Preface
This Recetario or Cookbook, is the result of an amazingly rich collaboration under the auspices of COIL, Collaborative Online International Learning, involving faculty and students at higher education institutions from several countries. With LaGuardia Community College (CUNY, The City University of New York) and UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, we organized the Food and Nation workshop, where student participants represented different academic levels (doctoral, masters, and undergraduate) and came from at least twelve cultural backgrounds — ranging from the Ivory Coast, Trinidad and Tobago, China, Peru and Egypt, to Latvia, Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, USA, Bangladesh, and the Dominican Republic.
The modules that we designed were informed by our lively exchanges over theory as well as anthropological works on the topic of food, and how this vital element has been construed and created at the local, regional, and national levels. We invited our students to reflect on how very closely food is tied to historical, social, and cultural processes, and to various levels of power deployment, expressed through contradictions, power relations, and inequalities.
How is a national culinary repertory constructed? What are the particulars of a national cuisine? How “authentic” are our national recipes? Which parameters allow us to define what is authentic? Who imposes such criteria for mapping values? Who does a national cuisine truly represent, and who is excluded from the national culinary repertory? How far can a recipe be modified while still preserving its “tradition”?
LaGuardia’s technical department contributed the method of using Slack as a platform for exchanging recipes and insights about material and symbolic aspects of food. Exchanges between countries and cultures were surprising, fun, heartwarming, and thoughtful regarding the central role that food plays in producing and transmitting a sense of collective identity.
This collaborative ”experiment” was extremely gratifying. Students exchanged recipes, and with them stories, memories, and anecdotes showing the different ways of preparing, presenting, and consuming the food. Along with lists of ingredients and instructions for preparing their dishes, this cookbook’s authors provided evidence that culinary culture in general constitutes a powerful element for identity and distinction vis-à-vis the “other”.
In this case, language was no obstacle to collaboration. In English and Spanish, often with the help of an online translator, the similarities, differences, and contrasts between one culinary culture and another were identified. “This is very different from any dish I would find in my culture,” comments one student as he reads with evident astonishment the ritual described by his classmate, which consists of walking the beef before turning it into meat for a broth. A student reacts with similar enthusiasm and amazement, this time upon discovering that the same ingredients and techniques exist in the cuisines of Cuba, Ivory Coast and Veracruz (Mexico), the result of an African diaspora that has garnered little attention until now: “we make the same cuisine; small world”.
The project Connected recipes and stories for tomorrow employs the genre of recipe collection as a versatile, well-known, and easily accessible device allowing us to record and reproduce the varied and contrasting ways of cooking that exist among the participants of the Food and Nation workshop. Our cookbook does not, however, emphasize national particularities of the recipes collected here, but instead explores the ways our recipes express a sense of collectivity and shared experiences. To this end, we reflect on the local, national, and global scope of culinary knowledge while questioning notions of authenticity and tradition; bringing to light channels for transmitting culinary knowledge, and challenges to the continued use of these recipes in the future. Connected recipes and stories for tomorrow brings together culinary knowledge from here and there, from bygone days well into the future.
Sarah Bak-Geller and Alcira Forero-Pena
