Culinary Literacy (in Russia and beyond)

The Free Library of Philadelphia has initiated a series of workshops on culinary literacy. Now this is really cool. "Our mission is two-fold: The first part is teaching literacy skills through cooking, and the second part is exploring culinary literacy."

Recipes are a window to math and reading, but they also are the missing link in our current society to health and wellness. "Culinary literacy" means an awareness of the advantages of fresh food, of cooking "from scratch." In a sense, it is the opposite of 20th century food science -- the Minneapolis labs of Pillsbury where my aunt worked after college to make new recipes and to invent ways to utilize baking "products" (see here for photos of the Mill City Museum, including the "Baking Lab").

As I discovered this spring in my course on Russia and cuisine, reading recipes can be a great access point to culture. For my students, it was about vocabulary and grammar, but they also came to understand why certain ingredients recurred, how recipes were recorded and passed on from one generation to the next, the relationships between local and imported cultures, and between economic practices (including kitchens-full of free serf labor) and the food on Russian plates.

In fact, I'm not sure the students came to fully appreciate my love for the concept of domestic economy -- of budgeting and planning and figuring out that strawberries must be eaten in season, while winter is the perfect time for root vegetables.

Vladislav Khodasevich used to talk about Pushkin's "poetic economy," which it seems to me is utterly adaptable to the kitchen. Pushkin, Khodasevich claimed, kept his rhymes and phrases and other poetic bits and saved them until they came in handy -- like those pieces of string and rubber bands and so on that tend to accumulate in a kitchen "junk drawer." You never know when you might need them.

I will continue to refine the course. But I am heartened by the idea of "culinary literacy" -- is it feasible to make to make Pushkin's poetry AND the top five recipes in Elena Molokhovets's classic cookbook graduation requirements for college students of Russian?

It would certainly be easier if I had a fantastic demonstration kitchen.

Demo Kitchen at Free Library's Central Branch

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