Category Archives: Autumn 2024

Puttu, Rockets, and Game Controllers: South Indian Immigrant Recipes in the Video Game Venba

By Haritha Govind

You pick up your game controller and settle down in front of the screen to learn about South Indian family recipes. What you don’t realize is that you are about to be pulled into the emotionally charged world of Venba and her family in Canada, complete with the financial, cultural, and generational hardships and joys that are part of the immigrant experience. While cooking challenges have been a mainstay of video gaming, Venba presents itself almost like a composite ethnography where food means something more than simply cooking, serving, and eating. It introduces the player to a complicated network of what it means to be an immigrant and connect with your home culture through food (Waszkiewicz 2022).

Illustration of South Asian family preparing traditional foods with the title Venba
Venba Video game promotional poster (Image sourced from https://venbagame.com/).

As you play through the game, you are introduced to Venba and her husband Paavalan, who have moved to Canada from South India. Amidst the trials and tribulations of fitting into a new country and their son Kavin being born, you are taught how to make traditional Tamilian and South Indian dishes like idli (steamed rice and lentil cakes), biryani (layered rice and meat dish), dosa (fermented rice and lentil crepe), and murukku (crispy lentil and flour snack). All the recipes displayed to you are from Venba’s mother’s cookbook, with smudged and concealed text, inviting you to learn as you go.

There is a section in the video game where Venba asks a young Kavin what he would like to eat, and he requests a pizza with lots of cheese. In an attempt to introduce Kavin to more traditional Tamilian foods, she suggests they make a dish called puttu. At first, Kavin is not convinced, but when Venba explains that the dish reminds her of a rocket, he is excited. You are then whisked to the kitchen to cook puttu, using the smudged family cookbook and ingredients of rice, water, and coconut. This single narrative and cooking section represents the intergenerational struggle between preserving Tamilian culture and integrating into Canadian society. It forces you to think about more than the recipe and consider how foods come to be synonymous with identity in many immigrants’ lives. 

Towards the end of the game, you see adult Kavin opening his mother’s cookbook to feel connected to his culture and childhood. He decides to make nattu kozhi kulambu (spicy country chicken curry/soup) and fumbles his way through the recipe along with you. This section of the game allows you to step into the shoes of a second-generation Tamilian in Canada and understand the complicated connection between culture and identity. 

Biryani cooking process (Image sourced from https://venbagame.com/)

Venba creates a cozy atmosphere for its players, with lively Tamil music in the background, sounds of cooking, and vibrant aesthetic ingredients and dishes. The ingredients and foods are designed in an abstract style but are instantly recognizable if you are familiar with them. The cloves, cardamom, bay leaves, and fennel seeds in the biryani cooking section are stylistic yet iconic. Waszkiewicz has suggested that cozy or ludic games like Venba encourage the player to approach the game and recipes with respect and curiosity, pulling them into an unfamiliar culture (2022). The creator of the game, Abhi, shared that he wants players to understand specific details about a recipe whether that involves getting the rice-to-water ratio correct or tempering spices in the correct order (Waszkiewicz 2022; Abhi 2023). To help the player carry on after the play has ended, the game also shares complete recipes with the player to try out in their own home kitchens.

Idli cooking process (Image sourced from https://venbagame.com/)

While you will have to play the game to learn Venba’s recipes, many Tamilian chefs and home cooks have recipes for the same dishes. Here is my mother’s recipe for Idli batter:

Ingredients:

  • 3 cups  Idli rice (or short grain starchy rice)
  • 1 cup   Urad (peeled black gram)
  • 1 tsp    Methi seeds (fenugreek)
  • 1 tbsp  Chutney daal (split yellow gram)

Instructions:

  1. Wash and soak ingredients overnight.
  2. Drain and grind ingredients in a high-powered blender until smooth and thick. Add fresh water as needed. Rub the batter between your fingers to ensure it is not gritty.
  3. Pour the batter into a large bowl or container and cover with clingwrap, lid, or plate.
  4. Let the batter ferment in a warm place for around nine hours.
  5. Once the batter has doubled in size and developed bubbles with a yeasty smell, it is ready.
  6. Add salt to the batter and store it in the fridge.
  7. Use it for steaming idli in an idli steamer or thin out the batter to make dosa on a skillet.

The Venba video game is a good opportunity to see how storytelling and recipe sharing can go hand in hand. It is also a good entryway into understanding specifically South Indian cooking techniques and flavors, an area that has not gotten the same attention as North India in the Americas. It also opens the floor for more culturally detailed immigrant stories to be told via interactive mediums such as video games. The video game as a medium does something very different from a perspective of imagery and visuals, compared to other mediums such as text, or a static graphic novel. The movement and paced story development, that you as a player control, work together to remove visualization barriers between the story and the player. This visual storytelling is also an excellent model for sharing subjects like History, Anthropology, Food Studies, and Cultural Studies in a palatable and inclusive manner. I believe that there is great potential for visual storytelling as a way to expand academia beyond university settings. 


Abhi. 2023. Venba. Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series/Xbox One, Playstation 5. Canada: Visai Games. https://venbagame.com/.

Waszkiewicz, Agata. 2022. Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

Using Images of Objects for Healthcare in Sixteenth-Century China

By Cheng He

Late-sixteenth-century China witnessed the increasing publication of illustrated books of various kinds. This includes books on health preservation, which deals with treating illness and everyday practices that are good for one’s health conditions and longevity. Sleeping, eating, drinking, walking, reading, writing, playing musical instruments, traveling, collecting, and appreciating art objects were all related to nourishing one’s life. In 1591, the book Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (Zunsheng bajian) was published. It covers the aspects mentioned above, and illustrations accompany a few sections. In addition to images that introduce gymnastic exercises, which have been discussed in academic research, there are also some images of objects. 

Fig. 1: Hamper for cold food and drink, in Zunsheng bajian: Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (1591), Vol. 8, 40b. Courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library, Chinese Rare Book Collection.

The first group of illustrations of objects is in the chapter on traveling in natural landscapes with friends. It is both a physical and spiritual pleasure to immerse oneself in nature, to enjoy the scenery, food, and drink of each season, and to create poems to record precious moments.

Fig. 2: Hamper with a stove, in Zunsheng bajian: Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (1591), Vol. 8, 41a. Courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library, Chinese Rare Book Collection.

In this chapter, two images introduce the internal structure of hampers and ways of packing (Figures 1 & 2). The author, Gao Lian, mentioned that he made both hampers himself. The first one is for cold food and drink, with upper layers for plates of different sizes and a lower layer for flagons and wine cups. The second hamper is equipped with a small stove in the lower layer. One can place pots for tea, wine, or congee in the middle layer for direct heating. Rather than depicting the food or drink themselves, the illustration is more about better utilizing the space for packing, which is also an element that helps the reader enjoy the trips.

The second image on flagons further emphasizes the practical purpose of using it (Figure 3). It shows two types of flagons: one round and the other gourd-shaped. Accompanying texts introduce their materials and uses. Here images simply show the shape of flagons as a visual introduction.

Fig. 3: The flagons, in Zunsheng bajian: Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (1591), Vol. 8, 41b. Courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library, Chinese Rare Book Collection.

However, illustrations are far more than just practical methods of  instruction. In other cases, they were as crucial as the text. A considerable quantity of illustrations in Eight Discourses are in the chapter on inkstone. One can grind an ink stick against the inkstone with water to make ink for writing and painting. Finely made inkstones vary in shape and materials, and are valuable collectibles commonly seen in study rooms. Literate people used them for writing or painting, appreciating the stones’ aesthetic quality, and thus gaining pleasure and cultivating their spirit. In the book, Gao shows his preference for inkstones over other collectibles. He carefully introduced the ways of appreciating and preserving inkstones, explaining the desired textures and colors of stones for grinding ink. He was sad that inkstones were less valued than gold or jade, easily lost or hidden at corners. 

His concern is demonstrated first through the number of illustrations: Gao included images of twenty high-quality inkstones that he claimed to have seen in the recent decade (Figures 4 & 5). Afraid that these fine works would be lost or damaged in the future, he made images as a record, stating that “I’m ashamed of my limited painting skill, failing to portray these inkstones fully.”1 This suggests that, for Gao, images can serve as a more helpful method than texts for describing objects or instructions for collecting.

Fig. 4: Inkstones, in Zunsheng bajian: Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (1591), Vol. 15, 24b–25a. Courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library, Chinese Rare Book Collection.

Compared with the illustrative images with inserted texts on hampers and flagons, the images here are more prominent and separated from the texts. Although aid is needed from the text to know the different materials and sizes of each stone, we can notice that more details are added to portray the patterns, textures, and shapes. The stone in Figure 5 is called “silver thread inkstone.” Besides the dimension, black color, and jade-like gentle texture, Gao emphasized that the silver thread patterns are “picturesquely intersected within the stone.”2 Therefore, images are both visual descriptions and aesthetic expressions. When appreciation of art works became a part of pursuing health, the images of health instruction went beyond illustrative functions. Illustrations of inkstones are not only visual translations of texts explaining “how to preserve health” but also convey artistic qualities that texts can hardly capture. 

Fig. 5: “Silver thread inkstone,” in Zunsheng bajian: Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (1591), Vol. 15, 30b. Courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library, Chinese Rare Book Collection.

Images in Eight Discourses illustrate the concept of health preservation in sixteenth-century China; it was crucial to nourish one’s spirit with entertainment and art in addition to daily practices such as eating, sleeping, or exercising. Although the reasons for including or not including specific images can vary, these illustrations provide clues for understanding images in recipes for health. In Eight Discourses, images were deeply associated with the author’s own experience: he made or saw those objects with appreciation. For Gao, Images as recipes helped visualize texts for both practical and aesthetic purposes. 


Cheng He recently completed her PhD in History at the University of Warwick. Her doctoral research focuses on the evolving concept of “lacquer” in early modern Britain, examining its materiality and varied applications in art and medicine. She is interested in early modern material culture, history of science and medicine, and global art history. 

  1. Gao Lian 高濂 (active 16th century), Zunsheng bajian遵生八牋 Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (1591), Vol. 15, 20b. All translations are the author’s own. ↩︎
  2. Gao, Zunsheng bajian, Vol. 15, 30b. ↩︎