Grandma's Recipes: Recapturing the Taste of a Moment

This project records the precious documents we are calling GRANDMA'S RECIPES -- meaning all kinds of cooking advice and directions encapsulating the wisdom and memories of those special people within the home who are the link between past and present.

We ask you not only to peer at this world of flavors and smells from the outside but to think your way inside. What's left out of many grandmothers' recipes is just what sums up the shared wisdom of a whole culture.

The same recipe that is a clear window for the insider is a clouded one for the outsider. The reason for using margarine in meat dishes may be obvious within the Jewish community, puzzling to others. A Cuban recipe from a generation back might call for milk to be scalded with aliños(seasonings), and anyone would have known just what ingredients to use: cinnamon stick, lime zest, perhaps star anise or aniseed. Insiders take such details in stride because for them the recipe is a two-way street of understanding -- an intimate dialogue between two cooks who share a wealth of assumptions.

The goal of GRANDMA'S RECIPES is to recapture not only moments in time but the taste of a moment. Like museum curators collecting paintings, we plan to treat these precious records of the hearth first as documents in need of conservation, then subject them to an interpretive process that may involve bringing the whole culture into focus. Recipes are not the same thing as cooking, any more than a piece of dried cod is a succulent morsel. Something has been removed. In the transition from living kitchen to written page, the sounds and smells of cooking are gone, along with the loving gestures, the quick reflexes, the silent judgment calls. Like the dried fish, the recipe is compressed, temporarily squeezed dry of its original life -- but for a purpose.

For insiders, the secret of restoration lies in memory and instinct. Outsiders -- which most of us are, even when faced with the cooking of our own past -- must try the following recipe: Take any knowledge you have of people, languages, history, geography, climate, plants and animals; mix in varying proportions until you can read, hear, smell and taste between the lines. Conjure up the hands that stirred the pots. Visualize the challenges of distant kitchens until you see beyond the flat words on the page and the dry numbers and formulas become succulent flesh, nourishing sap, pregnant pot, sizzling skillet, fragrant steam, tongue of fire.

by Maricel Presilla | back to home