A Hope for Historical Cooking

Can we eat with the past? This is perhaps an over-asked question by food historians. It is a question of longing, curiosity, and one that is especially tantalizing to think through when teaching history through food. It has inspired popular media from YouTube series to food blogs, as well as my work, where asking a similar question of “Can we eat with our ancestors?” helped me uncover the relationships between food and diasporic root-searching (Song-Nichols 2021). However, over the years, I grew frustrated over videos about trying to source the “closest ingredients” or rereading “ancient” recipes with uncritical attempts to “cook just like they did.” Most of these attempts invoked a feeling that we were making a spectacle or mockery of the past rather than helping us understand it. If we were to eat with the past, I wanted it to do more. I began to ask myself: Could cooking with the past help us be in the present? Can cooking with the past help us care for one another? And because care is something that is often best when reciprocated (even if unevenly or “ambivalently” [Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Hobart and Kneese 2020]), how might following recipes help us care for the past? Below is a response.I used to hate historical cooking. Well, at least I met it with the same disdain that many academic historians greet historical reenactors. My reintroduction to historical reenactors came through learning how to scoff at their practices as a sort of defense of the rigor of our academic discipline, a tension that Michelle Moon has noted exists between food history and culinary history (Moon 2016: 2). In many other cases, the historical truth that I thought they (historical reenactors) were searching for felt silly and impossible, in contrast to the “truth” of the archives and literature reviews that was supposed to be solid and reliable if you dug hard enough. These biases transferred seamlessly for me to historical cooking, where I met any attempt at recreating a recipe with an assertion that it was a meaningless endeavor, bolstered by observations that every single tool required for the recipe, all of the ingredients, appliances, people, stomach, and tastebuds, had changed. Watching cooking shows that found the oldest recipe and, no matter how faithfully, tried to cook from it always made me cringe and feel defensive, especially when the final assessment of the dish was a tasting that concluded with the sentiment of “oh so that’s what they ate.” I could feel fellow historians (primarily the ones that do not work on food) conflating my work with theirs, seeing my work similarly as “fun” or “silly” and questioning whether food history actually helped us understand the past better.It probably makes sense then that it was in a library, rather than in a kitchen or historical home, that my views on historical cooking began to shift. During the summer of 2023, I was a participant in a summer seminar put together by the Fisher Rare Books Library at the University of Toronto on their cookbooks and culinary collections. I attended the workshop because resting within the collection is a cookbook named the Chinese Japanese Cookbook by Sara Bosse and Onoto Watanna, published in 1914, and one of the, if not the, earliest cookbook on Asian cuisine published in the US or Canada by someone of Asian descent. I was ready for my engagement with this primary source to be purely textual, perhaps a close read of the introduction and recipes, analysis of the structure of the book, and maybe using it as an index of ingredients possibly available in a nearby Chinatown. However, this specific workshop would push me out from behind the book first into the archival ecosystem of historical cookbooks and then eventually into the historical kitchen. Elizabeth Ridolfo, Elizabeth Driver, and Fiona Lucas were our guides in activities ranging from a transcribe-a-thon and group discussions to lectures on digital humanities projects and ultimately some historical cooking at Campbell house, a heritage house first built in 1822.Elizabeth Driver started us off with an overview history of the varieties of cookbook genres and publishing pathways that produced them, drawing on her extensive bibliographic work on Canadian cookbooks (Driver 2008). Fiona Lucas assuaged my worries that historical cooks were aspiring for exact replicas of the meals made from historical recipes. The goal was instead to achieve a “modern realization” of the recipe. It was less about time travel but more forging a respectful relationship with the recipe, promising the original recipe writer(s) to faithfully follow the steps to the best of our ability before carefully adapting it to our circumstances, a process the Lucas has outlined in her collaborative republishing of The Female Emigrant’s Guide with Nathalie Cooke (Cooke and Lucas 2017). A point that Driver has also made when discussing The Female Emigrant’s Guide, that “If a novel is measured by how it stimulates the intellect or imagination, then a cookbook is fully understood only when the recipes are executed, the food consumed, and the outcome analyzed using all one’s senses” (Driver 2009: 264). This more open-feeling toward historical recipes led me to an article by Kyla Thompkins, who asked us to consider the “tenses” and “temporalities” of recipes, where “recipes demand to be done, to be experienced [as well as] choreograph the present by performing: by executing something that has already been imagined” (Tompkins 2013: 442).There is improvisation with recipes that demands you dialogue with rather than simply “replicate” the past. Thinking about building a relationship with these recipes allowed me to recognize the potential for reciprocal care between historian and primary source. This is a point that museum studies scholars and food interpreters, like Michelle Moon, have made. Moon has critiqued approaches to historical interpretation that understands itself as “just a few small details away from being indistinguishable from an actual past,” noting that this notion prevents historical sites from “offering useful skills, information, and insights to people struggling to negotiate the hazards of the industrial food system” through meaningful conversations between past and present (Moon 2016: 28–29). While I am still very new to the world of food interpretation and have much to learn, I am inspired by these conversations to think about how historical cooking can offer guidance toward more embodied ways of engaging with the past. Recipes, historical and contemporary, are forms that help us learn or practice skills that allow us to better take care of ourselves or others. Why couldn’t these skills or this care help up relate better to the past?I started making bao when I first moved to Toronto almost a decade ago with no conscious intention to use bao to relate to my past or to the past at all. Instead, I started to make bao as a way to relate to my new home. Toronto, home to large and multiple Chinese diasporas, provides many ways of reaffirming and growing my Chinese identity, from the Toisanese history of Toronto’s first Chinatowns and 2nd- 3rd-, and 4th-generation Chinese Canadian community projects to the sprawling ethnoburbs and transnational bubble tea shops and restaurants throughout the metropolitan area. This vast diversity of “Chineseness” contrasted with the smaller Chinese communities that I grew up with in the Greater Phoenix Arizona area, or even Montreal’s Chinatown, which I got to know as an undergraduate student in the 2010’s before moving to Toronto. Toronto’s Chineseness challenged me to think about how my own Chinese identity could fit in the city, where there were multiple ways of being Chinese. Bao helped me not only think through these connections but actively grow what would be key support networks for me.There were two reasons why I chose bao as the dish that would help to root my Chinese identity within the flurry of Chinese identities around me. First, it is one of my favorite Chinese foods, with steamed or baked chasiu bao (a barbecue pork) being the dish I always sought out during dim sum with my family. Second, I could mold them into fun shapes, an outlet for creativity that often felt stifled when trying to do academic work. While I first thought of these reasons as pretty superficial when I began to make bao, they both started gaining surprising importance as I developed my bao recipe. First was that my childhood love of bao helped me not only know what I wanted to taste for with the dish but also gave me a hunger to keep trying and working on a recipe until I was happy with it. The second reason slowly evolved my bao making into a new personal tradition of making Chinese zodiac bao to share with friends during Lunar New Year. The little snakes, dragons, tigers, and rabbits I made helped me to feed new connections and friendships that in turn would sustain me in this new city. In the end, the bao making became a process of self-sustaining and outward growing that was integral to adapting to a new space. Bao, while sometimes invoking memories, was primarily about gaining a new skill and making sense of where I now lived.I developed my recipe through trial and error, guided by a variety of recipes I found in old cookbooks, videos, and contemporary blogs. I slowly learned how I liked to knead the dough, how much oil I liked to add, when to add the yeast, how to pleat the bao around the filling, and how to know when they were steamed enough.I was surprised when my self-taught efforts with bao prepared me for a past I did not know existed. A few years ago during a holiday trip back to the States, my great-aunt showed me an index card titled “‘Bow’ Dough.” It was my Bakbak’s (my maternal great-grandmother) recipe. I never knew my Bakbak, let alone that she made bao. It was a list of ingredients with only two succinct instructions: “let rise once” and “steam 10–12 minutes.” When I first saw the recipe, instead of feeling daunted or uninterested, which I would have if I had gotten this recipe when I first moved to Toronto, I was excited and automatically started to fill in the “missing” steps in the recipe. I probably should warm the milk before combining it with the yeast and sugar, I might mix the salt and flour together before adding the yeast milk, I might knead the dough for ten minutes. In some ways, I was unintentionally ready to receive this recipe and ready to revive it after a few generations of rest. When I made my Bakbak’s bao recipe with my family, I got to show them how I was working to learn from Bakbak and honor the steps that were taken to bring her care to me.Despite the forces of assimilation, convenience, or simply the sense that it was never thought of as important enough to talk about, that had kept this recipe from me, I now had the opportunity to cook with my past. So in some ways it was diasporic happenstance that I chose to revive this recipe. However instead of letting it stay in happenstance, I began to ask questions about how historians, intentionally or not, “prepare” themselves for what they find in their archives and how that preparation inherently shapes the kind of connections and analyses they make. For me, my efforts to grow toward other members of the Chinese diaspora in Toronto unintentionally gave me a new tool to better recognize and relate to the past. With food, knowing how it can be prepared can open not only our minds but our stomachs and hearts to new connections and buried ones that may otherwise never be unearthed. Extending Tompkin’s observations on recipes further, we can think about how these new relationships allow us to be more full, using not just our minds but our whole body when researching the past with an alignment toward possible futures.On reflection, historical cooking in the present can be one way of learning specific skills or gaining experiences that make us better able to receive, learn, and/or sit with the past. Historical cooking taught me that perhaps the fuller we are, the better we are at being present with history. Our minds are steadier, our hungers satiated, we can be less “hangry” or “hangxious” with the past and demand that it give us everything it knows (something that underlies much scholarly historical work). When discussing this research with my friend and colleague Valeria Mantilla Morales, she taught me the Mexican phrase “que no se enojen los tamales” a sentiment that you should not cook tamales when you are angry because it will impact the flavor of the tamales. When combining this with historical cooking as a research method I want to ask if the same is there with historical research. How do we not let our tamales and histories get angry? How are our histories affected when we research and write them from states of anger, precarity, stress, joy, or excitement? Could this expand beyond historical research to research in food studies in general? I believe that there must be some impact or connection. Our body and minds are so interconnected and food studies is uniquely positioned to recognize and examine those connections (Pilcher 2016). My experiments with historical cooking extend this emphasis on connections to the process of conducting historical and food studies research. This among many things invites us to think about how the stresses we experience in the academy or in our lives may impact how we engage with the past and our research subjects. By striving to be full, it is my hope that we can continue to develop research methods that pay attention to our whole selves. With these methods I have one hope that one day, we can understand the past not as our research subjects but maybe as our dining partner, our sous chef, our cooking instructor, and that we can be present when we sit or cook with them.I would like to thank Elizabeth Ridolfo, Fiona Lucas, Elizabeth Driver as well as my fellow participants at the Cookbooks and Culinary Collections summer seminar at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. I am also immensely grateful for the support and readings of Lisa Haushofer, Janita Van Dyk, Valeria Mantilla Morales, Jin Chang, and my hoohoo when drafting this piece, as well as the anonymous feedback from folks at Gastronomica after it was submitted.

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