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Différance

Sunshine salad

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Analyses My approach to developing these analyses has generally been introspective. Where a particular recipe from the archive has given me pause, I've tried to connect it with my own cooking, a memory, or some other facet that brings the present together with the past. I've found it hard, in doing this, not to bring a certain relativism into the mix. Recipes like Sunshine Salad (left) seem positively absurd to me, today, but I have to consider that my grandmother and I came from very different worlds. I also like to think that she was excited for these recipes, happy to try them, taste them, serve them. And if lemon-tomato gelatin made her happy, and especially if it tasted good to her, then far be it from me to critique that.

But I've also tried to see the connections between the recipes themselves. Scalar makes that easy, in some ways, but hard in others. I want here to supply one of those "gimmicky network graphics" I mentioned previously. A network graphic is basically a visualization of the way things are connected, created in the hope that by mapping relationships visually, one will be able to better understand connections, see hitherto unrecognized relationships, and envision the totality of a relationship. This one shows the tags I created (recipes written by my grandmother, recipes with peppers & onions, etc) as the central, red-colored hubs to which the individual, green-colored recipes are connected. In this way, you can easily see what the major players are, and even drag-and-drop to reorganize them. This can help you better understand how the network operates: the more connections a hub has, the more "gravity" it has when you move it. Try moving the recipes hub to see what I mean!

You'll notice that I've often supplemented these analyses with recipes of my own. These take the form of a very modern cooking blog, rather than a simple index card. I'm still unsure how I feel about that, but their presence is necessary one way or the other and has given me additional insight into how my grandmother's cooking might have worked. Writing recipes down is hard, especially when you don't actually measure or time things. This, I think, explains why the foods I remember most from my past—chipped beef gravy, the salmon cakes made from canned salmon only when it went on sale—aren't represented here. She just made them too often to justify the labor of writing a recipe down. It was always already stored in muscle memory.