(Under construction)
The recipes you will be seeing on these sites connect (some very directly, some less clearly so) with an old attempt
to get a camp going for an alleged interactive art event which need not be named here. The alleged event was to take
place in the middle of a desert whose inhospitibility was rather more than an allegation, forcing some adaptations in
cooking technique. Water would be in short supply and so would be packing space as well, so the process of thickening
sauces by reduction, so beloved by so many of us while at home, did not seem so desirable in the context of the
upcoming event which, for a variety of reasons, never came, but this was a difficulty to be embraced, not mourned,
because it gave our creativity a source of motivation, and thus a little needed focus. But where to begin? Looking
at the culture of Chicago, and that of a number of my neighbors, I soon found one possible answer.
The starting point for our innovation - if there ever were a "we", was to be in a variety of traditional African
cuisines, primarily those of the relatively dry Eastern side of the continent, a blending of Ethiopian, Zimbabwean,
Kenyan, Botswanan and maybe some South African cooking, but relatively few other Western influences. How, then, as
people who grew up in what is usually thought of as being a supposedly Western country
(the United States) were we to innovate at all? In part, by looking at the nonwestern sources the cuisines we were
studying had borrowed from themselves: chiles, squash and tomatoes reaching Africa, where they were enthusiastically
embraced, from the native American civilizations, and curry from India being two very well known contributions
from outside, immediately suggesting two areas of exploration.
The Africans, like many in the Old World, had done a lot with a few new world items that they had borrowed, but
as was usually the case, only a relatively few items had made the passage. One could find the Habanero chile in
use, and something called a "bird chile", but few others, out of the wide assortment that Latin America offers.
One might try working some of those into a dish. Curry powder, something that the Indians themselves view as
being a Western abomination, has seen good and creative use in both Eastern Africa and the Middle East; how
interesting it might be to study how the Indians themselves will make curries, and apply what one has learned
to the making of an East African curry. In these ways, one could build on traditional cooking without leaving
one's subject matter so far behind that one could no longer recognize the tradition in the midst of all of the
innovation, doing violence to that which we would supposedly be honoring. Tradition, to be tradition, must maintain
its connection to the past.
Time to return to your ring. If you don't see the navbar for it below, you need to go to
the global webring return page for my sites.
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