Recipes and Dishes

 What is the role recipes in culture?

• Creating Dishes
• A recipe represents an agreed on list of ingredients, methods,  and an outcome- a dish
•  supplies an accepted use of techniques, applied to ingredients, which can be repeated again and again to reproduce a specific dish.
• recipes create "authentic" dishes
• Variable (especially in domestic contexts) - augmented by creativity, versatility, and adaptability - a cook's skill can be applied to the reworking of a recipe to their circumstances
• cooking is lifelong experiential learning- creating confidence through experience
• Recipes can change the way we eat
• Cooking is about much more than making food- it is about aesthetics, combinations of ingredients, skill, and the interplay of the senses, together with an image of what the food should look like when the dish is finished. 
• Each dish is differentiated by its culinary aesthetics
• the appearance of a dish, including how it is served, the dish acts as a form of visual communication, relying upon aesthetics and symbols to condense many cultural ideas and messages into one format.
• The interpretation of these messages depends on the beholder - a member of that culture or an outsider- mediated by the knowledge they have attained through experience and education.
• some dishes become culture bearers - coming to represent a culture through their presence at home, in private, in public on a menu. -"classic XXX"
• culinary representation of a culture- their national identity (hummus, Bahn Mi, etc.)
• Recipes are a means of cultural reproduction - even in immigrant communities, food is one of the things that retains its importance even when other aspect of ethnicity fade.
• Recipes allow cultural borders to be crossed and culture to be reproduced anywhere.
• oral more elastic, written, more rigid
• Experiential Cooking and Embodied Knowledge
• Oral recipes are passed down through the generations, usually through women
• embodied apprenticeship - technique of the body
• learned bodily actions that reflect or embed certain aspects of a culture. Cultural practices are literally embodied in physical motion and skills. 
• recipes are personal and familiar and belong to those who use them
• part of the lived experience of a cultur, recorded in memory through performance
• creative- adapting to different environments
• Recipes contain  a culture's culinary rules and the performance space to bend them- so cooks creatively do in the following ways as part of experiential techniques of living recipes. They allow cooks to respond to challenges while still ahereing to a cuisine's identity:
• Blending
• mixing ingredients in new combinations or mixing techniques and dishes together (making chili with more vegetables to make it healthier or less spicy)
• Submersion
• hiding the identity of new ingredients by adding them in a way that disappear (putting condensed tomato soup in a masala)
• Substitution
• replacing one ingredient with another, especially when not a vailable (or make your vegan tacos)
• Wrapping or stuffing
• enclosing something new or foreign within a familiar wrapping (leftover chicken tagine in a sandwich)
• Simplification
• paring down recipes or simplifying techniques to make preparation easier, less time consuming, and not in need of special equipment
• As recipes are written down, they lose the flexibility of the spoken, living "autobiographical" oral recipe, and they take on the format of the observer, rather than the cook
• fixes the ingredients and methods into a very specific formula
• offer a template for sociability of cooking and eating, using differently valued ingredients to suit guests social positions
• Individual cooks repertoires may be shaped by the ideological expectations of gender roles and the task of cooking to suit their family tastes.
• give one insights into the cooks social relationships (husband's favorite dish, always do taco tuesday for the kids...)
• Inalienable wealth- something that cannot be detached from the bearer. To take this is called "appropriation"
• Authenticity --- how do we determine it?
• the written recipe moved the ownership to the cookbook author rather than the cook or the culture
• privileged the textual recipe over the many LIVING versions of the everyday domestic cook
• appropriated the inalienable wealth of these cooks and commodified by bringing it to paper. 
• took recipe to the world of public discourse
• this alter's the dishes contextual meaning
• communicates ones willingness to cook dishes from other cultures, one's distinctive taste, and the search for the authentic

Reading Commercial Recipes: Textual Cooking

• High Cuisine: created by textual recipes for the wealthy
• but brought these recipes out of the public sphere and back into the hands of domestic cooks - gradually extended across classes
• convey the social and cultural ideals of everyday life played out through food
• home/public, free/wages, women/men, low status/haute cuisine
• cookbooks marked the boundaries of cuisines
• Haute cuisine remained in restaurants. 
• disembodied transfer of cultural knowledge. How many cooks learn how today.

Cookbooks: Codifying National Cuisines

• written recipes can be used to unite people with the cuisine of their culture and instill a sense of connection between people and a particular place (nationalism)
• allows citizens to imagine they share a common culture
• slow food movement in Italy
• suggests continuity with the past, reconciling the uncertainties of the present and the future. 
• its through food rather than political rhetoric that most people experience a culture.
• become a powerful symbol of identity
• connect to specific events in a nations history
• connect people to values, beliefs and achievements of an idealized past.
• Eating the National Cuisine became a benign way to embrace diversity, to get to know "the other", without actually meeting.
• Summary
• The pages that are splattered and stained are reminders of past meals
• Provoke memories of people and relations
• act as primers for accumulating social and cultural capitol
• are capable of blurring the lines between social differences to bring a sense of belonging and unity
• they are cross cultural traditions that can be reproduced in people's homes by learning how to cook another culture's cuisine -and the implications of this
• British cuisine: Cookbooks to Curry (example)
• cultural, historical, political, and economic changes can be recorded in cookbooks over time. 
• cookbooks reveal the social order of society
• Industrial Revolution: cookbooks became important-vacuum in transmission was first accommodated by the purchase of street foods and by using industrial cuisine. Cookbooks offered an alternative and became instruments of imparting cooking skills and eventually the government incorporate cooking into public school education.
• foreign dishes were domesticated and reworked to match British tastes
• tone down dishes to meet British culinary aesthetics
• placed women's roles firmly in the household and the domestic sphere
• British upper classes favored French Haute cuisine and Italian cuisine
•  the rise of celebrity chefs: Jamie Oliver and Heston Blumenthal
• modern British cooking emerged as an amalgam of French and British cooking techniques
• New British culinary aesthetic - colorful, spicy, healthy - and ethically sourced and organic
• new dishes are given new local meanings and values and often their foreign origins are forgotten and they take on an adopted culinary identity.