Skip to content
Do you have a favorite food or meal?Do you remember the first time you tasted it? What makes it a favorite?Who cooks it?Does it make a difference if you cook it or someone else cooks it?Can you cook anything?Can you think of a time when you made something delicious?Do you cook alone or with other people?When you think of a favorite food or dish, what sorts of memories come to mind? Is it a time or a place, or a special event? What does this food mean to you?Ingredients Sourcing Method Techniques/tips, and Serving suggestions/ritual.What were the added ingredients that made this a good memory? This might include company, laughter, and friendship What are some of the ingredients that you (and your family/friends) use to make up your life? These may be skills, beliefs, hopes or dreams. They might include: spirituality, honesty, patience, kindness, persistence, imagination or being different. Some further examples that children have offered included pigheadedness, fearlessness, instinct and adventure. Which of these do you particularly turn to in order to get through difficult times? Patience Kindness Resourceful Flexibility Discipline Hardworking Honesty Spirituality Bravery Perseverance?Where did your ingredients come from? What is your earliest memory of this ingredient? Do you gather different ingredients? Or borrow from friends? Do you share them with others? Has someone shared them with you?
Home grown Imported Borrowed A gift Shared Supermarket Pantry StolenFrom the market placeImportant people: family of origin, family of choice, special people who have influenced us, friends, neighbors, heroes or pets. Cultural history or identity: Race, culture, language, nationality Family History: Ancestry, family name, origins, extended family Locality: Village, town, country, environment Spiritual Beliefs: Belief systems, religion, spiritual practices Folks Culture: Dance, songs, sports, meditation, prayers, stories Physicality: Our physical abilities, health, age.How do you use your Ingredients? Would you use them again? Would you change their sequence? Would you change combination? Would you get different results if you put things in different combinations? Throughout your life in trying to make this recipe, have you discovered any special techniques/tips? If someone else was going to try this recipe, are there any tips you would offer them? From where do you think you learned this top? From who did you learn it? If someone passed this knowledge onto you, why do you think they gave this to you? What do you think they appreciated in you to give you this?If they could see you now, what do you think they would say to you? Can you see yourself one day giving these gifts/tips to others? Have you ever made any mistakes from which you have learned things? F Are there any learnings from past mistakes that would be good to include as a tip alongside your recipe? Who would you invite to share your meal? Are there any rituals or ceremonies that you appreciate? These could range from formal to informal rituals, from spiritual to sporting, and everything in between. What do you like about these rituals or ceremonies? What aspect would you like to include in your ritual? Is there anyone or anything that would like to appreciate or express gratitude towards in this ritual? If so, what would this look like? How do you show gratitude? How does gratitude feel?
Recipes For Life
Step One
To introduce both the program and the presenter, it helps to talk about positive associations with certain foods and the memories these evoke. This might be a sensory memory or an association to a time and a place. Some questions to stimulate our thoughts and taste buds might include:
Step Two
In the second part of the process we begin to consider not only recipes for food, but recipes for life, for instance the recipe you use for ‘getting through hard times’, or the recipe for ‘making a transition in life’, or a ‘recipe for happiness’, or for ‘good relations in the family’, and so on. This is not a recipe for describing one’s whole life, but a way of speaking about special skills, knowledge’s and ways of dealing with certain experiences of life. Every recipe is different.
Share an example recipe to assist people to understand the process rather than on the content of the recipe.
Here’s an example of a ‘Recipe for getting through hard times’ by Anita Yap, Lanny Santoso and Lena Low from Singapore.
As with all recipes, ‘Recipes for Life’ consist of a number of different sections. The sections provide the framework of the process. We flow from one section to the next.
The sections of each recipe include:
Below is an outline of each section and how we use these to spark rich story development in relation to people’s skills, knowledge, and what they give value to in life.
INGREDIENTS
To make a good dish, it’s important to have the right ingredients. The ingredients are the foundation on which our recipes are based. Think about your favorite dish to eat in life. What are its ingredients? What makes it special?
To spark conversations about ingredients, we ask people to think about one of their best memories which includes food. This might relate to eating, cooking, growing food, or any events which included food. The possibilities are diverse, from feeding a baby, to being out to dinner with friends, to eating your favorite dish, to learning to cook, to eating after doing exercise, to foods you have when you are sick or sad, to drinking cool water on a hot day, to a special pot your grandmother might have used, or something funny. Some questions we use to guide this part of the process then include:
Sometimes we might offer prompts. We might ask, ‘Have you used any of these ingredients at those times:
It’s important to be able to measure your ingredients. They can be measured in relation to each other, or by recognized importance. Some measures we have used in Recipes for Life have included: kilo, cup, litre, season to taste, a splash or sprinkle, to tonnes and truck loads! Very quickly, by speaking through the metaphors of food and recipe, we start to hear significant stories. In a workshop with a group of elderly people, one of the recipes created was inspired by their experiences during World War II:
This is a ‘recipe for hope’ that came from the war. One of the ingredients is ‘strength’. We didn’t know at first that we had this ingredient, but before long we had tonnes of the stuff.
Sometimes we also get to hear very specific measurements of ingredients, such as in this example of a ‘recipe for getting through hard times’ from Brazil:
SOURCING
By sourcing we mean: Where did the Ingredients come from?
Narrative practice is vitally interested in tracing the storylines, the histories, of people’s skills, knowledges, hopes, and dreams (White, 2007).
Richly tracing and describing these histories/stories can contribute to people having a renewed sense of identity. It can also assist people to reconnect what they care about with those who introduced them to those values in the first place. In this section, we ask people to tell us stories about how and when some of the Ingredients they have named came into their life.
Questions we might ask include:
Some of the metaphors people have used in relation to the sourcing of their ingredients have included:
For example: ‘Carefulness came into my life in 1953 … it was shown to me by my mother, she had buckets of it but I only needed 3 cups of it!’
Sourcing locates us. In this section, we tell the stories of how treasured ingredients have come into our lives. Our sourcing stories may involve:
Sometimes the sourcing stories are unexpected. One person created her ‘Recipe for survival’ in relation to dealing with the challenges of memory loss. One of the key ingredients in her recipe is adventure. She traced the source of ‘adventure’ back to a small airport close to where she grew up as a child. ‘Not many people flew back then. I would follow the planes across the sky wishing that one day I would be traveling on one’. When asked where she thought ‘adventure’ would be in the future she said, ‘It will definitely be with me because I have to carry on and I have to be strong’.
METHOD
The method is how we use our ingredients. The process is creative, directive, and sequential. It is also transformative and alchemical. It is here in the recipe that we look at how to bring out the best in our ingredients. Blending, mixing separating, combining, rolling, kneading and proofing are all words that we might use in relation to bringing ingredients together. It is also time to reflect on qualities and skills that assist us in life. The questions we might ask include:
Here is another person’s recipe for spirituality:
TECHNIQUES/TIPS
In this section we discuss special techniques and tips. These may be special practices we have learned over time that result in something special. Or they may be special tricks or advice given to us by someone who has cared about us. Or, they may be special knowledge that comes in handy when you need to adapt a recipe to suit a particular situation. We might not know we have special techniques or where they came from or the special people involved until we reflect on them. These techniques or tips are often handwritten notes tacked into recipe books or written in pencil along the margins of recipes. For example - if dealing with this sort of’ hard time … add an extra pinch of … or ‘change courage for bravery and a handful of humor’.
It’s relevant to note that sometimes techniques are the result of a mistake or mishap. Sometimes in life very important knowledge comes from our mishaps. This is true in the world of cooking too! If no-one had ever burnt sugar we would never have had caramel flavor or toffee! Here are some of the questions we may ask in this section:
Within the ‘Recipe for spirituality’ part of the method included: To proof it, cover in a warm quiet place where it will not be disturbed, and leave for as long as it needs.
A special tip or technique would elaborate on this. When times are too much, you might need extra proofing. This involves rest and surrender.
So the special tip in very tough times involves retiring to a warm undisturbed spot to rest and grow., For me this special tip is linked to what Sissy used to say ‘this too shall pass’, and to the kindness of old people.
Focusing on who is linked to our tips and techniques is a way of acknowledging the contributions and memories of those people who are traveling with us through our recipes.
SERVING SUGGESTIONS / THE RITUAL
The final part of creating the recipe involves describing the ‘serving suggestions’ or the ritual at which we would like our recipe to be delivered. This involves planning a celebration of our recipes and our lives. This might be a ceremony which involves gratitude and remembering all those who have contributed, shaped and influenced us. This can be very moving. We can be creative about our celebration. It might be an intimate dinner or a great banquet. It could be a sunset feast on the beach with music and dancing, or a relaxed afternoon picnic by a stream. It might be an elaborate red carpet event. As well as the setting, we must choose the guests for this ritual. These are often friends and family, heroes, dead or alive, whoever we want to celebrate or give gratitude to. This ritual might also involve special words or a tribute to people involved in the meal in some way. It might correspond with a time of year or celebration. It might also include gratitude to the earth, animals, farmers, fishermen, growers, teachers, carers.
Questions we might ask include:
Step Three: PRESENTING AND RE-PRESENTING THE RECIPES
Once we have been through these sections, we make sure that each participant has a written record of their own recipe! We present these to participants in a formal acknowledging manner. Depending on the context, we may also re-present these recipes within certificates or placemats or recipe books! Sometimes we include a pictorial record of our past journey, and also where we would like to go to in the future. We speak together about how these recipes may fit with special hopes and dreams they have for themselves and for others. Ideally, we also cook and eat together. We bring together our favorite food recipes with our recipes for life!
AN EXAMPLE OF USING THE RECIPE OF LIFE
Here is an example from Recipe of Life program alongside a cooking project designed for working in shelters with children experiencing homelessness. Combining cooking, artwork, storytelling and recipes for life has made it possible for children and young people to give voice to the strength in their stories, and their skills and knowledges, where previously there was silence. This project was inspired by a Kaurna Elder, Katrina Power, who was providing consultation about ways of working with Aboriginal people’s experience of being in shelters. After talking with Katrina, it was also decided to mark this event by making recipe books. These would include the children’s recipes, artwork and photographs of the food that was made, and of children doing the cooking. As Katrina Power describes: ‘Too often our children are made invisible, especially in these situations. The only pictures you see are kids with bruises on posters. Those negative images don’t speak of our strengths or of our stories. Too often our images are lost’. Building on Katrina’s idea, the project created recipe books with young people in a variety of shelters. The following examples were developed with a group of children from a wide range of cultural backgrounds who were living together, with their mothers, in a shelter in Adelaide. There were two brothers from Sierra Leone, two white Australian sisters, one Aboriginal boy, and one white Australian boy. The group was quite unruly at times and we wondered whether it would ever be possible to create recipes. But gradually, the following recipe was developed to convey how they work together as a team in the shelter:
After this ‘Recipe for Team Awesome Crew’ had been created, each member of the crew then made their own. As the young people made their recipes, facilitators constantly checked in with them to see how their recipe was unfolding for them. This is similar to cooking in the
kitchen. As you are cooking, you constantly taste the food to see how the flavors are building and the recipe is developing. It’s important to keep checking in with participants about their experience of the process and making whatever adjustments might be necessary.
One member, Liam, had recently learned that he was soon to leave the shelter and his newly found friends. This was potentially devastating for Team Awesome and for Liam. Building on the recipe metaphor, Liam embarked on creating his recipe for a new start:
The process of generating this recipe transformed Team Awesome’s experience of Liam’s eminent departure. It also transformed Liam’s experience. He realized that he had a lot of knowledge of what it takes to make ‘a new start’ and could draw upon this. Other young people who have created their recipes have gone on to use these as reference points as to how to act in school, how to get through hard times, and how to work together.
The article you have read is copyright © Dulwich Centre Publications Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968, no part of this article may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission. All enquiries should be made to the copyright owner at: Dulwich Centre Publications, Hutt St PO Box 7192, Adelaide, SA, Australia, 5000; email dcp@dulwichcentre.com.au
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ··· in the right corner or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.