«Super Authentic Home Cooking with Tomatoes and Eggs» is a project by Chiara Giardi, Jiaxi Han and Sherry Xiao. It was presented as part of the exhibition “Saganaki on Ice”, which took place at Communitism (Athens, Greece) on 28 October 2021.
Super Authentic Home Cooking with Tomatoes and Eggs is a project by Chiara Giardi, Jiaxi Han and Sherry Xiao. It was presented during the exhibition ‘Saganaki on Ice’ held at Communitism (Athens, Greece) on 28 October 2021. We are interested in the entangled processes that brought tomatoes, a comparatively ‘new’ vegetable fruit on most markets in the world, to be absorbed by local cuisines.
Tomatoes have been embraced to the extent that they can now be considered essential elements of different culinary identities around the world. For the sake of this little experiment, with the limited resources available, we decided to explore these processes through the variations of tomato and egg recipes we could collect from the participants of Transcultural Collaboration. We collected and tested four recipes where tomatoes and eggs are the essential or even the only ingredients.
Despite the striking similarity in ingredients and procedures, the recipes we collected are often presented through a national and atemporal lens, as a representative dish, a speciality of that single region: the authentic ‘Chinese’ Tomato and Egg, the ‘Greek’ Kagianas, the ‘Colombian’ Huevos Pericos, the ‘Italian’ Frittata. Such basic recipes were interesting to us because they show the entanglement below the label “a specialty from…”. In these homey recipes, the authority of the cookbook recipe is not so important; in the personal narratives we collected while cooking with participants in Transcultural Collaboration, we found there can be countless variations on the same recipe: the recipe in grandma or mum style, this or that Youtube tutorial, this or that ‘authoritative’ blog about a specific cuisine.
We combined personal narratives and research on the tomato in a cooking performance that included a multi-media installation and a zine. In the simplicity of tomato and egg recipes, we found a complex playground for exploring the doing/undoing and the writing/re-writing of national/cultural identities.
Group members: Jiaxi Han, Sherry Xiao, Chiara Giardi
Published: 5.10.2021
Location: Communitism (Athens, Greece)
Language: English
Programme: Transcultural Collaboration