Jaquel

name: Jaquel

collection #: ML10

collection location: The Chicken Coop, Mildred’s Lane, Beach Lake, PA

age: undisclosed

occupation: personal organizer

Relationship to food: afraid

Jaquel’s relationship to food is challenging. She is afraid of food. She explains to me that she ate poorly from childhood through early adulthood and as a consequence, has had a history of digestive trouble. As an adult she has found that her body works best when she doesn’t eat too much. So she eats a little at a time, otherwise she can’t digest it. (I should interject here that this does not make Jaquel a waif. She is hearty, vivacious, has beautiful red hair and is fit. She listens to her body enough to know its limitations and makes adjustments accordingly.) However, because of her relationship, she is afraid to dabble in new foods on her own. She seems to know what makes her healthy now and is afraid to push her body’s limits.

When I asked her about her food memories, she interestingly enough, had immediate memories of food from her childhood. She chose not to speak about the countess bags of chips and fast food she ate and instead specifically remembered eating walnuts at her grandmother’s and the process of cracking them open. Her grandmother worked at a camp and would bring home the spoils of the summer at the end of the season. She loved the colored candy on strips of white paper, candy buttons I believe they are called.

I did a little research on candy buttons, to find out their specific

name (which I mistakenly was calling dots) and found a page that shows you how to make them yourself. Sure, they don’t really taste like much, but that was never really the fascination about them in the first place, was it. What I loved about them myself as a child was the fact that they were on a big role in the store and you bought it by the row, tearing off as much or as little as you wanted. You could get a strip as tall as you, as it was inexpensive, and it would take days to eat that much candy off the paper. It was not cellophane wrapped as it is now and was immediate satisfaction. But I digress…

Jaquel also thought that broccoli looked like green trees as a child. She remembers eating the “heads” off the “trees” and getting in trouble for what her mother considered playing with her food. I think we should capitalize on this idea more…

At the end of her interview, after relieving these food memories from her childhood, Jaquel remarked to me that if she could start collecting food memories as an adult, she would like to remember what is was like when she started eating good food.

walnut image can be found at nature products.net

candy button image and blog entry about nostalgic candy can be found here

Coffee Warm Ups

During the Physical Space show, I gave people the opportunity to write about their relationship to specific types of edible materials. One of them was coffee. I got some great responses from participants, from the good to the bad: “Thank you lord”, “smells good, tastes aight”, “poop”. They also had an opportunity to ingest the substance, as I made cookies laced with the grounds.

It is an interesting substance for me, as I love the way it smells…hate the way it tastes. Well, that’s not true. I just don’t like black coffee in liquid form. I know I will make the die-hards cringe when I say this, but I think it is just the essence I like, as I love coffee flavored candy, espresso soaked lady fingers and coffee ice cream. This is probably why the cookies I made for the Physical Space show are a perfect use of the stuff in my opinion.

Coffee also has an interesting ability, for those who love it or hate it to create lasting memories, whether it is of the actual drink or to the whole ritual surrounding it. More coffee responses included things like “study time” or “mornin’!” as well as the more in depth relationship of “early morning wake ups and long bow watches at the boat house” and “I realize that I miss my country, France so much”. Who knew such a ubiquitous substance could elicit such bittersweet responses.

The cookies I shared with participants at the Physical Space Show are called Coffee Warm Ups, so called from an aural mistake by my husband (“no I said walnuts, not warm ups…”). They are made from a combination of two different memories: one on coffee, one on walnuts. Both of these memories were collected prior to the show at Mildred's Lane. This recipe was used in the first food memory dinner there and is much like a shortbread cookie. It was created out of common sense (coffee and walnuts would make a wonderful combination in a dessert) and a fair amount of research. It is an adaptation of a recipe by Alice Medrich.

Coffee Warm Ups

2 cups flour

1 cup walnuts

¾ cups sugar

¼ tsp salt

2 tsp coffee, ground

1 ¾ sticks butter, softened

1 tbsp + 1 tsp apple cider

1 ½ tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 350°

In a large food processor*, mix the flour, walnuts, sugar and salt. Pulse till combined. Add in coffee and butter and pulse till crumbly. Add apple juice and vanilla and pulse till it starts to form a dough ball. Remove from food processor and place on a well-floured surface. Kneed dough a few times till it sticks together better. It still will be crumbly. Place on a piece of waxed paper and roll into a log about 1 ½- 2” in diameter. Refrigerate for at least 2 hrs. Cut into ¼ slices and place on baking sheet about 1” apart. Bake for about 12-15 min. Makes about 4-6 doz.

*Yes, you can do this with out a food processor. You can chop and mix by hand. The ingredients will just be less finely ground and mixed unless you have righteous knife skills and buff arms

Days Past

Before I start sifting through the stories from the Physical Center Collection, I should pay homage to the event that started this project. In the summer of 2009, I was asked to be a guest chef for the Mildred’s Lane Social Saturday Lecture Series. Mildred’s Lane is a bucolic space that is a perfect retreat from the rest of the world. It is part residency, part educational workshop, part on-going art event, part think tank and part experiment in collective/alternative methods of living. The Social Saturday Lecture series is a way to interact with both the local community and connect with the larger art community through discourse and food.

Social Saturday Dinners are major events involving hours of aesthetic preparation of the meal. From the table setting to the food presentation to the dishwashing stations.

Even the refrigerator gets a makeover.

The whole meal is an aesthetic experience.

I was also a resident artist at Mildred’s Lane for the last project session and was looking for a way to combine my interest in memory culture* with the food projects I had been conducting for the two years prior. As a result, I decided to conduct a series of interviews with the current fellows and residents about their relationship to food and their memories associated with food. Interviews were primarily conducted in my living space, the Grafter’s Shack.

What was once a project installation is now a small sleeping accommodation. The space is quiet and removed, an excellent place to have an intimate interview and travel back in time. The interview was conducted much in the same way that it is now. A small amount of personal information was collected [like name, sex, age, occupation] and I asked a few questions about their relationship to food. [During this time, I want people to feel comfortable and believe that the type of memories people have and the experience people have reliving them can be dictated by a positive, negative or neutral relationship to food. To this end I have added tea and cookies to the interview process. This seems to give participants a sense of comfort, even if their relationship to food isn’t the most positive.] Time was left at the end for talking about their food memories.

The memories and ingredients were then sorted and gleaned to create the recipes for the meal I was in charge of as a guest chef. I wanted to create a collective meal, the creation of which was dictated by the memories of the people who were there during the week. This was the start of my interest in looking at the way food is created and consumed, physically, visually and metaphorically.

This event and the collection of memories is just as much a part of the Physical Space Collection and in this forum, I will be discussing the food memories collected at both of these spaces as well as collections yet to come.

*memory culture is predominantly the visual study of memorials, architecture and public grief, but also draws on oral story telling, photography, politics and cultural studies just to name a few.