15 July 2012

Book du jour - remembering how to cook

The work is about loss of sequential memory - the type of memory that helps you know what to do next. It's about memories of how my grandmother stopped helping in the kitchen, unable to make the dishes she'd been cooking all her life; about how my mother's prodigious baking skills took ever more effort for her, and about how I myself have to check and recheck recipes to make sure nothing gets left out.

I scanned in pages from their cookbooks, both in German, and have started filleting them, mainly taking out the verbs.

I'll also scan in pages of my own Dr Oetker cookbook - the English-language version - and see what happens - whether it too will lose its verbs, or its nouns, and whether it's possible to combine it with the German-language version in some way (which would make it about something other than sequential memory...).

2 comments:

Kathleen Loomis said...

if this were my project I would have to take out all the words in German that I used to know but have forgotten

Alison said...

and if I were doing this, based on my mother's experience, I would fill all the spaces with quotations from Shakespeare and the beloved poets, along with nursery rhymes and favourite sayings. Her decline is more a revealing of underlayers than a disappearing, I think.