Signing Off Amid Continued COVID Uncertainty: Until We “Meet” Again...
by Erin Jessee, Cassandra Marsillo, Margo Shea, and Stacey Zembrzycki
July 27, 2020
During one of our Zoom meetings, as we planned the schedule of posts for the coming week and found comfort in each other’s presence talking about food, work, and the current moment, Erin pulled out a ball of dough. We laughed as we watched her pound it out, understanding that under the comical nature of it all, was bubbling frustration, boiling over. For all of us. We know you don’t need a laundry list of what those frustrations might have been, because you all have been living it as well.
In that moment, we knew that we wanted to join her. We knew that there would be power in seeing the four of us, each in our little Zoom squares, pounding away at the same time, venting, laughing, and baking. We knew that this could be a virtual space of solidarity, and we wanted to invite you, our readers and collaborators, into both our literal and figurative kitchens. We planned to organize an interactive event, which was in line with community and mutual aid traditions, so as to enable interaction between our blog’s purpose and the current, pressing moment. We had been hoping to do something like this from the beginning of quarantine, but never got around to making it happen until George Floyd’s death touched off widespread protest in America and beyond, compelling us to step up and act in real ways that could affect change from within our kitchens.
Through some digging, we learned about Tangerine Jones’ Ragebaking project:
Ragebaking is a form of meditation. A way to center yourself and others in the midst of Supreme F**kery and turn anger or sorrow into something beautiful. It’s about transformation and renewal. It’s harnessing fury to tap into the power of home and hearth and holding space for healing and community. It’s making some good sh*t out of some bulls*t, plain and simple.
The “fundamentals” of rage baking, paraphrased from Jones, look something like this:
Make your rage-baking generous. Share what you bake.
Take a risk -- by making something new or by setting an intention to make a familiar recipe better.
Celebrate mistakes, or in Jones’ words, “embrace the fail.”
Bake with purpose.
“Be thoughtful, considerate and kind as f**k.” Bring your best “you” to your baking moment.
Share the process. Pics, vids, insta stories.
We were especially inspired by the insistence that ragebaking be not only creative and constructive, but also collective: Jones wrote in a Medium article entitled “The Privilege of Rage”:
Kitchens are sacred, powerful spaces to me. They are places of history and healing, of community and connection, of resistance and revolution, of transformation and truth. I’ve been taught that they hold the heart of a home and, collectively, the pulse of a community. For me, kitchens are a place for alchemy and renewal.
We loved this idea, but we weren’t sure how to channel it and how we could enact all of this from our vantage points, in three different countries. On social media, we learned about chefs Paola Velez, Willa Lou Pelini, and Rob Rubba’s global #BakersAgainstRacism movement. These initiatives and our desire, from the beginning of Historians Cooking the Past, to connect food, our kitchens, and our stories to the current moment, further confirmed what we and many before us have known to be true: food is, and always has been, inherently political.
All of the stories we have shared throughout the life of this blog reflect this reality, whether they came off as being warm, fuzzy, and focused on loving role models (grandmothers have dominated our posts), or whether they spoke to the hard moments we are facing as a civilization in turmoil. The posts that tried to unpack the difficult realties at the heart of each of our experiences - disaster capitalism, insecure food systems, precarity, discrimination against minorities - did not receive as many views as the feel good stories and we have spent a lot of time asking ourselves why this is the case. Who are our contributors? Who are our readers? What are these stories about and who are they for? To whose experiences do they speak? Whose experiences do they ignore? Ultimately, we’ve come up with one answer: white privilege. Having both the time and energy to be nostalgic in this difficult history-making moment and participate in our blog has been fun, distracting, and ultimately steeped in privilege.
Our goal in organizing a bake-a-thon which invoked #BakersAgainstRacism and acknowledged Juneteenth, the oldest national commemoration of the end of slavery organized by and for African Americans, as well as National Indigenous People's Day in Canada, was to raise money for organizations that are on the ground doing the important work required to hold our society together. While some of us marched in Black Lives Matter protests, the reality is that we could not all actively participate given the health risks posed by this pandemic.
Based on the confirmations we received from participants, our bake-a-thon raised approximately $2485 for a variety of organizations and charities, including the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal, Black Voters Matter, Equal Justice Initiative, TN BLM, Ubuntu Women’s Shelter in Glasgow, the Native Women’s Association of Canada, Montreal en Action, Afrique au Féminin, the Okra Project, the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, a Black midwifery student fund, and various local food banks.
We baked in the spirit of renewal, mutual aid, meditation, healing, and community, concepts that are so central to our homes and our kitchens. We felt that it was time to stop talking about activism, stop talking around our privilege, and start acting in ways that were manageable and reasonable for us at this time.
As we reach the end of the fifth month of these socially distanced “unprecedented times,” we have decided to put this project to rest for the time being. It was always meant to be a temporary, responsive, and reactive space for reflecting on current events while also pulling on the past, and on our training in storytelling. We didn’t know where this project would go when we started it in March, and much like COVID, we don’t know where it can take us in the future. We have a couple more posts coming this week, and then we are signing off for now. Until we “meet” again, know that we are extremely grateful for the stories and recipes you’ve shared and how they have offered a glimpse into what living history has meant for us in 2020.
Recipes & personal Reflections
Cassandra’s Bake-A-Thon Reflections: I remember mentally preparing myself in the days before the bake-a-thon. We have no AC and we knew it would be scorching. So we formed some kind of a plan: test the gnocchi and bake the cookies on Friday; olive bread first thing Saturday morning, then the rest of the gnocchi, and finish off with blueberry muffins. It ended up being down to the wire, with the last batch of muffins coming straight out of the oven and into the care package for pick up. There was no real reason for the goods we decided to bake. My boyfriend and I wanted it to be a joint effort, so we each chose two recipes and helped each other out, swapping places when one needed to start on something else. We - and our oven - did not stop until 6 PM on the last day. We were exhausted and sweaty, but also overwhelmed with that post-baking satisfaction that washes over you when all your whisking, stirring, kneading, incorporating, and (lots of) batter-tasting bears fruit. Our apartment smelled amazing, even though we didn’t. And though we didn’t have any energy left to make a batch of anything for ourselves, we fell asleep on the balcony happy to have raised $330 for the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal and to have contributed to the global #BakersAgainstRacism initiative through Historians Cooking the Past.
These are not the sugar cookies I made for the bake-a-thon, but the ones I usually make when I crave something sweet in the morning since they’re quick, easy, and small batch.
Classic potato gnocchi: 1 kg of potatoes, 1 egg, 300 g of flour plus more to dust surface, pinch of salt (without the egg, use 15 g of salt and 350 g of flour)
Boil the potatoes with the skins on, otherwise they take in too much moisture. They're usually done after about 20 minutes. Check with a fork before removing from heat.
When they cool, remove the skin and mash them.
In a bowl, fold in the egg, flour, and salt until all incorporated. Do not over-knead as you will continue to work with the dough as you cut the gnocchi. Dust flour onto your work surface.
Cut a slice at a time from the ball of dough and roll out to desired thickness. Cut the gnocchi and then roll onto a fork to get those little lines (don't be afraid to press down). If you don't know how, check out one of the many videos on YouTube.
Make sure you place the gnocchi on a floured surface so that they don't stick.
Freeze or cook immediately! They cook very quickly - when they float, they're ready.
Gabriele's olive bread: 200 g of all-purpose flour, 100 g of whole wheat flour, 150 ml of warm water, 75 g of sourdough starter, 3 g of salt, 1/3 of the olives in a 375 ml jar (green, kalamata, sliced, whatever you want!)
Mix 75 g of refreshed sourdough starter with the flour, water, and salt.
Let the bread rise for at least 8 hours (total time will depend on your starter) at room temperature in the summer, or in the oven with the oven light on in the winter.
When you're ready to make your bread, rinse olives and let them dry on a paper towel.
Preheat oven to 465º F or 240º C and line a pan with parchment paper.
On a floured surface, spread the dough by hand, keeping a rectangular shape. Make sure the thickness is between 3-4 mm.
Distribute the olives on the dough and roll (like a baguette).
Before putting the bread in the oven, make a longitudinal incision (2-3 cm deep) along the top of the loaf.
Place on the pan and bake for 20 minutes with a cup of water at the bottom of the oven for the first 4 minutes (make sure it's oven safe please).
Let cool on a wire rack.
Stacey’s Bake-A-Thon Reflections: Margo spearheaded this whole fundraising initiative despite all of us feeling completely burnt out from the winter semester. When she posted a beautiful montage of the recipes she planned to make I immediately and frantically started envisioning what kinds of foods I’d be able to commit to and make, given that there would be a heatwave on the two baking days we planned for the event. Eventually I settled on my great aunt Barbara’s pyrohy recipe. It was a staple for feeding members of her church and family, and I wanted to invoke her memory but also provide a hearty meal for those who helped fundraise in the name of #BakersAgainstRacism. In addition to this ethnic staple, I made brownies (the best recipe I have found over the course of quarantine), pre-carroty-cake to acknowledge the ever precarious nature of my work and a number of my colleague’s, and s’more cookies because I was pining over the fact that we would not be able to make it to our family cottage just five minutes over the Canada-US border in Vermont. While I made the pyrohy in advance, I did the majority of my baking on Friday and my husband Rob made deliveries to friends in the city. Overall I raised $400 for the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal, which operates in the neighbourhood where my college is located. It was a tiring but wonderful weekend, made better knowing that I fed friends good food and supported a charity that works hard to make the lives of those I see routinely, but rarely know how to help, better.
I also threw in a jar of my homemade salsa, a treasured and secret family recipe shared with me by a friend many years ago.
Margo’s Bake-A-Thon Reflections: I started with wanting to engage Jones’ principles, so I opted to bake something to share with others. I wanted to “up my game” by baking complex things or new recipes. Then I got the idea that I could offer up deliveries of baked goods and ask for donations. Who wouldn’t want a delivery of yums, especially when COVID-19 has us feeling kind of stale and restrained? I have been really inspired by LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, and especially by her insistence that power matters if the Black Lives Movement is to result in real, systemic change. So I decided to ask people to donate to the Black Voters Matter Fund but I also said that they could donate to causes that were significant to them.
I chose to make browned butter rice krispie treats because these are the comfort food of my childhood with a fancy twist. Next, sugar cookies. This was where the “rage” part of rage-baking came in for me. Since my mom stopped making them about 20 years ago, I have usually been the person in my family who makes the sugar cookies that show up at Christmas, Easter, and other holidays. My relationship with my family is strained and I don’t really engage with most of my five siblings these days. I liked the idea that there could be a place in the world for the classic iced sugar cookie I have (nearly) perfected that would let me engage in a beloved ritual of rolling, cutting, baking, decorating and sharing -- beyond family.
I opted to make chocolate babka pull-apart muffins because they are in the top three baked goods I’ve ever made and I couldn’t imagine who wouldn’t love them. Finally, I really wanted to try something new, to be experimental, so I chose to make focaccia garden art loaves.
Erin’s Bake-A-Thon Reflections: We were still deep in lockdown and physical distancing measures here in Glasgow, so I decided to focus on improving my galette-making skills and raise funds in my immediate community: mostly among the neighbours who share my building and a few local friends and colleagues. Fruit galette struck me as perfect given the time of year and the amazing locally-grown fruit that is widely available this time of year in a country whose cuisine is otherwise only celebrated for the quality (ie: hardiness) of its potatoes, cabbage, beets, and turnips. Plus, this allowed me to make the most of the glorious peaches, blueberries, strawberries, cherries, and raspberries that under normal circumstances I would have missed completely due to the hectic fieldwork and conference schedule that I typically have in the summer months. I gave people the choice between two classic galettes: peach and blueberry or mixed berry. And depending on people’s needs, I then arranged to deliver their galette fresh from the oven on the afternoon of their choice between 19-21 June. In exchange, I asked people to make donations directly to one of two organizations that are close to my heart: Ubuntu Women’s Shelter in Glasgow or the Native Women’s Association of Canada. I don’t know ultimately how much this raised -- I didn’t set an amount so that people could donate according to their conscience and financial ability -- but I made ten galettes over the weekend, which received rave reviews. One person even offered a second donation if I would share the recipe, which -- having adapted it from the ever-amazing Smitten Kitchen website -- I gladly did.