Tag Archives: recipes

tsp to smbc: Culinary Vernacular and the Evolution of Language in Personal Recipes

By KC Hysmith

Brillat-Savarin might be able to tell you about yourself based on the food you eat, but I bet I can tell you even more by how you abbreviate the word “teaspoon” when writing out a recipe. No matter how you learned to shorten it, the way you write “teaspoon” reveals ample information about your culinary influences. Looking at a larger body of work, such as someone’s personal recipe collection, provides even more details.  

Personal recipe collections contain countless semiotic clues about their authors, but they also hold linguistic tells of shared experiences and community, revealing historical, social, and economical insights about all the people and places that made each recipe possible. Through the lens of measurement abbreviations, this post considers the importance of a shared culinary vernacular and how it passes between recipe collections (from one generation to the next; from one demographic to another) in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American world, and analyzes the evolution of language, especially in regards to transcription and the shift from analog to digital.

Food scholars Amy L. Tigner and Allison Carruth argue that recipe writing serves as a kind of literary vernacular practice with “quotidian modes of writing that develop within specific historical contexts and that intermix rhetorical and aesthetic craft with the dissemination of applied knowledge that is variously empirical, sensory, instructive, interactive, and intergenerational.”[i] The deliberate use of the concept of vernacular versus “jargon,” “dialect,” or “code” highlights the particularity of recipe language and its functional design (which Tigner and Carruth align with the word’s “Latin root vernaculus, meaning domestic”).

There’s no official abbreviation, as each major publication from published cookbooks to legacy media outlets has their own preference, but common versions include: “tsp.” (with period), “tsp” (sans period), a lowercase “t,” “ts,” and “tspn”. It’s never a capital “T,” because that is typically saved for denoting tablespoons (unless you’re German or Dutch, then you’ll likely use a capital “TL” for Teelöffel or Theelepel, which translates to “teaspoon,” respectively). All of these variations came about thanks to numerous colliding forces including culinary literacy, generational trends, cooking methods, and technologies ranging from writing implements to autocorrect (and now, AI).

While personal recipes might start as strictly private, ephemeral texts, they sometimes become shared semi-public artefacts. Countless personal recipes have been shared in community and church cookbooks (often with myriad culinary vernacular stylings)). My departed mother’s recipe for pan de campo (she also uses “tsp,” but funnily does not abbreviate “cup”) sits framed on my office wall. And my personal recipe for cornbread (I use the little “t” notation, when I’m not dealing in metric), has been passed through many hands, in both written and digital forms. Even celebrity chefs with professionally published cookbooks sometimes find their personal recipes in the public eye; consider Julia Child’s handwritten recipe for pain de mie (she uses “tsp” and “c.”) which was pulled from her personal collection and is now on display at the National Museum of American History.

Sharing culinary information is part of our society’s cultural tradition, a custom that blurs the relationship between private recipe text and public artefact.

A scanned image of a page with cake recipes from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896.
Fig. 1. Recipes for cake, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Fannie Farmer, 1896, Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project.

 

The ubiquitous use of standardized measurements—using a “tsp” versus the more obscure “spoonful”—transformed the world of recipe writing. Until the early twentieth century, recipes were incredibly imprecise, according to food historian Helen Zoe Veit, owing to the lack of oven thermometers, timepieces, and “scant tools available to ordinary people to tell exactly how much of an ingredient they were adding.”[ii] Though many contributed to this shift, domestic scientist and culinary lead of the famous nineteenth-century Boston Cooking School, Fannie Farmer, is widely considered the “mother of level measurements” in the United States. Farmer’s methods—along with several other recipe writing “best practices” such as ingredient lists and ordinal instructions—were quickly adopted along with a nationwide trend towards the scientific standardization of all spaces in the age of industrialization.

But recipes are more than their measured ingredients. How we name recipes (or don’t) plays a part in this vernacular, too, with longer titles losing adjectives along the way. When we write recipes for ourselves, we often write instructions as truncated actions, generously detailed instructions, or some combination. And then there are the recipes that are mere lists of ingredient ratios that expect the reader to know how to combine them, a shift from early historical recipes that were mostly instructions with a few non-standard measurements sprinkled in (if you were lucky).

A folded over lined notebook, messy with ingredient smudges and drips, lists ingredients in metric measurements for a banana and tahini baked good.
Fig. 2. Recipe for Banana Tahini Muffins by Oona O’Toole, baker at While You’re Up Bakery in Carrboro, NC, texted to the author without instructions.
A scanned image of a manuscript page full of sprawling handwriting explaining a 17th century gingerbread recipe.
Fig. 3. A recipe for gingerbread, “A collection of medical receipts and prescriptions,” MS502, 1650, Royal College of Physicians catalogue

 

The advent and exponential use of the Internet in the aughts and 2010s created additional influences on the recipe vernacular, for as the amount of information available grew, our attention spans shrunk even as recipe titles grew longer (ex: Briny, Garlicky, Lemony Green Beans with Quick-Pickled Red Onions). The acronyms and abbreviated words of Internetspeak (LOL) were already well worn linguistic territory of recipe writing. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch argues that “Internet acronyms are a perfect example of the intersection between writing and informality.”[iii] Then came social media. At first there were character limits, 140 characters for X (formerly Twitter) and 2200 for Instagram. Early Twitter users relied on code-like workarounds—slashes, no spaces, symbols—to fit full recipes into the character container.

A screenshot of a Twitter (X) post by Maureen Evans (@cookbook) featuring a recipe for Pumpkin Pie.
Fig. 4. A screenshot of a Twitter (X) post by Maureen Evans (@cookbook) featuring a recipe for Pumpkin Pie.

 

A screenshot of the results of a query in the Instagram app for the hashtag #smbc. Results include nine preview square images of various cakes, upclose frosting shots, and a woman holding a massive bowl of buttercream.
Fig. 5. A screenshot of the results of a query in the Instagram app for the hashtag #smbc. Results include nine preview square images of various cakes, upclose frosting shots, and a woman holding a massive bowl of buttercream.

 

On Instagram, where hashtags once helped drive more traffic to your post, bakers would use the tag #smbc to share a recipe for Swiss Meringue Buttercream Frosting. With far more characters to work with but even shorter user attention spans, Instagram recipes take on many abbreviated forms using bullet points, articleless phrases, and the ample use of symbolic emoji.

A screenshot of an Instagram post by @natashas_baking featuring a recipe for Funfetti sourdough. An image of a jar of sprinkled, rising dough is on the left and a caption with the emoji-sprinkled recipe is on the right.
Fig. 6. A screenshot of an Instagram post by @natashas_baking.

 

A screenshot of an Instagram post by @philkhoury featuring a recipe for SMBC. The recipe is listed in detail in the caption and as an ingredient list in the image.
Fig. 7. A screenshot of an Instagram post by @philkhoury.

 

Even with more technology than ever before, the way we share recipes still tends to rely on a shared culinary vernacular. And while McCulloch argues that “writing systems are greatly affected by the tools available to make them,”[iv] our collective understanding of “tsp” (or “TL” for German speakers) remains. However we abbreviate or piece together our instructions, recipe writers both professional and personal recognize one another by our shared understanding and appreciation of the small—but important—details of recipe writing.

 

[i] Amy Tigner and Allison Carruth, Literature and Food Studies (London: Routledge, 2017), 3.

[ii] Helen Zoe Veit, “The Making of the Modern American Recipe,Smithsonian Magazine, 19 September 2017.

[iii] Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (New York: Penguin, 2019), 11.

[iv] McCulloch, Because Internet, 13.


KC Hysmith, PhD, is a food scholar and writer who focuses on the intersections of food history, gender, and digital media. She is the co-author and co-editor of several books on food culture including When Southern Women Cook (America’s Test Kitchen) and An American Girl Anthology. She holds a PhD in food studies from the University of North Carolina and an MLA in Gastronomy. See more of her work at kchysmith.com.

Culinary Literacy in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Personal Recipe Collections

By Elizabeth M. Schmidt

When I graduated from college in 2011, my cousin Aurora gave me a cookbook she had compiled. Titled “Everything but the Kitchen Sink,” it was a binder filled with her favorite recipes: some she wrote herself and others she collected from friends online. Over the years, I added to the binder, slipping magazine cutouts between the pages and taping in small pieces of note paper on which I had scribbled instructions. The cookbook Aurora gave me is part of a long tradition of personal recipe collections created by, and for, women. These collections can be found in kitchens, attics, drawers, libraries, and archives around the world. As readers of The Recipes Project will know, historians have found recipes useful for thinking about how and what households ate, and they are often prized for their access to women’s voices and perspectives.

The varied nature of these collections make them tricky to catalog, and the lack of information on the compilers is often perplexing. An eighteenth-century recipe collection by Elizabeth Michel, currently housed at the Wellcome Library, was initially catalogued by someone around 1931 who referred to Michel as “illiterate,” even though the book was clearly written by someone familiar with the written word and educated to some degree. In 2010, literary historian Wendy Wall used this cookbook and catalog entry as the impetus for an essay that confronted the question of literacy in relation to what she called “the domestic arts,” specifically pointing out the ways that literacy is often unfairly gendered.[1]

What I want to make clear is that the people building these recipe collections were both compilers and authors. Women like Michel were acting as compilers by collecting recipes from various sources, but also as writers by modifying the recipes they collected and creating the books themselves. This became evident when I initially began researching personal recipe collections and wanted to find evidence of real-world use of published cookbooks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Like many, I have shelves of cookbooks that I have collected but rarely cooked from. I wanted to know if this was the case centuries earlier: if eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts were also collector pieces rather than used on a regular basis. In two nineteenth-century manuscripts I found explicit evidence of engagement with a published book. In the cookbook collection at Texas Woman’s University’s Blagg-Huey Library was a recipe book by Mrs. E. A. Foord, an author who copied out a “Claret Cup” recipe from Isabella Beeton’s 1865 book The Dictionary of Every-Day Cookery. Then, at the Huntington Library, I found a recipe collection written by Susannah Judith Blencowe which included the following note: “For Oyster Sauce refer to Miss Rundell page 320 Calves foot jelly Mrs. Glasse page 295 Carrot Soup Cobbet’s 131,” referencing Maria Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery (1842), Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1784), and Anne Cobbett’s The English Housekeeper: or, Manual of Domestic Management (1840).

These were certainly classic examples of literacy, but what I found in the rest of the pages of Foord and Blencowe’s collections, as well as in countless other manuscripts I examined, were examples of a larger “culinary literacy.” Culinary literacy includes the ability to read published cookbooks and competently write out recipes, but it also entails engagement with information networks, friends and family sharing recipes amongst themselves, as well as the ability to modify recipes based on experience, knowledge of how to find appropriate ingredients, and practical skills.

For example, in addition to Beeton’s “Claret Cup,” Mrs. Foord’s recipe collection had attributions to at least forty-nine different people, including a recipe for “Curry” attributed to Abraham Cook, one for “Mango Pickle” she received from Mrs. Norfor while Foord was living in Cuddalore, and a recipe for “Little Cakes” from a butler working for a family named Caldwell. Michel’s book, which instigated Wall’s initial inquiry into literacy, also includes attributions, such as “To Make Plum Cakes My Lady Nowell’s Way,” “My Lady Lucas’s Receipt to Pickle Wallnuts,” and “Sugar Cakes Mrs. Carter’s Way.” The networks accessed by Foord and Michel, evidenced by these examples, crossed international boundaries within the British empire, as well as class boundaries. Michel’s distinction between Lady Nowell and Mrs. Carter indicates that she was sharing recipes with women in the nobility as well as the middling classes.

Fig. 1. Page from Elizabeth Michel’s recipe book. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

Beyond published cookbooks and acquaintances, culinary literacy includes engagement with other sources. Foord included clippings from newspapers in her recipe collection, such as three recipes for marmalades and five “tea-time” recipes for using marrow (a squash similar to a zucchini), and recipes cut from an advertising pamphlet created by a commercial flour company, Paisley.

Fig. 2. Page from Mrs. E. A. Foord’s recipe book. Photo taken by author, permission from TWU

Beyond just incorporating the recipes into their collections, our compilers also often made changes to them. Michel felt it necessary to include the caveat “my own way” on a recipe for cakes, implying that while this particular recipe was something she had invented, any other unattributed recipes in her collection were likely copied from books; by writing “my own way” she claimed authorship and exhibited pride in that fact. On a clipping for “A Breakfast Preserve,” an M. J. Foord added notes modifying the recipe to utilize the natural pectin in the orange seeds but avoid leaving them in the finished product. This example of “kitchen literacy” is key in understanding how these personal recipe collections are products of a larger culinary literacy that encompassed engagement with published texts, exchange of information within social networks, and a body of knowledge gained through experience. Incidentally, Elizabeth Michel’s entry at the Wellcome Library still describes the recipe book as being written in an “illiterate hand,” which showcases the need for resources to re-evaluate catalog descriptions across all archives and adjust them to reflect this idea of culinary literacy.

Fig. 3. Page from Mrs. E. A. Foord’s recipe book. Photo taken by author, permission from TWU

[1] Wendy Wall, “Literacy and the Domestic Arts,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 73:3 (September 2010), 384. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1525/hlq.2010.73.3.383.pdf

 


Elizabeth M. Schmidt is a recent PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara specializing in British Atlantic foodways of the eighteenth century. From roast beef to turtle soup, she researches the intersection of eating and identity during the Age of Revolutions and imperial turmoil. Using microhistories of figures like sailors, military generals, merchants, and housewives, she explores the impact of foodways on discussions of identity, belonging, inclusion, and exclusions. Elizabeth also enjoys cooking historical manuscript recipes, translating eighteenth and nineteenth century instructions, measurements, and tools into their modern equivalent to learn what she can about culinary knowledge and labor.

Recipes for animals: husbandry and animal medicine in early modern England and Anglo-America

By Dr Leah Astbury

One group of actors has been relatively neglected in scholarship on early modern recipe books: non-human animals. And yet, farmyard animals were also members of the household-family, albeit in unequal ways. Whilst there has been some interest in the use of animal bodies and bodily products in culinary and medicinal remedies including their fat, faeces and the practice of applying alive animals to human bodies to cure, there has been little interest in animals as recipients of care, something my new research project seeks to remedy. [1] 

A great many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century recipe books contain medical and cosmetic remedies for animals.  Some of these recipes crossed the Atlantic, reaching the Anglo-American world, where they became important tools for those seeking to live a prosperous and healthful life in new territories. In the British Isles, some compilers spliced recipes for animals next to ones for humans like Magdalen Coward’s ‘For a Horse troubled with ye wind’ directly above a treatment for ‘sore Eyes’ in humans, or the Cross family recipe book that listed three recipes for horses beneath one for ‘a sore breast’ [2]. Others like a bundle of loose-leaf recipes in the papers of the Griffith family of Denbighshire in Wales, are exclusively concerned with the treatment and prevention of disease in farmyard animals [3]. Most notable of these kinds of animal-focused recipe books is a collection attributed to Eusebius Ashby (1652-1741), a Leicestershire gentleman, who kept two extensive volumes called ‘The First Book of Horses’ and ‘The Second Book of Horses’. They contained records of his veterinary practice and remedies he had collected for horses, cows, pigs, dogs, chickens and, on one occasion, a cat. He collected his knowledge from friends, cow-leeches, farriers, farmers, travellers, shepherds, rat catchers, ‘The London Carmen’ (members of the Worshipful Company of Carmen) and printed books on medicine and husbandry. Ashby also kept at least one volume of more human-focused recipes [4]. 

A page from Eusebius Ashby’s ‘The First Book of Horses’ 1705-1740, MS.993, Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.
A page (95) from Eusebius Ashby’s ‘The First Book of Horses’ 1705-1740, MS.993, Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

These recipes drew on many of the same ingredients and practices used in human recipes, and were occasionally useful for both humans and animals. Indeed, some recipes for animals even drew on human bodily products. Ashby’s remedy to ‘procure a stomach’ in a horse (or increase its appetite) required a pint of ‘Human Urine (the old[e]r the bett[e]r)’ with hen dung ‘the whit[e]r the bett[e]r’ [5]. A remedy in an anonymously penned mid-eighteenth-century book of animal remedies from England, recommended drying and beating ‘mans dung’ and blowing it through a goose feather into the eyes of horses that were struggling to see [6].

Searching for animal remedies in the archives has led me to farmers’ account books and almanacs. These books have been unexplored by historians of recipe cultures. One such example is that of the Ballinger family of Arlingham, Gloucestershire in England and their farm rent account book from 1777-1784 in which William Butt recorded the purchase of cattle and rent of fields and buildings in Gloucester along with remedies like that ‘For staunching the blood of any Beast Cut or hurt and how to make a salve to heal it’ [7]. These books not only tell us about the considerable veterinary knowledge and skill required to be a husbandman (a male head of household who managed a farm), but also provide a much-needed window into the recipe cultures of a relatively non-elite social group.

Ensuring one’s animals were healthy quite obviously had high stakes for families that relied on agriculture to survive. Additionally, however, diagnosing and curing one’s ‘beasts’ was inscribed in sermons and religious texts of the period as an important aspect of masculine piety. The London clergyman John Rawlinson’s 1612 sermon Mercy to a Beast made this explicit when he noted that amongst the six obligations that husbandmen had to their animals, they ought to seek help and ‘heale’ them when they were sick [9]. In managing animal health, in these texts, husbandmen asserted their mastery over the natural world, their masculinity, devotion to God, and importantly, their Englishness. As Wendy Wall, notes, husbandry manuals of the period sought to ‘English the soil’ [10].  

These ideas, practices and literal remedies were taken with colonists when they travelled to North America and sought to establish new communities, the success of which also depended on the health and wellbeing of farmyard animals. Husbandry manuals were some of the first books imported to Virginia including Barnaby Googe’s 1614 The Whole Art and Trade of Husbandry and the 1616 English translation of Charles Estienne’s Maison Rustique [11]. Virginia DeJohn Anderson has noted how farmyard animals were key, if unknowing participants, as the ‘advance guard’ of settler colonialism transforming the environment irrevocably [12]. 

Richard Surflet, Maison Rustique, or, the Countrey Farme (London: 1616). Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Richard Surflet, Maison Rustique, or, the Countrey Farme (London: 1616). Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

The few recipe books that were penned by settlers from the British Isles in America, or taken from home for use there, show that the culture of inscribing remedies for animal health alongside human health persisted. Peter Dicks (1696-1760), living in rural Pennsylvania, recorded in his recipe book ‘A Cure for Cattle that has murr[a]in’, an infectious disease characterised by fever and general malaise, opposite a remedy for the presumably human ‘Piles’ [13]. The Saffin-Ellis family who spent years in America before moving back to England, included a ‘receipt for the mange in a Hors’ in their book of cures [14]. The 1712 New York and Boston editions of The Husband-man’s Guide contain a chapter on remedying illness in horses, sheep and cows alongside receipts for humans and advice on account keeping [15]. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, a Frenchman who owned a farm in Chester, New York, described in the mid-eighteenth century how a good farmer should be knowledgeable about animal medicine and would apply the ‘recipes he possesses’ [16]. The place of recipe collecting for one’s animals did not just persist in Anglo-American colonies but became a key part of economic and social success. 

Recipes for animals in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century receipt and account books point to the complex entanglement of the bodies and health of human and non-human members of the family. Collecting and applying recipes for farmyard animals redounded to husbandmen’s piety, their nationality, masculinity, and, one might argue, the colonial project as a whole. 

*****
Dr Leah Astbury is a Lecturer in Health History at the University of Bristol. Her first book, Making Babies in Early Modern England, will be published by Cambridge University Press in November 2025 and is about pregnancy, childbirth and after birth care. She is currently working on a project on animal medicine and husbandry in the early modern British Isles and Anglo-American colonies.

NOTES

[1] From this site for example see:  R.A. Kashanipour, Canine cures or our best friend…,; Lisa Smith, ‘The puppy water and other early modern canine recipes’, and Robert Ralley and Lauren Kassell, ‘Pigeon slippers’. An exception to this is Catherine Flood’s piece on this blog ‘My Charming Ancestor: Lost Spells and Sick Cattle’. Louise Hill Curth has also been interested in animal medicine but mostly using printed medical texts see: The Cure of Brute Beasts: A Social and Cultural Study of Veterinary Medicine in Early Modern England, Leiden, 2009 and ‘A plaine and easie waie to remedie a horse’: equine medicine in early modern England, Leiden, 2013. 

[2] Magdalen Coward, ‘Booke of Receipts’, MS 88, unfoliated, Huntington Library, California and Cross family, ‘Receipt book 1724’, f. MS. 1986 002, unfoliated, University of California, Los Angeles, California.  

[3] Griffith family of Garn, ‘Veterinary recipes 1730-1767’, ED3/2, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales. 

[4] Eusebius Ashby, ‘The First Book of Horses’, MS 993 and ‘The Second Book of Horses’, MS 994, Wellcome Library, London. Ashby’s more human volume is titled ‘The Second Book’ and is held at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland. There is presumably a ‘The First Book [of humans]’ but I have not been able to locate it so far.

[5] Ashby, MS 993, p. 74. 

[6] Anonymous, MS.4124, unfoliated, Wellcome Library, London.  

[7] Ballinger family, ‘Farm rent account and account book, 1777-1784’, D356/1, p. 36, Gloucestershire Heritage Hub, Gloucester. 

[8] John Rawlinson, Mercy to a Beast A Sermon preached at Saint Maries Spittle in London on Tuesday in Easter-weeke (Oxford: 1612), 23-32. 

[9] Wendy Wall, ‘Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England’, Sixteenth Century Journal 27, 3 (1996): 659-976. 

[10] Hillary M. Nunn, Recipes on the Move in Early Modern England and British North America: Domestic Medicine, Mobility, and Manuscript Culture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025), p.114.   

[11] Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of empire: how domestic animals transformed early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 243.  

[12] Peter Dicks, ‘Home remedies 1715-1718’, unfoliated, Delaware County Historical Society, Media, Pennsylvania. 

[13] Saffin-Ellis Miscellany, Ms. Codex 230 Saffin-Ellis miscellany

[14] The Husband-man’s guide in four parts (New York and Boston: 1712). 

[15] Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Sketches of eighteenth century America: More “Letters from an American farmer” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925), p. 40

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.