WRITING, COOKING AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Inspired by Dorothy Iannone’s A Cookbook, made in 1969, the writer María Arranz proposes a workshop aimed at the creation of a collective recipe book. Based on a survey of the literary and artistic works of different creators who have made cooking a focal point of their lives, Arranz invites us to take part in a space designed to identify connections between the world of food and other fields like creation and writing that combine art, food and life.

In A Cookbook, Dorothy Iannone shows us that a collection of recipes can reflect not only daily life but the author’s existential musings. While a recipe book can be intimate and introspective, it also speaks to us of domestic and popular culture, of the time and place in which it was compiled. On loose sheets of paper, in notebooks or in published works; with or without drawings; with notes in the margins; with stains and splashes or pristine; inserted with tips honed from years of trial and error, or with precise instructions that leave no room for improvisation. A recipe book reveals many things and therefore demands attentive reading, much more attentive than has historically been granted to these texts. In this workshop we’ll talk, reflect on, discuss and, above all, read recipes, relating these readings to Dorothy’s work and those of other artists and authors who have also found a unique form of expression and thought in cooking.

María Arranz is a writer and a journalist specialising in cultural, feminist and gastronomic topics. A regular contributor on gastronomy to media like El País, she is the author of El delantal y la maza (Col&Col ediciones), an essay about the role of women in the kitchen from a feminist perspective. Among many other interests, in 2013 she founded FUET Magazine, which examines the relationships between food and culture, and she was a member of Cocinar Madrid, a multidisciplinary collective that uses cooking as a tool of anthropological research.