When Cookbooks are Not-Books:

Reading Bodies & Labour in Diasporic Kitchens

By Katie Konstantopoulos

2016 The Association for the Study of Food and Society Conference: Scarborough Fare

Food on the brain:How many of you know how to cook?

How did you learn?

Who taught you?

Research Question:How do we treat bodies and oral narratives as valid historical documents?

How do we use the physical and social geographies of bodies as a way to validate non-written texts?

IntroductionFifty-four years ago, a Greek woman migrated to Canada and settled near Toronto's Greektown, bringing her culinary knowledge with her. In this paper I discuss an alternative to traditional ideas of the cookbook, by providing a framework of how to view the body as a culinary and cultural text by use of my grandmother, or Yiayia, as a medium of expressing culinary history.

Oral Narrative as… Useless?Ken Albala argues in Cookbooks as Historical Documents that using a transcribed or translated version of a cookbook will disrupt the integrity of the cookbook as fully historical, and that modernized spelling and adaptation of the recipe to be used in a modern kitchen will further shift the original meanings. He states, rather strictly, that such cookbooks and recipes are “practically useless as a record of the past”.

What does this mean for cookbooks that have never been physically written at all?

(Incorrect!) Assumptions:

❏ Validity can only be given through the existence and standardization of written documents and texts.❏ People are not the experts of their own knowledge/experiences.

Oral Narrative as… Useless?Given the known complications of using historical artefacts that are not rooted in time, and given the bias of perspective, I understand where the reservation against Memory and Orality comes from.

My question becomes then, how do we acknowledge and validate the knowledge and the labour of people who do not physically write their cookbooks?

If “cookbooks are not the only primary source for food history”, and records such as wills and diaries are valid, then why are oral traditions and pedagogies of motherhood less valid? How do we begin to read this?

The role of “Memory” in Oral CookbooksHow people remember is important in understanding how pedagogy and labour is presented within Kitchen spaces. Further, the changes and modifications that can be made to recipes and cultural meanings are often due to memory.

Does this mean that each of these recipes are invalid, simply because they are not tangible?

Non-Physical “Ethnic” CookbooksIn an article called “Hunger as Ideology” within Carmen Luke’s book, Susan Bardo retells personal experiences of watching her mother make cabbage rolls, mentioning that her mother was "visibly pleased when I asked her to teach me exactly how to make the dish and thrilled when I even went so far as to write the quantities and instructions down as she tried to formulate them into an official recipe" (134).

What is also striking is the next line, where she explains that the process of recognizing the recipe textually was an act of validity of the transmission of generational labour; she states "until then, it had been passed through demonstration from mother to daughter, and my mother considered that in writing it down, I was conferring a higher status on it" (134).

Questions to think about:Why is it only valid when written?Can bodies be seen as archives of culinary knowledge?

“How Authentic Am I?”Rey Chow speaks to this question in relation to "ethnic films". She suggests that mothers (and their ethnicity, sexuality) can be read as narratives through markings on their bodies. Here, she discusses scars as expressions of origins, and she uses the scar to express the positionality of women within a larger framing (213).

Chow explains that "Behind each mother is thus always another mother. Mothers are [...] always already a mark-on-the-other, a signifier for another signifier, a metaphor. Most of all "mothers" are legends [who] offer, in themselves, ways of reading" (213); she chooses to focus on "the very physical details about them" as a way of enlarging and amplifying the focus, similar to the way one might technologically zoom in and blow up a segment of a photograph (214).

She states that "All in all such physical details constitute the mothers as encrypted texts, gestural archives, and memory palaces" (214).

Bodily Geographies as Marginalia“On rare occasions the historian may find tell-tale stains on the pages of a cookbook that can be chemically analyzed as direct proof that someone tried a recipe at least once or twice. More often discovered are marginalia, and these are sometimes the most illuminating of all treasures discovered in cookbooks. Little comments, corrections to a recipe, or additions are positive evidence that someone interacted directly with the text and actually cooked the recipe.” (Albala)

I’d like to take this further to argue that the way people interact within spaces, and with objects within spaces, can also be seen as marginalia.

Introducing: Yiayia

How can you read this picture?

Introducing: YiayiaFor my Yiayia, the kitchen has long been a space of family gathering, and also a space of labour. It is a women's space, but a space that is re-negotiated through the influences of family and migration and aging. As a migrant and a Greek woman, the food prepared by the mother in families is important by maintaining ties to history and the homeland, but also in supporting the family's endeavors in new societies and cultures.

Family Food PedagogiesRick Flowers and Elaine Swan use a term called cultural transmission (Berliner 2013) simultaneously in line with recent discussions in food studies regarding racial practices (Slocum 2011), ethnic food senses (Law 2001), alimentary pedagogy (Highmore 2008), and visceral pedagogy (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes Conroy 2008, 2010). They suggest that according to David Berliner, "words are powerful 'transmitters' [, but that there are other] powerful mediators", such as "'institutions, gestures, interactions, smells, texts, silences, ordinary moments, sounds, emotions, objects and technologies" -- these are all important ways of learning that happen outside of the limits of language, and have no fixed model (49-50).

I want to also add in the importance of reading the body as well, not simply as being a conveyor of communicative body language in the way that we read hand gestures and facial movements, but into the very physical representation of each body: the consequences of pregnancy and aging and sickness and labour, accidents and trauma, as well as other features of the body that stand in as symbols of experience.

Bodies❏ Signs of Labour & Aging

❏ Familiarity with cooking and ingredients

❏ Burn marks

❏ Swollen feet

❏ Bending/hunching over

❏ Memories & Experiences of Womanhood

❏ Memories & Experiences of Nationhood

Objects & Physical Spaces❏ Meanings of Sizes/Significances of Space

❏ Old cloths

❏ Worn rugs

❏ Spotted cloths

❏ Slightly rusted pots

❏ Warped wooden spoons

❏ Grooves in the floor of the kitchen

People❏ Interactions and negotiations she has with my grandfather (aka. Papou) while cooking

❏ Sometimes he helps

❏ Sometimes offers suggestions regarding his preferences for more salt

❏ Sometimes offers corrections about the amount of meat within a package

❏ Interactions with the family

❏ Cooking larger dishes for more people

❏ Changing up the amounts and the types of dishes

❏ Stories she tells my family, and recipes she passes along

ConclusionMy aim is to move from the tendency to view bodies as non-relevant or invalid as historical documents, into a more holistic form of recognizing various knowledge pedagogies within academia. I want to I argue against a reading of authenticity and standardization through the written text, and to propose alternate ways of “reading” texts.

I refer to my Yiayia not simply through the form of oral narrative, lending off of a series of interviews conducted over the course of the last year, but also by offering suggestions towards reading the body as a text through the marginalia of physical and social geographical spaces.

This is an ongoing project, which I am really excited to continue to pursue.

❏ Interviews❏ Video Documentary - Love & Food, Labour & Family: Gendered Labour in the Greek Diasporic Kitchen❏ Mapping❏ Secondary Research on Gender, Bodies, Labour, and Identity

Thank you!