This week on the menu: Lasagne! Probably one of my favourite meals in the world would have to be Mum’s lasagne. This is a must-have whenever I go home for the holidays, and so I couldn't do this blog without including a meal with lasagne. Mother kindly donated her lasagne recipe to me – along with many others - when I moved down to Dunedin. So all the ingredients were brought at the supermarket on Monday, ready for me to make the lasagne last night (Wednesday). Our kitchen is attached to our lounge, therefore when we are cooking, it is quite good as we can watch TV and talk as well. So as I started preparing the lasagne, home and away starts on TV – perfect; my favourite show. I get started on mum’s recipe – mixing and cooking the mince, which already starts to smell amazing and make me hungry. Then come the tomato and the cheese sauces, the lasagne sheets and the layering of these three ingredients. After about five minutes in the oven it already smells amazing, making us all ten times hungrier as we try to sit and watch the news, waiting desperately for some food.
“We turn the consumption of food, a biological necessity, into a carefully cultured phenomenon. We use eating as a medium for social relationships: satisfaction of the most individual of needs becomes the means of creating community.”
- Visser, 1992, p. ix
Aesthetics: Cooking can be seen as an art, as it is combining ingredients and processing these in order to make a final product. Although, it is not the same as other arts such as dancing and painting, it is something that is made and many people see the beauty in it. The alluring smells that come from cooking is aesthetic in itself, and then the presentation on the plate (not generally in my cooking) can also create a masterpiece. The beauty of eating the meal is real winner in the end though!
Spirituality: Food is something that always brings our family together. Cooking for us is a time to gossip, socialise, have fun and catch up. Cooking for some people can be a very spiritual thing, like a traditional meal, such as a Hangi for the Maori. Birthdays, anniversaries and any event – good or bad – are celebrated with food somehow. For example, when it is my birthday, I get to chose exactly what I want from the beginning of the meal to the desert. It is a way food is used to commemorate a special day.
History: The history of cooking goes a long, long, long way back. Obviously I’ve been surrounded by cooking since I was born, as everyone needs food to survive. My mother was the main cook in my household since I can remember and then we children and Dad did the washing up. Mum learnt most of her cooking off her mother, and she learnt off her mother and so on. Everyone loves Nanny’s cooking, it just always tastes so much better than if anyone else tries to make the same meal; and the same goes with mum’s cooking too. The recipes get passed down throughout the family and everyone puts their own twist on their cooking. No-one else can ever do someone else’s recipe as well as the original cook though.
Visser M. (1992). The rituals of dinner. London: Viking, The Penguin Group
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