Starter Kit. Idea 40 of 500. Cluster 2
Grandmother's Kitchen: one dish, one district, one story
The mechanism, from the book
The craft cannot be copied and the object can. In Europe people queue to watch glass being blown and then buy the glass.
The first step
Record one grandmother cooking one dish from her district, with her permission: the dish, the method, and the story of when it was made. Write it up as a single page with photographs. Offer a lunch of that dish, cooked by her, to visitors, and the recipe card as a paid keepsake. Bookings and cards sold are the proof.
- Who pays first
- Visitors and Sri Lankan families abroad who want to eat one district's dish from the person who has cooked it longest.
- What leaves today
- Recipes held by grandmothers leave with them, unrecorded and unpaid; a named dish with its story turns that knowledge into income.
Ask first
- the area Medical Officer of Health. Ask what standard a home kitchen needs to cook for paying guests.
- Department of Cultural Affairs. Ask whether they collect regional recipes or stories that could be shared.
Check before you spend
That each cook agrees to share her recipe and story and is credited and paid, and that the kitchen meets hygiene expectations.
Find out these three numbers
- What will a visitor pay for one dish and its story?
- How many grandmothers in the district would teach their dish?
- Which guesthouses would send guests for an afternoon?
A comparison from the book
Sri Lanka. Chapter Five
"with somebody's grandmother, and they go home able to cook it for"
The grandmother is the teacher, and that is what makes the lesson worth travelling for.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.