Teta's Kitchen: Archiving Oral Traditions of Food Histories

Part culinary exploration and part writing excavation, this program invited participants into the kitchen of oral tradition. Together, we sculpted and cooked Teta’s Kofta recipe, a recipe passed down from a grandmother to her daughter and later to her daughter’s son. This recipe, that existed only orally and particularly to a grandmother’s kitchen explorations, became a vehicle through which to honor and continue a fragment of her legacy upon her ascension to heaven. There are no measurements or a step-by-step recipe. The meal was passed down belwayem (بالوايم) – (an Egyptian Arabic term referring to eyeballing ingredients and their measurements while cooking and adjusting accordingly; to literally measure and cook by hand and to learn its composition by observing its cooking and replicating it gesturally. Here, there is no codified structure of cooking, but of an attunement inherited.

Following cooking Teta’s Kofta and breaking bread together, participants were invited to excavate their own oral food traditions by way of writing prompts, and to later translate these narratives into their own visual, linguistic, and mixed media explorations. Everyone who attended and participated in the program was automatically considered for the first edition of The Living Archive (أرشيف العيش), which will focus on narratives surrounding oral traditions of food histories and will be invested in both archiving and contextualizing these largely undocumented food histories.