Every summer the Smithsonian Institution, the nation's attic, goes out onto the nation's lawn, the Mall in Washington, and starts cooking.
It's part of the Festival of American Folklife, a 10-day celebration of our national heritage of storytelling, skills, music and food. For 25 years now, the Smithsonian's Office of Folklife Programs has sponsored this celebration as a way to preserve and display the regional and ethnic traditions that make up the complex pattern of American culture.
It may seem strange for a museum whose most famous exhibits are silent and static -- dinosaur bones, the inaugural gowns of America's first ladies, Dorothy's red slippers, the Hope Diamond -- to focus on sizzling pans of Southern fried chicken or baked raccoon with sweet potatoes and platters of Aunt Mary's apple stack cake. But the Smithsonian views the festival as a living museum and food as the glue of society.
"We're used to looking at objects of daily life and objects of art as relevant to a museum," says Ralph Rinzler, founding director of the festival. "And until very recently food has never been considered by museums in cultural terms. But food is part of a daily bonding ritual in the family."
Now the museum has found another way to showcase and preserve the nation's foodways with the publication of "Smithsonian Folklife Cookbook" (Smithsonian Institution Press, hardcover, $35; paperback, $15.95), by Katherine and Tom Kirlin.
For many years at the festival, the Smithsonian has sold small $1 booklets of recipes by festival participants, but it was Mrs. Kirlin's idea to gather the recipes together in a book.
The idea came to her during the festival in 1988. Mrs. Kirlin, a public affairs specialist at the Smithsonian, recalls that she was listening to one of the food programs, a demonstration by Cecilia Ojoe of Bethesda, who grew up in Trinidad and Tobago.
"I was really captivated by how much the audience loved that whole event," Mrs. Kirlin says. "Cecilia Ojoe was so wonderful in imparting her culture with funny stories and her island ways that it was packed. It was like a theater sold out. Immediately I thought, boy, I'd like to be her agent or I'd like to be able to put her on TV or something, she does such a great job. But instead I came home and told Tom about how wonderful the food demonstrations were and how these little $1 pamphlets, recipe booklets, a couple of thousand of them, had sold out in the first few days."
