A collection of cookbooks
This past Christmas, L got me a copy of Zaynab Issa’s recent cookbook, Third Culture Cooking.
The book means a lot to me because it showcases Zaynab’s recipes, which closely mirror many of the dishes my grandmother used to make when she was alive. Zaynab, growing up in an East African-Indian family like mine, was the first person I encountered in the culinary world who ate the food I did growing up, prepared in many of the same ways my family would make a meal.
Third Culture Cooking has many more recipes than just the ones from my traditional culture — L particularly enjoys the “Carthage must be destroyed” recipe for breakfast — but looking at the cookbook, having it on my bookshelf, reminds me that my family traditions are worth saving and chronicling; the cookbook is more than just a collection of instructions on how to make dishes, but instead a marker of self.
Or as Joshua Raff put it some years ago:
If the author brings personal elements into the book in an elegant and entertaining way, the book can become memoir through food.
For years, there was a store near the Toronto Reference Library called The Cookbook Store. It was, as expected, filled with culinary literature: cookbooks, travel and food writing, industry magazines, and the occasional food-themed greeting card or two. I used to spend an inordinate amount of time perusing its shelves and getting lost in the words and photographs on the pages.
Back then, most cookbooks weren’t the highly-produced, immaculately-presented pieces of art that they are now, but they still all told a story of the love of food, and said so much about the authors and their experiences, all through what they chose to put on the page and how they chose to present it. I was sad when The Cookbook Store closed; online recipes seems to have been the obvious reason for its demise, but the real reason was most likely rent (in that neighborhood, especially) that was too high for any independent bookstore to afford.
The good news is that the arrival of the recipe website did not kill the cookbook, but instead rejuvenated the medium. Cookbooks became more than just collections of recipes, but instead works of art, things you would be proud to put on your coffee table. The book is a signifier of taste, and tells visitors what kinds of experiences mean something to you, and what sorts of things you savor.
In a recent essay about the longevity of the cookbook as a format, Shaan Merchant not only outlines the re-emergence of the format, but also reminds us that the cookbook is also more than just a signifier of taste, but an opportunity to escape into different terrains of experience:
They aren't purely decorative signifiers of taste and identity. They are worlds I want to step into, symbols of participation in the multidimensional ways our food stories play out today.
We love giving cookbooks as gifts — we carefully select the books that we think would appeal most to the receiver, and maybe challenge them a little too — and I especially love receiving them as gifts too. We have a whole bookshelf in the living room dedicated to cookbooks, and our collection keeps growing. Some of them are dog-eared and stained from constant use; some of them are more pristine because they are more vessels for stories and memories than they are recipe-providers.
Each one says a little bit about who we are; each one is a little escape from the ordinary. The books will continue accumulate marginalia and stains, and we’ll continue cooking for loved ones, creating stories of our own.
Two poems
from A History of the Theories of Rain
Stephen Collis
How pleasant
to say
small rain
rather than drizzle
—
Haiku
Richard Wright
I give permission
For this slow spring rain to soak
The violet beds.
Some links
Mandy Brown just wrote another insightful and incisive post, this time about workslop and the way we are starting to mediate our human interaction through machines. It’s a powerful piece:
Only by talking to each other can we enter that genuinely creative and generative space--not in the machine sense of sloppily recapitulating what's come before, but in the profoundly human sense of sparking something new into existence--a space that only ever occurs in the encounters between people, in relationship to other humans and the more-than-human world. Only by talking to other people can we recall that we are humans, with human needs, one of which is not to be programmed like machines
When my phone does its little mating calls of pings and buzzes, it could be bringing me updates from people I love, or showing me alerts I never asked for from corporations hungry for my attention. When I pull it out, content and communication appear in similar forms—notifications, social-media posts, vertical video—and they blur together. As interactions with loved ones converge with all the other kinds of media on smartphones, Samuel Hardman Taylor, a professor who studies social media at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me, “our relationships are becoming a part of that consumption behavior.” When the phone becomes more of an entertainment hub, using it for social interaction can feel more optional. And picking my loved ones out of the never-ending stream of stuff on my phone requires extra effort.
You might not care about the new MacBook Neo, and you might not care to read about technology product reviews, but you should still read Sam Henri Gold’s review of the Neo because it is less about a product and more about the hope and excitement that comes from being to explore and tinker and learn.
We live in an extractive world, and it’s actively harming us, but we can take actions to strike back: “everything in our world is driven by the impulse to extract power and wealth from one set of people or resources and move it further up the chain.”
“The act of doing laundry is predicated on the idea of washing away past grimes and past mistakes.” Apparently, there’s a guy on Reddit that is famous for teaching people how to really do laundry. I never thought doing laundry had such nuance; might have to go digging in his archives to learn a bit.
Love this short video of Ryan Coogler talk about making movies like baking a croissant: building in layers that can be teased apart, but all add up to a delicious whole.
“For astronaut Jeremy Hansen's participation in the historic Artemis II mission to the Moon, his mission patch was graciously created by Anishinaabe artist Henry Guimond”, and it is gorgeous.
It’s no secret that I’m obsessed with The Pitt, so I really loved this piece featuring the actors playing the patients from the tv show, rather than just the doctors and nurses that get most of the attention.
One thing that has come up on The Pitt a lot this season is the burden of charting and how doctors often put in many unpaid hours to do administrative work. It reminded me of this short piece articulating the problem: the paperwork burden weighing on Canadian physicians.
An overview of chopsticks gaffes that are best avoided when eating in Japan. I have made so many of these.
“It’s time to kill the hero — on Cesar Chavez, René Redzepi, and all the men we make excuses for in the name of the greater good.”
Love this exploration of Michael B. Jordan’s talent, slowly discovered, by Wesley Morris, written just before Jordan won the Oscar.
Reuters' former Ottawa bureau chief was laid off and moved back to the US and now drives an Uber to make ends meet. He wrote a sobering and heartbreaking essay about how he, like so many others, are just trying to get through the day.
I’m not a computer programmer (I stopped coding after learning basic JavaScript all those years ago) but as someone who has worked with coders all his career (and whose father spent his life writing code for a large bank), I know that AI coding tools are really changing the industry and that this is a really big shift for developers. This piece by Clive Thompson captures some of that shift, and its repercussions, quite saliently.
