EATING YOUR HISTORY: PASTA AND INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HISTORY

A Muse Bouche | Natalie Scola

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In 2003, UNESCO adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), in an effort to protect global intangible heritage. The ICH includes oral histories, performing arts, social practices, traditional knowledge and craftsmanship. However, the ICH does not include the production and consumption of food, which is a key part of heritage. Cultural groups worldwide have varied practices relating to food. It is a central tenet of identity for individuals, communities, and entire countries. The production and consumption of food is a practice that forms community bonds while maintaining cultural practices.

The Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity does include a variety of food practices. This list contains elements of intangible cultural heritage in order to "help demonstrate the diversity of cultural heritage and raise awareness about its importance". The examples of food practices on this list are fascinating and show the variety of cultural food practices found around the world: Washoku, Japan (2013); Qvevri Wine-making, Georgia (2013), Neapolitan Pizzaiuolo, Italy (2017); Airag, Mongolia (2019).

One food practice not found on the list is pasta making. My family is Italian, and I have been around pasta my whole life, from preserving tomato sauce in the summer to rolling gnocchi by hand with my nonna (grandmother). Pasta making is a varied and unique practice that changes throughout Italy and the diaspora. 

Homemade garganelli pasta. I discuss how I made this pasta at the end of this article. Photo courtesy of Natalie Scola

There are so many varieties and methods of making pasta that it is impossible to know or even name them all. Recipes change from house to house and village to village. The mechanization of pasta in the 19th and 20th centuries changed pasta production and mass immigration contributed to loss of knowledge. Some pasta types are only made in a handful of villages or by a few people. For example, in Sardinia, the rarest pasta in the world is made only by three women. The pasta, called su filindeu in Sardo or fili di Dio in Italian (Threads of God), has been made for over 300 years by women in the same family. The women make dough of semolina, wheat, water and salt and create extremely thin pasta strands. The strands are criss crossed over a circular wooden frame and dried before being cooked in a broth of mutton. It is a beautiful, complex dish but will it still exist in 50 years? With decreasing populations in smaller villages and an aging population, knowledge of how to make regional pastas and sauces are quickly dying out.

A few years ago, I was amazed to discover a YouTube channel dedicated to recording regional and often disappearing pasta dishes. Pasta Grannies is a fascinating channel that records Italian nonnas making pasta at home. The channel features pasta from all over Italy, including Sicily and Sardinia. It is addicting to watch these old women – some in their 90s! – make pasta by hand. So many unique varieties have been recorded on video: Su succu; bauletti; code de pecora; strozzapretti; curzul; ndunderi; trofie and so many more. These videos are a way of preserving a dying art and creating a digital record for years to come. I highly recommend you watch them!

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A Many-Stranded History

Pasta is of course the quintessential Italian dish. But for a food that looms large in the popular imagination, it’s origin is maddeningly difficult to trace. Popular culture gives us the tale of Marco Polo bringing pasta to Italy from his travels to China but that is most likely a myth – records of pasta predate his 13th century journey. Pasta as a form of boiled dough has existed since Roman times. The first written record of pasta, or a pasta-like dish, is found in the Jerusalem Talmud from the 5th century CE. The author mentions itrium, a dish of boiled dough. By the 9th century, this word is recorded as itriyya, referring to string-like dough made from semolina that was dried prior to cooking. Pasta likely made its way to Italy through the cross-cultural Mediterranean trade. The Arab conquest of Sicily introduced many dishes and flavours that are still seen in Sicilian dishes today; pasta may have been one of the foodstuffs introduced. From Sicily, it likely spread up the peninsula. The Arab geographer al-Idrisi makes mention of pasta production in Sicily, where large quantities of pasta were produced and exported to mainland Italy and throughout the Mediterranean. Other Italian cities had strong trade connections throughout the Mediterranean, so pasta may have entered different areas of Italy at separate times.

However pasta was introduced, by the 13th century it was an established food. Pasta was not referred to as pasta, but instead called vermicelli, meaning a long, thin noodle — a word we still use today. Vermicelli was produced on a large scale and dried for long-term storage and trade. It was a common ingredient in most households and was eaten in broth or as part of gruel. Some recipes called for vermicelli to be cooked in almond milk, sugar and saffron, which is very different from how we think of pasta today.

14th century illustration from the medical treatise Tacuinum sanitatis (written by the physician Ibn Butlan in the 11th century). Pasta was thought to have medicinal properties and be good for the chest and throat. This illustration shows two women making pasta. One is kneading the dough and the other is laying long strands to dry on a frame. Source.  

While pasta-like dishes existed elsewhere in Europe, Italy developed a particular approach to pasta. There were a huge variety of pasta dishes but contemporary cooks did not categorize them as “pasta” dishes in the modern understanding as a category of cuisine. Pasta referred to a dough-based preparation made of flour mixed with other ingredients to form a paste. This paste could take on different flavours and forms, including cakes, tarts and shaped dough that were boiled or cooked in moist heat. These dishes were an ancestor of modern pasta. Pastasciutta were dishes of pasta served with sauce and pasta in brodo referred to pasta cooked in broth. Fresh pasta was made in the kitchens of the rich while common folk used dried pasta, which was a traded commodity throughout the Middle Ages. Areas like Apulia, Naples and Sardinia were main producers of durum wheat, a key flour for pasta production, and they exported pasta across Italy, to Spain and other areas throughout the Mediterranean and Europe.

By the 14th and 15th century, pasta is seen as a category of dishes on its own. Pasta varieties expanded and some familiar shapes developed: lasagne, tagliatelle, gnocchi, tortelli, and ravioli. Tortelli, a stuffed pasta, was considered a bite-sized cake, hence the name “little cake”. This is also where we get the modern-day name tortellini, which is a round, stuffed pasta. Tortelli would have been square and pan fried or cooked in broth. Bartolomeo Scappi, chef to Pope Pius V, recorded a recipe for torelli stuffed with capon as well as cow udders. The filling was scented with sugar and spices, which were common additives in savory Medieval and Renaissance dishes. While a filling like this is very different from what we are familiar with today, the idea of shaped pastas existing as a discrete genre of food emerged.

Bartolomeo Scappi's recipes for tortelletti with capon. The first lines of the recipe reads: "In a mortar grind the flesh of two capon breasts that have first been boiled with a pound of boneless beef marrow, three ounces of chicken fat, and three ounces of boiled veal udder..." There is an excellent English translation of Scappi's cookbook by the historian Terence Scully. Recipe source. Translation source. 

The commercialization of pasta was greatly helped with improvements to a machine called a brake. Brakes were used to knead pasta dough which could be very stiff and heavy when produced in large quantities. Kneading the dough by hand – or by feet! – was time consuming and strenuous. The brake mechanized this process and made it quicker to produce pasta. Brakes were used as far back as the Middle Ages but became adapted for pasta use by the 16th century. The development of the brake coincided with the development of manual extrusion presses to produce different pasta shapes. Shaping pasta was another laborious, hands-on part of pasta making. Naples was an important producer of wheat and the hot weather was ideal for drying the finished product. Pasta manufacturing was a mixture of mechanical process and artisanal skill. The machines needed workers to turn them by hand and some pasta shapes could not be made through an extruder; handmade shapes were often produced by women.

An image showing a baker's brake 17th century baker's brake. From Giovanni Branca's Le Machine (1629). Source.  

Industrialization in the 19th century brought steam and increased mechanization to pasta manufacturing. Machines automated almost all steps of the process, from kneading the dough to extruding shapes to drying. While machines were faster and more efficient than human workers, the mechanization of the industry throughout the 19th and early 20th century eliminated the knowledge of workers who had been making pasta for generations. Pasta factories, while industrial, were not massive companies, and towns often had multiple pasta producers; this shows how important pasta production was for the Italian economy. But throughout the 20th century, large companies expanded their operations, putting smaller pasta producers out of business. International companies also impacted Italian pasta export, with North America producing much of its own pasta by the 1920s, greatly reducing the need for Italian pasta exports.

Men carrying pasta, early 1900s. Source.

Pasta drying in Gargano, a town near Naples known for its pasta production. Source.

The popularity of pasta has spread through industrialization and immigration, cementing it as a national food. Artisanal pasta making is still a common practice today in many households across the country. However, the physical composition of pasta changes throughout Italy: in the North, egg-based pastas are more common but in the South, pasta is made mainly of flour and water. There is also a great variety of flours used, from the more common 00 flour ("doppio zero” or the finest grind of flour) to semolina or even flours made from chestnuts and chickpeas.

Pasta shapes themselves can be formed in many different ways, not just by cutting or filling. Pasta alla chitarra is produced using a wooden frame with wires stretched across. A sheet of pasta is placed over the frame and pressed with a rolling pin, cutting the pasta into long, thin strips resembling guitar strings, hence the name. Grooved boards are used to create ridges on gnocchi and cavatelli. A thin iron rod, called a ferrato, is used commonly in the South. A piece of pasta dough is wrapped around the rod and rolled, making a semi-closed tube, creating pasta shapes like carrati and filijie.

It is important to see the intangible heritage of pasta being preserved through projects like Pasta Grannies. How are cultural dishes are being remembered in other countries? Hopefully there will be more movements across the world to bring awareness to intangible heritage and the importance of preserving living culture.

Cuciniamo — Let's Cook! 

While researching this article, I was inspired to make one of these pastas and I settled on garganelli, a short tubular pasta made from egg dough originating from the Emilia-Romagna region. The defining feature of garganelli are its thin ridges which help to hold a heaty sauce – typically a ragù made from duck or lamb although other sauces can be used. The ridges are produced by rolling the thin squares of dough on a tool known as a pettine or comb. These are curious tools as they are historically made from the combs of weaving looms! The combs are typically made from hemp, bamboo and wood. These traditional tools are hard to find but modern ones can be made from solid wood. (In a pinch, a gnocchi board works well.) Follow along as I try my hand at making this wonderful pasta!

I started by making my egg dough. I used a mix of fine 00 flour and semolina rimacinata (a durum wheat flour). The eggs are placed in a well in the flour and beat, then small amounts of flour are incorporated until a loose dough is formed. The dough is then kneaded until smooth — about 10 minutes. It is definitely an arm workout! 

After the dough is made and left to rest, portions are passed through a pasta maker to make thin sheets. The dough is then cut into 1 1/4" squares. The squares are placed diagonally on the petinne to be rolled. I don't have an authentic petinne but my father made me one of wood and a matching dowel! 

The bottom point of the square is rolled around the wooden dowel. The dowel is then rolled forwards, pressing into the petinne to form ridges. This also seals the edges of the dough. 

And here we have garganelli! They resemble penne with their ridges but are different in that the sealed "flap" is visible. 

I didn't make ragù, the traditional sauce for garganelli (I don't think my family would enjoy duck ragù...) so I served it with pesto I made last summer using basil from my garden. The garganelli were a hit, there are no leftovers! I can't wait to try making another heritage pasta. 

Photos in this series courtesy of Natalie Scola

FINE DINING: CURIOUS FOODSTUFFS AT THE HISTORIC TABLE

 A Muse Bouche | Natalie Scola

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Every few months I turn to Pinterest for design inspiration as to how to make the dining room table look beautiful for events. Pinterest brings up pictures of complex floral centerpieces, show stopping gingerbread houses, and every manner of iced cake. That got me thinking about how people dressed their tables hundreds of years ago. 

Food, like fashion, indicates wealth and status. Historically, the divide between the haves and the have-nots was incredibly pronounced on the dining table though ingredients and presentation. As dining and dining customs became more formalized, the upper classes looked to dress their tables with unusual, rare and elaborate centerpieces to further display their wealth. 

The pineapple was one such item. Pineapples, which are now readily available at the grocery store, were once incredibly rare and expensive items. They had to be shipped over great distances to buyers. Growing them in non-native climates was labour intensive and costly. Once a pineapple was purchased, it became a display as a centerpiece, being used over and over until it eventually rotted.

Another item found on dining tables was an epergne (pronounced AY-pairn), a centerpiece made of small dishes connected by scrolled branches which held fruits, nuts and other sweetmeats and confections. In the 18th century, they were a costly item made from silver or other metals. Even as the style of dining changed in the 19th century, epergnes remained on the table as decorative pieces. Manufactures began to produce epergnes from glass and porcelain, which eventually made them available to a wider audience and brought them into middle class homes.

This epergne from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, displays intricate silver metalwork as well as the characteristic bowls for fruit. Source.

Elaborate game pies were also used as showstopping edible centerpieces. While lower classes did eat meat, it was still seen as a luxury food reserved for the upper classes. People ate a wide variety of meat and poultry, including ham, beef, pork, venison, mutton, hare, ducks, pigeons, geese and partridge. A common way to eat meat was to cook it in a pie. One of the earliest English-language cookbooks, The Forme of Cury (cury from the Middle French cuire, meaning to cook), gives recipes for the making of pastries called coffins and chastelets. Coffin, or “coffyn” (meaning box) as it was in the late 14th century, were pastries made with straight sides, sealed at the top and bottom. Chastlets were much more dramatic, made in the shape of a castle, usually with each tower holding a different filling.

The page from The Forme of Cury giving the recipe for chastlets. The first lines read: "take and make a foyle (leaf) of good paste with a roller of a foot broad and longer by compass. Make four coffins of the self-paste upon the roller..." Source.

The 17th century saw more development in the art of pastry crusts. These are not be the same puff pastries we have today, but a type of hot water crust pastry made with a durable rye flour. This strong flour helped the pastry hold its form. Cooks developed pies with elaborate designs, mimicking patterns from textiles, heraldry and architecture. The pastry patterns were created by hand, either by rolling or tracing paper designs directly onto the pastry. Some were created by pressing the pastry into carved wooden boards. Later in the 18th century, earthenware and metal springform tins developed and became a common item by the 19th century.

A page from Edward Kidder's Receipts of Pastry and Cookery (c.1720) showing the intricate designs for two pies. Source. 

The fascination with novelty shapes extended beyond pies. Manufactures developed a whole range of novelty molds to be used for cakes, jellies and ice creams! Molds were made from copper and covered with tin; some had a special vent at the top to help release the food within.

While jellies are not as popular today, historically they were seen as food for the rich. Jellies begin to appear in the 14th century, but it was not until the end of the medieval period that cooks were able to perfect jelly making. Jellies were not just sweet dishes (like how we think of Jell-O today) but also for savory dishes, such as blancmange or aspic. Cooks originally obtained gelatin from boiling collagen-rich bones, such as calf’s feet. This was a time consuming process, and restricted the use of gelatin to the wealthy. In the 16th century, isinglass, a form of pure gelatin found in fish, was imported from Russia. Again, the cost of importing the ingredient was prohibitive. But by the 18th and 19th centuries, gelatin was mass produced, which fueled the Georgian and Victorian craze for molded jellies.

Aspic was an incredibly popular dish, appearing on tables in the late 18th century. These were clear, savory jellies which encased whole or sliced ingredients. Their elaborate molded shapes made them show-stopping centerpieces; some were intentionally designed to be inedible! Molds were made out of wood, pewter, ceramic or ceramic coated in copper or tin. The more elaborate molds – those with many details or pointed tops – were the most difficult to form correctly. Aspics were so popular that the famed French chef, Antonin Carême, developed a category of food he called “chaud froid”, which were hot dishes served cold.

Examples of the types of molds available for savory jellies. Source. 

Sweet jellies were also popular desserts and had their own range of flavour and molds. Blancmange, a dish made with almond milk, originated as a savory dish in medieval times and included shredded chicken or fish. By the 18th century, it was a sweet dish, with sugar, cream and rice and served in tall, decorative forms. Flummery, a softer pudding made with starch from flour, oats or almonds, and milk, was molded into elaborate and novelty shapes. In Elizabeth Raffald’s 1769 cookbook, The Experienced English Housekeeper, she provides a number of recipes for molding flummery, including: a nest of eggs, floating islands, stars, moons, and eggs and bacon. She declares these unique dishes: “pretty decoration for a grand table.” Raffald gives instructions on how to form shapes by using dishes and other pots, but by the 19th century, specialized molds made it easy to create interesting novelty flummeries for the table.

Elizabeth Raffald's recipe for Eggs and Bacon made from flummery. Source. 

A modern-day recreation of the eggs and bacon in flummery recipe. Source.

Ice cream was seen as a rare and expensive delicacy. It was difficult to produce because ice was hard to obtain and conserve year round. Ice could be stored in special ice houses, but only the rich could afford to maintain them and enjoy frozen dishes all year. “Ices” were a popular social treat throughout the Georgian era – Jane Austen’s novels make mention of eating ice – but it was not until the mid-19th century when ice and ice cream became affordable. Ice was imported from Norway and the United States, and inventors developed better churning machines, allowing the middle classes to produce ice cream at home. 

One manufacturer was Agnes Marshall, known as the “Queen of Ices.” Marshall developed her own ice cream empire, publishing cookbooks, running a cookery school, and manufacturing ice cream churners and novelty molds. Ice cream molds continued the trend of novelty ice cream shapes, which likely developed in Italy in the late 17th century before becoming popular throughout the rest of Europe. By the 19th century, novelty ice cream forms had taken the shape of fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs.

 

Ice cream molds offered by Agnes Marshall in her cookbook The Book of Ices (1893)| Source

Marshall capitalized on this trend, offering an incredible array of mold shapes to choose from: pineapples, grapes, melons, wicker baskets, wheat, and birds. A common – if unusual – shape was a bundle of asparagus! Many of the flavours Marshall gives in her cookbook are familiar to us today, like pistachio, lemon and cherry. Others are foreign to our taste buds, like cucumber. She provides instructions to freeze fruit ice cream in the mold that matches it’s flavour: pineapple ice cream in the pineapple mold, peach ice cream in the peach mold. Marshall even produced her own line of food dyes to colour the ice cream realistically.

A surviving example of a three-part pewter asparagus mold. Source. 

A modern-day recreation of ice cream in the asparagus mold. Source.

The great diversity of edible and dramatic centerpieces would end by World War I, as modernist ideas began to change dining trends to be more minimal. Some trends, like jelly foods, had a revival in the 1950s; with refrigerators seen as a status symbol in the post-war economy, gelatin-based dishes once again were seen as an indicator of wealth.

It’s easy for us to be shocked when looking at historical, either in cookbooks or in modern-day recreations because the food, flavours and presentations seem so different from what we have today. Shocking food combinations live on in modern cookery, like bacon ice cream or the novelty foods served at the Canadian National Exhibition each summer. What is lost is the incredible skill and artist that went into producing these elaborate dishes and the molds that formed them. While cookbook authors live on in their publications, home cooks and kitchens staff are unnamed and unrecognized as the talent behind these unusual dishes.

FOOD DREAMS: FINDING OUR MUSES

A Muse Bouche | Dominica Tang and Lindsay Chisholm

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Happy summer days to you all! We have previously written on pressing issues such as the impact of COVID-19 on food and racism in the food industry. We are putting our other ideas on the back burner for now but we’ll get back to the meat of things in our next articles. In light of the sweltering humid heat of Toronto, we have decided to cool things down and take a more introspective approach to this month’s writing. We thought this would be an opportune time to reflect on our food journeys and dreams through a light conversation with each other.

Mother of All Foodie Muses, Julia Child, photographed in her own kitchen. 
This kitchen was reconstructed within the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Source. 

Dominica: Lindsay, you are one of my favourite people to geek out about food! We’ve picked A Muse Bouche, so clearly, you have a special affinity for food in museums. What do you find so special about it?

Lindsay: Food is universally necessary for survival and intertwined into all aspects of life; through its research we can learn more about what it means to be human. The examination of tangible foodways can help uncover intangible concepts, whether they be reflections on society, culture, economics, and/or politics. Personally, I’m interested in people from past civilizations through the study of “edible archaeology”. What eats at you to study food and museums?

Dominica: Yes I think we both love food for its ability to provide insight on so many facets and intersections of human relationships, ideas, and activities. I'm interested in the broader modes of learning that multi-sensory experiences can provide, and intrigued by food as a medium for immersive learning. Most of my experiences with food studies in academia were purely theory-based, and while I thoroughly enjoyed that, my knowledge was enriched through cooking and baking in the historic kitchens of museums. I’d love for food to breach the walls of historic kitchens and infiltrate the larger museum sphere. COVID-19 has certainly stunted the growth of this aspect of museum learning, and I’m interested to see how museums further develop ways around this new challenge. 

Lindsay: What would your ideal museum food experience look like? Mine would be within a recreation of a Roman-style villa. I’d sample the elaborate tastes of the Roman elite while lounging on a kline atop an ostentatious mosaic within the triclinium. Bring me a globi and some peacock or boar to snack on. Possibly an edible chubby dormouse? 

"The Unswept Floor" mosaic in the Villa on Aventine Hill in Rome, created during Hadrian's reign. Source.

Lindsay: I’d also want to experience the life of a cook for a prominent family in a working kitchen. The grueling task of bread making can be recreated from this time period. The smells of sweat and smoke while enclosed in a hot cooking space would transpose oneself into the mentality of poorer Romans. These harsh and arduous working conditions exemplify what the daily life of a worker might have been like. Too often we get lost in the romanticization and wonders of elite and mythos of emperors, forgetting the larger portion of the population. Further dialogue should then take place within museum contexts that displays artifacts from antiquity in relation to food stuffs and cooking ware. And of course, my forever love of garum (the Monosdium Glutamate (MSG) of the Roman world). Who wouldn’t want to sample putrid fish guts?

Dominica: I love MSG and fermented fish sauce, so I would totally be into that. Echoing your thoughts on focusing on the general population, I want food and other multi-sensory experiences in museums to turn more towards marginalized histories and present-day experiences. MSG is still labeled as unhealthy, which is the legacy of a white scientist’s racism against Chinese immigrants. I still see “MSG-free” labels on Chinese food products and at Chinese restaurants. Of course, food can bring people together, but people also use food to antagonize, demonize, and ostracize a community as we’ve recently seen with the “bat soup” myth. As we’ve mentioned before, museums have a large platform to shed more light on these stories and I think food will play an important role in encouraging greater empathy towards these experiences. The Museum of Food and Drink put on the multi-sensory "Flavor: Making It and Faking It" exhibit, which included the science and history of MSG. The exhibition team offered home-made MSG tablets for visitors to try! 

The end of our conversation concluded with a hypothetical discussion about our new life goal to open a Michelin star restaurant together. The menu will be historic food inspired using kitchen instruments from that era. A historian and a classicist. What a dream team. GoFundMe account coming soon! (Just kidding!) 

                                Till next time in Julia Child's signature sign-off, "Bon Appetit!"

WHY FOOD?: AN INVESTIGATION INTO PASSION AND INTEREST

A Muse Bouche | Jordan Fee

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As I close in on the end of my term as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Musings, I am beginning to reflect on just what it is about food that fascinates me. Over the course of the past two years, my thoughts and opinions on the relationship between food and museums have varied greatly. Now, at the end of my time in the Museum Studies program, I am struggling to understand how I might go on preaching about the social, political and educational value of food to groups of people who might not share the same degree of passion and interest.

When I began thinking about food and museums, it was mainly on a sensory level. While museums are generally defined by the act of looking – and in some cases, touching – I was fascinated by the concept of a multi-sensory museological experience, one that included senses like smell and taste. Local iSchool Professor Irina Miahalache’s book, Food and Museums, provided me with a great amount of reading material on this subject, and inspired me to consider how individuals outside of the museum, such as chefs and community members, could form new approaches for exhibition and interpretation. Reading about the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (SOFAB) in New Orleans and the ElBulli Foundation in Spain, my eyes were opened to an entirely new mode of thinking.

The Southern Food and Beverage Museum (Source)

Following this initial fascination with multi-sensory museum experiences, I began to notice how the educational aspects of museums can, in some ways, mirror food industry. While working at my job at a local butcher-shop, I had unique interaction with some customers that made me realize that the meanings that we assign to objects in museums are often somewhat arbitrary, and how important it is to let visitors develop their own relationships with these objects without too much intervention.

A local butcher shop in Spain (Source)

Later, I began to consider how contemporary and historic cookbooks could be used as a means for companionship and understanding between individuals, which I would argue is also one of the core tenants of contemporary museology. Since beginning my internship in the Publications department at the Art Gallery of Ontario, I have thought more and more about how art books – those fancy codices that accompany museum exhibitions – resemble cook books in their format and content. Since then,  I have since learned about companies like Figure 1 Publishing, a firm based in Vancouver which designs cook books and art books exclusively.

If you’ve read some of the more recent articles that I’ve published on Musings, you’ll have seen that my focus has not necessarily been on how to get food into the museum. There are already many individuals working hard to accomplish this task. Rather, I have been trying to show how food and reflect all aspects of our culture, from generational knowledge, to intangible heritage.

Of course, this is not to say that I don’t want to see a more literal crossover between food and museums. In my opinion, some of the most interesting museum displays in the world are food-related, such as Julia Child’s kitchen at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum for American History. Furthermore, I believe that art can serve food in the way that it challenges our modes of perception and thinking about the world around us. 

Julia Childs Kitchen in the Smithsonian Museum of American History (Source)

Ultimately, I believe that food and museums are important to me because they point outwards. When I serve food to my friends, I am thinking not only of what is on a plate, but also about where this food came from, how it got to me, and who was affected by this process. This is something that I find myself doing whenever I am strolling around a museum; wondering where these objects came from, how they got there, and who might have played a part in this process. Unfortunately in both cases, the process may or may not be very clear, and sometimes, many individuals have been taken advantage of along the way. Still, I can’t help but seeing food and museums as vast networks of connections and relationships that extend across the globe.

While it may be cliché to say, many of us today are stuck in a culture of self-gratification. I, myself am implicated in this. However, I believe that both food and museums force us to look outwards, into the world around us, and understand that we form part of something larger. When you look at an object in a museum, try to think about all of the other objects that were not put on display, or that were sent to a different museum by a different collector. When you eat a piece of food, try to not only think about how it might taste, but also about all of the people who made it so. Focus not only on what is present, but also on what is absent. In this way, we can all become more empathetic towards both people and objects, which can only help us to become better professionals.

MAIZE AND MEXICAN HERITAGE: AN EVENING AT THE DEPANNEUR WITH IVÁN WADGYMAR

A Muse Bouche | Jordan Fee

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In the final weeks of 2019, just days before we all sunk into holiday-hibernation, a friend and I took a leisurely stroll to an unknown location. That is to say, my friend knew where we were going but I did not. The entire night had been set up as an end-of-semester surprise, and I had no serious expectations as to what we were getting into.

Around 6pm, we arrived at our destination: The Depanneur, which is located at 1033 College Street, just a few blocks west of Ossington Avenue. Lovingly referred to by patrons and owners as “The Dep”, this space is one-part kitchen, one-part restaurant, and one part-forum. As I write this article, I find it quite difficult to define just what is The Depanneur. Perhaps, it is best to simply refer to their website, where the space is described as “a place where interesting food things happen.”

Inside of The Depanneur (Source)

The event attended by my friend and I was part of a larger Table Talk series. For each of these events, the owner of the Depanneur, Len Senater, invites a local culinary personality to speak to guests about a topic that is of particular interest to them. The talk is then accompanied by a series of plates and dishes that reflect the ideas and themes found within the talk.

The personality invited to speak at this particular event was Iván Wadgymar, who is the owner of a tortelleria (ie. a place where tortillas are made) called Maizal. Originally a restaurant, Maizal has scaled down to become a one-stop shop for hand-made tortillas and totopos (think the best chips you’ve ever had). Although hard to find, the business is located on Ossington Avenue, in the kitchen space behind the bar Baby Huey. 

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#ActFast TUE Dec 3 — Table Talk: Iván Wadgymar on The Past and Future of Maize Maize, the staple grain of many pre-Colombian civilizations, is now one of the most widely cultivated crops on Earth. But along the way, so much of what made corn culturally central and sacred is under threat of being erased by the soulless commodity products flooding the global market. Artisanal producers like Iván Wadgymar are returning to the heritage varietals and traditional processing techniques, along with zero-waste agricultural practices. This produces a higher quality, more authentic, and far more delicious product that honours this precious gift of nature and culture. ----- Dinner by Len Senater This menu showcases the versatility of maize in Mexican cuisine Tostadas – crispy tortillas topped with squash, beans, chorizo (optional) & garnishes Pozole Verde – a pre-colombian soup of whole nixtamal corn (hominy) in a green chicken broth w/ tomatillos, green chiles, cilantro and pepitas Tamales Dulces – festive dessert tamales filled with dried fruit and garnished with cajeta caramel Chocolate Atole – a cornflour thickened beverage with vanilla and Mexican cacao. #GF #vegan options available ----- Doors open at 6pm, talk starts at 7pm Includes dinner and coffee or tea. $35 (includes HST) BOOK NOW https://thedepanneur.ca/event/table-talk-ivan-wadgymar-on-the-past-present-and-future-of-maize/ This Table Talk is presented in collaboration with Artery Every space is a stage. Artery lets anyone bring creative experiences to life, in places you may not expect. ----- Iván Wadgymar is a tortillero and molinero who runs Maizal, a tortilleria that evolved from a Mexican restaurant into an end-to-end producer of artisanal corn masa, tortillas & totopos. They grow heritage maize locally, nixtamalize it in traditional ways and produce products that seek to reconnect to centuries of cultural tradition and wisdom. ----- Every month The Depanneur invites a local food personality to talk about something that interests them while Dep founder Len Senater cooks dinner for everyone. Find out more on Table Talks at The Depanneur https://thedepanneur.ca/table-talk/

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Originally, hailing from Mexico, Wadgymar was careful to emphasize the importance of what is known as maize to Mexican culture and heritage. Although corn and maize are both varieties of the same species Zea Mays, the corn that we consume in North America today is generally prized for its high-sugar content, whereas maize is much more prized for its starch. This means that maize holds greater potential health benefits than corn, and that it can sustain humans for a longer period of time.

However, Wadgymar explained that one cannot simply eat maize like you would a piece of corn-on-the-cob. Instead, maize needs to be dried and then boiled in an alkaline solution (most commonly water and limestone). This solution breaks down the cellular structure of the corn and produces a thick porridge called nixtamal, which is highly nutritious in nature. This can in turn be used to make masa, which is the dough that can be made into those tortillas and totopos that I mentioned before.

A Traditional Tortelleria (Source)

According to Wadgymar, both nixtamal and masa have integral to the agri(cultural) history of Mexico for thousands and thousands of years. In fact, the process of nixtamalization (ie. the process through which dried maize is turned into nixtamal) has been dated back to 1500 B.C. This means that this process could have been just as important for pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican societies as it is to people like Wadgymar today.

In keeping with this extensive tradition, Wadgymar has travelled to Mexico to collect indigenous species of maize and brought them back to Canada to be cultivated here. Much of the maize grown for Wadgymar’s tortelleria is produced on a farm north of Toronto, and he is very careful to follow the steps taken by his predecessors to produce the highest quality masa possible. 

More recently, Wadgymar has also taken the opportunity to plant varieties of corn that are indigenous to North America, thereby constructing a bridge between the Mesoamerican cultures that relied on varieties of Zea Mays as a major food staple. He has even gone on to describe the food that he makes as “indigenous Mexican cuisine”, thereby embedding himself firmly in the traditions of his home country. 

When this talk began, I believed that I possessed a strong understanding of what the many varieties of corn represented in todays agricultural system. For many, corn is representative of some of the worst aspects of contemporary agriculture, from habitat destruction, to animal feed lots, to monocultures whose scale exceeds comprehension. However, Wadgymar’s talk revealed a completely different world, one that is defined by local communities, intangible cultural heritage and generational wisdom. In just a few short hours, Wadgymar flipped the script completely and showed each of the guests how maize can represent some of the strongest and most resilient aspects of food culture.

I would highly recommend that anyone reading this article check out the Depanneur’s website to see all of the exciting events that they have planned for the coming months (these are not limited to the Table Talk series!). Furthermore, if you want to taste the product of Wadgymar’s hard work, make sure to stop in at Maizal for some tortillas! I promise that you will not regret it.

Finally, if you’d like to find out what me and my friend ate on this wonderfully informative evening, follow this link: https://thedepanneur.ca/event/table-talk-ivan-wadgymar-on-the-past-present-and-future-of-maize/ to find out.

FLOUR POWER: 1960S HOUSEWIVES COOKING IN TORONTONIAN MUSEUMS

A Muse Bouche | Jordan Fee and Dominica Tang

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Hello, fellow Musers! For today’s post, I have invited another Museum Studies colleague, Dominica Tang, to chat with me about how the museum enacted gender roles within the framework of 1960s food programming in Toronto. More specifically, we will be taking a look at the workshops and demonstrations organized by the Women’s Committee at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and comparing them with some of the activities offered by the newly founded Black Creek Pioneer Village (BCPV), which opened to the public in 1957. Our discussion is inspired by Joan Sangster's article "Creating Popular Histories: Re-Interpreting "Second Wave" Canadian Feminism," and Irina D. Mihalache's “Recipes as Culinary Communication in a Canadian Art Museum: Lobster Souffle, Beef Stroganoff, and the Tensions of Gourmet Cooking in the 1960s."

During the 1960s, the AGO – then known as the Art Gallery of Toronto – held a series of cooking workshops and demonstrations, organized by a group of female volunteers known as the Women’s Committee. Famously, the Women’s Committee invited celebrated chefs, such as Dione Lucas and James Beard, to share their knowledge and training of gourmet cooking with a Canadian audience.

Conversely, the female volunteers at BCPV worked to demonstrate historic methods of cooking – ones that did not necessarily coincide with contemporary understandings of culinary expertise. In this case, knowledge was disseminated in a manner that was less formal, sometimes creating a romanticized portrait of Canadian life during the nineteenth century. However, as will be shown, this portrait also reflected 20th century understandings of gender roles and the domestic sphere at large.

Jordan: So Dominica, how did a place like BCPV come to represent a time other than the 19th century?

Dominica: Museums are a product of their time. Living history museums, such as BCPV, may represent and interpret a past time period, but their rationale and methodology is grounded in their contemporary environment and ideologies.

In 1960s Ontario, there was a push towards increased industrial and commercial capacity, which caused many women to leave the domestic sphere and enter into the professional world. The 1960s also saw somewhat of a reinforcement of gender roles, especially in suburban areas, which is reflected in some of the programming offered at Black Creek. In the 21st century, BCPV has softened these rules greatly. During my employment with BCPV, I cooked, cleaned, and spun wool as a Victorian farm wife would, but you would also find me in the tinsmith shop piercing tin squares or in the doctor’s office showcasing 19th century splints and stethoscopes. Additionally, my pixie cut at the time did not conform with the typical feminine Victorian style, so I covered it at all times with a house cap or bonnet.

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#canada #toronto #blackcreekpioneervillage

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Jordan: Although BCPV was certainly envisioned as an historical site, it represented an idealized construction that in many ways mirrored contemporary social values. While it was built as a reaction against rapid modernization, it also helped to strengthen existing gender roles in that it offered a space for female volunteers to teach female visitors about domestic practices. In this way, the programming at BCPV mirrored the cooking demonstrations taking place at the AGO.

Dominica: Both programs served as a means to assert gender identities through the improvement of culinary skills in different ways. The food programs at BCPV were, in the participants’ imaginations, models for imparting and reinforcing gender roles for their children. The motivation for women partaking in the culinary program at the AGO was to become better hosts as part of their duties as middle-class housewives. By offering a historical perspective, the female interpreters at BCPV were attempting to reiterate and reinforce the superiority of modern lifestyles. They, moreover, compared the laborious and time consuming mode of preheating a wood-fired brick oven to a simple push of the button on their stoves at home. I often did in my interpretation while the visitors watched me chuck yet another log into the fire and wipe the sweat off my brow. The AGO also sought to maintain this superiority but through a more direct manner by partnering up with the Consumer’s Gas Company and Canada’s Packers’ ltd.

Both the AGO and BCPV were maintaining the division of domestic labour, and offering female participants the opportunity to improve their own lives through the use of more efficient technologies, both in regard to the packaging and the preparation of food items. In order to understand the role of women in the 1960s, it is crucial to remember that agency does not simply come from rebellious or transgressive behaviour, rather these women were exercising agency by choosing to actively participate in the improvement of their own lives. Saba Mahmood, in her discussion on the Egyptian Islamic Revival, terms this understanding as “docile agency.”

Jordan: Still, it does seem that the AGO offered a less restrictive environment. The women who observed and participated in these cooking demonstrations were not as bound to the past as the female volunteers at BCPV. Rather than reframing the past through an understanding of the present, the AGO’s Women’s Committee worked to create new possibilities, which included modern techniques and ingredients. In addition, the gourmet cooking programs organized by the Women’s Committee were meant to elevate quotidian practices, often understood as mundane, into the realm of the miraculous.

Surprisingly, the AGO has not taken advantage of the 21st century obsession with all things food, which is reflected today in an almost total lack of food programming. BCPV, on the other hand, still offers butter churning workshops as part of school tours, and still keeps living animals on the farm. When I visited BCPV in 2018, I was quite surprised that these traditions had been maintained so carefully.

Posing Sheep at Black Creek Pioneer Village (Photograph Courtesy of Dominica Tang)

While the programming offered at Black Creek Pioneer Village in the 1960’s was perhaps more traditional, it has nevertheless been sustained well into the 21st century. Although the workshops and demonstrations organized by the Women’s Committee were perhaps more innovative, they eventually died out either from increasing food costs or decreasing interest; we cannot be sure. In any case, it is quite evident that both of these institutions helped to cement and subvert power structures and gender roles at a time when the general social landscape was undergoing a drastic transformation.