Category Archives: Emotion

Emotion, Food and Drink, Ingredients, Modern, Summer 2024

“It Tastes/Smells like Home!”: Memory, Food Nostalgia & the Immigrant Experience

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By Annima Bahukhandi
British-Iranian food writer, Yasmin Khan, opens her recipe book, “The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen” (2016), with a frank admission of her lifelong obsession with pomegranates. She fondly recalls the multi-sensory pleasure of eating pomegranates—from the visceral feel of the fruit’s leathery skin, to the crunch of the pomegranate pearls, to the deep red color that stains hands, tongue, fingers, and even clothes. For her, pomegranates transport her back to the warmth of Iranian culture and cooking, a stark contrast to the negative portrayal of Iran in the British culture she grew up in.

Ripe pomegranate. Image Credits: Pexels
Ripe pomegranate. Image Credits: Pexels

Cooking and consuming food is not only a subjective sensory experience but also a cultural and political assertion of diverse ways of living. In this piece, I explore food ingredients as powerful signifiers of gastro-nostalgia and as sites for the construction and reconstruction of immigrant, intergenerational cultural identities. The 21st century is witnessing more people moving away from their natal homes and regions than ever before. For many refugees and exiles, their migration is a question of survival, while others move away for better lifestyles or work aspirations. Despite untethering from their geographic homelands, individuals keep the psychological representation of home alive through cultural practices like food habits, language, and everyday lifestyle. Food, in particular, plays a crucial role in evoking cultural identity due to its multi-sensory impact, imbued with intrapsychic and interpersonal meanings. 

David E. Sutton, in his seminal work “Remembrance of Repasts” (2001), argues that food and memory are perfectly intertwined when exploring identity, as both encode powerful hidden meanings. Food evokes strong gustatory and olfactory memories, nourishing us both visceral and intra-psychically. For members of diaspora communities, even a single food item can evoke a deep connection to one’s homeland. For example, many Koreans go to great lengths to carry their mother’s homemade kimchi, regardless of its pungent smell. 

For many Indians traveling abroad, carrying homemade pickles and ghee (clarified butter) helps them stay rooted in their home culture. For Tibetan refugees exiled from their homeland for decades, eating tsampa (roasted barley flour) with salted butter tea maintains their connection with their homeland.

Tibetan butter tea served with tsampa cakes. Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons
Tibetan butter tea served with tsampa cakes. Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons

Social media is a powerful site where diaspora identity and cultural reproduction are consolidated through the popularization of food networks, food bloggers, and channels celebrating indigenous, local, and lesser-known cuisines. Indian food representation is a prime example, as Indians form one of the largest and most diverse diasporas globally. For decades, the global representation of Indian cuisine has been limited to a narrow Northern Indian scope, with dishes like butter chicken, naan, and dals synonymous with Indian food. Yet, for most Indians in the southern, eastern, and western parts of the country, these dishes are far from their everyday home meals.

Fresh kokum flower. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
Fresh kokum flower. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
Kokum drink which is sweet and tangy and usually served cold. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
Kokum drink which is sweet and tangy and usually served cold. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

It is heartening to see a widening space where regional cuisines thrive online, emboldened by diaspora desiring the visual and gustatory appeal of their ancestral foods. Much like regional cookbooks, social media sites like Instagram, Facebook and Youtube have become powerful visual cookbooks preserving and spreading cultural cuisines while also creating communities of succor through gastro-nostalgia. 

For the Indian diaspora which has diverse food histories linked to their specific regional identities, social media has allowed for many under-represented dishes and ingredients to find a larger audience. Many home cooks and chefs in India and abroad now emphasize their regional identity and bring hyper-local ingredients to the fore—kokum (garcinia flower) in Konkani cuisine, sattu (roasted gram flour) in Bihari cuisine, bamboo shoots in Naga cuisine, and kulith (horsegram lentil) in Garhwali cuisine.  While many of these ingredients are often shared across multiple cuisines, yet it is their unique usage or over-presence in one’s own cuisine that strongly connects these ingredients to one’s geographic and psychological sense of rootedness.  

Kulith lentils. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
Kulith lentils. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

Sutton recounts the nostalgia for “patridha” (greek for homeland) that the fragrance of a basil plant evokes in many Greek immigrants living away from their homeland. He argues that objects can become more powerfully loaded with identity when experienced in new or different contexts, crossing boundaries of nation-states and cultures. In a similar view, in this piece I talk about ghee making as a gastro-nostalgic exercise for me, recalling subjective memories of my grandmother’s cooking as well as evoking larger cultural imagery of my under-represented Garhwali identity.  

Homemade Ghee. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
Homemade Ghee. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

For many of us, uprooted or not yet fully rooted, familiar food ingredients operate like transitional objects, soothing our anxieties and giving us a sense of safety as we navigate unfamiliar experiences. Basking in the fragrance, touch, and taste of familiar ingredients often creates a sense of wholeness in an increasingly alienating world. Sometimes, the waft of basil, the taste of ghee, the crunch of pomegranates, and the spiciness of kimchi added to any dish are enough to maintain and creatively reconstitute one’s memories of one’s homeland and remind us that we are safe indeed. 

REFERENCES
Khan, Yasmin. The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen. Bloomsbury USA, 2016.

Sutton, David E. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Berg Publishers, 2001.

Annima Bahukhandi is a psychologist and interdisciplinary researcher with a profound interest in psycho-social research. She holds a Master’s degree in Psychology and an MPhil in Sociology. She has taught psychology at the University of Delhi and B. R. Ambedkar University, India. Her primary areas of interest include memory, migration, and psychoanalytic theory. She has published work on the silenced exile in Burma and the Tibetan refugee community in India. Currently, she practices as a psychologist, and in her free time, she enjoys exploring the cultural and historical roots of both popular and lesser-known cuisines. Writing about food and culture allows her to blend her passion for diverse cuisines with her academic pursuits, providing a rich, conceptual anchor for her gustatory explorations.

Emotion, Food and Drink, Modern, Summer 2024

A Connecticut Yankee in Texas

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By Meli Alexander
Growing up in a small state like Connecticut in the 1970s was a great time to be an aspiring chef. Sandwiched between bigger states and bigger cities shaped Hartford Connecticut’s cuisine: NYC-style Chinese takeout, with its ubiquitous packets of duck sauce and hot mustard; Italian-American delights such as baked ziti or sausage and peppers; and Boston deep-fried cod and clams. These foods woke up my taste buds and my curiosity about the world.

Despite the terrible school lunch options offered at my elementary school, I always looked forward to Pizza Fridays. In Connecticut, this meant a Sicilian-style American pizza, thick and hearty, in a perfect rectangular shape. But I couldn’t help but wonder what other pizza styles were out there…just waiting to be discovered.

I knew I had a hidden talent about coming up with my own recipes, especially focusing on food combinations. By age five I was creating fun ice cream flavors such as maraschino cherries and vanilla ice cream. I also studied the very first cookbook I ever saw, which was a community cookbook from my grandmother’s beloved home in New Brunswick, Canada. It was a peek into another culture and I had no idea of the scope of recipes that were waiting for me around the corner.

In 1979, my mother made a huge decision that changed the way I see the world through food. Our sudden  move to Pasadena, Texas was more traumatic than I have ever let on, despite the thrill of flying first class. Being uprooted from everything I knew — my home, my school, my church — was surreal. Trying to understand the heavy Texas accents alone was beyond challenging.

I did my best to fit into my new world. We lived in a huge apartment complex and had year-round access to a swimming pool. My brother and I became latchkey kids. This gave us a lot of freedom mixed with responsibilities, and I did a lot of grocery shopping and cooking.

Thanks to a few of my new neighbors, I also learned about Tex-Mex and Southern cooking. One of my neighbors was a stay-at-home mother, and I absolutely adored her. She was warm and gracious, the classic example of Southern hospitality and charm, and one of the first things she did was to teach me how to make pecan pralines with their signature gooeyness and creaminess. The recipe was found in a community cookbook, which  became a portal into a new culinary world. I was surprised to see many versions of the same recipe but later realized that this was a common feature of community cookbooks.

My neighbor lent me that cookbook for inspiration, and I learned even more about ingredients and dishes that I had never heard of: okra, jalapeño chiles, tamales. My perception of food expanded and honestly, become an addiction! It even influenced my bold choice of constantly trading in my homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a hot meal at my junior high school.

With very little allowance money (despite all of the chores I had to do), I always tried to come up with the 85 cents required for a meal at school. I tried delicious meals featuring fried okra, burritos, and tacos. However, Fridays were never quite the same without Sicilian-style pizza. My pizza cravings were about to change…

One Saturday, my brother and I were taken out to lunch by that wonderful lady who taught me how to make pecan pralines. I wish I could remember the name of the restaurant, but Tex-Mex pizza was featured on the menu. I never had anything like it; I was so used to my favorite toppings of pepperoni and mushrooms. Seeing “new” toppings such as chorizo, jalapeño chiles, and cilantro blew my ten-year-old mind. I was in culinary heaven.

Homemade Tex-Mex Pizza. Image courtesy of the author.
Homemade Tex-Mex Pizza. Image courtesy of the author.

That single meal expanded my desire to experiment with ingredients. Before I knew it, I was exchanging recipe ideas with some of the mothers in my apartment complex. One idea I remember sharing was taco salad, using Doritos instead of regular tortilla chips for added flavor and depth.

By my eleventh birthday, I accepted the fact that I was in charge of grocery shopping and cooking for my family. That Christmas, I opened up one of my presents and it was a Crockpot (or so I thought). However, when I opened the box, it was a wonderful and soft teddy bear. This was a reminder I was still a kid, despite some grown-up responsibilities. 

Soon after that Christmas, my mother ended her relationship with her partner, and we moved back to Connecticut. I never had the chance to return the community cookbook I borrowed, but it had permanently changed my culinary repertoire. Despite how challenging life was in Pasadena, I am forever grateful to our apartment complex neighbors for helping me to learn about an entirely new cuisine. Tex-Mex will always be one of my favorites.

Now, I always encourage people to try new ingredients and dishes. One of the cool things about a particular kind of cuisine is to embrace the regional differences. Recipes are really just guidelines. Most community cookbooks will have slight variations of the same dish. It is up to you to find your favorite version of a classic recipe and share it with your loved ones.

Meli Alexander has been passionate and — honestly, obsessed — about genealogy after going to a family reunion in New Brunswick, Canada when she was a pre-teen. Her love and respect for international cuisines started much earlier; living in New York City fueled that fire. In 2004, Meli made the life-changing decision to go to culinary school. She graduated from the one-year culinary program at the Art Institute of Seattle with honors. Her experience includes working at an Italian restaurant, Whole Foods Market, and a truffle café at the famed Pike Place Market. During the COVID pandemic, Meli put her acting career aside and focused purely on genealogy, joining a vast community of fellow genealogists on social media. Struggling to find her place in that amazing and collaborative world, Meli was inspired by genealogists such as Gena Philibert-Ortega and Michael W. Twitty, authors who combine genealogy with food. Defining herself as a Culinary Genealogist, “a person who combines the disciplines of food and genealogy,” Meli reinvented herself as The DNA Chef in 2022.

Culinary History, Early Modern, Emotion, Experimentation, Family and Household, Food and Drink, Manuscripts, Posts, Pre Modern

Imperfect practice: a case for making early modern recipes badly

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By Kate Owen

I used to think “what’s the point of recipe making if you know you will not be making them with the diligence and expertise needed for practice based research?”

Recreating early modern recipes is not part of my academic work and the thought of making them from the manuscripts I work with was initially quite intimidating, especially when the threat of failure is ever present. That
failure is also highly visible, material, and sometimes requires a time consuming clean up. Making an early modern recipe requires the maker to confront the gaps and absences which are created in the process of translating physical acts into written recipes. This empty space reflects the difficulty of translating action and experience into the written word, or the inability of transferring a ‘knack’ for something from one person’s muscle memory to another’s brain. Some of the pitfalls I encountered when recreating early modern recipes in the 21st century were also present 250 or
more years ago, but have become almost impossible to avoid as time stretches away from these moments. The most obvious differences observed were the working environment, cooking equipment and tools, and variations in the production, look, and taste of ingredients. However, the most striking is assumed knowledge: the things that the recipe author had deemed so elementary to everyday cookery that there was no point wasting ink on their description. When so much amazing work is being done on recreating early modern recipes, is there any purpose of trying it at home when those results are (mostly) unachievable?

My first successful attempt at recipe making was born out of necessity when I needed to make a dessert for my partner’s visiting parents. It was a very busy week and by picking a simple early modern recipe, I could introduce my partner’s parents to my research and avoid any cake rising disasters. I baked some rosewater biscuits from Frances Springatt’s receipt book. [1] This triggered a madeleine moment for my partner’s mother, who suddenly remembered a similar biscuit she loved as a child, but had long forgotten. The act of making this recipe had produced a non-physical gift along with the physical product, and created a special moment between me and my partner’s parents . Since that first biscuit I have made early modern recipes frequently, still without the conscientiousness of faithful recreation, and have learned the ways in which the making process operates in the life of the maker in addition to producing the product. I realised that the social and bonding functions of recipe making that I had read about academically in Elaine Leong’s Recipes and Everyday Knowledge and Leong and Sara Pennell’s ‘Recipe Collections and the Currency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern “Medical Marketplace”‘ were just as relevant to my recipe recreation.[2] Like early modern recipe book users I have made recipes for social reasons and gifted them to potential friends, to ease the stress of fellow students during our dissertation presentations, and to show solidarity with striking staff.

Photograph of a plate with biscuits. The biscuits are pale in colour and covered with rose petals.
Kate Owen’s version of Springatt’s biscuits, made without ‘the herb coffins’ and gluten free (c) Kate Owen

The ways early modern recipes have acted in my own life have made me more appreciative of the invisible impact of recipe compiling and testing in the early modern period. What did people gain from making recipes that could not be
quantified by a usable (or unusable) product or a new addition or annotation in a manuscript recipe book? I began to wonder about the less tangible, often emotional, by-products of recipe making that left no material trace, such as
satisfaction, relief, frustration, or an altering of a sense of identity. Scholarship on recipe book compilation has described how the organisation and upkeep of these manuscripts created a place for self construction and expression
in a society where a successful household had social, religious, and political implications. Since starting recipe making myself I am interested in how the individual testing process can equally feed into the maker’s sense of self.[3]  By attempting to create the physical product, rather than just reading recipe books, one can gain insight to the emotional impact of recipe making that is often not captured on the page.

Looking back, it was rather naive of me to believe that you had to begin recreating a recipe with the guarantee of a perfect end product. In actuality, recipes are written to inspire action and I have gained so much appreciation into the manuscripts I work with through making them. Recreating these recipes can be both an insightful and emotional experience for the modern maker.

Kate Owen is a second year PhD student at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London. Her project looks at knowledge organisation in early modern manuscript recipe books.

[1] Wellcome MS.4683

[2] Elaine Leong, Recipe and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Elaine Leong and Sara Pennell, ‘Recipe Collections and the Currency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern “Medical Market Place”‘ in Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies c. 1450-c.1850, ed. By Mark S.R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

[3] Catherine Field, ‘“Many hands hands”: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books’ in Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, ed. by Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

Early Modern, Emotion, Ingredients, Knowledge Transmission, Manuscripts, Posts, Religion

A Black Rooster and the Angel of Dread: Jewish Magical Recipes Against Fear

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By Andrea Gondos

Illness and a desperate longing for wellness and healing defined Jewish magical recipes books, written in a thriving manuscript culture of practical Kabbalah that existed alongside printed works in Jewish communities of East-Central Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[i] These manuscripts, many of them cherished by their compilers, played an important role in recording, accumulating, and subsequently transmitting knowledge about the natural and the supernatural worlds. As recipe compilations, they include lists of ingredients that are accompanied by detailed instructions directed at a practical goal, which in this case aimed to improve a person’s material and spiritual wellbeing. The writers of these amulets were collectively called ba’alei shem[ii] or masters of the (divine) name who deployed experiential types of knowledge in combination with traditions of angelic and divine names. These expose a holistic outlook based on the careful alignment and calibration of three interrelated spheres of human existence: the religious, derived from prayer and proper conduct; artisanal knowledge of the natural world, the unique qualities of herbs, plants, and animal substances; and the mastery of supernatural forces and processes by wielding power over demons, forces of impurity, and astrological influences.  The acquisition of this unique type of expertise, enumerated in these magical recipe books, bequeathed upon its master extraordinary powers and charisma. Here, I will survey three visually interesting amulets designed to counteract demonic forces that were believed to cause negative mental and emotional states such as fear.

Image courtesy of The National Library of Israel, MS 38 3279, fol. 109v: an amulet against fear for a child.

 

“[An] amulet for a child gripped by terror. It should be hung on the child and her/his name should be written on it; he can also hang on the child the foot of a black rooster.”

A curious ingredient and technique presented in this recipe is the use of charaktêres, or angelic alphabet, that was meant to directly command and address specific angelic interlocutors to produce a desired outcome.[iii] Defined as “an alphabetic sign or a simple ideogram which does not belong to any of the alphabets used in that specific magical text, or to any known system of meaningful symbols,”[iv] charaktêres constituted a form of linguistic magic and were frequently deployed through cross-cultural borrowing and adaptation in a variety of cultural settings, including Judaism, from Antiquity to modern times.

Another recipe that addresses fear was supposed to be written on parchment made from a kosher animal, one that was considered in compliance with Jewish dietary laws. Here the visual element is the formation of a square from the angelic name PAHAD’EL, which is a composite of the words ‘fear’ (pahad) and God (‘El). At the upper corners of the recipe, on the left and right sides, two additional angelic names are indicated: Hasadi’el (left), and Rahami’el (right). Both names are cognates of mercy, thus visually these two merciful angels flank the Angel of Dread (Pahad’el) overpowering and diminishing its negative effect on the person, who is gripped by fear. When confronted by the debilitating effects of mental distress, such as fear or dread, the Jewish shaman thus had recourse to a cache of magical modalities to affect healing. Ingredients here are comprised of a magic square, letter mysticism, alongside theoretical elements of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, which invokes the mystical principle of containment. Accordingly, the demonic powers of the left side of the divinity need to be included, encompassed, and subsumed in the right, the sacred aspect of God. Kabbalistic theosophy places great emphasis on the idea of tricks and ruse to co-opt the dark forces of the left, instead of confronting them directly; this conceptualization is visually demarcated in the diagrammatic features of this recipe formula.

Image courtesy of The National Library of Israel. MS 8 1070, fol. 31r

 

In the final recipe for fear, food and plant substances, bread and garlic, are promoted as effective therapeutic ingredients to overcome this negative emotional state. This particular compilation does not contain any distinctly Jewish elements. Rather, it draws on more common cross-cultural practices, which are adopted and offered as part of a ba’alei shem’s stock of natural remedies:

“For one who goes out at night so he would not fear evil spirits even in a place of danger: He should take a loaf of bread in his right hand and in his left hand some garlic, and no harm will come to him, God willing, who saves and protects.”

Image courtesy of The National Library of Israel. MS 8 1070, fol. 11v

 

The above recipes which were offered as panacea against fear, a form of mental distress, highlight the multiplicity of approaches that ba’alei shem in East-Central Europe took to alleviate the debilitating grip of negative states of the mind. While some recipes display theoretical, particularistic, and more elite forms of knowledge, other variants for the same illness exhibit a more universal, folkloristic, and popular stance.

 

[i] See Agata Paluch, “Practical Kabbalah and Practical Knowledge: Kabbalistic Manuals and Natural Knowledge in Early Modern East-Central Europe,” History of Knowledge, April 11, 2019, https://historyofknowledge.net/2019/04/11/practical-kabbalah-and-practical-knowledge-kabbalistic-manuals-and-natural-knowledge-in-early-modern-east-central-europe/.

[ii] On ba’alei shem, see Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “The Master of an Evil Name: Hillel Ba’al Shem and His Sefer ḥa-Heshek,”AJS Review 28.2 (2004): 217–248; and Immanuel Etkes. The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader, translated by Saadya Sternberg (Hanover and London: Brandeis University, 2005).

[iii] Gideon Bohak, “The Charaktêres in Ancient and Medieval Jewish Magic,” Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis, 47 (2011): 25-44.

[iv] Ibid., p. 25.

 

 

About

Andrea Gondos’s scholarship has focused on knowledge organization and transmission reflected in early modern study guides in the field of Kabbalah. Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the DFG-Emmy Noether Research Group “Patterns of Knowledge Circulation” at the Institute of Jewish Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, where she examines the conceptualization of the female body, gender, and reproductive health as expressed by Jewish male healers in early modern manuscripts of magic in East-Central Europe.