Recipes for change

Cookbooks are usually filled with well-researched recipes that are tested with scientific rigor and accuracy, then tailored for the home cook. Recipes are meant to introduce new ingredients, sometimes exacting methodologies and yet, more and more, the cookbooks I have recently purchased or reviewed for my work have put themes like heritage, migration, identity, reclamation, and history at the forefront of publications.

Cookbooks, from my observation, have increasingly leaned on personal stories, bicultural experiences and nostalgia for home countries or the homelands of first and second generations, especially here in the US. Barbara Fairchild, former editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit magazine, recently spoke to this shift in the last 50 years to an audience at the Culinary Historians of Southern California.

KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL

Here’s how I arrived at my cookbook habit. I grew up in the Global South, the Caribbean, in the 1990s – before access to the World Wide Web and the plethora of information that now exists. My island has a long history of African, Asian and European influence in food, passed on in less than linear ways – from different special classes and traditions. Oral history shaped how I learned to cook. There were rarely written recipes. Instead, everything was passed down orally.

Measuring was done with your palm, your eyes, and your intuition. You relied on your gut and your senses, as the kitchens I accessed were far less equipped with tools and electronic gadgets. You learned by watching first, then by doing. You were taught why things were done a certain way and were sternly warned about the importance of following specific procedures. You sometimes learned where a recipe came from and its cultural significance, all through stories and demonstrations. For me, before any culinary training and international travel, the flavors I learned then were my mother tongue.

In my 9th-grade Food & Nutrition class,I encountered my first typewritten recipes. They were photocopies from a notable cookbook. I made a mental note of the author and the book’s title. A few years later, in 2000 to be exact, after my first paycheck, I bought my own copy of The Real Taste of Jamaica by Enid Donaldson (originally published in 1996) for my mom as a Christmas gift. She still has it today.

That’s when I fell in love with cookbooks, especially the headnotes – the few lines of engaging text that offered context to a recipe, much like the stories shared by the matriarchs I had grown up learning from. Cookbooks became a road map to introduce me to the stories of other home cooks, chefs and foodways. Since then, I’ve amassed a vast cookbook collection.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

During this last decade as a by product of working in the culinary world, I peeked into yet another world, that of wine, initially as an outsider with feelings of being an imposter, and later on, after a few liquor store wine tastings and a girls’ trip to the Napa Valley, I adopted the language I heard in the wine world. I made references to notes of oak and stone fruit, and dryness, trying desperately to find my place in a tradition that I barely understood, in a space in which I had way less language and experience to truly appreciate. I often ponder if wine could be paired with goat meat?

I enjoy wine, like many in the culinary field, yet my understanding of wine would be considered basic and bordering non-existent. At least until I sought out knowledge and connected with colleagues such as Alice Achayo, of The Wine Linguist. Through her work expanding the language of wine, Alice helped me with initial (re)accessing my first food language, the one I developed many years ago on that Caribbean island, the palate I refined as the observer in the kitchen, but now in the context of wine.

For the first time, I understood my own preferred flavor profiles, and confidently proclaimed my favorite stone fruit as mango, not peach. My wish is that the language of wine, much like the evolution of food literature in the last two decades, can move beyond technical jargon and varieties, tapping into culture, heritage, and identity to enrich its narrative – offering a space for my bicultural, immigrant experience, and welcoming more culinarians and home cooks into wine. These lessons from food literature can serve as a blueprint for the wine world to expand, making room for more inclusive stories of flavor and tradition.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

The evolving focus of food literature and cookbooks offers a promising model for wine education and communication. I offer some insight from two notable cookbooks, both published in 2024, whose authors I had the honor of meeting on respective legs of their cookbook tours in Boston, Massachusetts.

My first example of a body of work that leans heavily into identity and personal reflection, forging emotional ties through memoir is Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds, a remarkable culinary and literary presentation. The book opens with a poignant quote from Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow, anchoring the narrative in themes of grief and love. This sets the stage for a celebration of vegetables that is as much about their culinary diversity as it is a deeply personal tribute to McKinnon’s late father, Wai Keung Lai. Her father, who worked in Sydney’s wholesale fruit and vegetable markets for decades, profoundly influenced McKinnon’s appreciation for fresh produce and the stories they carry.