Food Preparation and Whole Ingredients

I modelled this image in the tradition of the Renaissance still life. I chose that style because I wanted to implicitly set the frame of reference back in time. John Berger submits that such paintings were a form of advertising one’s wealth and position. I’m not trying to advertise wealth, rather traditional ways of doing things—cooking in this case—to juxtapose “then” and “now”. So the picture below is an image of then: the tools, ingredients and resources.

During my basement archeological dig, I found my mother’s cookie cutters and cake mould. A recipe book is on the right. I was reminded of the Christmas cookies she used to make and the ones her mother used to make when I was a child.

As I read through my mother’s recipe book, a couple of things came to mind. First was the ingredients. Most have little or no processing; the sugar and flour are refined, the fruits have been dried, but the nuts are whole. Unlike many of the baked products one can buy today, there are no unreadable chemicals in the recipes.

My second thought was we don’t bake Christmas cookies any more. It’s a lot of work; my grandmother used to make a half dozen or so different varieties of cookies. Convenience might be one reason, but time I think is a big factor. Being able to spend the hours to prepare and cook speaks to a period when the time was available, when women worked at home. The home was their priority. It speaks to gender roles: worker vs. housewife. As women moved out into the workforce, priorities changed, many of these traditions fell by the wayside. I’m not commenting on good or bad; I’m not preferring one set of roles vs. another; I’m just pointing out a change that has affected a large portion of our society. It may be a change that many never witnessed.

Now that I am retired from an office job, I have the time to follow up on these traditions, so may be it’s up to grandparents to take the time to bake for their grandchildren so they have something to remember later in their life. Or may be, as the pandemic has resulted in many people working from home, time previously spent commuting can be used to bake.