Start Date
26-5-2026 4:15 PM
End Date
26-5-2026 4:30 PM
Description
This paper explores the difference between daily eating habits (what is “eaten”) and handwritten recipe notebooks (what is “written”) within a Cretan-Turkish kinship network influenced by migration and resettlement. By combining oral history interviews with five women and analysing 242 notebook recipes, the study shows that these handwritten books are not just passive records of daily meals. Instead, they serve as selective domestic archives shaped by a “festive bias,” standardisation, and social value. The research indicates that while routine meals (such as stews) depend on embodied, unrecorded knowledge, the notebooks mainly contain special dough recipes using modern industrial ingredients like margarine to ensure consistent results. Ultimately, the paper reinterprets these cookbooks as a “technology of hope”—a future-oriented tool designed not only to preserve the past but also to uphold hospitality, identity, and domestic stability amidst displacement and shifting material environments.
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Included in
What My Grandma Ate, What My Grandma Wrote: Culinary Memory, Migration, and Changing Foodways in a Cretan–Turkish Household
This paper explores the difference between daily eating habits (what is “eaten”) and handwritten recipe notebooks (what is “written”) within a Cretan-Turkish kinship network influenced by migration and resettlement. By combining oral history interviews with five women and analysing 242 notebook recipes, the study shows that these handwritten books are not just passive records of daily meals. Instead, they serve as selective domestic archives shaped by a “festive bias,” standardisation, and social value. The research indicates that while routine meals (such as stews) depend on embodied, unrecorded knowledge, the notebooks mainly contain special dough recipes using modern industrial ingredients like margarine to ensure consistent results. Ultimately, the paper reinterprets these cookbooks as a “technology of hope”—a future-oriented tool designed not only to preserve the past but also to uphold hospitality, identity, and domestic stability amidst displacement and shifting material environments.