The Things We Make, and the Stories They Tell: Unpacking Ethnogastronomic Repertoire through Autoethnography

• In Event: Practicing the Possible: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Improvisation Toward Remedy and Inclusion

Abstract

In this section, I consider improvisation in an understudied and vocationalized arts domain: the culinary arts. I conceptualize improvisation as a series of on-the-fly moves that occur throughout freeform culinary practice—through choices supporting or reshaping the ontological structure of dish concepts or recipes, based on available and preferred ingredients, tools, and techniques. I look at improvisation in low-stakes everyday cooking contexts as a possible practice to surface what I refer to as artists’ ethnogastronomic repertoires: heterogeneous maneuvers and orientations cultivated through engagement with cultural elements across heritage, physical geography, space, and relationships (Vossoughi et al., 2020). I glimpse into this repertoire via autoethnographic data excerpts (Chang, 2016) surrounding processes and artifacts (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010) to surface the invisible rationales, histories, and cultural liminalities inherent in artistic practice.

This section builds on work positing everyday culinary practice as a rich venue to cultivate orientations toward a multitude of ways of being and knowing in quotidian artistic practice (Authors, 2024; 2023; 2023). I present an example from autoethnographic data of a self-directed culinary learning narrative from my first experience cooking the South Asian staple dish dal, an experience brokered through my relational history with a co-author who made Indian food regularly for a taste of home (Authors, 2024). My co-author told me I could use whichever vegetable I had on hand—which served as an invitation for improvisation. Noting the textural contrasts of the vegetables I had on hand (carrot, celery, onion—which I recognized as a French mirepoix) with the soft dal, I conceptualized the idea of sabzi (meaning “vegetable” in Hindi) in tandem with dal, re-conceptualizing a fusion of the two as the dish I was making. This entailed retaining the texture of the vegetables—inspired by crunchy cold celery my Chengdu godfather made during hot summers—rather than cooking them until texturally indistinguishable in the style of a mirepoix. As a resident of a Global North country whose heritage culture cuisines hail from the Global South, I was mindful of global power dynamics—and intentional to not replicate hegemonic techniques of French cooking that felt inauthentic to my commitments in this particular South Asian culinary project. My co-author marveled at the crunch of the celery in the dish, saying she had never had dal with celery—and told me at a later point that now she always makes dal with celery (Authors, 2024).

In this example, improvisation yielded an artistic process and artifact embodying situationally-unique liminalities between personal, relational, and collective (vis-à-vis cultural) histories. Additionally, autoethnography around the process rendered visible the rationales that serve as entryways to personal histories and axiological commitments. From this example, I present a protocol (see Appendix A) as an invitation to reflect on the histories that undergird repertoire, visible through improvisation. The idea is that this working protocol serves as a starting point to consider improvisation through a) personal reflection on artifacts and practice, or b) with learners in arts spaces, toward culturally-sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2017) research that make space for and promote non-exploitative excavation of marginalized artists’
onto-epistemologies.

Author

• Phebe Chew, New York Hall of Science