Rocio Carvajal Cortés

Food is an integral aspect of everyday life: it can be eaten in a fleeting moment, on the run, at a desk or in a car, providing the quick sustenance needed to fuel the human body and ensure its survival. It can be tasted, chewed, and swallowed hastily, leaving no trace of its original form as it is consumed and digested, or even left to spoil. Yet food can also linger long after its final morsels have disappeared into hungry mouths or the remnants of a meal have been cleared away. A familiar aroma or taste has the capacity to transport us back to people, places, and events. Food can invoke memories – both pleasurable and disagreeable – as it engages all of our senses. The ordinary gives way to the extraordinary as the everyday, often mundane, act of eating brings the past into the present and connects us to the places and people in our lives. The foodstuffs may be temporary, but in recollecting them through sensorial experiences, stories, and recipes we create and establish continuities with our personal and cultural histories.
Our connection with a particular food or dish not only revolves around its taste, feel, look, and aroma, but is also centred on our social relations with people and places. Behind the ingredients and meals lie the gestures and cultural values that help us tell the story of a food. Commensality – the act of eating with others – creates new social bonds and can transform strangers into friends, as well as maintain and rekindle old relationships. As we eat together, whether it be with friends, family, or strangers, we come together. This often under-appreciated act of eating further allows for conversations to blossom, memories to be recalled and created, new connections to places to be established, and identities to be made and remade. For food, cooking, and eating can tell a rich story that helps forge our social and cultural identity and anchor us to the people and places in our lives. Telling a story through a specific dish, taste, or smell, however quirky and personal, can paint a picture not only of our culinary identity, but also our broader cultural belonging. It can help define and express much of who we are. Food and stories act as a celebration, then, of ourselves as cooks and as socially connected people.

These are the foundations of Stories On Our Plate - SOOP. Founded in London in 2016 by Jack Fleming, Jolien Benjamin, and Laura Love-Petschl, SOOP is an organisation that celebrates and provides a space for people and their culinary identities. Launching with the London-based supper club series, SOOP has welcomed chefs and home cooks from all backgrounds and cultures. The series, which is convened by SOOP once a month, provides a space for cooks to share their food with curious guests and narrate the stories behind the food. Every supper club, convened in a pop-up space such as a former café or cookery school, tells a different story: from the sharing of family recipes to the challenging of misconceptions and stereotypes of national cuisines. For example, one cook, Ribale, has used the supper club series to share their family recipes from Lebanon to showcase the distinct culinary identity in the region, whilst another, Katrina, has used the series to share Eastern European recipes, specifically from Estonia and Russia. Both these cooks feature in this book. Growing from strength to strength, the SOOP supper club series has convened brunches, lunches, and dinners across London with close partner pop-up spaces such as the London Cooking Project in West London. A further component of SOOP’s work, launched in 2017, is a culinary training programme for home cooks with migrant and refugee backgrounds who worked towards the hosting of their first supper club to paying customers at the London Cooking Project. Shakirat, whose Nigerian recipes are featured in this book, joined and concluded the programme with her first supper club in south west London.

Stories On Our Plate: Recipes and Conversations is a result of a collaborative research project between SOOP, food anthropologist Emma-Jayne Abbots, and cultural historian Deborah F. Toner, entitled Food Stories: Fostering Cross-Cultural Dialogue through Food. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project aimed to encourage cross-cultural conversation through cooking and eating food, and by sharing stories of culinary heritage and cultural identity. The premise of the Food Stories project, and therefore this recipe book, is that food, and its narratives, can act as vehicles for translating the histories and cultures of different parts of the world to one another, and that food can encourage individuals to reflect and value their own culinary heritage as part of their identity. This is particularly important, we suggest, in the context of diasporas and migrant groups and in the current political climate, which has seen a rise in anti-migrant and refugee rhetoric, increasingly entrenched and polarised divisions, and political extremism.

This book draws together a number of chefs and cooks from across London, many of whom have been involved in SOOP’s supper club series and culinary training programme, and it provides a platform through which they can share their favourite recipes and the stories that lie behind them. Each cook has selected three dishes that are close to their heart and soul and form part of their personal, familial, and social memories, as well those recipes that reflect their unique style of cookery and the culinary traditions and ingredients of the myriad regions that influence them. To capture the stories behind the selected recipes, Jolien Benjamin, together with Elodie Vincendeau, an intern at SOOP, and photographer Rocio Carvajal, whose stories and recipes, are also featured in the book, were welcomed into the cooks’ homes where they allowed the ingredients, smells, tastes, embodied practices, and kitchen utensils to guide and inform rich and evocative conversations. The cross-cultural dialogues that were sparked from the different methods and ingredients revealed our commonalities and helped build a deeper understanding of one another through food and our culinary heritage.

In narrating their personal culinary heritage, each chef, in very different ways, shows how food creates connections between people and between people and places, and helps forge and maintain cultural identity. Yet this is not static nor rigid; rather, the stories and recipes highlight the fluidity and openness of cuisines, the adaptation and hybridity of dishes, and the ways in which people make and remake their home, identity, and sense of belonging. It is hoped, therefore, that readers will not only be inspired to cook the recipes, but will also be encouraged to think about and share their own food stories, as well as listening to those of others. To this end, we have supported this book with a series of workshops and online resources that work to stimulate continuing dialogue about the ways in which food and culinary heritage can help challenge misconceptions of seemingly ‘other’ people and blur social divisions. Our broader ambition, then, is that this book forms part of a wider conversation about the capacity for food to encourage cross-cultural understanding and that it inspires community initiatives and cooks in other towns and cities to instigate similar projects. We very much hope you enjoy and take inspiration from the pages that follow.

This general audience book is the outcome of the AHRC project "Consuming Authenticities: Time, Place and the Past in the Construction of Authentic Foods and Drinks." It addresses the temporal relationships and ideas that contribute to the construction of narratives of authenticity in relation to four foods and drinks: pulque (an alcoholic drink from Central Mexico), flaounes (celebration Easter pies from Cyprus), Welsh craft cider and acarajé (a street snack from Brazil).