The Ritualism of Cooking; Trying to Cook from Online Recipes
Ritualism:
- the regular observance or practice of ritual, especially when excessive or without regard to its function.
- a traditional or fixed way of behaving."Christmas shopping is steeped in consumer ritualism"**Yes I used the google definition for this.
As of late, I've taken on two hobbies: reading and cooking. The latter often involves a series of searches, such as 'recipes involving tomatoes', 'uncommon vegetables to cook with recipes', or perhaps more specific ones like 'rosé sauce recipes.' Unfortunately, I'm still perfecting my rosé sauce, but we'll get there. Watching The Bear certainly has been inspiring me, amongst other romanticizations of culinary experiences.
However, a constant line of curiosity remains: what happened to "grandma's cookies" recipes?
Allow me to explain. As I grew up, my family stopped or didn't have recipes to pass down. I mean, goodness, my grandparents from the Netherlands were bakers for crying out loud! However, when they immigrated, they were also preteens. Yet, when I speak to my family, I'm unfamiliar with so much, which is what I should connect with. I feel a 'true sense of being Canadian' in the way that I've genuinely acclimated to losing my own sense of self in my heritage. The closest understanding of my familial roots in food is Ollie Bollen. This delectable fried dough is covered in sugar icing. Or, "Druppies," as my family called them, which to many are more-or-less drier black licorice. How terrible that I can't seem to stand them.
So, as a person with no understanding of the foods—or even an idea of what they are—I turn to the influences of other people around me, in awe of the newfound ritual and shocked by the loss of such ritualistic connections in my family and likely many others.
So, I turn to the term 'ritualism', one that I learned about during my undergraduate degree in relation to communication but that I find equally relevant in forms like cooking. What is cooking, if not a mode of communicating love, passion, or other emotions in a way that you can taste and connect to a memory?
I recently read a romance novel by Ashley Poston called The Seven-Year Slip. While unrelated for the most part, I enjoyed a quote from it where one of the characters states:
Universal truths in butter. Secrets folded into the dough. Poetry in the spices. Romance in a chocolate. Love in a lemon pie.
A simple line, a cliché of sorts, but one that I enjoyed regardless.
It's not just a cliché, though, really. When you break down the idea of ritualism, it connects to the material or activity. In cooking, you connect to a flavour or a food that has often been passed down for generations. Or when you go to a 'culinary experience' type restaurant, you are—in theory—connecting with what the chef wishes to decorate your palate. Although, sometimes, those can be expensive, which can take away from the experience.
So, basic observations, what's the point?
A recognition of the loss and a thought-provoking next step.
I want to explore other cultures (while doing my best to do the culinary experience justice) while simultaneously reconnecting with my own. I long for something I never had the chance to understand. My grandparents have all passed now. Fortunately, I can learn more from natural causes, but I cannot learn more from them now. But that doesn't mean it's impossible.
Next year, I will look into where my grandparents are from in the Netherlands and Germany, learn more about their background, including culinary, and pass down those notes in the future. In the meantime, however, I have to bear with the online recipes and the advertisements, which feel less personable but still teach me something about what wine works best with what dinner.
I hope to find a piece of myself and my history I long for and I hope I find what I didn't know existed. I'm sure there's more to it than that, I'm a bit more of an optimist with a lil realist anyhow.
TLDR; I like food and hope to know my family's history and their way with food.
Until next time,
M
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