Cookbook Survivor: Hawa Hassan and Julie Turshen, In Bibi's Kitchen
(With an Update on My Indecision)
First off, in case you were hanging in suspense, I’ve decided I really can’t sign the letter discussed earlier this week. I think the essay in question should be strongly criticized, but a retraction is a different kind of thing that has to be reserved for a different sort of case.
Anyway, perhaps occasioned by thinking through this whole issue, today I’m going to work with a book I bought a couple of months ago called In Bibi’s Kitchen. It’s built around interviews with a series of East African women that are connected to recipes for one of their favorite things to cook.
I’m definitely in the “I would rather recipes without so many stories” camp for the most part (honestly, most cookbook authors are just not very interesting; I really don’t need to read a series of rapturous tales about the author’s wonderful year in Provence, etc.) but I like the format of this book quite a bit. The interviews are short but they’re very interesting and vivid, combined with some terrific photography and a number of great recipes. It’s a very different model for cookbooks that aim to showcase the typical cuisine of a particular region of the world (contrast to Yucatan, which I wrote about recently)—it’s not a master chef travelling to that place, learning from local people, shopping in local markets and then effectively rebranding the new dishes as his or her own. The book keeps the food connected to the lives of the people who make it.
I think the discourse about “appropriation” can sometimes be appropriative itself in a way—not only does it formalize “cultures” (and to some extent misrepresent their development over time by making them static and bounded), but it also inserts post-facto conceptions of property relations where the “owners” of culture might not want them, on their behalf. But that talk is a very positive thing when it produces a shift like the one this book seeks to embody: to ask permission and give credit, to distinguish between the transformational work of a later maker of culture and the originary work that inspired it, and to be transparent with people who are showing or teaching culture about who’s going to make money from what they’re teaching and how that money’s going to be made.
I have some whole chickens, so what I’ve decided to do is spend part of the day breaking down those chickens for two meals. Today, from the cookbook, I’m going to make a yogurt-based chicken stew served with rice and banana, for which I’ll need the deboned thighs from the chickens. Tomorrow I’ll use the breasts for buttermilk-dredge sandwiches (aka my imitation Popeye’s) and fry up the chicken wings while also making end-of-the-week chicken stock.
I’d eat either of those!