Immersethrough.com
engaging with the world
naomi's place
A Kenyah woman just returned from harvest carrying a huge basket of rice, in February, after the end of rainy season in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo.
She is sitting on a bench on the verandah of the longhouse where she lives. Now that the dam on the Rejang River has been built, despite years of opposition, this place, which is well upstream of Belaga, lies under water.
harvesting vegetables in Casamance, west of Ziguinchor, in southern Senegal, at a locally run woman's co-op
Where there's water, the soil in Senegal's Casamance region yields rice (the Dioula, who are the majority here, have an age-old rice growing tradition), as well as millet, and a wide variety of vegetables, including dia-kotu, known as African eggplant.
FACES
a chomo, a Tibetan nun, I met at the nunnery in Labrang, in China's Gansu, in 1985.
BOOKS, READINGS
It occurred to me that I should keep a list of books here, just add to it when a name occurred to me, from past reading, or when I discover a book that speaks to me in some special way.
This column is narrow, and so the book list may end up moving to take space in the writing block to the right. For now it's here.
SPRING 2009:
AWARDS!!!!
BEYOND THE GREAT WALL won its category (International) at both the IACP and the James Beard Awards.
And Jennifer McLagan's book FAT won single subject both places, as well as being named Beard BOOK OF THE YEAR.
mid-nov/08:
Do go out and buy Ann Mendelson's new book about MILK.
She is very special, and after seeing her again last weekend in NYC I am reminded of just how special. You'll be taken places you never dreamed of by her book!
Just bought a copy of Jennifer McLagan's new cookbook FAT, which engages with the myths and facts around animal fats. The recipes will be reliable, hers always are, and the arguments and discussion about animal fats should get people rethinking their prejudices.
And a wonderful classic cookbook that anyone interested in food will want to own is Dorothy Hartley's FOOD IN ENGLAND, first published in 1954 and reissued in soft cover about ten years ago. It has wonderful line-drawing by the author to illustrate details and is full of regionally specific English foods, a reminder that food there was generally wonderful until the end of the nineteenth century. Now once again England is a place of good food and fresh markets. The hundred year hiatus in between is what most people still think of when the phrase "English food" is mentioned.
A third book to mention in this first entry, also by an Englishwoman, is Elisabeth Luard's book about European peasant cookery, called THE OLD WORLD KITCHEN: great writing, wonderfully interesting recipes. Another classic.
And finally, to make a trio of English writers, there's Patience Grey's HONEY FROM A WEED, detailing with love and care the rural food tradtions of places she lived in the Mediterranean: Puglia, Tuscany, Catalonia, the Island of Naxos. Wonderful.
And to leave food for a moment, do engage with Karen Connelly's remarkable novel THE LIZARD CAGE, which won the Whitbread New Writer's award last year in Britain. Set in Burma, it tells a huge story by telling the intimate story of one man. And she writes so beautifully.
I'll be writing here from time to time, and posting some of my photographs too. But I'll be doing more writing and posting, blog-style, at my new blog. I realised it would be a lot easier to post at a blog than if I had to enter the website and publish this page freshly every time I had a quick thought, such as another book to recommend, or whatever. The blog is: naomiduguid.blogspot.com. I'm posting once a week, or sometimes more often. I'm enjoying doing it, talking about a recent trip, or a recent encounter, some of them food related, others very much not.
And as I head into new projects, I'm trying to remember to engage with each day with the same alert positive energy we see in the face and style of this Dong woman, whom I met as we were both walking to a rural market about an hour from the beautiful village of Zhaoxing, in eastern Guizhou.
Happy immersing!
- naomi
JULY 2009 - THE COMING MONTHS
I'm booked to go to Greystone for the Worlds of Flavor Conference in mid-November. This year the theme is Streetfoods and Comfort Foods. It should be as amazing and intense as Worlds of Flavor events in other years, with people from many places and cultures all participating in learning and explaining and opening the worlds of food to each other. Can't wait.
Before that, I am booked to go to the Couchiching Conference in August, in Ontario, where the topic is focussed on food and sustainablity this year...
And in between, on September 26 in the late morning, I'll be giving a talk and demo at the Stratford Food Festival, under the auspices of the Stratford Chef's School. (There's a highly acclaimed production of the Three Sisters on that afternoon that I'm hoping to see as a reward for my labours!)
In late fall, after the Greystone conference, I'm hoping to spend four weeks based in Chiang Mai. We'll be getting ready for the next immersethrough session, scheduled for the last week in January 2010 (January 24 to February 1, 2010). I also hope I can have a ten days to two weeks in Burma in there, perhaps to go south, where I've never been, to the town of Moulmein and area. I'll keep you posted...
OXFORD COMPANION TO SOUTHEAST ASIAN FOOD: This volume will be a treasure house once it is published. For now it is an obligation for many people, and we are among them. Sri Owen and Roger Owen have undertaken to corral people to write all the entries needed to complete the book. I undertook to do only four, and now at last they are all in and edited.
The cultural diversity in Southeast Asia is of course staggering, and so is the fact that we know so little, so the articles were difficult to write.
I think part of the problem is that the entries are about delivering "the facts" in an orderly way. I am more drawn to story-telling that includes facts. And also it involves generalizing, which always feels dangerous and somewhat dehumanizing, when what is most interesting in culture (and food is after all is essentially an expression of culture) is the personal and specific. More later...
UPDATE spring 2009: Now that all four articles are in, I am hoping to be able to help wth editing and working on a few of the many articles that have been submitted by many people from all over. Sri and Roger Owen have done so much work, but this last stage is pretty wearing for them, just getting it all beaten into final form. Yikes! And a huge tip of the hat to them for taking all this on.
LATE SUMMER 2009: I did a complete rewrite of an article on fermentation this summer. I learned a lot (and gnashed my teeth a lot too of course!). Now Roger and Sri have written to say that the future of the project is uncertain, since they need to relinquish responsibility for editing it to others. I'll keep you posted.
