Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island (Volume 52) (California Studies in Food and Culture)

__Secrets from the Greek Kitchen__ explores how cooking skills, practices, and knowledge on the island of Kalymnos are reinforced or transformed by contemporary events. Based on more than twenty years of research and the author’s videos of everyday cooking techniques, this rich ethnography treats the kitchen as an environment in which people pursue tasks, display expertise, and confront culturally defined risks. Kalymnian islanders, both women and men, use food as a way of evoking personal and collective memory, creating an elaborate discourse on ingredients, tastes, and recipes. Author David E. Sutton focuses on micropractices in the kitchen, such as the cutting of onions, the use of a can opener, and the rolling of phyllo dough, along with cultural changes, such as the rise of televised cooking shows, to reveal new perspectives on the anthropology of everyday living. Secrets from the Greek Kitchen explores how cooking skills, practices, and knowledge on the island of Kalymnos are reinforced or transformed by contemporary events. Based on more than twenty years of research and the author’s videos of everyday cooking techniques, this rich ethnography treats the kitchen as an environment in which people pursue tasks, display expertise, and confront culturally defined risks.

Kalymnian islanders, both women and men, use food as a way of evoking personal and collective memory, creating an elaborate discourse on ingredients, tastes, and recipes. Author David E. Sutton focuses on micropractices in the kitchen, such as the cutting of onions, the use of a can opener, and the rolling of phyllo dough, along with cultural changes, such as the rise of televised cooking shows, to reveal new perspectives on the anthropology of everyday living. Introduction: Why Does Greek Food Taste So Good? -- Emplacing Cooking -- Tools And Their Users -- Nina And Irini: Passing The Torch? -- Mothers, Daughters, And Others: Learning, Transmission, Negotiation -- Horizontal Transmission: Cooking Shows, Friends, And Other Sources Of Knowledge -- Through The Kitchen Window -- Conclusion: So, What Is Cooking? -- Epilogue: Cooking (and Eating) In Times Of Financial Crisis. David E. Sutton. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 221-232) And Indexes. This volume explores the changing nature of everyday cooking practices on the Greek island of Kalymnos. It asks how cooking skills, practices, and knowledges are being reproduced or transformed, concomitant with other changes associated with contemporary life.