cultural appropriation and decolonization
so, as you remember, i made this dish called 'senegal stew' last week. when i found the recipe, i was thinking...who made up this name? it seemed awfully suspicious. it seemed likea name someone would make up if they wanted to make a really 'exotic dish'. but i pushed all of that down, way down. i made the stew.
i took the soup with me to work, the next day. someone commented that it looked a lot like a jamaican dish. deep down inside me, something stirred a bit, started gurgling up.
then i read lintil's blog entry, about eating at simon's wok. she talked about cooking as decolonization, about cooking beyond the cookbook. that thing deep down, it started making its way up up up.
and then this weekend, lintil wanted to make a curried chick pea dish. and she was talking about a recipe she was using. and karob was talking about the ways she cooks the dish. all of a sudden, the brew gurgled its way all the way upupup to my heart and squeezed something out. all of a sudden, i thought about all of the things i was supposed to know how to cook as a brown pakistani muslim girl. i thought about all the cookbook-cooking i did, that wasn't really cooking.
i thought about standing beside my grandmother during summer vacation in high school, when she was desperately trying to teach me how to cook chapatti and i stubbornly refused, or only pretended to be learning, or only doing it with deep resentment.
i thought about what it means for me to cook the 'delicious indian vegetable curry' dish that i found somewhere on the internet, or in some cookbook with a kooky white lady on the cover who's surrounded by sparkly fabric and a little buddha statue. or what it means when i cook tandoori tofu for my mom, and she can barely keep it in her mouth.
i thought about it all, and it made me cry.
posted by been @ 4/09/2005 02:36:00 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
that was beautiful...you made me cry.
Mmmm...tandoori tofu sounds mouth-watering! Have you ever substituted tofu for paneer in saag? It's so good!
As women we are supposed to be the ones with the particular cultural expertise of cooking food, but if a man living in South Asia has only as much capacity to cook a variety of South Asian dishes as the average diasporic South Asian woman has the capacity to read and write in Urdu, Hindi AND Bengali, then what makes him more culturally authentic than her? I'd say they are even (if I even believed in cultural authenticity, or that those examples are markers of it). It's so funny how cultural authenticity gets trowelled into the very bricks and mortar of women's intergenerational relationships.
Once my sister-in-law asked me what I know how to cook, which confused and startled me. What does she mean? I can cook anything--just show me the recipe. I guess she assumes that dishes are--memorized? ...but to me that's such a ridiculous waste of time, sort of like all the high school biology we had to memorize. Maybe she assumes you practice cooking them until they're mastered..? which makes more sense, but then that feels like it comes from a place where there's only one right (traditional) way to cook each dish...It's like an alternative traditional cooking tradition of multilayered sensory overload in which each detail counts...but when you're immersed in so many conflicting currents, maybe for some people its easier to hang onto the basic principles and improvise the rest.
Thank you for a beautiful post.
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