Image 1 credit Chris Green
Image 2 credit Ella Bean
Recipe Book is the culmination of a year of shared meals. Borrowing from Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Recipe Book combines recipes with the memories of those we have shared food with, and those we think about when we eat.
Throughout 2020, we shared monthly meals as part of doing PhD research together. How these meals were shared was altered in March 2020 by the Covid-19 pandemic. This recipe book documents the meals, allowing them to be reinterpreted, and is a diary of the year.
It borrows from the structure of A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, replacing 'Figures', 'Order' and 'References' with 'Recipes', 'Addendums' and 'Souvenirs'. These refer to the instructions for the meals, any changes made or suggested, and memories of these meals at different times, shared and recreated throughout our friendship. Addendums was used mistakenly instead of addenda.
The book itself is hand made, typeset using collage, pritt-stick and glue and scanned for printing. For us, writing and making objects for the writing go hand in hand. Re-writing the recipes and spending time constructing the book gave us new memories and interpretations of the food we shared.
Running throughout the book is the theme of friendship, of hospitality and sharing, of ways of caring for one another and of finding community and safety in sharing housing.
A typed PDF version of Recipe Book is available here
Image credit Katheryn Owens
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