By Sakura Eguchi, Andrew Gordon, Vivian Jiang, and Leadora Kyin
During the development of our cookbook chapter, “Turning a New Leaf: An Exploration of Food and Recipes Through Migration and Transport,” what drove our conversation was the merging of cultures, particularly amongst Africa and Asia. This semester, we were challenged to question if any cultural representation can genuinely be “authentic.” While authenticity contends, our group collectively recognized that the strong attachments people feel to their culture is valid. Foods are an essential way to stay connected to one’s culture. Our group proposed the use of banana leaves as food wrapping to preserve the cultural significance that lies within the inner filling. However, does this “authenticity” remain if the fillings are changed to foreign ingredients? What about if these cultures are brought to new lands during immigration––are they fused or distinct? These are all questions that we chose to explore.
During the current global pandemic, home-cooked meals seem to have an elevated sense of purpose. The term “comfort food” has been given several definitions over time, but the 1997 Merriam-Webster dictionary’s description as “food prepared in a traditional style having a usually nostalgic or sentimental appeal” (“Comfort Foods”) has particular significance to our project. We wanted to explore how traditional meals are valued by people, especially immigrants in a new nation. In The Book of Salt, Binh moves from Vietnam to become a chef, eventually working for two American women in Paris, France. Feeling displaced and isolated, Binh often dwells on memories of his mother, who taught him how to cook. Intimate experiences with loved ones and caregivers often take place in the kitchen during food preparation and consumption. Culturally ethnic dishes also invoke feelings of homesickness (Locher et al. 2006). This relationship between “food” and “home” is what inspired the naming of our group, Homebodies.
During our preparation, we questioned where oral histories are placed in foodways. This brought us to the realization that there are different methodologies in the way that people share recipes with each other. While we instinctively think of family recipes in a cookbook, this is not true for everyone. In fact, many families share their kitchen secrets by word of mouth. Preparing food in this manner requires more sensorial ques that cannot be encapsulated in written recipes; this method requires direct communication between teacher and learner (Claxton 2019).
Upon finding this research, we realized the implications that oral recipe sharing had with critical fabulation, the concept developed by Saiyida Hartman. In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman describes critical fabulation as “laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible . . . to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration” (Hartman 11). This term can alternatively be described as a way to tell the life stories of those who have no written records–it is a form of archiving. Our team realized that oral recipe sharing can also be viewed as archiving the lives of our ancestors. The traditional meals we prepare use ingredients and techniques that are representative of geography. Critical fabulation in the context of oral recipes helps us imagine what life might have been like for our ancestors who pioneered these dishes, while simultaneously bringing us closer to the relatives we have in this lifetime.
The archiving is an act of cementing the past, yet throughout our course, cementation rarely means completion. Preservation does not guarantee complete coverage or thorough incorporation. There are gaps in the discourse and missing voices. Thus, it is paramount to continue to interact and engage with the archive rather than let it collect dust. Engagement with the archive can go so far into critical fabulation, where the archive and subsequently, its disparities become a catalyst for dynamic reimagination, an exciting launchpad. Conversations with the archive in effect, generate possibilities for reinvention. If there are stories untold from the past, what is stopping us from reformulating new ones, not to replace but to recognize?
When it came down to crafting our recipe, we had to contemplate the fabricated binary of traditional versus modern, convention versus reconstruction. There is a tendency for narrowing one’s aperture to focus on what is “authentic.” It is easy to find oneself in a constant tug-of-war between doing a dish “justice.” Displacement relies on the often painful contemplation of the original “placement” once was. Like Binh from The Book Of Salt and Lowe from The Pagoda, the past and its settings can haunt a person regardless of their associations with these memories and places. How much can one “owe” to their origins without inhibiting their outward growth? Being in transit does not need to be exhaustive and instead, can prove to be inventive. With the nature of our recipe, we aimed to challenge the idea of looking in strictly one direction, and instead, embrace the temporal duality of acknowledging the past in a retrospective manner, and engaging with the imagined futures full of plurality. This took in the construction of our reimagined lamprais recipe.
Our chosen recipe, lamprais, traditionally consists of ghee rice surrounded by a variety of specific side dishes, all wrapped and baked in banana leaves. When one opens a lamprais up, the warm, spicy, and hearty aroma enters the nose, enticing the tastebuds. In the center is the ghee rice, which is made using short-grain rice cooked in stock, onions, cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, and, of course, ghee, which is clarified butter. Along the sides of any lamprais are a meat curry (lamprais curry), blachan (shrimp paste), wambatu moju (eggplant pickle), and seeni sambol (onion chutney). In some variations of lamprais, one may find frikadelle (Danish flat meatballs), fried fish cutlets, eggplant, and ash plantain curry, or twice-cooked eggs alongside their rice and curry. The lamprais curry typically consists of three types of meat–beef, pork, and lamb–but sometimes is made of chicken to suit a wider audience. The flavor profile of lamprais is complex, as it has the rich ghee rice, spiciness from the curry, and sweet, sour, and salty from the accompaniments. To top it all off, or, rather, to wrap it all up, the banana leaves provide everything inside the parcel with an earthy aroma and flavor. To assemble the lamprais, one cup of rice is placed in the middle of a banana leaf along with a small amount of the curry, and a teaspoon of each of the accompaniments. Then, the banana leaf is folded over and held together by bamboo skewers or by aluminum foil. The lamprais is placed into the oven for about twenty minutes to release the aroma from the banana leaf and to allow all of the flavors to familiarize themselves with one another in the warmth from the oven.
Confronted with a recipe with a colonial past, we began our project with the lamprais in its original form. A Sri Lankan dish imbued with Dutch colonial influences cooked in a banana leaf, the lamprais already possessed threads that were on par with the conversations from our course. We pondered on how to reimagine a story that had already been shaped by a colonial narrative. Despite its colonial context, the original dish celebrates its own Southeast Asian components with ingredient ecologies that permeated past definitive borders. By maintaining the structural qualities of the original lamprais recipe, we wanted to pursue an outward-looking, forward-facing framework while tying our dish to the theme of the course, Afro-Asia, by exchanging the lamprais’ components for dishes of African and Asian origin.
Specifically, Ghanian kelewele and Jamaican saltfish fritters were substituted for plantain curry and frikkadels (meatballs)/fish cutlets, respectively. Replacing the three-meat curry with Sri Lankan jackfruit curry also accommodates an even wider audience than the original version of lamprais curry. Jackfruit has been used as a meat substitute for centuries in Asia, as it has a neutral flavor and can be shredded or cut into small pieces that can easily replace chicken or pork in dishes. Since the lamprais curry consists of small pieces of meat, jackfruit makes a suitable substitution. Some lamprais has a plantain curry in addition to the meat curry, so we thought of adding kelewele, Ghanian spicy fried plantains, to be a part of the dish. Though kelewele is not curry, it has the fried element of the fish cutlets that can also be found alongside the ghee rice in lamprais. Our reimagined fish cutlets are Jamaican saltfish fritters. Fritters are an essential part of African cuisine, specifically street food cuisine, and we read and wrote about the significance of saltfish in The Pagoda as well as in Albert Chong’s photography. Our reimagination applies elements and uses foods from African cuisine while trying to keep the original lamprais taste and appearance.
Retaining the use of the banana leaves in this dish not only has practical advantages for transit and movement, but also connects to the themes of migration and preservation of culture that were explored throughout the semester. The banana leaves’ function of physically encapsulating the lamprais’ ingredients can perhaps symbolize the Sinhalese people’s attempts to maintain and preserve their culture during the Dutch colonization of Sri Lanka. In contrast, the banana leaves can simultaneously demonstrate how European influences are conserved in Sri Lankan culture and cuisine, as a result of the Dutch East India Company’s involvement in the spice trade and subsequent European colonization of Sri Lanka (Balachander).
In connection to the texts we’ve read this semester, the theme of immigration and cultural preservation is exemplified in And China Has Hands. In his novel, H.T. Tsiang illuminates Chinese immigrants’ tribulations of assimilating in American society through the story of Wong Wan-Lee, a laundry business owner who was born in Canton, China and immigrated to the U.S. Throughout the novel, Wong-Wan Lee is consistently perceived as inferior and subjected to racism by the American characters. As a result, he seeks to maintain his connection to his homeland, China, in order to ease his feelings of isolation. For example, Wong Wan-Lee purchases Chinese sweets such as “almond cakes, rice cakes, peanut candy, Lee Chee nuts, preserved mixed fruits, golden limes and ginger syrup” when settling into his laundry business (Tsiang 46). Wong Wan-Lee’s specific selection of Chinese snacks serves as a representation of the collective immigration experience, in which immigrants consume foods from their cultures to not only alleviate their homesickness, but also to preserve their culture when moving to a foreign environment (Le).
Our chapter, “Turning a New Leaf,” seeks to analyze the past to understand the present. We explored how food consumption and preparation helps us connect to ancestors and culture because engaging with our archives prevents them from being lost. We challenged authenticity in our reimagination of the Sri Lankan lamprais by incorporating components from the African and the Asian diasporas while remaining true to the origins of the dish. We acknowledge how food builds communities and brings solace to those who feel displaced, particularly those classified as immigrants to new lands. The themes we discussed in this project are vantage points that can be used to dive deeper into authenticity, archiving, and critical fabulation.
Works Cited
Balachander, V. (2018, June 01). History Baked in Banana Leaf. Retrieved from
https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2014/history-baked-in-banana-leaf/
Claxton, Alana, “Cooking Lessons: Oral Recipe Sharing in the Southern Kitchen” (2019). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 3550. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3550
Hartman, Saidiya. Venus in Two Acts, vol. 26, no. 2, June 2008, pp. 1–14.
“The Importance of Food in Preserving Cultural Identity.” All About Cuisines, All About Cuisines., 13 Dec. 2013, www.allaboutcuisines.com/importance-food-preserving-cultural-identity.
Le, Chau. (2017, January 7). What Food Tells Us About Culture. Retrieved from
https://freelymagazine.com/2017/01/07/what-food-tells-us-about-culture/
Locher, Julie L, et al. “Comfort Foods: An Exploratory Journey Into The Social and Emotional Significance of Food.” Food and Foodways, vol. 13, no. 4, 21 Aug. 2006, pp. 273–297., doi:https://doi-org.proxy.library.cornell.edu/10.1080/07409710500334509.
Solomon, Kisha. “Food as Culture – Why Cooking Is Important to Preserving Identity.” Medium, Medium, 11 Aug. 2016, medium.com/@kishasolomon/food-as-culture-why-cooking-is-important-to-preserving-identity-f9e7a74d97be.
Truong, Monique. The Book of Salt. Mariner Books, 2013.
Tsiang, H.T. And China Has Hands. Kaya Press, 2016.