ABSTRACT
How might we think of ordinary food preparation as a site that brings together skilled practice, the senses, and memory? In refl ecting on his grandmother’s challah bread, Steinberg suggests some of the larger identity issues embedded in the relationship between people and their socio-material environment, in this case a set of relatives and a set of kitchen tools, fl avors, and ingredients. He evokes an image of “traditional” cooking, without recipes, cookbooks, cuisinarts, or bread machines, but with the implied hierarchy of gerontocratic authority passed in a female line. He further suggests that loss of tradition, which is, in fact, loss of particular skills , is a necessary part of becoming the modern, individualistic Americans that his family members aspired to be. Is this image, then, a relic of grandmothers past? How do people face the task of everyday cooking under conditions of “modernity,” and what might this mean for issues of skill, memory, and embodied sensory knowledge, particular given the uncomfortable relationship with the “lower senses” associated with modernity and modernization projects and the devaluation of practical knowledge, tradition, and social embeddedness. How have recent times changed people’s relationship to the various kinds of cooking tools, ranging from their sense organs (the nose, the tongue) to pots and pans, knives, even bread machines, with which they populate and structure their kitchen environment?
