>> Muhannad Salhi: Greetings
ladies and gentleman.
Welcome to our symposium
on religious practices,
transmission and
literacies in Africa,
the Middle East,
and Central Asia.
Today we have what promises
to be a very interesting
presentation
by Professor Heather
Sharkey, but first,
a few words about the
section -- about our division,
a few words about our
division, the obligatory plug.
Our division is divided
into three sections,
the African section which
deals with sub-Saharan Africa,
the Near East section
which deals with everything
from Kazan [phonetic] in the
north to Khartoum in the south,
Kashkar in the east to
Casablanca in the west,
and the Hebraic section
which deals with Hebraica
and Judaica worldwide.
Today, we would like
to welcome our speaker,
Professor Heather Sharkey.
Professor Heather Sharkey
is professor and chair
of the department of
Near Eastern Languages
and Civilizations at the
University of Pennsylvania,
where she teaches Middle Eastern
and North African history,
and where she received the
Charles Ludwig Distinguished
Teaching Award from the
College of Arts and Sciences.
She previously taught
at the University
of Massachusetts-Amherst,
the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT), and
Trinity College in Connecticut.
She was visiting professor
at the Ecole des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)
in Paris during the
2012 to '13 year.
She holds degrees from Yale in
anthropology, the University
of Durham in Middle
Eastern Studies,
and Princeton, her
PhD in history.
She has won fellowships
including the Marshall,
Fulbright-Hays, and Carnegie.
She's the author of Living
with Colonialism, Nationalism
and Culture and the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan,
University of California Press,
American Evangelicals in Egypt,
Missionary Encounters in an
Age of Empire, and A History
of Muslims, Christians and
Jews in the Middle East.
She has edited Cultural
Conversions,
Unexpected Consequences of
Christian Missionary Encounters
in the Middle East,
Africa, and South Asia,
with Mehmet Ali Dogan,.
American Missionaries in
the Modern Middle East,
Foundational Encounters
with Jeffrey Edward Green,
and The changing of
religious freedom --
The Changing Terrain of
Religious Freedom, sorry.
And now without further ado,
Professor Heather Sharkey.
>> Heather J. Sharkey:
Thank you, Muhannad,
for that introduction.
It's an honor to be here today.
I'm going to share my screen
now, and I have some slides
to show you while I talk.
Again, I'm really delighted
to be here, so thank you.
The Library of Congress
holds cookbooks from all
over the world written
in dozens of languages.
Many focus on cuisines and
food ways of the Middle East
and North Africa, and come
from authors who were born
in the region or whose parents
or grandparents came from there.
In late May and early June in
2022, I visited the Library
of Congress as a
guest of the African
and Middle Eastern Division
to participate in this project
on national religious literacy.
My talk builds on research that
I conducted during my residency
when I consulted dozens of
cookbooks in English and Arabic,
along with a few in French
and German from the 20th
and early 21st centuries.
My goal today is to
suggest how Middle Eastern
and North African cookbooks
can promote religious literacy,
meaning an awareness of and
respect for distinctions
and commonalities rooted
in religious cultures
and social values.
On the one hand, cookbooks often
cast light on Muslim, Christian,
and Jewish particularities
by linking foods to holidays
and dietary practices,
including fasting.
On the other hand, many
transcend religious differences,
while emphasizing universal
values such as love for family,
and the importance of
sharing food with others.
We can understand these values,
I suggest, through the concept
of commensality, which
means sitting and eating
at the same table
with implications
for mutual appreciation
and respect.
Here is my plan.
I will start by addressing the
questions why study cookbooks
and Middle Eastern and North
African cookbooks especially?
I will next described types of
cookbooks according to themes
that they cover to
show their diversity.
I will then consider how
cookbooks connect food
to religious practices, and how
they model values of sharing.
Moving to the level of recipes,
and before quickly concluding,
I will highlight two dishes
that illustrate Middle Eastern
and North African social values.
So why cookbooks?
For historians, anthropologists
and other scholars,
cookbooks offer rich insights.
They suggest what
people have eaten,
or what they would
have liked to eat.
Cookbooks, as one food
historian has observed,
are often aspirational.
The arrangement of recipes
can yield insights too.
For example, a cookbook
may have sections devoted
to breakfast foods, snacks
or holiday favorites.
Such categorizations,
typically set out in chapters,
convey assumptions about when
people should eat certain
things, and how meals should
order days and seasons.
Cookbooks can also
tell us about things
like agricultural resources,
what grows where, technologies
for food preservation
and preparation.
For example, did people
have refrigerators,
and if they did not, then how
did that affect what they ate?
Labor, think about the
work involved in procuring,
cooking, and serving food.
And long-distance trade,
consider access to spices
like cinnamon, which
came from far away.
Cookbooks can also
illuminate customs,
for example by featuring
festive foods,
such as date-filled
shortbread cookies for Easter
or for Ramadan nights,
or flourless nut
cakes for Passover.
The Middle East and North Africa
is an especially important place
to study from the
perspective of food.
Millennia ago, the Fertile
Crescent became a cradle
for agricultural development,
the birthplace of founder crops
such as wheat, barley,
and lentils.
After the rise of Islam
in the seventh century
and the expansion of the
first Islamic empire,
the region became a hub for
the global diffusion of crops
like sugarcane, which allowed
for the proliferation of sweets
and what we now call desserts.
From roughly the 17th century
onward, the region popularized
and spread coffee, and with
it, the social institution
of the neighborhood cafe via
roots that started in Ethiopia
and went through Yemen.
The region also helped to
circulate New World foods
like chili peppers,
tomatoes and potatoes,
as they traveled eastward from
the Americas through Europe,
and further into
Asia and Africa.
From the vantage point of
food studies, the Middle East
and North Africa region
has played major roles
in world history.
The region has also
been supremely important
for cookbooks as
a literary form.
A thousand years ago in
cities like Cairo and Baghdad,
elite men who often had ties
to palaces and courts began
to write Arabic cookbooks,
some of which doubled
as dietary manuals containing
advice on what to eat
to maintain or restore
good health.
As one scholar put
it, the region ended
up producing the richest
medieval food literature
in the world, so that there
are more cookbooks in Arabic
from before 1400
than in the rest
of the world's languages
put together.
In the 20th century, cookbooks
became an increasingly popular
medium and became
cheap to print and buy.
My research starts here,
with cookbooks published
from about the 1950s onwards.
Whether in English or Arabic,
these modern cookbooks attest
to the expansion of
female education.
For in fact, women started to
predominate as cookbook authors.
20th century cookbooks,
whether written by women or men,
often appeal to women as assumed
readers reflecting social
realities of who was
working in home kitchens.
Many of the English-language
text -- cookbooks, sorry --
many of the English-language
cookbooks in the Library
of Congress attest to
histories of migration
that have brought Middle
Eastern and North African people
to the United States from
the late 19th century onward.
Authors have frequently
identified themselves
as immigrants or as the
descendants of immigrants,
and as grandparents,
children or grandchildren,
giving their cookbooks a strong
generational consciousness.
Many have expressed clear
intentions for their cookbooks
such as a desire to
preserve familial
and cultural traditions, to
raise funds through book sales
for scholarships
and other charities,
and to promote peaceful
relations amid
regional conflicts.
Others have aimed to survey
culinary traditions within
and across ethnic, national and
religious or sectarian lines,
some consciously
and purposefully
across national and
communal borders.
Many have described their
efforts to record recipes
in terms of archiving
and preserving heritage.
I was struck by how one Yemeni
author used the Arabic verb
archa [phonetic] to describe
what she did, using the verb
for writing down history,
a verb related to the word
for altaarikh, history itself.
Cookbooks often convey what
some scholars call culinary
nostalgia, the acute
missing of a distant homeland
or earlier time,
and describe a race
to save traditions
before assimilation,
the death of loved ones,
or lifestyle changes
obliterate them.
Dozens of cookbooks that I saw
stressed the economical nature
of Middle Eastern and North
African food, whether written
from the 1960s -- in the 1960s,
or during the last five years,
cookbooks repeatedly
praised the ability of cooks
to stretch recipes from these
cuisines, and to feed people
in thrifty yet still lavish
ways, notably by using beans
and lentils, along with
common vegetables like cabbage
and others while limiting meat.
One Palestinian cookbook author
summed it up when he observed
that when he was a child,
his family and his neighbors,
whether Muslim, Jewish
or Christian,
were almost vegetarians on the
grounds of financial necessity.
Pride in cuisines that are
at once delicious, healthy,
potentially cheap, and
above all, shareable,
surfaced repeatedly in
the books that I saw.
The variety of Middle Eastern
and North African cookbooks
in the Library of Congress is
stunning, and while I was there,
I found myself making a
list of types or subgenres
as I was reading them, with
many cookbooks fitting into more
than one of the categories
that I devised.
I saw cookbooks that featured a
number of things, and I'm going
to show you some
slides, some from --
of book covers and
some snapshots
that I took while I was there.
So some cookbooks
feature national cuisines,
either a survey of the
food of one country
or a volume specializing
in one part of the cuisine
such as I found, for instance,
a book of Algerian pastries.
This is a funny example
I have up now.
It's a book of Kuwaiti cuisine,
Kuwaiti food and the picture,
the photograph there is a
picture of eggplant dip,
shaped like the Kuwaiti
flag with garnishes
and beans on the side.
What I would also like to point
out, on the right-hand side,
you can see that the author
of this particular
cookbook donated it
to the Library of
Congress directly.
I found many cookbooks
specializing
in specific religious,
sectarian or ethnic communities,
such as this book you see
in the main reading room
of Sephardic Jewish cooking,
centered primarily on Spain,
Andalusia, and Morocco and using
recipes, many of them coming
from before the 15th century,
and works devoted to the food
of particular Christian
communities such as the one
on the right from a Chaldean
Catholic community in Michigan.
I found books that covered
food or used food as a means
of addressing issues related
to interfaith harmony,
social reconciliation, or
cross-communal understanding,
especially vis a vis Israeli
and Palestinian relations,
and what you see on the
left is a bilingual Arabic
and Hebrew cookbook written
by a Muslim Palestinian woman
and featuring the cuisine
of one town, Jaffa,
which is outside Tel Aviv.
I found books associated
with religious history
and with ancient and
medieval Judaic, Christian
and Islamic tradition, such as
recipes inspired by the Bible,
or as in this example you see
now, by the poems of Rumi,
the 13th century
Muslim Sufi visionary.
I found many cookbooks that
featured Middle Eastern
and North African
restaurants, and in fact,
this is a growing trend.
I have three examples up here,
Zahav, an Israeli restaurant
in Philadelphia which
is where I live,
and you see another
restaurant that I used to go
to when I was a student
in Cairo,
and they now have
a cookbook as well.
And then on the right is
a recent Afghan cookbook
from Australia based
on a restaurant there.
I also found a couple of
fascinating books that were part
of domestic science curricula in
schools, so these are cookbooks
that were textbooks
and the examples
on the screen here are
from Egypt and Sudan.
I found many books
that celebrated Middle
Eastern cuisine as a route
to good health, and this
is a funny one I found,
A Belly Dancer's Slim-Down
and Shape-Up Secrets
published in 1979.
Then too, there are cookbooks
that function as an adjunct
to tourism, presented
in lavishly photographed
coffee table book formats,
which I would suggest
are often more
for looking than for cooking.
The recipes are often
quite elaborate,
but the beautiful
photographs mean
that it's a pleasure
to leaf through them.
There is also a growing
number of cookbooks
that feature a single
ingredient,
and I have two examples
on the screen.
I own both of these
books, The Yogurt Cookbook,
and a more recent one
about date palm syrup,
which is really beautiful
to read.
This yogurt cookbook
got me started.
-- I brought a show and tell --
making my own yogurt
because after reading it,
I felt inspired and
I've been making my own
for the past three years.
There are also cookbooks
that use food for social
and political advocacy
by raising awareness
about displaced people
and survivors of war,
and here are two excellent
examples on the screen.
And finally, I found many, many
books that use food as a way
of remembering or
honoring family,
and preserving traditions,
and these are examples here
of Palestinian, Armenian,
Syrian, Sephardic
and Bahraini cultures.
The cookbooks that can most
effectively cultivate cultural
and religious literacy are often
the ones of this last type,
which strive to honor family
and preserve traditions.
That is because writers with
this goal often say more.
They preface recipes with
stories and anecdotes
that give their books a
memoir-like ethnographic
or even history book quality.
Focusing on family customs and
on instructing future readers
and cooks, they convey
information
about religious observances
and communal customs,
how families lived every
day, marked special events,
and mixed with neighbors.
In English, the cookbooks
of Claudia Roden,
a giant in the field
of Middle Eastern
and North African food writing,
stand out here, and so I propose
to use them now as examples.
Roden was born in 1936
to a Jewish family
that had immigrated
to Egypt a couple
of generations earlier
from Aleppo, Syria.
Roden has written
many cookbooks,
but two have been
especially influential.
One is a book of Middle
Eastern food published in 1968,
and in a revised
edition in 2000.
And another is The Book of
Jewish Food published in 1996,
which the Jewish Women's
Encyclopedia has called a bible
of Jewish cooking.
Although The Book of
Jewish Food surveys recipes
from Jewish communities all
over the world while covering
Europe extensively, it begins
and ends with the Middle
East and North Africa,
and with stories about
Roden's family in Cairo.
Writing in a straightforward
way that both Jewish
and non-Jewish readers
can grasp --
and here I'm referring
especially to The Book
of Jewish Food -- Roden
explains Jewish dietary rules
such as the avoidance of
pork, which Muslims also shun.
She discusses the Jewish
calendar, the weekly Sabbath
and holidays like Passover,
and then gives recipes
that marked these occasions.
She notes regional variations
regarding Rosh Hashana,
for example, when Jews
have often made sweet foods
to augur a sweet new
year, she explains
that Moroccan Jews would often
add sugar to spinach, zucchini
and other vegetable dishes,
while Egyptian Jews
would avoid using bitter
and sour ingredients like
lemon juice and tamarind,
and again these were
adaptations for foods
for the Rosh Hashana
holiday in particular.
Roden mentions popular
beliefs that Muslims
and Christians shared
with Jews such as the idea
that seven is a lucky
number, which led people
to make certain dishes with
seven ingredients for good luck.
She gives recipes for casseroles
that people slow cooked
unattended in ovens
on Friday night, so that
they could respect the rest
of Sabbath the next day.
Reading Roden's cookbooks,
one can learn a lot
about Jewish holidays
and practices,
but also about connections
among Muslims, Jews,
and Christians more broadly.
Now, of course, many of Roden's
cookbooks have been bestsellers
issued by well-known publishers.
By contrast, most of the
cookbooks I saw in the Library
of Congress were low-budget
editions with small print runs,
and some of them were things
that very few libraries
in the United States,
if any, would have.
While I do not have time
to discuss cookbooks
as material objects,
I would like to point
out that the nature of the
various cookbooks in terms
of their format and
paper quality,
and whether they have
illustrations and photographs
or not, varies widely.
Regardless of their relative
fame or obscurity, though,
and their relative
glossiness or simplicity,
many of the cookbooks I
saw struck me as gold mines
for cultural information.
This was especially true again
when they included stories
with recipes, or signaled foods
common to wider communities,
such as lentil soup in
relation to Ramadan,
Lenten and Yom Kippur fasts.
One of the most beautiful
and touching cookbooks
that I read during my
residency at the Library
of Congress was the work of two
Syrian women named Itab Azzam
and Dina Mousawi who were
both theater producers living
in England.
Azzam and Mousawi wrote that
they took up pots and pans
as their weapons
to draw attention
to the Syrian Civil War and
its toll while raising money
for refugees.
In stories attached to recipes,
they often mentioned foods
and attitudes towards
food that Syrians shared
across sectarian
and religious lines.
They wrote, for example,
that bread is considered
a sacred gift from God
in the Arab world,
whether you are a Muslim,
Druze or Christian, and
it's a sin to waste it even
after it has gone stale.
That's one of the
reasons why fatteh,
literally bread crumbs made
from leftover pita chips,
is such a popular dish.
And here you can see a picture
for that kind of recipe here.
They expressed pride in how
Syrians could make banquets
from humble ingredients,
describing meals
like the one a refugee
served them in London,
and they included some
recipes as memorials too,
such as the favorite sandwich
recipe from a friend's father
who was struck and killed
by a missile while
standing at an ATM.
In cookbook after cookbook,
written across the years
and from many different places,
authors repeated
certain core principles.
A guest to an Arab home,
declared a 1995 cookbook
published
by an Arab-American civic
association in Detroit,
is always welcomed by [foreign
language] meaning you are
amongst family.
When Grandmother reminded us
of our duties to our guests,
wrote an author from an
Azerbaijani and Iranian family
in 1960, she often quoted
a famous Persian saying,
which means a guest
is God's gift.
If you are the host,
advised a 2010 cookbook
from a Chaldean Catholic
Iraqi American Women's society
in Michigan, remember to
say fatalah [phonetic],
which means do me the honor.
When guests visit a home in
Syria, Lebanon or Jordan,
wrote an Armenian
American author in 1999,
they are immediately
made to feel
that their presence is a cause
for happiness and celebration.
When a host says bayti
baytak, my home is your home,
he or she really means it.
Some of the cookbooks, whether
written in Arabic or English,
began or ended with prayers,
thanks to God, or quotations
from the Bible or the Quran.
Such passages may
give the cookbooks
and obviously religious
character,
but what really drives
home the social ethics
and religious impulses behind
so many of these cookbooks,
I would argue, is the emphasis
that they place again on love
for family and the imperative
of sharing one's food.
Moving now from the scale of
the cookbook to the recipes
within them, I would
like to highlight dishes
that exemplify the ethics of
hospitality and generosity
that tie together diverse
communities of Middle Eastern
and North African origin, and
I have chosen two examples.
The first example is a
dish called mujadara,
which comes from the Levant,
that is from what is now Syria,
Lebanon, Jordan,
Israel and Palestine.
Mujadara consists of grain,
lentils and caramelized onions,
and can be served on big trays
that are ideal for sharing.
Historically, mujadara
featured bulgur wheat,
but in modern times, rice
has become common too.
Recipes for mujadara appear
in several of the books
that I consulted, and a book
about medieval Arab
cuisine mentioned it also.
Christians have favored
mujadara during Lent,
because it is vegan, and as
two Syrian authors noted,
the previous two
that I mentioned
who wrote the book
called Our Syria,
the Christians have
favored it for Lent
because it imparts a sense
of humility, as a food common
to poor people and workers.
Claudia Roden noted that
Jews often made mujadara
for the Sabbath, because
it tastes good cold,
which is to say it can be
pre-made, and when served
with yogurt, can be a dairy
dish according to kosher rules
that forbid mixing
meat and milk.
Muslims have always
enjoyed mujadara simply
because it is delicious and uses
readily available ingredients.
As one Palestinian
Muslim author noted,
mujadara was an everyday
food when he was growing up.
It was a staple unlike meat.
Mujadara embodies the
notion to adapt a proverb
that one author cited
that a small house
can have a big heart.
It is a humble dish
that can make a feast.
The second example of
a dish that I would
like to highlight
is called ashura.
It is a sweet and nutritious
soup, or a soup-like
or porridgy-like thing, which
is also good hot or cold.
Though somewhat less commonly
eaten today, then mujadara,
it is also very historic.
I found a luxurious
recipe for this dish
in the recent prize-winning
cookbook called Feast,
Food of the Islamic World
by Lebanese-British
writer Anissa Helou.
Her book features festive
foods of Muslim communities
across the Middle East and
North Africa and further afield
in places like Somalia
and Zanzibar.
Helou's version of
this dish includes --
and here's a long list -- wheat
berries, farro, chickpeas,
cannelini beans, fava
beans, rice, dried figs,
dried apricots, raisins,
butter, sugar, ground hazelnuts,
walnuts, milk, rosewater,
and spices such as
cinnamon and nigella seeds.
In today's terms, we might call
it a high-protein main dish
and dessert rolls into one.
Helou's ashura recipe jumped
out at me when I saw it,
because during the
COVID-19 pandemic in 2020,
I attended a Zoom
symposium sponsored
by the German Research
Institute in Istanbul,
in which historians discussed
this dish in different contexts.
Helou writes that ashura is
prepared on the feast day
of Noah's escape from the
flood in the first month
of the Muslim calendar.
Those living in the
countryside used to make it
with what they had
growing in their fields.
City folks would buy their
ingredients from the bazaar,
but regardless, many
also made this dish
to commemorate the holiday
of a Ashura on the 10th day
of Muharram, which is when the
Prophet Muhammad's grandson,
Hussein Ibn Ali, was
martyred in the Battle
of Karbala in Iraq in 680 BCE.
The anniversary of
Hussein's death
at Karbala is a somber
holiday that Shia Muslims,
not Sunni Muslims, tend to
observe, but as I learned
from the Istanbul symposium,
and you can see the announcement
for that symposium here, this
weak soup was once common
in Iran, as well as
in the heartlands
of the Ottoman Empire
among diverse Muslims,
Christians and Jews.
In the 16th century, Ottoman
Sultans sometimes distributed it
to guests as a sign
of their munificence.
They also gave it to travelers.
Armenian Christians historically
made it on festive occasions
and called it Noah's
Ark pudding,
I suspect because it
includes so many things.
One speaker mentioned that Jews
used to serve it after funerals.
It was a comfort
food for mourners.
In other words, this dish was
widespread, symbolically rich
in various social and
religious contexts, and healthy
and comforting at once.
Recipes for ashura remind
me of another soupy dessert
which I saw in various
cookbooks that I consulted.
One, written by an
Arab-American woman in 1957,
described a very similar
though simpler version
which she called St.
Barbara's miracle.
She wrote that Christian
families made it
to celebrate the
birth of a baby.
Ashura recalls another
traditional dessert
called hushaf.
In the Library of Congress,
I found a Sudanese Arabic home
economics textbook published
in Khartoum in 1973, which
recommended chilled hushaf
for breaking the fast of Ramadan
because it is filling, hydrating
and restorative at
the same time.
So to conclude, Middle Eastern
and North African cookbooks
can enrich our cultural
understanding, and contribute
to religious literacy
by introducing us
to distinctions
and commonalities rooted
in religious cultures
and social values.
We can think of these values
in terms of commensality,
a word that means being at the
same table and eating together
with implications for
sociability and mutual esteem.
Commensality is becoming
a lively area
of research among public
health experts, as I realized
when I came across a series of
articles from last year, 2021,
published in the
International Journal
of Environmental Research
and Public Health.
In different case studies
featured in this journal,
teams of public health experts
studied how eating together,
as opposed to eating
alone, affected individual
and collective wellbeing, and
physical and emotional health.
Thinking comparatively, as a
historian interested in food
and cookbooks, I believe
that commensality may help us
to appreciate what we
could call civic health,
and the collective wellbeing
of religiously pluralistic
societies,
like what we find in
the United States.
I hope that I have convinced
you of the value of cookbooks
for academic study, while
showcasing one small part
of the Library of
Congress collections.
The Library of Congress
is a magnificent
and tremendous scholarly
resource,
and I remain extremely grateful
for having had the opportunity
to explore what it holds.
Thank you.
>> Muhannad Salhi: Well, thank
you very much Professor Sharkey,
for a very, very
fascinating presentation.
I'm actually very interested
in this avenue of using books
as a means of studying history
and culture, and you suggest
that a number of
scholars are doing this.
Can you please elaborate
on that just a little bit?
>> Heather J. Sharkey: Yeah, I
think what's going on is that,
you know, this area of food
studies in general is booming.
More universities are starting
to have programs on the subject.
It's a subject that
one can approach
from many different angles,
so just thinking in terms
of Middle Eastern and
North African Studies,
you can approach food
studies from the point of view
of literature, environmental
impacts, health, nationalism.
There are just so many
ways of approaching it,
so that's one reason why the
area is becoming so vibrant.
And then also, it's
really important
for studying migration,
and that's something that's
becoming increasingly important
as the United -- as the
people of Middle Eastern
and North African origin and
their descendants are growing
in size as a community, people
are becoming more interested
in the culinary traditions
that brought people together.
So for a variety of reasons,
it is a really thriving field
for study, and cookbooks
are a wonderful source
for giving us insights
into that process.
And then too, by the way, we can
track different kinds of changes
over time, like changes in
technology, access, you know,
what people have in their
homes, access to trade
and the global circulation
of resources.
And another thing to point
out is that Middle Eastern
and North African cultures
are constantly evolving,
and you can see that
in cookbooks, too.
So one cookbook, for
example, has quinoa recipes,
and another has, you know,
Syrian style tiramisu,
so you see these
changes and these changes
and exchanges going
on through food.
>> Muhannad Salhi: Well, so I'm
wondering, as a scholar yourself
and other scholars,
how are cookbooks --
I'm assuming that you use
cookbooks in your classrooms,
and I'm wondering how
you go about that.
I mean, what is expected
of students
that are required
to read cookbooks?
>> Heather J. Sharkey: So I
started -- well, first of all,
what's -- two things started me
out in this field of inquiry,
and I began to develop
a class on this
at the University
of Pennsylvania.
One is that I'm an avid cook
myself, and the other is
that I found myself reading
the scholarship on food
and realizing how
much there was.
So I started by assigning
translations of some
of these historic cookbooks.
I put one up in my PowerPoint,
and I would have students read
and think about it, and then
what really happened is also
during the pandemic,
when at my institution,
as at other institutions,
we all had to be online,
I realized people weren't
able to come together.
I used to bring food
to my classes.
I couldn't do that anymore,
so I started assigning a what
I call an experiential learning
assignment, where I gave --
and I got our institution
to access certain cookbooks
as e-books, since our
library was closed
for a while, physically closed.
And then I assigned
students a set of cookbooks
and told them they had to make
something from it and bring it
for a virtual buffet,
and what I found is
that it became an extremely
meaningful experience
for the students to have this
hands-on multisensory learning
experience, and then
also realizing that even
if we couldn't be together,
we could have a kind
of commensality online,
even if it's not perfect.
The experience has
been so successful,
and students have
been so enthusiastic,
that they've asked me
to incorporate more
such assignments going forward.
And I could talk more about how
I do that, and what I advise,
because over time,
I've become more aware.
I should also say most
of my students do not
have cooking experience,
even basic experience,
and they live in a world
where they eat a lot of
takeout and pre-prepared foods,
so on a very broad level,
I think I can help them
to learn more about the
Middle East and North Africa,
to feel like it's an adventure,
a learning Adventure for them,
and at the same time, give
them another set of life skills
that they wouldn't
otherwise have.
>> Muhannad Salhi: Well, now
that you've made us all hungry,
I am going to ask
one last question.
And you have me wondering now,
like authors of these cookbooks,
who is their target audience?
I mean, I've always assumed
that it was just people who like
to cook or learn recipes,
but from what you're saying,
it seems like it's a
much more complex --
>> Heather J. Sharkey: It is.
I mean, I am -- again,
I'm an avid cook.
I look at cookbooks and
the ones I was looking at,
I was reading them for
insights and for stories
and for thinking, oh, would
I actually want to work
with this one, but
I have a colleague
who told me he never
cooks from cookbooks.
He's an expert on cookbooks.
He reads cookbooks, and it
was while talking to him
that I became more aware
of how some people read
cookbooks the way I read novels.
And then too, you
realize, again,
there are different purposes.
Sometimes these cookbooks
are almost
like cultural touchstones,
so for --
if you think about target
audience, let's say somebody --
there was one cookbook I found
from the Arab-American
community in Michigan.
There are a few like that.
And it's like Grandma's recipes.
Well, are people actually
cooking Grandma's recipes?
Not really, partly because
tastes change, but they want
to be able to see what Grandma
did, and it's that ability
to look back, and to be able
to open a cookbook and say ah,
that's the tradition
that my family had.
That ends up being meaningful.
So for example, one of the
slides I had up earlier
from the Armenian Assyrian
cookbook by a grandmother,
written down by her
granddaughter who explained
that her grandmother didn't
even know English after living
in the United States
for many years.
She had a whole series of
recipes for curing olives.
I mean, who cures their
own olives, right?
It'll be -- you're not
-- I'm -- even I'm --
and I'm pretty serious, I'm not
going to cure my own olives.
Where are we going
to get them anyway?
But I think that's important,
and that's an example
of how a cookbook can
preserve information,
and the information feels
meaningful to people.
So I guess what we should
also then understand is
that people turn to cookbooks
for different reasons,
and another one might
be, let's say,
you go on a wonderful
vacation to Morocco,
and it was the journey
of a lifetime.
You get that Moroccan
cookbook, and you can flip
through the pages and
you're like, ah, remember,
we had that wonderful tajine
in Marrakech, you know?
And it becomes meaningful,
but you're not actually
cooking from it.
So again, cookbooks do many
things, have many audiences,
give lots of different kinds
of information, and I believe
that they are really
valuable as sources,
and I hope that the Library
of Congress will
continue to collect them.
>> Muhannad Salhi: Well, thank
you very much, Professor Sharkey
for a wonderful,
wonderful presentation.
I don't know about
everybody else,
but I'm about to go
get something to eat.
With that, we would like to
conclude this presentation,
and we hope that you
join us for the rest
of the panels in this symposium.
And for those of you who are
interested in researching,
not just the Middle East, but
anything, any topic really,
we invite you to come to
the Library of Congress,
and we are sure we can
provide you with the sources
that you need for your research.
Thank you very much, everyone.
>> Heather J. Sharkey:
Thank you.