Cooking with Grandmothers

K'eguro Macharia guest writes this week about rural cooking shows.

This week, I have a guest, writer and excellent person K'eguro Macharia. He is the author of the book Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora, winner of the 2020 Alan Bray Memorial Prize. He lives in Nairobi, and you can follow him on Twitter.

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Cooking with Grandmothers

When I was growing up in 1980s Kenya, there was one cooking show on Kenyan TV: Mke Nyumbani. Roughly translated as housewife. Cooking was work for women. For wives and domestic workers. From what I remember, the show was sponsored by Kenyan cooking brands, so the recipes showed how to use particular cooking fats—Kimbo, with the texture and flavor of crisco; cowboy, a bright orange Kimbo alternative that had a pungent chemical taste; and elianto, liquid corn oil, especially suited for deep frying chips— and royco, a powdered blend of spices. The recipes tended toward the basic: rice with meat stew. Ugali with sukuma wiki. A very basic vanilla cake. Pancakes. Fried sausages. It felt like an extension of a home science class, teaching the newly emerging Kenyan middle class the types of meals that were appropriate to serve families and guests. No grandmothers were mentioned. This was cooking for urban people.

Grandmother food was rural food, and the distinction between rural and urban defined Kenya’s middle class. Once, we were having guests over and for greens, I suggested we harvest terere (amaranth, callaloo) and managu (African nightshade) from the garden, and my mother and aunts looked at me in horror. That was rural food. The guests—my aunts who live in rural Kenya—would refuse to eat such food. We had to buy cabbage.

I did not learn any recipes from my grandmother. From what I can recall, she did not have any specific recipes. When my cousins and I stayed with her during the school holidays, she would make a hearty stew. She put vegetables, starches, and meat into a pot, added salt and water, and boiled until it was edible. Most generally, it had onions, carrots, cabbage, potatoes—always potatoes—and cubed pieces of beef or mutton. When we gathered for family feasts, more elaborate dishes, including pilau and chapati, were made by my aunts.

So I was fascinated when I started watching U.S. cooking shows and noticed how often grandmothers were invoked. Apple pies, just like grandma made! Turkey with all the trimmings, just like grandma made! Boiled cabbage, just like grandma made. For amateur cooks—Rachael Ray, for instance—the grandmother used as a credential that culinary schools cannot bestow. Nostalgia is training. For professionally trained chefs, the grandmother is invoked to relate to untrained home chefs. For a long time, there seemed to be something particularly U.S. about this focus on grandmothers.

A few years ago, I wondered if other places also used grandmothers in the same way, and I stumbled upon the world of Asian grandmothers on YouTube.

For a few months, I was obsessed with watching Mastanamma, who, according to a 2017 video, was 105 years old.  

In the earliest videos I recall, she does not speak at all, and no other people appear to be helping her. She is dressed in a sari, hair held back from her face, and cooks outside. The setup is rural: most often, she cooks over a wood fire, and part of the process is watching her build the fire and manipulate the firewood to adjust the heat. The cooking tools are basic: knives and machetes, graters that look homemade, and very basic pots and pans. While the ingredients are clearly identifiable for those familiar with cooking—salt, whole spices, common herbs, powdered spices, the most identifiable being turmeric, chili, and cumin, and whatever meat or vegetable or grain is being made—no measurements are given. It is the grandmother cooking of a handful or this and a pinch of that.

Unlike my grandmother, Mastanamma paces her cooking. In a Yummy Chicken Drumstick recipe, she sets her large metal pot on top of three stones, and builds a wood fire under it. This is familiar to me. The three-stone technique is what rural Kenyans use. Once the pot is ready, she blooms whole spices including cinnamon, bay leaf, black cardamon, and whole bay leaf). Next, she adds water, some kind of green herb (perhaps methi leaves), and lets the mixture boil. After that, she adds chicken legs and lets them boil until cooked. While they are cooking, we see her sitting by the pot patiently, gazing into the distance. Once the chicken is ready, the water is drained, and then the boiled chicken is coated with turmeric, chili, cumin, coconut flakes, ginger-garlic paste, yogurt, and vegetable oil, all by hand. She is still not talking, and there are no written instructions, so I’m guessing some of the ingredients. This mixture is left to marinate, though it’s not clear for how long. Finally, we see her frying the marinated chicken and, when it’s done, adding dhania as a final touch.

I am intrigued by the choreography of this cooking, by the staging of it, just as I am by the filming. The aesthetic of the video is talented amateur. It is not shaky and there is a good balance between close-up and distanced shots. The number of angles suggest that at least more than one filming device is used, though the strange angle of some of the shots points to phone cameras rather than professional video equipment. But I could be wrong. This is part of what’s so compelling about these videos: the professional production of amateurism. Each recipe I have seen requires intricate steps, but the tools of U.S. cooking shows—how much to use of what, how long each step should take, the stories that flavor the recipes—are all absent. Most of all, I am captured by her silence. In some ways, it is a relief from overly chatty U.S. amateur chefs. And in other ways, it is eerie.

It had been a while since I watched her videos, and when I returned, I found they had been rebranded. Where, before, she had been a rural grandmother in India, now she has a name. Recipes have ingredient lists, though no measurements are given. And it turns out that I am not the only one obsessed with her: the BBC ran a segment about her.

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More recently, I’ve been watching a woman from China, identified as Fujian Grandma. In some of the earlier videos, she is identified as a “rural aunt.” Like Mastanamma, Fujian Grandma does not speak in most of the videos, even though she is clearly being filmed by different cameras. The camera work in the Fujian videos is professional, with fade-outs and similar devices (I will not pretend I know much about cinema). The Fujian grandma might be anywhere from her late 40s to her early 60s—it’s almost impossible to tell. Part of the illusion being sold is that the labor of rural life sustains health.

A major difference between Mastanamma and Fujian Grandma is the kind of recipes and techniques used. Mastanamma cooks mostly one-pot meals. They are layered and intricate and probably take about 3 hours to prepare. In contrast, Fujian Grandma makes foods that take days, weeks, and months to be ready. In the purple rapeseed video, we see her harvest the rapeseed, place salt over it and let it marinate for a day, place it on a drying rack and dry it for a day, place the dried rapeseed in a pot and pour brine over it for a day, place the brined rapeseed out in the sun to dry for two days, return to the rapeseed to the brine for another three days, remove it from the brine and place in the sun until completely dry. At which point, the brined and dried rapeseed can be rehydrated and cooked. All of this compressed into a video that lasts less than 10 minutes.

All the videos I have seen have a similar farm-to-table aesthetic. While farm-to-table in the U.S. focuses on the freshest, most seasonal food, in the Fujian Grandma videos the focus is how food is harvested and processed and transformed: it is dried and steamed and pickled and dried, with long intervals between each step. Nostalgia is gendered as women’s labor. One video title reads, “Grandma uses 50-year-old tools to brew wine by ancient method.” One of the most popular implements in Fujian Grandma’s videos is a hand-powered stone mill she uses to grind grains and legumes into pastes and powders. Much as I am charmed by watching her do it—I am not immune to the nostalgia—I wonder about the labor involved. I wonder about the particular ways women are being asked to incarnate tradition.

It is, in part, the contrast between the high quality of the filming and the range of tools the Fujian Grandma uses that disturbs me.  The tools are basic: mortar and pestle instead of an electric grinder, external drying racks instead of a dehydrator, meals cooked over a stove fueled by firewood instead of gas or electric. Yet, the filming is professional: the lighting is good, multiple angles are used, and it seems multiple cameras. It’s the kind of production that costs a lot of money. If that is so, it is quite likely that more modern, time-saving  tools would be affordable. We are asked to participate in a fantasy where recipes that require intricate steps and hard work are labors of love, the essence of a rural bucolic that depends on women’s silent labor.

With their focus on natural ingredients, prolonged cooking processes, and anti-tech tools, these videos contrast the many “quick hack” others that promise easy recipes. Cakes made from three ingredients. Meals prepared in 10 minutes. An ever-growing assortment of tools that make prepping and cooking faster and more efficient. At the same time, these videos featuring rural women—we can suspend the term grandmother for now—contrast the many others filmed by cooking influencers in well-equipped kitchens, with an assortment of ingredients we are assured can be found at local specialty stores. Or others with speciality tools made by exclusive craftspeople or “picked up” during trips to a range of international locations.

But the fantasy that rural tools and methods are simpler and easier and cheaper only works if we discount the arduous labor these women perform. We must discount the hand grinding, the work to collect firewood and feed the fire to keep cooking temperatures constant, the elaborate processes of drying and fermentation, and the general sense that a meal takes weeks or months to prepare, not minutes or hours. Maintaining tradition is hard work. As these videos have gained in popularity—the Fujian Grandma channel has about 150 thousand subscribers, and videos regularly get over 300 thousand views, with the most popular getting well over a million views—the frequency of posting has increased. It might well be that there’s a large reserve of content that is released at scheduled times, but it might also be that the demand for content has increased the demands on the Fujian Grandma, so that food items once prepared at specific times of year to celebrate specific occasions, items requiring intricate processes, are now prepared to provide content.

As I watch these videos—and I must admit, I enjoy them a lot, so I am not claiming any innocence—I think of the old divide between tradition and modernity: women incarnate and preserve tradition while men represent modernity. These videos by rural women are available at a historical moment when gender is fraught, when there are global demands and requirements that gender is fixed and immutable, and deviations should be punished. In June, FINA, the world governing body for swimming, banned transgender women from participating in swimming competitions. Over the past few years, at least five African women have been banned from competing in global sports based on their hormone levels. While the world of elite sports may seem completely detached from cooking by rural women, the latter world is offered as a corrective to the former. Tradition is invoked to discipline women into performing proper gender, and that gender is located in the rituals of home and hearth. Most of all that proper, traditional gender is located in the silence of the cooking women.

It might well be that such videos provide a salve for our broken times, quiet moments in which we have space to dream of futures free from wars and pandemics and ecological devastation. Yet, such a bucolic vision is only possible if we discount the work rural women perform to sustain tradition.