Cooking

"In 1983, the artist Daniel Spoerri created "Lunch on the Grass", a work designed to be excavated decades later. between archeology and contemporary art ...

En 1983, le plasticien Daniel Spoerri crée "Le déjeuner sous l'herbe", une oeuvre conçue pour être fouillée quelques décennies plus tard entre archéologie et art contemporain..."

There is currently a renewed government focus on teaching cookery in schools. There are also barriers which hinder the success of government objectives. Pu- pils often do not transfer the skills they learn from school to home. Key Stage 2 cooking projects rarely include enough cooking time for skills to be acquired to a useful level. Modernist cookery pioneered by chefs like Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adrià has had a major impact on the restaurant industry. The creations of these chefs amaze and delight their customers, yet their techniques have not often been used to amaze and delight pupils who are learning cookery. No previous instances in which modernist cookery was taught in primary schools have been found. An action research project with Key Stage 2 pupils was created and implemented to explore the potential of using modernist cooking techniques to create interest in cooking, to teach basic cooking skills and to inspire cooking at home. The project was highly effective in creating interest, effective in teaching skills and showed some promise in facilitating a transfer of skills from school to home. This was a small project and the concept would benefit from further study in concert with critical exploration of cookery teaching at Key Stage 2.

Around the year of Canada’s centennial (1967), Canadian cookbooks actively participated in the project of defining a national identity. Proposing recipes representing a wide variety of cultural groups, and often even presenting an explicit discourse about Canadian diversity, these cookbooks included, amongst others, ‘Indian’ (Aboriginal) foods. In this paper, I propose to examine three different types of culinary publications used to construct Canada in the kitchen: government-sponsored cookbooks, community cookbooks, and company cookbooks. As these arguably each carry a distinct agenda – presenting an official version of Canada’s nation-building history, local self-representation, and offering what Canadians presumably wanted to read – the manifestation of a consistent discourse and recurring themes throughout these books is particularly significant. It suggest that despite the existence of competing narratives about Aboriginal people and the lands known as Canada, the single story told in cookbooks had won hegemonic standing. This story emphasizes the (past) role of ‘Indians’  in teaching re-settlers about edible flora and fauna, focusses on the abundant ‘gifts’ of nature, and claims select native North American foods as ‘traditional.’

I argue that the ubiquitous noble imaginary ‘Indian’ acts as a mythologized intermediary between the land and white Canadians who desired a special connection with an environment they did not fully understand or control, without necessitating a direct interaction with real Aboriginal people. The very idea of ‘wild’ foods suggests that these originate from an unfamiliar land free from human intervention (akin to Locke’s ‘common state of nature’), where the fruits of the land are simply there for the taking, thereby denying Aboriginal ecological agency. An analysis of the Euro-Canadian concept of ‘the wild’ emphasizes the limitations of the binaries farming/gathering, and husbandry/hunting. Furthermore, the inclusion of ‘wild’ and ‘Indian’ foods in cookery books places the kitchen at the nexus of modernity and tradition, where the Canada of daily experience meets an imaginary, ‘authentic’ Canada. Interestingly, Canadian cookbooks offer cooking tips to ‘dress-up’ ‘wild’ foods in order to make them palatable to the modern white family, thereby appropriating Canada’s land, and mentally colonizing its ecosystems.

This paper consists of a section of my Master’s Major Research Essay in Public History, which I am currently completing under the supervision of Prof. James Opp at Carleton University. My MRE aims to present how 1960s cookbooks act as a form of public history, disseminating national mythologies and values which form the basis for the construction of a desired modern national unity.