Tag Archives: Autumn 2023

Autumn 2023, Knowledge Transmission, Modern, Posts, Students

The Embedded Recipe: Vibration Cooking as Literature

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By Rhiannon Scharnhorst

“Afro-American cookery is like jazz—a genuine art form that deserves serious scholarship and more than a little space on the bookshelves” (Smart-Grosvenor xviii).

Originally published in 1970, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s cookbook/memoir Vibration Cooking: or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl really began in the coastal waters of South Carolina, where the Gullah Geechee people, descended from West Africans, created their own unique culture, language, and foodways. A self-proclaimed culinary griot, Smart-Grosvenor uses food, and stories about food, to bring people together—an early visionary of the self-stylized food documentarian genre. What her work captures—beyond the literary imagination of an African-American woman in the mid-twentieth century—is the need for serious scholarly attention to recipes as a form of storytelling.

 Vibration Cooking is a series of vignettes about Smart-Grosvenor’s life, but what connects each vignette are the recipes. Integral to the surrounding narrative, the recipes extend, complicate, or connect the stories quite literally—they are often dropped in the middle of a sentence which continues after the recipe concludes (see recipe for Cousin Gussie’s Coconut Custard Pie, Figure 1).

Figure 1.

 

Sometimes recipes are layered on top of one another, like when a story about returning from a hunting trip leads to a recipe for smothered rabbit, which is immediately followed by a recipe for squirrel, then venison, before moving onto “recipes” (but really just humorous statements; Figure 2) for peacocks and pheasant and others, before finally returning us to the hunters.

Figure 2.

 

When I assign Vibration Cooking in an introductory literature class on food at a predominately white institution, students are immediately struck by Smart-Grosvenor’s familiar and engaging tone: she treats her audience like an insider, writing as though we intimately know all the people of her world. Simultaneously, she maintains a critical analysis of race: Smart-Grosvenor doesn’t like being essentialized as a “soul food” writer, as it minimizes the culinary traditions celebrated and embraced by Black people around the world. She loved saltimbocca just as much as collard greens, and she wrote for a similarly global audience. Other critiques of racism are woven throughout Vibration Cooking alongside experiences of shopping and food culture writ large. In one vignette, she writes of a greengrocer where the Black employee always packages the greens but is never allowed to take the customer’s money; in another, she writes how “so-called gore-mays” are just like plantation owners who take credit for what Black folks created or discovered long before it was considered sophisticated.

My first question to students after assigning Vibration Cooking is always: “Did you actually read the recipes?” Almost resoundingly the answer is no. Students skip or skim through them, as though they are simply instructional tidbits sprinkled throughout the text and included just to interrupt the “real” narrative. Discussions about why they skip them range from individual preference (I’m not going to cook anything, so why bother) to a critical disavowal of recipes as literature (they’re just instructional, right?). What students often overlook in these moments are how they perpetuate misogynist and racist stereotypes by refusing to see this domestic aspect of Smart-Grosvenor’s writing as valuable and intentional: Black women in particular use food in creative and ingenious ways to combat racism and oppression, as scholars such as Dr. Williams-Forson suggests in her work on Black food history. What Smart-Grosvenor’s work teaches us through the act of reading it is how much knowledge can be embedded in what, on the surface, might appear trifling.

That most of the students skip the recipes upon the first read tells me something about our relationship to food and identity, particularly as Smart-Grosvenor obviously intends for them to be read. Even when directly embedded into the story, readers still don’t stop and fully listen to the Black woman speaking. Some people ignore her expertise and knowledge in light of preconceived ideas about what makes a narrative whole. Upon a second reading, students realize the recipes contain more than instructions—they are moments of humor, and history, and, perhaps most importantly, integral to the understanding of the narrative. What Smart-Grosvenor does through her writing is create an active, participatory work of literature that requires a reader to recognize meaning-making as an embodied experience: if we really want to know how to cook, learn, or be human, we must respect the intentionality behind others’— and our own—narratives. We have to unpack what identities we claim through our own food choices. Without deep, mindful engagement with the whole text, we miss out on all the good stuff.

Looking at recipes as narrative highlights the performance embedded in all texts; just as a moving picture captures the physical embodiment of the individual on film, recipes capture the entangled embodiment of people, place, and food. Recent feminist scholarship has determined that recipes are valuable artifacts of literary history (as the very existence of the Recipes Project alone demonstrates). Recipes are always embedded in a culture and time; they capture a moment rich in historical meaning and detail, particularly of those whose narratives have often been excluded from white European canonical spaces. Smart-Grosvenor’s work in Vibration Cooking is just one such example of a Black literary tradition rich with possibility.

 

Dr. Rhiannon Scharnhorst is a Lecturer in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University and an affiliate with the Kenan Institute for Ethics What Now? network. Her current research explores the complex negotiation, construction, and contestation of authenticity through a food studies curriculum in the writing classroom. When not writing, she is throwing pottery on the wheel in her backyard.

Autumn 2023, Food and Drink, Knowledge Transmission, Modern, Posts

Transpacific Kitchens: The Makings of the Diasporic Kusinera

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By GJ Sevillano

“Through my family’s many moves to many different cities, I began to connect the dots of my life. Every single dot I connected was a pot…that form[s] a picture of my life, my family, my calling, and my home.”

-Malou Perez-Nievera, Connecting the Pots: Charting Stories and Filipino Recipes to Find Home

“This peek into the cooking pots and lifestyle of some families makes one realize how much culinary wealth hides, grows, and brings pleasure in Philippine homes, where in truth our mother cuisine develops.” 

-Doreen G. Fernandez, “Mother Cuisine” in Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture

 

While elusive, the embodied culinary performances of self-actualization—the private moments and movements in which the cook slices, stirs, and spices her meals to her satisfaction—are palimpsestically constructed in recipes. Recipes serve as a key genre in which historical subjects have constructed versions and visions of themselves that have exceeded the bounds of normative archives and their print cultures—the “undigested” figures that symbolize everyday forms of cultural resilience.[i] Thus, it is important as we expand our understanding of recipes beyond a mere set of culinary instructions, we must also expand our understanding of the figures that “dance” alongside us as we cook through the culinary repertoires of past, present, and future.[ii]

A selection of female-authored Filipino and Filipino American cookbooks. Photo taken by author.

 

 In the opening narrative to her co-authored cookbook with Ligaya Mishan titled Filipinx: Heritage Recipes from the Diaspora, Angela Dimayuga states that writing recipes and creating the cookbook was a “form of coming home.”[iii] Rather than a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age narrative, Filipinx perhaps can be more accurately called a coming-of-home narrative. Home not only in the sense of where she resides, but a coming-of-home within the Filipino diaspora in northern California, within the kitchen, within herself. This literary device, of grappling with different senses of home and homeland, is a key genre used by diasporic Asian writers. From the refugee narrative to the transnational adoptee narrative, Asian migrants have dealt with issues of home in their writing for some time. Similarly, Dimayuga uses the cookbook as a literary site to showcase herself “as a complete person.”[iv] For Dimayuga, her recipes inform not only the foodways she inhabits, but also the person she has found home in—a diasporic kusinera (chef).

The figure of the diasporic kusinera represents the ideals of the modern Philippine kitchen. Caught in the double binds of Spanish and American postcolonialism; cultural preservation and culinary innovation; belonging and unbelonging; and subjecthood and abjecthood, the diasporic kusinera represents the complexities in which Filipina womanhood is constructed in and beyond the sites of the culinary. Recipes like Vanessa Lorenzo’s “Navy Beans with Chorizo and Tomato Chutney (Habichuelas),” Nicole Ponseca’s “Banana Ketchup Ribs,” and Abi Balingit’s “Adobo Chocolate Chip Cookies” index the culinary creativity of the diasporic kusinera that takes seriously the everyday realities of postcolonial life.[v]

As Denise Cruz argues, “Figures of transpacific Filipinas are still a means of negotiating shifts produced by geopolitical transitions, now manifested not in formal empire of occupation, but in the dynamics of neocolonialism and the global marketplace.”[vi] Important to expanding Philippines’ foodways are cookbooks that recenter minoritized experiences of the culinary realm.[vii] Leland Tabares notes how “misfit professionals” use the narrative device of “coming-to-career narratives” to underscore the ways in which chefs of color, female chefs, and queer chefs utilize the genre of the cookbook to challenge normative notions of culinary professionalism.[viii] Building from this, I argue that the cooking, feeding, and eating Filipina embodied in these cookbooks and recipes materializes the ontoepistemological tensions of the quotidian Philippine diaspora. In other words, Philippine tastemakers must grapple with the afterlives and aftertastes of colonial histories that continue to stricture contemporary diasporic life.

In her genre bending cookbook-cum-autobiography-cum-poetry-collection titled Asian Girl in a Southern World: This is Not Your Mother’s Cookbook, Dalena H. Benavente, narrates the struggles of growing up Filipina in Obion County, Tennessee, one of the least Asian-populated places in the U.S. Benavente states, “It’s not enough to tell the stories. You can’t just read about it, hear about it or imagine it. You can’t because it’s just too much. In order to truly understand these stories that I have to tell, you have to eat them.”[ix] She continues, “I hope my noodles make you laugh, my cake makes you want to hug someone you love, and I hope my sangria makes you want to fight for what you believe in.”[x] For Benavente, the normative literary form of narrative is incomplete without taste. To translate her experience as a diasporic kusinera is incomplete without her recipes and her readers cooking alongside her. The consumption of her autobiography can only be corroborated by the embodied experience of following her recipes, cooking her food, and eating the flavors of her transpacific kitchen.

Benavente ends her cookbook where a lot of other Philippine and Filipino-American cookbooks begin, with a recipe for kinilaw, or as she names her dish, a ceviche of jalapeno peppers, prawn and peach. Kinilaw is a dish “cooked” with acid thought to be one of the longest standing pre-colonization culinary traditions native to the Philippines. Benavente’s version differs slightly in her preference to pre-cook the shrimp before she adds it to the lime juice, onion, jalapeno, and peaches. The blend of these seemingly unrelated surf and turf ingredients formulates the essence of her Filipina-American subjecthood. She states, “It’s the marriage of the prawn and peaches together in one place, much like your feet standing on unfamiliar ground but knowing that there is something about the proximity that seems so right.”[xi]

To cook the recipes and eat the foods of transpacific Philippine kitchens means to directly engage with the kusineras that grapple with the complexities of diasporic life. To taste her cuisine one must simultaneously confront the material realities of postcolonial haunting, global capitalism, and everyday cultural resilience.

 

Notes

[i] Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

[ii] Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2009): 67-94.

[iii] Angela Dimayuga and Ligaya Mishan, Filipinx: Heritage Recipes from the Diaspora (New York: Abrams, 2021), 10).

[iv] Ibid.

[v] For recipes see: Jacqueline Chio-Lauri, ed., The New Filipino Kitchen: Stories and Recipes from around the Globe (Chicago: Surrey Books, 2018), 122-129; Nicole Ponseca and Miguel Trinidad, I Am Filipino: And This is How We Cook (New York: Artisan, 2018), 316-319; Abi Balingit, Mayumu: Filipino American Desserts Remixed (New York: Harvest An Imprint of William Morrow, 2023), 143-145.

[vi] Denise Cruz, Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 234.

[vii] Francheska Go, “The Next Generation of Filipino Food,” Food Philippines, https://foodphilippines.com/story/the-next-generation-of-filipino-food/#:~:text=Making%20waves%20in%20the%20global,dishes%20like%20adobo%20and%20sinigang.

[viii] Leland Tabares, “Misfit Professionals: Asian American Chefs and Restaurateurs in the Twenty-First Century,” Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Summer 2021): 103-132.

[ix] Dalena H. Benavente, Asian Girl in a Southern World: This is Not Your Mother’s Cookbook (Self-Pub., Dalena H. Benavente, 2016), Introduction.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Ibid., 232-233.

 

GJ Sevillano (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at George Washington University. He received his M.A. in American Studies from George Washington University in 2021 and A.B. in Politics and Certificate in American Studies from Princeton University in 2019. He was born and raised in Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles, CA where his academic curiosity and passion for Filipinx food was cultivated. His writing has been published in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Ampersand: An American Studies Journal, and Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies.

Autumn 2023, Environment and Climate, Family and Household, Posts

Recipes for Sacred Porridge in Post-Earthquake Turkey

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By Su Hyeon Cho

Mid-August is the grape harvest season in Vakfılı, an Armenian village perched on the mountainous region of the southernmost Turkish province of Hatay. Tasting grapes takes the form of ritual in the patient waiting until Surp Asdvadzadzin, the holiday that celebrates the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary by blessing the grapes and cooking a sacred porridge. The prelude to this festive occasion consists of the drumbeats of davul and the blasting of zurna the night before. Cheerful crowds dance around seven steaming cauldrons of harisa in the churchyard overnight. The porridge, made out of sacrificed meat (madagh) and wheat, is simmered overnight on an open fire until the meat disintegrates. The repetitive labour of churning the ingredients into a viscous consistency is key, hence the name harisa (or hrisi in colloquial Arabic), which originated from ‘churning’ or ‘pounding’ in both Armenian and Arabic.

Left, Middle: Distributing harisa during Surp Asdvadzadzin in 2023 (photo credit: Ismail Zubari), Right: The destroyed cross tower on the churchyard of Surp Asdvadzadzin Church, Vakıflı.

 

This year’s Surp Asdvadzadzin was prepared by a much smaller, more dejected crowd, as Lora Baytar Çapar, a resident of Vakıflı, describes in her essay “May the taste of harisa be the same, this holiday lacks its flavour”. Earlier in February this year, a deadly earthquake shook Hatay and the wider region of north Syria and south Turkey, resulting in over 50,000 deaths and the destruction of the livelihoods of millions.

In Vakıflı, villagers also fell victim to the earthquake. Many had left the village by summer. A community centre in the village stood in for the severely damaged churchyard, and candle holders and other ecclesiastical ornaments were brought in to imitate the usual celebration. Yet, the seven once brimming cauldrons were only half full. There were no cheerful rhythms and melodies of davul and zurna. Although the setting may seem insufficient, Çapar underlines, continuing the tradition of cooking harisa is the community’s will to survive.

A cat sitting on the rubble of Hünkar Mescidi in the old town of Antakya in February 2023 (photo credit: Daniel Thorpe)

 

During my visit to Hatay in September, I witnessed construction work in progress, a series of emptied plots of land and what locals call “camp cities” (çadır kentler) along the road from Antakya to the coastal district of Samandağ. After an hour of dusty travel, I reached the Hızır Aleyhisselam Türbesi, where the suprahuman Hızır (al-Khidr) is believed to have met with Moses. In the vicinity of this spiritual centre for the Alawite community, there is a communal kitchen area where harisa is prepared throughout the year. As harisa is the most celebrated sacrificial meal in the region, locals vow to make a sacrificial offering (called adak in Turkish) for the healing, fertility, and safety of their beloved. On that account, Turkish guest workers in Europe (gurbetçi) hurriedly returned to their hometown shortly after the earthquake and cooked harisa.My interlocutors pointed out that cooking harisa is a form of prayer, and post-earthquake harisa reflects this belief even more strongly.

In the wake of the fortieth-day commemoration after the earthquake, Mişel Orduluoğlu pens an essay grieving for the capital Antakya. Orduluoğlu notes that fortieth day signals the departure of the souls that are no longer with us. The writer adds the period of “five Friday prayers, five shabbat meals, and five Sunday masses with candlelight and frankincense” had passed without Antakya’s usual soundscape, a mixture of call for prayer (ezan), church bells (çan), and Jewish canton (hazzan). “When the city has lost its spiritual sites, then where should one convene the funeral procession?” the writer rhetorically asks. The earthquake did not select its victims, and each community, of different ethno-religious backgrounds, is going through the same pain – together. Orduoğlu remarks that harisa is a means of collective mourning for the loss of the diversity of Antakya that residents have long been proud of.

Habib-i Neccar Mosque, built in the mid-7th-century, is one of many buildings with historical and religious significance in Antakya that was severely damaged during the earthquake (photo credit: Daniel Thorpe)

 

No writer would set preparing harisa in a closed, family kitchen. It is a communal dish, cooked in bulk for sharing at sites where communities feel a spiritual connection. The new kitchen setting, surrounded by rubble and debris, is an odd spectacle. In his essay, Hakan Mercan painfully details the destruction of historical buildings, from Habib-i Neccar Mosque to St. Pierre Church, allegedly the first mosque in Anatolia and the oldest cave church in the world, respectively. Amid despair, the author notes, the survival of the Hızır Aleyhisselam Türbesi gave solace to the community. The essay concludes with reclaiming harisa’s boisterous presence, which reads, “Nothing would remain the same as before, but let’s not surrender to the shadow of hopelessness… Excited children will impatiently stand in a long queue in front of the cauldrons of harisa, burning the frankincense. We will bloom again and again.”

Vernacular writing about harisa in the wake of the earthquake culminates in a recipe for compassion, sharing, solidarity, miracle work, and hope. As such, food writing on harisa does not resemble other food writing. It often contains wordy headnotes about pain and loss, without much in the way of culinary instruction or gastronomic pleasure. Gastronomic pleasure is nowhere to be found. Their recipes for harisa are in the future tense, waiting for the joviality to return, the community to revive.

Su Hyeon Cho is a DPhil candidate in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral project ‘Saints and States in a Plastic Bowl: Tales of a Sacred Porridge in Unlikely State’ focuses on harisa-cooking Alawite, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian communities from Hatay to explore the transcending power of rituals in perpetual ruptures from anthropological perspectives. Before returning to academia, she worked in different capacities at research institutions, diplomatic missions, and the United Nations in the Middle East.

Autumn 2023, British Studies, Global Exchange, Posts

A Recipe for Brown Stew

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By Geeta Budhraja

This is the apéritif to what I hope can translate into a larger comprehensive project on the delights of Anglo-Indian cuisine. Born into a family where conversations celebrated food – what to eat, why, the origin of the dish or ingredients, etc. – and a healthy inclination towards fusion, it’s not surprising that Anglo Indian cuisine is by far my all-time favourite.

An illustrated bowl of steaming stew sits on top of a cookbook
Image courtesy of Ms. Priyanka Sarkar.

 

My paternal grandfather was Chief Engineer with the Indian Railways from the early part of the twentieth century when it was still under British governance. He maintained links to this colonial past until well after Indian Independence, which showed up in the cuisine served at railway parties and were a part of celebratory dinners at home. The khansama, or family cook, who was typically local and Indian, was trained in whipping up all the basic Anglo-Indian dishes, as he’d previously been in the employment of the “gora sahib” (white British men).

My father was with Dunlop India Limited, which had its headquarters in the Anglo-Indian Mecca- Free School Street in Calcutta (now Kolkata). So, meals at our home were a celebration of all things Anglo-Indian.

In this post I am going to look at a quintessentially Anglo-Indian dish that is a fusion of a very typical British base to which Indian spices or an Indian touch has been added to rather glorious, if I may say, results.

The khansama had been used to serving British bachelors who came without their wives as the first wave of officers, unsure of living conditions in India. They introduced the gora sahib to Indian spices like turmeric, mustard seeds, cumin, cloves, cardamom, and asafoetida to rather promising responses. When the memsahibs (their wives) arrived, they wanted to reclaim their husbands’ palate, and therein lies the origin of the battle of spices between the khansamas and the memsahibs. Anglo-Indian recipes are the battleground of this war that was never quite won by either but settled into a grudging truce where either one would concede defeat depending on the response of the bada sahib (husband).

A key dish is a brown stew (distinct from the Caribbean one that gets its name from the addition of brown sugar). A British stew is a dish wherein meat and vegetables are simmered to create a very light and flavourful soup-like consistency, while stew in India is trotters simmered in a gravy with onions, garlic, ginger, and yogurt along with spices like cloves, cardamom, nutmeg, and mace. The end result is a rather rich gravy-like dish. The brown stew referred to here is a fusion of these two, and its origin probably lies in one of the kitchens where the British memsahibs would have asked for stew, and the only stew that the khansama knew of was paya (trotters) curry.  So, for his ‘stew,’ he probably substituted the trotters with the meat of choice and added ‘English vegetables’ like carrots, celery, and potatoes. He also retained spices like black cardamom, cloves, cinnamon sticks, whole peppercorns, and bay leaves, thinking that the memsahib and the bada sahib would not appreciate a bland bowl of soup particularly in the winters when this would be a typical dinner repast. The understanding was that there should be a little bit of warmth to blunt the edge of the season, which of course the spices such as cinnamon and cloves would deliver. Sometimes ‘Indian’ or local vegetables like round gourd and cauliflower would also be added if they were handy.

Additionally, this stew is thickened with whole wheat flour – what in India we call atta, which is the entire kernel of wheat that has been ground – rather than refined flour. To go back to the origin of its use, the khansama in the railway houses, when told to dish out a stew (I believe in my house at least this is what happened), ran out of refined flour and innovated by adding what was available, which was wheat flour. Atta is a little coarser than the refined flour and makes for a richer, earthier gravy with a nutty flavour. A roux calls for light sauteing with clear instructions to not allow browning, while atta requires a rich brown hue to remove the raw taste and enhance the nutty flavour lending a rich brown colour to the stew. Any good khansama wouldn’t consider his “Angrezi” (English) khana (food) complete without a liberal dash of Worcestershire sauce as the crowning glory. The end product would be dished out in elegant white porcelain bowls, usually sprinkled with a little bit of garam masala garnished with a combination of coriander and parsley.

Brown stew, as I know it, is a steaming hot, rich, and flavourful repast. It is redolent with a heady mix of spices, spiked with tangy Worcestershire sauce and generous portions of chicken, mutton, or pork. This dish is an ode to a successful marriage of culinary cultures.

 

Dr. Geeta Budhraja is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Aryabhatta College, Delhi University. With over 30 years of teaching experience, she has been actively involved with students and college life in the classroom and areas of art and culture, theatre, and other administrative responsibilities. She works actively in theatre production, culinary culture, and gender studies, and has contributed articles on Feminist Theory, Performance Theory, and book reviews in national and international journals. She has also been an invited speaker on Cultural Studies in international and national forums. She writes poetry and non-fiction.

She may be contacted at drgeetabudhiraja@gmail.com.