Dear Dartmouth,
Everyone knows that food brings people together. That’s why so many of our cultural, religious, and commemorative holidays and festivals center around feasts. As a human race, we’ve imbued food with the power to evoke and create memories, to channel and magnify emotions. A table set with plates and people with family that remind us of feasts past, dishes that make our mouths water and our lips tug upward into a smile is universally accepted as an occasion for joy and celebration. But interestingly, as you may have noticed, these past months, as the country has been confined into our homes, food has become a topic of incessant interest and fascination.
As many of us began to feel constrained within our homes and started to miss our friends and family not with us, we turned to food. We did so for comfort, of course, but I also feel that we reached for those long-held family recipes and strived to recreate restaurant favorites because we wanted to feel that joy and delightful anticipation that food always sparks within us. This is the joy of celebrations and holidays from the past but also the simple contentedness of sitting at a restaurant surrounded by your favorite people, chatting over plates and plates of hot, flavorful, delicious foods. Food and people are inextricably linked, and that may be why so many have begun to explore this connection through a new medium: the virtual scape.
About a month into quarantine, once I had exhausted myself by baking and cooking every recipe I had ever saved on my Pinterest boards, I started to search for new ways to further my passion for cooking. New recipes, though, just weren’t that exciting anymore. So I spoke to my cousin, Roshni Dugar ’20, on the phone, and we decided to try something new that she’d done a few times with her friends: making food together virtually. We picked a recipe based on ingredients we both had and called each other up one Friday afternoon, clad in aprons and whisks in hand, to simultaneously prepare a batch of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. It was a basic choice, I know, but our focus wasn’t so much the food itself.
Instead, it was an effort to recreate the effortless link we feel in person when two people cook or eat together. And the result was beautiful. The actual baking served as a conduit for conversation: we dropped in flour and chocolate chips together while talking about TV shows and school drama, we combined the dough while discussing our favorite childhood memories, we waited for our cookies to bake in the oven while questioning what our futures looked like. Since then, we’ve roped in another cousin, and I have a feeling our cooking circle will continue to grow.
The difference between looking at a person’s floating head on FaceTime for an hour at a time versus engaging in an effortless dialogue ribboned together with a mutual intention – to bake those cookies – was astronomical. With both our hands and minds busy, the two screens and thousands of miles between us fall away. What was left was natural and easy, like a conversation on a park bench.
Roshni agreed, stating that once she discovered her newfound for cooking over quarantine, she appreciates that cooking virtually with friends and family has “given me the opportunity to share my newfound excitement with others, and has become a great bonding experience.” She continued, “By scheduling weekly virtual cooking sessions with friends, I’ve been able to ensure that I stay close with them despite the large physical distance quarantine has created.”
As my cousins and I continue our weekly cooking and gabbing sessions, my mother independently decided to set up a similar engagement with her friends. With eight women in total, one picks a recipe each week. Where my mother’s cooking Zooms differ from mine is that each woman in her friend group shares a recipe that is somehow significant and personal to her. This could be a family recipe passed down for generations or an Indian sweet someone had grown up savoring that was difficult to find in the States. In any case, each of these recipes held a tangible cultural and familial component, expounded by the fact that most times, the children would join in too––if not in cooking, then certainly in eating and appreciating. Here we see food as both a vehicle for culture and ancestral connection and as a way for us to remove ourselves from the confines of quarantine, spending time with our friends without the clunky reality of a screen so conspicuously separating us.
As we continue to confine ourselves to our homes for the protection of those most vulnerable in our communities, it is important to take time for ourselves and do what makes us happy. It’s equally important, I believe, to try to find elements of our regular lives that we may thread into our present realities. For me, this means bringing together food with family and friends and with joyful memories and open-mindedness. If you haven’t already, try calling up your best friend and picking a recipe to make together. I’ll soon be doing just that with my sorority because each of us has come to the similar realization that cooking together, virtual though it be, brings us some semblance of closeness and comfort. You may find yourself feeling as if you’re back in your dorm kitchen or smiling over a coffee and scone at KAF. That cozy and bubbly feeling of being surrounded by warm people and warm food isn’t too hard to recreate after all. Such is the power of food and of the cultures and memories that food evokes.
Yours truly,
Sanjana
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