After The Bake Off final last night, today seemed like a good day to openly reflect upon Digesting Recipes: The Art of Culinary Notation by Susannah Worth, which I finished reading last week. It is a book, which looks at recipes as cultural documents. How, as a formula for writing, its constraint can be seen in a negative light – as a set of instructions in place to trap or enforce aspirations of the unattainable; as well as in a positive light – it’s potential to provide escape, a proposal for action or a guide to new possibilities. It highlights the manner in which food can bring people together as well as bring to prominence ‘contemporary society’s stark disparities’.
I often use food in my work, playing with these relationships. I am interested in the way foods can signify, represent, or become a label of a place and/or the exotic, as well as the role of food in contemporary society’s search for authenticity.
In my 2,3 Kilometer oder 4 Schnittlauchpflanzen oder 0,5 Schrippe oder 10 Pommes frites guide. I placed two similar recipes for ‘Fresh Cheese & Chives’ next to each other – one in English and one in German. At first glance they appear the same set of instructions. However, depending on your knowledge of both languages you, will come to realise that they are quite different recipes, and representative of the way in which different cultures approach the same end goal. I am interested in this process of assuming we understand what we see and having to reassess with time.
Digesting Recipes mentioned the discovery of a new disorder liked with this rise of lifestyle programming and competitive leisure cooking – KPA or Kitchen Performance Anxiety, which involves many of the symptoms of Generalised Anxiety. It shows how the high standards set on the telly by ‘immaculately choreographed renditions of rehearsed recipes’ that fly across our screens, really can affect us. In response to this, I think perhaps Bake Off exposes a more healthy / human side to cooking – through emphasising the inevitability of mistakes and the fact that these are laboured creations that provide both stress and escape. In my own work I often make extreme versions of food items. Through this my primary concern is to try allow the object to ‘escape’ its labels but perhaps I should look at my position as female artist and avid watcher of Nigella and think more about these links. Whatsmore perhaps art making does contain some sort of performance anxiety too….
Last night I made Hanley Forest Gateau, a recipe I came across in The Oatcake Cookbook. I was intrigued by the way chocolate, kirsch and cherries, when in combination, were representative of a Black Forest Gateau, no matter how far from the original this new concoction may be. Layers of oatcakes made the sponge and I have to say it was pretty horrid, oatcakes definitely were meant for bacon and cheese. However, I think the way flavours are linked to places and the manner in which pairing meals with foreign influences seems to ‘upgrade’ them are things to look into further. Stoke, whilst very English in many respects, is a multicultural city. And I don’t want to forget that in my work here.
