These are two recipes and three poems developed as part of Kitchen Cultures, a project founded by researcher and designer Kaajal Modi and low-waste chef Fatima Tarkleman. The project was funded by the Eden Project’s Invisible World exhibition, and has continued through a collaboration with Eden Project Communities.
For the first stage of the project, six migrant women/non-binary people of colour were brought together over Zoom, WhatsApp and the phone for six weeks to recover and develop recipes to reduce food waste in the home. These were Eklass, Pepa, Rinkal, Soha, Sibutseng and Victoria. The intention was to highlight ancestral and adapted migratory knowledge about sustainability that lives in our homes and our kitchens, but that might often get overlooked as valid knowledge about climate and culture.
As well as recovering existing recipes, we paired up our collaborators interculturally and intergenerationally to create new recipes. We wanted to create new encounters between our collaborators, and in doing so generate new insights into all of the survival and care practices that make up our communities, in all their similarities and differences. As part of the work we ran weekly storytelling activities and culminated in a poetry workshop with Bristol-based Somali poet and artist Asmaa Jama, where we learned to tell our own stories through food metaphors.
The outcomes from the project have been: six recipes preservation recipes that can be adapted to use foods that might otherwise go to waste in your kitchen; a sound piece to listen to while you are cooking, that attempts to capture the feeling of cooking collaboratively across different cultural traditions; a tasting activity that can be used to get people to think about how our food connects us to our ecosystems, and how we might see eating as a practice of climate care; and a series of poems and stories about food, land, identity, memory, migration, colonisation, preservation, fermentation and hope.
Rinkal is a first generation Indian-Gujarati woman who has lived in London for over a decade. She has two young daughters, Arya and Shriya, both of whom were involved in every part of this project, from helping with cooking to writing poems to popping by to cheer us on during workshops. She is passionate about reducing food waste, and is part of an organisation called ‘Preservation Culture’ in Poplar, East London, where she uses her extensive cooking knowledge to develop delicious and healthy recipes that can help us to do so. Her bubbly personality, creative spirit and expertise were an utterly essential part of what made the Kitchen Cultures experience so special.
Soha is a Canadian-born Iranian who has been living in London for the past few years. She is interested in personal relationships to food: how they’re formed, how they evolve, and how they’re shared. Soha’s creative exploration of food as a form of care, coping and communication was felt throughout the project– she is a beautiful curious soul. If she ever meets you, she will probably try to cook you dinner, and she just wants to make her grandmother proud. Her grandmother deserves a special mention; she was always on the other end of the line with cooking advice, and I feel like we really got to know her through Soha’s stories about teatime and jam.
If Rinkal is the belly of the project, Soha is the heart. Rinkal and Soha came together through a shared love of pickling and feeding other people, and theirs was what I would describe as a truly fermentation-led collaboration. By which I mean that they were literally fermenting, in that the recipes they developed are lacto-fermented pickles. I also mean that metaphorically; they came together and shared knowledge and adapted to each other so wonderfully, and created recipes that were transformed through their collaboration with each other. I hope that they themselves were also transformed through the practice.
Rinkal was extremely excited to learn about Iranian spices such as Sumac, which she has incorporated into this traditional North Indian oil pickle/achar, and Soha has likewise incorporated Indian spices into a traditional Iranian Torshi.
Recipes:
Chilli Carrot Pickle
- Wash, peel & cut carrots into desired sizes (approx. 4 carrots for 1 jar).
- Mix carrots into salt & turmeric dry mix bowl, cover let carrots rest in mixture for 5 hours.
- After 5 hours, drain the water content released from the carrots and wrap them up in a clean cloth and let it rest overnight (minimum 8 hours).
- Heat up 1 tbsp of oil with crushed methi seeds (fenugreek) and mustard seeds, let this roast for a couple of minutes and. then cool.
- Create a dry spice mix for the pickling including: chilli powder, sumac, salt, fennel seeds, and black cumin (kalonji) if you have it.
- Mix the carrots into the dry mixture, add the oil mix to it as well. Once mixed in, place into a sterilized jar. Add 1 spoon of vinegar.
- Now, heat up an oil of your choosing, the amount is dependent on how you’d like it to be stored. If you want to keep it out of the fridge for up to a year, the carrots should be covered in oil, or you can do it about halfway or so if you want to leave it out of the fridge for only about a month, or if you’ll be putting it in the fridge eventually.
- Get the oil very hot, and then turn off the heat and let it cool completely for a few hours.
- Add the cooled oil to your jar!
- All done.
Recipe notes: Heat the oil the night before, and allow to cool fully before adding to the pickle. The longer you leave it out of the fridge, the more the taste will develop.
Carrot Torshi Style
- Wash and chop all vegetables (carrots & also cauliflower if desired) – add salt and leave to dry overnight.
- Wash and chop herbs (coriander, tarragon, dill) and allow them to dry as well (overnight not necessary).
- Mix vegetables & herbs in a bowl.
- Mix spices in a separate bowl or the same one as vegetables:
- turmeric for colour.
- 3 tablespoons of salt (for 2 large jars of torshi –eyeball the salt just to ensure it coats and salts the size of your bowl of vegetables).
- 1 tsp per jar of any other spices such as cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds, and fennel seeds, depending on what you have!
- Vegetables and herbs go into the jar & you fill it to the top with vinegar of your choice. 1 chilli and a couple of cloves of garlic / shallots & a bay leaf are nice inside as well, usually placed at the bottom.
- Let it sit in a dark cool place for 10 days before opening. Good to keep out of the fridge for at least a month as long as liquid is still covering the vegetables/herbs. I prefer it in the fridge for an extra crunchy and contrasted temperature to hot foods.
For both recipes, herbs and spices can be used based on what’s available! Open for experimentation ☺
Poetry:
edible memory by soha
at times i find it difficult to remember things that are probably significant
but some memories just aren’t appetizing
they’re bitter but not in a nice way like sucking on citrus peels
they’re tart but not in a nice way like an entire greengage in my mouth
they can be hard to chew and hard to swallow too
so sometimes i’ll eat fast and then forget
the moments i do remember keep me full though
realizing i could have feelings for her when she pocketed three apricots before leaving the house
learning that the perfect grilled cheese has its bread buttered inside and out
discovering we were both lactose intolerant and trying our best to hold off
drawing with pancake batter
instructed to eat every last grain because “do you know how much water it takes to grow rice?” (i’m habitually vigilant now)
three days straight of smelling like my favourite stew, you said I tasted like it too
making loved ones laugh when i lick the plate clean and silly
watching in awe as you lower saffron cotton candy into your mouth with your head tilted way back
confessing that i enjoy eating onions raw
her admitting she enjoys it too
spitting small pits into big hands
struggling to crack open fully enclosed pistachios with baby teeth
bullied off the beach by seagulls with our takeout fish & chips
tupperware filled with fresh pomegranate seeds for recess when the season hit
judged by my dentist for an obvious excess in lemon intake
our first and only argument over leftover chilli
heart shaped fig insides on our second date but you couldn’t look because you have trypophobia
ghee as a gift
meeting someone i want to cook for forever
these memories are sandwiched between blank spaces that look like empty plates
but i think what matters is that i can remember these
and i’m happy to only remember these
Crunchy Carrots by Rinkal (helped by Arya)
Crunchy carrots, carrots, carrots.
As bright as a parrot, parrot, parrot.
You can use it as a snowman’s nose but
don’t put it in your hose!
I like carrots in my soup,
I like carrots in my cake,
I like carrots, nice and crunchy but they’re
hard to bake!
Crunchy carrots, carrots, carrots.
As bright as a parrot, parrot, parrot.
You can use it as a snowman’s nose but
don’t put it in your hose!
When I cook a carrot, the smell is nice.
When I cook a carrot, I put it in my rice!
Rice Rap by Rinkal (helped by Shriya)
I like rice,
I like rice,
I like rice,
With a bit of spice.
I like spice,
I like spice,
I like spice,
When it’s on some rice.
To find out more about the project, check out Instagram.com/our_kitchen_cultures, or email our.kitchen.cultures@gmail.com (for Fatima), or Kaajal on hello@kaajalmodi.com.
Kaajal Modi (she/they) is a multidisciplinary designer and artist researching multi-sensory eco-social practices that have the capacity to draw our attention to the complex organisms and interrelationships that form our ecological worlds, and how these might emerge in the most everyday of domestic contexts. She is currently completing a practice-based PhD at UWE, Bristol, supervised across the Art and Design department and the Science Communication unit. As part of her practice, Kaajal collaborates with migrant women of colour in the kitchen in order to explore how fermentation as a practice of material survival can be used to reduce food waste in the home, and at the same time give us new metaphors through which to (re-)imagine collaboration, sustainability, migration, colonisation and care.
World Wide Wontons 