cooking

Mr. Her Makes a Noodle Lunch for the Fieldwork Team

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On July 13th, 2011 the entire field school team made their first visit to Mr. Her’s studio. Mr. Her showed the team around his studio, which is currently under construction. He discussed with us several of his finished paintings. The paintings were lined up under a covered walkway with an open wall to a courtyard. He is originally from Su Pu village in Southern Ningxia Hui Autonmous District in North Central China. He explained the strong influence his home has on the imagery in his paintings. Mr. Her also described the materials he used, where he obtained the materials in Song Zhuang and how his canvases were constructed. There are several stores in Song Zhuang where artist’s materials are sold since there are so many working artists in the area.

Mr. Her told us he was working very closely with the workers helping him build the studio to make sure it fit his specific vision. He wanted to make sure his studio and gallery space would be the best space for presenting his artwork in. For example, the courtyard has hand carved images of oxen in the stone walls that Mr. Her created. His studio is still under construction and is representative of many studios in the area with regard to its state of completion. During the course of this first tour, Mr. Her told the team he would make the fieldwork team noodles the following day.

When the team returned to his studio the following day Mr. Her had already prepared the dough and it was ready to be kneaded. The team documented the preparations of the noodles from this point on. Mr. Her described the process of making the dough. He woke up at six in the morning (he was making lunch for us) and began preparing the dough which would eventually be the noodles. He told us it was important to let the dough sit for one to two hours before kneading it so it would reach the right consistency. During the morning he had also obtained the other ingredients of the soup, including vegetables and meat, and beer for the lunch.

Throughout the noodle preparation, the sound of construction could be heard in all four directions around Mr. Her’s studio. In the courtyard you could clearly hear the sounds of drilling, construction materials being moved at the sites of nearby studios and buildings. You could also hear vehicles and trucks moving down the streets around the studio. If you listen to the audio recording of the noodle preparation below can you pick out these sounds? What other sounds can you hear? The sounds of construction could also be heard in the partially enclosed area in Mr. Her’s studio where the noodles were being made, since he was still in the process of installing doors and walls. The partially enclosed area where he prepared the noodles had a second floor above it. It was still under construction and would eventually become a gallery to show his finished work to visitors.

While Mr. Her was making the noodles the materials he had out on the work table included cutting boards with flour, a teapot, ladle, chopsticks, knives, rolling pins, a lazy susan with tea and condiments, two rags, a bowl of flour and a half chopped potato. He used a table about two feet above the ground to knead, roll and cut the dough. The table was in the center of the partially constructed room and the stove was to the side of the table. Since the table was in the center of the room it was easy for the fieldwork team to document the process. Mr. Her kneaded the dough and showed one member of our team, Jeanette, how the knead the dough using the technique he was using. Jeanette received feedback from the fieldwork team and Mr. Her about how to best knead the dough to create the proper texture of the noodles. After several minutes Mr. Her began to knead the dough again.

The whole team formed a semi-circle around Mr. He while he was kneading and cutting the noodles in order to document the process. His wife videotaped and photographed the group gathered around Mr. Her. Neighboring artists, including Mr. SouTian, also came in towards the end of the preparation and ate lunch with the fieldwork team. When Mr. Her moved to the pot of boiling vegetables and meat in order to put the noodles in, the whole team moved with him to follow the process of putting the noodles in to the pot. After documenting the process of preparing the noodles, the fieldwork team had lunch with Mr. Her and some of the artists with studios neighboring his.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/31348440[/vimeo]

When you watch the video and look at the photo gallery, what kitchen utensils are like the ones you would use to prepare noodles, pasta or another similar dish? Do you think you could recreate the technique used to make these noodles after watching this video?

Listen to the sound recordings below. What sounds can you pick out from the background of the recording of noodle preparation and the recording of the fieldwork team having lunch?

Mr. Her explains his process while he prepares noodles by chinavine

Lunch conversation over Mr. Her’s noodles by chinavine

Assignment D

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Part 1.
I will describe both my current family (me and my husband who I have lived with for five years) and my family that I grew up with (myself and my grandmother). Me and my husband are photographers and we end up taking a lot of artistic photos and photos of ourselves while we are traveling. These photos are digital and we also use film cameras. Like many people, a lot of our digital photos sit in computer files and we only look at the every so often. The photos we take that get developed or are Polaroid photos end up getting put on the wall. I am usually the one that makes scrapbooks out of the photos and my husband is the one who will tape them on to the wall. Most often we look through the digital photos while we are looking for a specific photo in the digital files. Then we might start looking at images and remembering vacations. The photos we had when I was growing up were usually put away in the attic and my grandmother look care of those. Usually the photos were only accessed when I was purposefully looking through them for something specific (like the digital photos). The oldest photos I can remember is from the 1940s but there could be some that are much older. Me and my grandmother might only look at photos when we are in the attic for some other reason. So in both situations (digital and film) I only end up looking for photos when there is some other reason I would be going through them, like looking for something in a box or looking for a specific image for a project. Typically, in my family growing up we would only remember people and events in the context of a certain event. So while having a holiday dinner we might remember something that happened at a previous holiday dinner. Thinking back I’m not sure we connected stories or events to specific objects or had many photos up around the house.
Part 2.


I posted four photos. One is a photo of me and my husband when we got married at the Oregon coast and a landscape photo from the same day. The second set of photos is from a road trip we took to explore central Oregon and northern California. The picture was taken on a hike by a waterfall outside of Bend, Oregon and I included a photo of the waterfall the photo was taken in front of as well. When I was examining the photos we have I found that since it was just the two of us together a lot of the time when we were taking photos, most of the photos are of landscapes or just one of us. These were one of only a few photos I could find of the two of us together. Both of us remembered the photos being taken at different times during the course of each of the events. I thought the photo of us on our wedding day was taken before the ceremony and he thought it was taken afterward. Even though this is just a small difference in time, it does seem to represent that photos will recall events differently for people who have set up the time-line for an event differently in their mind even though we sometimes think of photos as fixed images. The same is true of the photograph by the waterfall which I thought took place at the start of the road trip, but Adam was able to demonstrate with the time stamp on the image that it took place at the end of the road trip thus demonstrating one of the benefits of digital.
Part 3.
Grandma Grunthaner’s Peanut Butter Cookies
Sift: ½ cup brown sugar and ½ cup granulated sugar
beat until soft: ½ cup butter
Add in the sugar gradually and blend these ingredients until they are creamy.
Beat in: 1 egg, 1 cup peanut butter*, ½ tsp salt, ½ tsp baking soda
sift before measuring: 1 ½ cups bread flour (I just use all purpose)
add the flour to the batter and: ½ tsp vanilla
Roll the dough into small balls. Place them on a greased (I use ungreased) tin. Press them flat with a fork. Bake them in a moderate oven, 375 degrees, for about 15 minutes.
*Do not use the natural peanut butter that is good for you. THE COOKIES WON’T TASTE RIGHT. Skippy Crunchy works best. The easiest way to measure the peanut butter is to put, say ½ cup of water in a Pyrex measuring cup and then add peanut butter until the water reaches the marker for the amount of peanut butter PLUS ½ cup. Pour out the water before you add the peanut butter!!

This is a recipe from my great-grandmother. My aunt sent it out at the holidays with a letter about the recipe. One part of her letter read “Also, while you may be wondering why I am passing this recipe on to you, it is because it is the only Worland family recipe worth passing on.” She goes on to comment on recipes made with cold hotdogs and Velveeta cheese etc. I personally never got to experience any of the recipes with Velveeta and grew up eating a very different type of diet since my grandmother I lived with cooked differently and when my father would cook he was very health conscious. After I got this letter in the mail I made a batch of the cookies and shared them with co-workers. I also sent the aunt that sent me the recipe a Polaroid of the finished product. I don’t have much interaction with this aunt who lives in Virginia so it was a way to communicate with her about a family recipe which she thought I would be interested in because I bake quite a bit. When I am cooking with my husband, especially for larger holidays, he always cooks the main course and side dishes and I make the dessert. We usually are alternating who is in the kitchen working on the different parts of the meal. Typically whenever I have been in a living situation where we cook a lot I am responsible for the dessert and so I am in the kitchen by myself either before, during or after the main preparations and eating of the meal getting that ready. Before thinking about this exercise I had never really noticed that before, but there is usually a large group of people involved in the preparations for the main meal while I am engaged in a different routine preparing the dessert.

Part 4.
I would be interested in making a documentary about the recipe I shared above that my aunt sent out to several family members including me. I would look in to exactly how many people she sent it out to and choose maybe ten of them to follow in their process of making the cookies. The characters would be these ten people in an extended family living in all different parts of the United States and possibly elsewhere depending on how far out in the family her mailings extended. I would show all the steps each person would take gathering the materials, baking and then sharing this family recipe in the respective places they were living. This would highlight not just the individual differences but the differences in the process of making the same recipe in all the different regions the people were living in. I might also interview at least two family members that remember eating Grandma Grunthaner’s cookies. During what situations did they eat the cookies, when did she usually make them and who did she share them with and what did the people I was interviewing like most about the cookies or those events? Most likely I would not interview the people actually making the cookies but rather I would let the process of baking the cookies speak for itself. I would focus on using minimal music and narration. I would think that I would focus on the different tools used in the baking process when filming the baking shots. I would also try and get some outdoor shots of the places the people making the cookies were living to enhance the context. Since the cookie recipe was taken from the 1943 version of The Joy of Cooking I might include some historical background and information about that book and the role it played in shaping the tradition and history of cooking in America.