Kevin Klutschkowski Research Papers

Kevin Klutschkowski is my fifty-two-year-old step-father and can boast about being the only person in the world with his name. His memories are very nearly all perfectly intact and there is little more he likes talking about than his childhood. He is German on his father’s side and Mexican on his mother’s side, and these two very different cultures have heavily influenced his tastes and sense of culture as an individual. As the two strongest food palates in his life were so very different from each other, they have made him more open to other cultural palates and flavors as he has grown up. Incidentally, there are quite a few dishes that trigger food-related memories for my step-father. The strongest memories he has are tied first to his mother’s meatloaf, as it was a staple for their family and one of the few dishes she knew how to make regularly. He found them disgusting, mainly due to the long, worm-like onion strings she put into it without cutting them up. His father was a strict man and made him eat everything on his plate, and those onions were notoriously difficult to choke down. Both sides of his family did not believe in wasting food whatsoever, having

Lima beans and sauerkraut were especially vivid. His first taste of these foods happened close together in his life when he was between the ages of three and four. His family was living in very bad apartments at that time and the food budget was a tight one. The women in his life who cooked for him did their best to keep his, his father’s, and his sister’s stomachs all full any means necessary, while also pulling on their cultural roots. My step-father loved both the lima beans and the sauerkraut due to their inherently bitter tastes, which he has kept with him as he has grown up. Bratwursts and sauerkraut are one of his favorite dishes to this day and one he learned from watching his German grandmother in the