Item Detail
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Cutting the Ham
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2/14/2017
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Phone interview
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Female
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Plainville
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Kansas
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71
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Grandmother
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Christian
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We had just been discussing small\rtowns and stories that everybody knows but doesn't know where they started.
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She knew the purpose and subject of the assignment before we began our conversation, so she was actively searching for folktales she knew, but this one came about as a tangent and was therefore much more natural than the others she thought of.
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Where we're from in Kansas, traditionalism is highly valued. There are a lot of leftover traditions from the early 1900s, especially from the Depression and "Dirty 30s" era. Typically, these things are seen as frugal and wise. \rLikewise, in cooking, word of mouth and example is preferred and viewed as the best way of learning how to make something, so it isn't surprising that someone would blindly follow this example.
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Cooking, folk tale, tradition
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I transcribed a phone conversation that I had with her on this particular information.\r\rTranscript:\rBette: Oh, that's like the lady that…the family that the ladies always cut the ends off of the ham. You know?\r\rMandi: Huh uh.\r\rBette: And they didn't know why. And finally, they asked the grandmother or great-grandmother, and she said, "Why, it's the only pan I had, and I couldn't make the ham fit in it, so I had to cut the ends off!"\r\rMandi: Oh, that's funny!\r\rBette: And, but they always did that. They cut the rounded ends off just…and they didn't even know why.\r\rMandi: Yeah.\r\rBette: Yeah. And that's why. Because the grandmother had a pan that the ham didn't fit in, so she always had to cut both ends off. \r\rMandi: Yeah. Was that somebody you knew or just a story you heard?\r\rBette: It was just a story I heard.
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Mandi
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Diaz
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Female
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24
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ENGL 392
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Eric Eliason