Sharing food is usually an act of love, joy or celebration (if not all three), which is why food is so intrinsic to memory and nostalgia. This sense of what it was like to be loved and fed by another is what Barcelona-based artist Sophia Katharina is trying to capture through her crowdsourced Food & Love art project.
Katharina, 26, invites people to share their favourite recipes and the memory tied to those recipes, in posts that she then illustrates. This recipe in personalised digital art form is then preserved on her website, soephely.com, and a print shared with the contributor.
Katharina accepts submissions in Spanish, English and German and has so far received stories from Spain, Italy, the US, UK, Germany and India. “With almost every recipe, I get to discover some fascinating dish or ingredient I’d never seen or heard of before,” Katharina says. “There seems to be infinite approaches to preparing a meal.”
It’s also heartening, she says, to read of how a chicken soup conjures memories of a loving grandmother in one contributor’s mind; how a loaf of bread is forever tied to an act of kindness in another’s; or how familiar flavours of street food in a new city made someone miss home a little bit less. Many of these are simple recipes: bhel, butter chicken, risotto, but the stories are a complex and touching mix of emotion and memory.
“I could smell tamarind; I could hear the ragda lentil boiling and I could see a big container of puris behind the counter. I couldn’t contain my happiness,” says the story on finding Mumbai-style chaat in Arunachal Pradesh, which accompanies a recipe for bhel puri. “The feeling was as if I’d finally found what I was looking for.”
A recipe for krachmandeln, a German dessert of candied almonds, begins, “My Granny used to make ‘cracking almonds’ for my sister and me when we came to visit her. At the time we knew that our Granny was ill and did not feel well. But being children, we really did not notice and just enjoyed having fun, cooking, baking and playing with her.”
Katharina sees her work as complementing these memories. “The picture serves as a reminder, and gives people a whole new way to appreciate the food they ate and loved,” she says. The contributor of the recipe may disclose as much or as little as they want to about the role the dish played or plays in their life. This flexibility gives the stories a layer of intimacy that’s intriguing, a sudden bright light shone onto a stranger’s life.
Since February this year, when the project was launched, Katharina has posted 21 entries, with another 30 waiting to be sketched. Among them is one by Anusha Sundaresan, 30, a Berlin-based food entrepreneur who contributed her mother’s vegetable pulao recipe. She picked it, she says, because it was the dish that offered sustenance and solace when she first left home as a student seven years ago. The one-pot meal could be made quickly and easily with more or less whatever was in her fridge. Plus, every time she made pulao, her kitchen smelt like home.
The pulao she makes today combines her memories of home with new memories of cooking with her German boyfriend, Sundaresan told Wknd. The print Katharina sent her as a thank-you is now added to the mix. It sits on the corkboard in her bedroom, among other souvenirs of years gone by: photographs, postcards, letters and cards.
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