This sound is water. But is it boiling water, steaming from a cooking pot in a warm, family kitchen? Or is it water rushing down a bed of rocks cut through a pristine sylvan glade? Or does it gush from a chrome faucet into the cracked enamel of a clawfoot tub, ready to clean behind a new generation's ears and wash away the sting of shampoo? Is this the sound of the stream left behind by the tempest that has just destroyed the midwestern family's home—their hopes, their dreams?
We call all of these things water, and if pressed we would identify each of the sounds above as water. Yet, we have no need to dip our hand into a swirling pot of cooking pasta to know that the searing pain we would invite from that action is vastly different from the soothing sensation of dipping one's hand into a bath prepared with parental care. This idea of difference approaches—in the most basic, reductionist of ways—Jacques Derrida's idea of
différance for which this project is named (Derrida, a veritable giant in the field of English studies, speaks of différance with regards to the relationship between the spoken and written word). Language can never truly communicate what its speaker intends: there is always a distance between one's meaning and the words one uses, a distance that we attempt to gap by adding more words, by constantly deferring meaning.
Differ.
Defer.
Différance. Water. Boiling water. Water boiling on a stovetop. Salted water happily boiling atop a stove scrubbed ever-clean by generations of my family. But what or who are my family? What does the water taste like? Smell like? What land filtered it? What year is this in—how does that year feel? In what color of nostalgia is it steeped?
All of this came recently to mind while cooking pasta, an act that always brings me to a place of comfort. Cooking reminds me of weekends spent in my grandmother's kitchen, watching her strong, though aged, hands clean vegetables, chop cuts of meat, wash pans, and perform the work of nourishing her family. It was in these moments that I first learned both the art of cooking and its purpose, and I've spent the following decades of my life improving my craft. In this, as with many facets of my life, my grandmother remains with me—a part of me. But just as water is ever mercurial, there are many differences between the simple rural woman who raised me and the English doctoral candidate I've become. A whole lifetime of differences, really. This project is an attempt to understand, through cooking, those differences, to map them in language, and at the same time to better understand how the tools which the humanities give me are at once adequate and inadequate to the task I've set. In doing so, I hope to abide by the prescriptions set forth by
Kathleen Fitzpatrick for making university projects accessible to the general public, avoiding jargon and unnecessary theoretics. We call this an outward-facing project: one that makes it a little easier for people not in the humanities to understand what it is the humanities and humanists do. I hope that it is the kind of project my grandmother would have wanted, and been able, to read. I hope that you like it, too, even if you're just here for fun, old recipes (of which there are literally dozens!).
