Fleurs dans l’Hiver: Kaitlyn, Hannah, Jane, and Amrita
Throughout this course, we visited numerous archives in the forms of novels and oral histories. This last project brought together those two archives in order to engage in the exercise of critical fabulation, defined by Saidiya Hartman in her famous essay “Venus of Two Acts” (Hartman 2008). Critical fabulation calls on the vulnerable and often hidden aspects of the story, and looks for the gaps in histories to create an alternative archive to give space for those other than the most powerful (Hartman 2008). We used our own oral history interview to put into praxis critical fabulation in the context of this cookbook. The cookbook itself is an exercise in the formulation of story, the analysis of food as a form of resistance. We seek to illustrate this movement through our posts and oral history.
For our first post, we chose to incorporate the oral history. Because it was the inspiration for our recipe, we believed it would be an effective way to begin our chapter. Fortunately one of our group members had a friend, Sophie Matsumoto, who has worked in Cornell’s dining hall from her first year at Cornell. Now a senior, she is a manager at Alice Cook dining hall on West campus.
Our group prepared five questions each beforehand, seeking to better formulate questions for the oral history. Looking specifically at the way in which those who are often passed by without notice live and append their daily lives, we asked the following questions: 1) what is your daily life like?; 2) how is the community in the dining hall?; 3) what have been your favorite things about the dining hall, food or otherwise?; 4) how do you feel about the way Cornell manages food?; 5) what have you liked about working at the dining hall and what has been valuable to you?; and 6) did your semester abroad change your outlook on food in America, or, on a smaller scale, Cornell dining? We felt that these questions covered a good part of Sophie’s life and work, especially in terms of thinking about the spaces in which grievance could be voiced. Additionally, in the inclusion of the question about her study abroad experience, we thought it encompassed, well, her humanity in that she herself has a culture that she appreciates and seeks to understand.
Kaitlyn sat down with Sophie for the interview. Meeting in person in a pandemic is its own sort of privilege, which we acknowledge and are thankful to have. The interview lasted about thirty minutes, and at that time Sophie ironically then had to go to work at the dining hall that day. Following the interview, we made sure to ask for her consent to use her voice recording and photograph in the post. Obtaining consent is another crucial part of oral histories and critical fabulation. An archive is not helpful or respectful of the people it seeks to highlight unless those people have allowed for their stories to be recorded, especially since there is so much vulnerability involved. After receiving consent, we were able to add a photo and some audio of Sophie into the post.
Regarding the design of the post, Kaitlyn was given free rein. She started off with an orange background for a more warm color and included yellows and whites in addition for the main colors. Some neon color foods were added to fill the space. Luckily, the color of the audio happened to match the colors chosen for the posts already, so that was put in last.
The process of choosing a recipe for the cookbook chapter involved a long and sustained discussion, in which we decided on the themes and ideas we wanted to evoke surrounding the topic of Afro-Asia and food as a vehicle for preserving heritage and transcending temporal and spatial distance. We considered a few different ideas based on our family photos, such as Kaitlyn’s idea of a curried rice dish with mango as a topping and Amrita’s idea of a vegetable and tofu curry with dried hibiscus. Ultimately, it was the oral history with Sophie Matsumoto that gave us our primary source of inspiration, after Sophie described spaghetti nights at the dining halls being her favorite times she spent working there. It struck us then that spaghetti and other noodle dishes were, in essence, communal dishes–given to being prepared in larger portions and easily shared amongst a group of people. These ideas of building community and a shared dining experience that emphasizes warmth and developing bonds with others thus became central to our goals for the cookbook chapter. With this in mind, we set out to create a version of spaghetti and meatballs that would be enjoyable to prepare and eat and have significant Afro-Asian connections.
After some brainstorming regarding how exactly we wanted to reimagine our rendition of this classic dish, we decided to use ingredients that paid homage to Sophie’s story as well as our own family traditions. Since Sophie feels very tied to her Japanese heritage, we decided that udon would be a good choice for the noodles in the dish to honor that connection, especially since they are also incredibly versatile and readily available in many places throughout North America. We decided to incorporate the tofu and mango from our earlier ideas into the new recipes because of their significance in both East and South Asian as well as Caribbean culinary traditions. The Book of Salt by Monique Truong and The Pagoda by Patricia Powell were also especially influential to our conception of the recipe, as the inventive and collaborative aspects of food preparation in both novels were important to how we imagined our dish.
With regards to the design of the recipe introduction post, we went with a light pastel green as the main color scheme, with yellow accents and leafy greens as a background element. The pastel was a callback to one of the decorative elements used in the oral history post so as to create a sense of continuity, the yellow evoked the color of the mango in the dish, and the greens were both a reference to the herbs used in preparing the dish and the theme of natural life and growth we wanted to maintain throughout our chapter.
Since we were creating a chapter of a cookbook, it was important to us that the recipe itself be accessible and centered in our work. The process of actually developing a usable recipe proved to be both more difficult and enjoyable than expected. After doing a great deal of research into recipes for udon, tofu “meatballs,” and savory mango curries and dishes that were already in circulation, Amrita worked on conceptualizing a recipe that would be easy to follow and suited for improvisation. Details such as portion sizes and ingredients that would work well with the primary flavors of the dish were cemented through studying similar recipes and a great deal of practical trial and error. Moreover, Jane was able to rely on her own experience of preparing tofu to devise a recipe for the tofu bites, our vegetarian meat replacements, that made use of popular ingredients such as panko and would be understandable even by beginner cooks.
It was important to us that people feel welcomed rather than daunted by this recipe, that they would want to attempt it for fun and even think about putting their own spin on the preparation. Keeping that in mind, we put the emphasis on simplicity and accessibility with the design of the recipe post: clearly laying out the ingredients and steps for both parts of the recipe and using a large font that would be readable on mobile devices. For the background, Amrita decided on a soft and grainy pink cloth theme that continued the floral, nature-related color motif and reminded her of both textile traditions across South Asia and the binding on older hardcover books, making it seem as though there was a tangible physicality to the recipe even in its online form.
As discussed in the post, mangoes find their origins in India, where they historically have cultural significance and ties to folklore. Mangoes have since spread across the globe, and developed many different varieties and cultivars. This spread and adaptation has contributed to their accessibility–today we can find varieties of mango even in the wintertime. It is this idea that connects mangoes to its place in the recipe and to themes from this semester. Our group name Fleurs dans l’Hiver translates to “Flowers in Winter,” evocative of finding beauty in grey times, sweetness in unexpected places; similarly, mangoes serve to add freshness and color in an otherwise savory noodle and tofu dish.
In relation to our texts, this concept ties into Saidiya Hartman’s motivation for developing her term “critical fabulation” – to augment the singular stories we find in the archive and gesture to the complexity that these people’s lives surely held, to create a space to amend the way too many people are preserved in history (if at all) in only a violent, tragic line. Monique Truong wrote The Book of Salt in the spirit of this position, centering the story on Binh, the cook in the shadows of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas’ biographies; in doing so, Truong provides Binh with the space to be more than a silenced laborer. In a nod to this notion, we added mangoes to our dish to offer an additional flavor and texture, creating a more complex and interesting meal. The orange and green tones utilized in the post’s design were meant to evoke a kind of warmth and life, indicative of the way that mangoes themselves are a vibrant yellow, sometimes with orange and green highlights noting its stage of ripeness. The fruit offers us a juicy sweetness and deep color, even in the winter.
The inclusion of tofu in our group recipe stems back to both Jane’s midterm menu (in Vietnamese spring rolls) and a larger trend of using tofu as a meat substitute. To round out our fruit-garnished noodle dish, we included crispy tofu for protein bites and contrasting textures. Tofu is versatile and easy to include in any dish, whether it’s simply cubed and added, salted or marinated before hand, or battered and fried as in our recipe. Our Instagram tofu genealogy aimed to cover three topics; the history, tofu in various cultures, and the cultural impact of tofu in crafting cuisine. Since tofu originated in either Mongolia or China, Jane used a papery theme with cut-outs of traditional art depictions of tofu, underlining its timeless character.
In our recipe, tofu gestures to the Asian narratives we’ve read throughout the semester. Whether it’s Binh or Mr. Lowe, two characters decontextualized by identity through forces of labor, gender and migration, either one provides allegory for the role of tofu in our recipe. Tofu seems fitting, paired with udon, yet juxtaposed with mango. Moreover, the ancient origins of tofu reference impositions of cultural baggage and unshakeable ties to an unreachable homeland upon phenomenologically Asian individuals. Tofu’s ubiquity in modern global diets perhaps masks the potential awkwardness of including these processed-soy blocks into quotidian cultural meals.
In practicing critical fabulation through food, talking with Sophie and highlighting the unnoticed narratives of Cornell’s campus food system, we discovered a strength in food. Compiling a group recipe, intended at a scale for communal dining, required a balance of collective tastes throughout the process. Inventing a recipe brought another dimension to the idea of critical fabulation that already links disparate time flows and memories, ultimately connecting the individual story of Sophie to our own personal food experiences, the timelines of each ingredient, the present preparation of the meal, and the future anticipation of having another card in the recipe box.
Works Cited
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