2024 - 2025 HTCTWR #1: Fermentation as Transformation: a Long-Scale Intuitive Cooking Project in Two Parts

How to Cook Things While Roaming (HTCTWR) is a four-session series lead by Sophia Zbinovsky Braddel that intends to integrate the metaphysical space of the kitchen as a site for knowledge-production into the DAI program at large. 

The daily menus for each Confluence already serve as a bridge between ‘local’ terroir and the DAI’s roaming nature through the materiality of food, but the course will grapple with questions of how to cook sustainably for a large community and will attempt to drop into each space and place by weaving manual activity with cognition to deal with the state of ‘becoming’ that we find ourselves in- within the program and its community, and in the world around us.  

HTCTWR aims to be as flexible and spontaneous as possible- mirroring the necessary nature in which the kitchen itself operates. Therefore, the sessions do not have to be attended by the same people, but it is preferable that for the first two, some do return. 

DECEMBER 9, 2024

Led by Sophia Zbinovsky Braddel featuring Alicja Jurasinska. 

When: 15:30 - 17:30

Location: Small Kitchen

Max capacity of participants: 15 

“Fermenting has taught me so much about time, about death. Fermenting with salt is steady, slow and steady and time stands still…The things I choose to consume, allowing my DNA to meld with its DNA… that changes who I am. Inherently inherited… (creating) a new tradition based off of recipes from other traditions in other spaces and other times, sometimes wondering what conversations we would have if those recipe creators met my recipes.” 

Khan, Z. (2017) Fermenting Feminism [zine] p.48

For this first iteration of “How to Cook Things While Roaming”, we will discuss fermentation as a process of transformation— as a metaphorical and material practice. Working within some of the ideas laid out in the journal Fermenting Feminism (2017) we will approach fermentation as a perpetual state of becoming, as an approach to “collaborative survival” (Anna Tsing), with our bodies as sites for knowledge production. 

While we are bound by the hours of the session, we will try to reflect on the “non-time in which things play that were never in time.” (Regel, H. p.74)

I will also introduce my own research into the concepts of “quiet sustainability” and “quiet food sovereignty”, terms to describe anti-colonial ‘every-day resistance’ in the Eastern European context as ecologically aware domestic food practices that have occurred and still occur despite post-Soviet influence. 

We will be joined by Alicja Jurasinska, a chef from the borderlands of Poland who has vast knowledge of various fermentation practices, and will guide us in pickling fruits and vegetables “left-over” from the kitchen. These ferments will be left bubbling, until Session #2 where we will work with them again in their transformed state. 

Please bring your laptops or notebooks and writing utensils if you prefer, as we will reflect together also through writing.

In this first workshop we will also discuss how to form and create the rest of our sessions.