories are, as I suggest
with the discussion between Yiorgos and Mihalis above, instantly recog-
nizable on Kalymnos, drawing as they do on community discourses that
stress the intimate details of the tastes of different foods, different meth-
ods of preparing dishes, and different qualities of ingredients.
Eleni continues to describe their decision to build an outdoor
oven, elaborating on the importance of her memories of taste:
And that is why I told my husband to build an oven for us.
He did not want to because he knew what was going to
happen if he did build it: that is, that the owners would
end up being like invited strangers. I insisted, though.
Mostly because of the taste. My kids tomorrow they will
get married and there’s enough money to go around but
there won’t be any taste if we did not have an oven. And
the custom is only once a year and you have to live it in a
nice beautiful way, you have to taste it, it is not part of your
everyday routine. It is not like you do in any other occa-
sion when you go to some other place and do it there; in
everyday life in the old days we would find a bakery and we
baked our foods there when we did not have a regular oven
at home, and it would taste good; but there is something
special about lamb that requires it to be cooked in a wood
burning oven in order to be tasty.
This complicated passage shows the fluidity of individual and
collective memory. Eleni begins with a memory of the decision to build

15. A Tale of Easter Ovens 171
the oven, which she claims was made based on her insistence, motivated
by her own taste memories. This leads her to recount a “prospective
memory” in which she projects her family into the future, imagining
it with and without the oven and the proper taste of Easter lamb. She
follows with a generalizing statement about the importance of ritual
observance: “the custom is only once a year . . . you have to taste it,”
once again neatly tying together the social and the sensory. Finally,
in switching between the second person and the third person plural,
she also makes a statement that distributes the memory of different
ovens among herself, her family, and the wider Kalymnian commu-
nity. Note also that the building of the oven itself was not based on any
do-it-yourself booklet or suggestions from a local home store. Rather,
Eleni’s husband Nicholas drew on his own embodied skill, as well as
the direction of his mother-in-law, Eleni’s mother, who told me that she
explained to him how it should be built, its dimensions, etc., based on
her recollection of her own mother-in-law’s (now defunct) oven.
These memories are embedded in a number of ways that traverse
the individual and the collective. They are embedded in the stories of
individuals and families, at the same time that they are about both indi-
vidual and shared discourses about taste and smell; they tell the stories
of families from the point of view of particular family members—Eleni
feels that the taste of Easter lamb is more important, while her husband
worries about the social consequences of building the oven—at the
same time that they draw on collectively shared discourses about what
things were like in “the old years” in order to anchor and make sense of
one’s particular experience. Let us follow Eleni’s story a little further in
order to examine how these memories of ovens are intimately related
to social action in the present, serving as a commentary and planning
out of one’s relationship to a larger community of extended family,
friends, and neighbors.
Eleni: When we built the oven at that time the kids were
young and they did not have any mothers in law [refer-
ring to her sons who were not married, and thus still ate at

16. 172 social research
home]. So we told a friend to join in because he was to go
away next year. He did come, and he told us that he never
wanted to leave. We invited another friend, Pantelis [the
son of a neighbor that they have been close to for a long
time], and he said the same thing too. And then, there is
this cousin of ours who is crazy and wild and asked if he
could come in. And we told him he could come in until the
kids grew up and got married, and then he would have to
leave. And we said the same to everyone. But no one would
leave and they would all argue with us. And now as a result
I have to always be ready to treat people with coffee and
octopus and other things [this year they made sausages],
not so much because I have to, but also because I want to
because it is the custom to do so. While in the old days,
in the old ovens we fasted, baked, and joked and though
mad at each other, that is how we spent the time. Now
Figure 4. Nikolas Mixas, in front of the outdoor oven that he constructed in
the courtyard of his wife’s/mother’s house.

17. A Tale of Easter Ovens 173
people will get drunk, they expect alcohol and whiskey and
beer and we do provide them with that and we don’t even
get any respect from them, even though we honor all our
customary obligations . . . but rather they become annoy-
ing with their demands to bring in other people—we don’t
have the space for other people. . . . In a couple of years we,
the owners we’ll end up having no space for our own pot.
So this year was an upsetting one for us but I hope next
year won’t be the same; ‘cause I will let them know the
rules in advance, or else we will have a Chicago-style drive-
by shooting!
I have elided some of the details here to give a feel for the
complex social negotiations that go into deciding who gets to use space
in the oven which can fit 8 to 10 pots. Eleni, in fact, spends much longer
recounting the ins and outs of these negotiations, which are tied not
Figure 5. Nikolas feeds the fire as his mother-inlaw, Katerina Kardoulia, looks
on.

18. 174 social research
only to decisions about one particular year, but once again, thoughts of
future reconfigurations and claims that people will make on their oven.
In deciding who there is room for, a balancing of different kinds of social
relations comes into play. There are a series of relatives related through
men (since women tend to be all included in the immediate family
on this matrifocal island). In this case that included Eleni’s husband’s
brother and her father’s maternal nephew. There are close neighbors,
and there are friends, including those in godparent-relationships. All
these different demands must be weighed and evaluated, which may
put strains on the immediate family, with different family members
pressing for the inclusion of their connections.
In this recounting we can see Eleni’s relation to the wider commu-
nity of Kalymnos spread out against a landscape of past and future
Easter preparations. Once again, these individual experiences are sorted
and recalled based on a more familiar island-wide discourse (or schema,
to use Bartlett’s (1932) terminology) of generosity and betrayal, at the
same time that the current Easter is remembered and contrasted in rela-
Figure 6. Nikolas seals the oven with bricks and mortar while a friend gives
suggestions.

19. A Tale of Easter Ovens 175
tion to past Easters which were seen as more innocent—even if there
was fighting there was no alcohol and no expectations of providing a
big party for those coming to share the oven. This once again suggests
the easy sociability that is believed to characterize former times on the
island, in which all kinds of social relations, including stealing from
neighbors, are imagined to have been simpler and more pure than the
stress and atomization of social relations in “modern times” (cf. Sutton,
1998; 2001:53-57).
Two interesting features of Eleni’s recollections should be noted.
First there is a temporal blurring here; more than simply a prospec-
tive memory, she is looking back to her intentions when building the
oven. Thus she says “When we built the oven at that time the kids were
young and they did not have any mothers-in-law,” which would indi-
cate to an uninformed listener that they are in fact now married (at the
time of the interview they are not even engaged). Thus, past, present,
and future temporalities are projected onto the locus of the oven. A
second blurring is that between people and the pots that they bring to
put in the oven. At various points she refers to the people entering or
leaving the oven, rather than to their pots. She also refers to the “land-
lord” of the oven, as if the oven itself is a home that is being invaded
by outsiders. All of this metonymical switching is suggestive, giving the
oven a kind of personhood, or agency, what some might call fetishism,
but which I would argue is the simple recognition that the oven is a
key site for reconnecting with the past and projecting into the future.
In other words, the oven stands for both good tastes and good social
relations, which may have been always better in the past, but which
Kalymnians might be able to reclaim through proper action in the pres-
ent and future.
JUNK FOOD MEMORIES: THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE
I have used this long ethnographic example to suggest the multiplic-
ity of types of memory evoked by Easter ovens and the preparation of
lamb. The spate of oven rebuilding, like other heritage food activity
(Kockel, 2007; Trubek, 2008), can be seen perhaps as an invention of

20. 176 social research
tradition, recapturing an imagined lost past at the same time that pres-
ent day lambs can never quite match the flavor of the past since it was
the clay pots, rather than the ovens themselves, which were common
practice for the community in former times. At the same time, unlike
some commodified heritage foods, “the result of a conscious state policy
aimed at both the protection and the promotion of a rural cultural heri-
tage” (Demossier, 2000: 146), the oven-prepared lambs remain very much
embedded in ongoing social life and the negotiation of relations within
families and between families and the wider community. They seem,
in this regard, to agree with Pierre Nora’s characterization of milieux
de memoire that have not (or not yet) been replaced by lieux de memoire,
which Nora sees as part and parcel of the processes of modernity.
But while this distinction may be useful to in contrasting a rela-
tively face-to-face community like Kalymnos with a more anonymous
society, it does not preclude the fact that food still serves as an excel-
lent source of all of these different sorts of memory, even if we see
food as a “site” rather than an environment of memory. For example,
perhaps we can say that unlike Kalymnos, the United States does not
have a shared “cuisine,” as Mintz argues, which would imply a shared
community eating similar food “with sufficient frequency to consider
themselves experts on it. They all believe, and care that they believe,
that they know what it consists of, how it is made, and how it should
taste” (1996: 96).1 Nevertheless, I would argue that food, even at its
most commodified and disembedded from the layerings of knowledge
that we see with Kalymnian Easter ovens, would still have the propen-
sity to provoke a kind of social memory (very much in keeping with
Halbwachs’ observations).2
Take, for example, an essay by novelist Jill McCorkle, with the
inauspicious title “Her Chee-to Heart.” She recalls incidents from her
childhood such as the following:
I was enamored of a boy named Michael in the first grade
who licked Kool-Aid powder from his palm whenever the
teacher wasn’t looking. He moved away before the end of

21. A Tale of Easter Ovens 177
the year, and yet thirty-one years later, I still remember him
with a fond mixture of repulsion at the sticky red saliva
that graced his notebook paper and admiration for the
open ease with which he indulged his habit. I loved Pixy
Stix straws, which, let’s face it, were nothing more than
dry Kool-Aid mix poured right into your mouth. Sweetarts.
Jawbreakers. Firecrackers. Mary Janes. An item that I was
told was very bad for my teeth (McCorkle, 1998: 149).
Here, instead of the Easter lamb, the production and exchange
of each part of which is a familiar part of community life, we have
memories of the consumption of industrial chemicals with tastes and
colors that no food has had before. And yet, these chemicals still evoke
memories of taste that are embedded in a social situation: one of young
love (or admiration), but more important, of the secret resistance to
authority and the momentary sense of freedom it provided through
bodily ingestion of forbidden substances. Substances that cause strong
bodily desires, but which are restricted or forbidden by memories and
emotions that, then, also pass over the boundary between the most
private of acts and public, collective identities (in the sense of chil-
dren staking out their identities in relation to parents and teachers).
McCorkle captures this sense of a larger childhood identity toward the
end of her essay, summarizing many of these memories, which move
from one to the next in a chain of associations (as with Kool-Aid to Pixy
Stix in the above quote). McCorkle concludes:
I bite into my Hostess Snowball and retreat to a world
where the only worry is what to ask your mother to put in
your lunch box the next day or which pieces of candy you
will select at the Kwik-Pik on your way home from school.
Ahead of you are the wasteland years: a pack of cigarettes,
some Clearasil pads, a tube of Blistex, and breath spray. But
for now, reach back to those purer, those sugar-filled, melt-
in-your-mouth, forever-a-kid years (154-55).

22. 178 social research
Here it is not resistance to authority but rather the sense of child-
hood freedom from concern with weight, hygiene, and sexuality that is
evoked through the memory of taste pleasures: a pre-adolescent iden-
tity that is called upon to ground these individual tastes in the social.
Like the Easter ovens, these candy memories are deeply social without
necessarily being shared, the emotions are recognizable but the specif-
ics may be highly variable, since, as with the ovens, they are part of
ongoing social life.
THE POWER OF FOOD
My point is not to argue there are no differences between my two
examples of memories tied to food. Indeed, it might not be inaccurate
to say that the Easter ovens are embedded in milieux de memoire, while
American junk food (and fast food eateries perhaps as well) are lieux de
memoire, some of the few common topoi of relatively general, shared
food memories, but lacking the multiple, overlapping referents of my
Kalymnian example. Either way, I want to suggest that both these can
be analyzed to recognize individual and collective aspects. The power
of these memories is that they unite very different levels of experience,
whether we think of them as mind and body or sensory and social, or
something else; they move seamlessly between taste and social relation-
ships, and this wholeness allows them to stand for and powerfully evoke
entire periods of time—“the good old days,” “childhood years”—and
thus capture individual biographies and collective identities. To return
to Holtzman’s point, it is the fact that food “intrinsically traverses the
public and the intimate” even in relatively disembedded context, that
makes it such a powerful vehicle for studying memory. In other words,
I am suggesting that it is at some level intrinsic to our experience with
food that this should be so.
NOTES
* For their thoughtful readings and comments, I thank Bill Hirst, Arien
Mack, Amy Trubek, and Peter Wogan. Special thanks go to Leonidas

23. A Tale of Easter Ovens 179
Vournelis, for the long discussions of these issues, and for translating
the longer text.
1. By this definition, we would have to consider that there are enclaves
of “cuisine” within the wider U.S. society, such as New Orleans. See
Beriss (2007).
2. In my earlier ethnography I tracked food memories tied to such
commodities as feta cheese, which is “embedded” in Kalymnian life
only as a commodity bought at the store. But given its iconic status as
a “Greek” cheese, as well as recent controversies over “foreign” feta, it
is equally provocative of collective memories for most Kalymnians as is
locally produced cheese. See Sutton (2001: 80-85) for a full discussion.
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