From Smashed Potatoes to Bolo de Aipim: Artists in their Kitchens

I didn’t go to university until much later in life, which was fine. Still, I bring it up because it means that I didn’t have the opportunity to discover Martha Rosler’s 1975 film Semiotics of the Kitchen until I was already kind of set in my ways and biologically past what might be considered my best reproductive years.¹I remember first seeing Rosler’s work and recognizing the disdain she was spearheading in naming kitchen instruments. I felt the same antipathy towards gendered roles even thirty-five years after the work was made. At the end of the film, her shrug transmits a bit of a take-it-or-leave-it sentiment that I, too, knew well. I think if I had seen this work as a twenty-year-old, I’d be a lot more of a killjoy.² This work, made in the mid-’70s, signaled to me that there had to be more women like her out in the world. 

All of this is to say that I didn’t inherit the language of domesticity. Especially through my teens, I pushed against it in search of feminism: a word I wouldn’t learn for many more years. Going against the confines of patriarchy has had its pros and cons—and I would argue that the pros have been many—but one of the cons is that I never learned how to cook. I’ve never been interested in food more than an essential tool for sustenance and have maintained a palette that some might say is limited—I would argue that it’s merely refined. To me, a perfect meal is a couple of veggie samosas from Touch of India³ or a classic grilled cheese sandwich eaten in the front window of the Junction Fromagerie, so associating me with the word “cookbook” seems questionable.⁴ And yet. 

In the winter of 2019, while having beers and a few slices of pizza with Kristine Misfud, we tossed around this concept for a cookbook, and I committed to the idea of learning how to cook. But, I wanted artists I didn’t know to help me. I searched the internet for artists with practices I was curious about but whose work I didn’t know well. The “research” happened in much the same way that you find yourself watching a few cat videos online, and then three hours later, as someone with a bus pass, you’re watching NASCAR reels. Because I assumed complete rejection, I cast my net wide—I emailed nearly 200 artists from across so-called Canada and asked them to submit a recipe. I told them I’d prefer a vegetarian something-or-other, but I would learn to make whatever they sent me. I would collect the recipes, make and photograph each one, compile them in a book, and send each contributor a copy in return for their effort. I remembered doing something similar in grade three for Mother’s Day, and as tradition dictates, this book would be spiral-bound for functionality. 

Those who responded were earnest in their replies, and in total, fifty-two artists sent me recipes. One of the things that stood out was that many of the recipes were accompanied by a distinct intergenerational narrative. I felt grateful for the generosity in which they were shared with me. As I made the recipes, it also became clear that recipe writing is its own genre. Although artists do cook and eat, their notes left a lot of room for interpretation, including missed or forgotten ingredients and general assumptions for which I didn’t have a baseline. It was out of necessity that I became a copy editor and not just a compiler. Even more surprisingly, the artists sent me actual recipes for tasty food. Maybe they did this because I was a stranger or because of the earnestness of my ask. Still, I expected recipes more along the lines of Yoko Ono’s TUNAFISH SANDWICH PIECE: 

Imagine one thousand suns in the
sky at the same time.
Let them shine for one hour.
Then, let them gradually melt
into the sky.
Make one tunafish sandwich and eat.⁵

Or maybe someone would propose a mono-colour meal similar to one that Bici Hendricks⁶ included in George Maciunas’s New Year’s Eve Flux-Feast in 1969,⁷ or perhaps instructions to record the audio of kitchen utensils in a nod to Lisa Myers’ 2012 Noise Cooking performance.⁸ I somehow thought there would be more instructions for art included and not just life. But the efficient directions for making Smashed Potatoes and Annisquam Blueberry Cake and Red Lentil Soup served me well, because little did we know that SARS-CoV-2 would be making its international debut soon after the release of The Artist Cookbook Vol. 1, and eating samosas on sidewalk benches and being delirious over cheese shop sandwiches would come to a halt. 

I cooked my way through the first year of the pandemic like everyone else. As we lapped our first calendar year in periodic lockdown, the recipes I toiled over the year before had become exhausted. I was longing for connection and needed new recipes. Part of my intention for The Artist Cookbook, aside from filling the gaps in my cooking skills, was to build relationships with artists, and the recipes were the perfect tool to bridge us. Cooking and eating seemed to be an equalizer in a field where success can feel competitive, and hierarchies are manufactured. While the politics of food don’t evade any of us, the Mayor of Bernay in Normandy remarked in 1767 in his treatise on the potato, “The poor eat them from necessity, the rich do so for taste.”⁹ So just like that, in the winter of 2021, I emailed more artists while thinking of potatoes. 

In Vol. 2, which was released in November 2021, forty-nine more artists, most of whom I had never met before, sent me vegetarian recipes ranging from Japanese Pickles to Paraskeva Clark’s Paskha. I learned how to make Bolo de Aipim, a cassava cake you can make in five minutes and Really Good Chocolate Chip Cookies. I boiled oranges to make an almond cake (heaven!) and learned how to make a squash soup with whatever was in the fridge. I ate crepes for breakfast (preferably on Saturdays), and when the days felt longer than they ought to be, a few cocktail recipes were passed along that reminded me of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems in which he wrote on his lunch breaks while working at New York City’s MoMA in the 1950s: 

Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it, and a phone call to the beyond
which doesn’t seem to be coming any nearer.
“Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days”
on the poetry of a new friend
my life held precariously in the seeing
hands of others, their and my impossibilities.¹⁰

This project has made me drunk in many ways—I was drunk on new friends, skills, and knowledge—all the things that had previously evaded me. Typical generational narratives and hand-me-downs are missing my own family’s history. There are patterns of child neglect that have meant that cycles of parents have been unavailable, often operating in dissociative terms and putting up walls that divorce them from the present and the past. These intergenerational struggles do not serve well for someone hoping to inherit a lemon loaf recipe and a story of where they came from or to learn how their ancestors made flour. 

Recently, Kuh Del Rosario and Todd Gronsdahl, two artists who participated in The Artist Cookbook Vol. 2, and I met over Zoom to talk about food, family, and art. Below is an excerpt from our conversation: 

Carrie Perreault: What did you have for dinner last night?

Todd Gronsdahl: So last night for supper, Megan made oxtail stew and my homemade baked beans. So that’s what I ended up having. 

Kuh Del Rosario: I was really craving fries, so I just cut up potatoes, baked them, and bought ketchup for the first time in, I don’t know, ten years, and yeah, I just had fries and ketchup. I think I’ve gotten into this student life; I’m also eating like a student, which is kind of fun. I live by myself, and I could just think, hmmm, maybe it’s going to be ice cream for breakfast. It’s kind of gross, but that’s how it is. 

CP: Last night, I had, and only because I knew it was going to be asked, was brussels sprouts—pan-fried with balsamic vinegar. But if not for this question, I probably would’ve had toast or crackers and cheese. I felt significant pressure to eat something green. 

TG: So, my wife is sort of the chief influence in my life. She absolutely cannot not make a complete supper for our kids every night. So, every night there’s a salad, it’s usually different and some sort of main. And it all goes well unless the kids turn their nose up at it after she did all this work, and then it suffers a meltdown, but it’s always delicious. 

CP: What was it like growing up at your house? Was food a central part of your day-to-day? 

TG: It was for me until I turned thirteen—a lot of roast beef dinners on Sundays. It was when I was thirteen that my sister moved out. She was one of the main awesome cooks in my life. And then also my mom went back to university. So, after that it was lots of bagels, perogies, and hot dogs. She had a student life too, so we all kind of fell into line there. But my sister’s famous for her soup and dumplings, and my mom is half Swedish, half English, and my dad’s side is all Norwegian. So every Christmas we do this massive Norwegian feast, and then my mom would always do this English dinner at my grandparents’ house with roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and other things—I just remember that it was a lot. The more we start discussing this, the more I find food has been a pretty big part of my life. 

CP: Kuh, I know that you were born in the Philippines and then grew up in Calgary—I want to assume that the food culture and access to certain ingredients in Alberta would be challenging to your mom; would that be fair to say? Have you ever talked to her about how she navigated the shift when she came to Canada? 

KDR: Yes, so we moved to Calgary when I was eight, and my mom didn’t know how to cook. She was the eldest girl in her family, and right after school, she worked full-time. It’s customary to live with your parents until you marry, and her mom never taught her how to cook—she didn’t want to waste ingredients during the learning process because they were poor. It was also how her mom showed love—by doing all the cooking for everybody. And so, when we came to Canada, we were hosted by my mom’s coworker’s sister, who we met for the first time at the airport. She was an amazing baker and cook. We lived with her for six months. We had our first Christmas with her, and it was very lavish, but then when we moved out on our own, we ate a lot of beige food from boxes.

CP: Ha! I love that!

KDR: It was fun for me as a kid because that’s not the kind of food that I grew up with, but at the same time, as a teenager I was experiencing other family’s dinner habits, and I wanted to have that. I wanted to have this normal family situation where you sit at a dinner table and have casserole and these Western foods. And so, I learned how to cook as a teenager. I wanted to have a normal Western family experience, which of course, was a totally failed experiment. But it prepared me for adulthood.

CP: Why was it a failed experiment?

KDR: Oh, because my mom worked two jobs and so she couldn’t come home right at dinner-time, and she just was always exhausted. So instead, I would make cookies for people in high school and stuff. It was pretty cute.

CP: My experience is probably a little bit like yours, actually, except my parents were born here. But eating and food was never really a thing other than something that needed to be done. Both of my parents worked, and they would leave the house early in the morning and get back in the evening, not leaving a lot of time outside of homework and baths, and I just don’t think they were interested in mealtime—lots of frozen peas and white bread. My mom didn’t really know how to cook, and the patriarchy ruled, so she was our only hope. What we had was mostly uninspiring. Like Todd, there was always a roast on Sundays at home or at my grandmother’s house, but often with overcooked carrots. Eating was a means to survive; we did not eat to celebrate or honour our family’s history. I think that’s part of why I wanted to make these cookbooks—because food’s never been important to me, but I knew it meant a lot of different things to different people.

KDR: Yeah. And I think we all kind of grew up in the same era with TGI Fridays. You know, very family-centric, the sort of nuclear family where it’s just a given that everyone sits at the table and has conversations about their day while they have two or three dishes in front of them. And so, food became this symbol of this type of love. I think for me, of course, I was loved as a child, but it’s a symbol of a kind of love that I wasn’t sure how to get. Of course, this TGI Fridays narrative was just a veneer presented in TV shows or these kinds of idyllic family situations. 

TG: I think that’s why my wife makes such an effort. Because she experienced something similar being raised by her grandma. Because she didn’t spend a lot of time with her nuclear family, she wants that for our kids. So maybe that’s why she tries so hard at it. And then also, I don’t think it’s necessarily hard for her; she’s pretty natural at it. 

CP: Todd, what kind of food projects are you working on now?

TG: In 2021, I did a project with Jesse Birch at the Nanaimo Art Gallery, and we built a rain-capture machine that was a Dutch cargo bike with a rain-capture system. It also had a solar panel, and it would heat the water, and we’d make coffee with it. And then I had this little cart with a donut grill. So, we would bike it downtown and then use the energy collected to make coffee and donuts for people. 

I’m also working on SuperOkay!, a new restaurant and snack bar with an adjacent art space which launched in November 2021. We’re working on the food part, which includes sushi, strange appetizers, and then café baked goods. It’s located across from St. Paul’s hospital and inside a medical building, hence the inspiration for its name. One of the doctors is our landlord, and he has a wonderful art collection and was a fan of our old restaurant, so he was keen to have us in this new space.

CP: Where did your relationship to food and art cross paths—when did that happen?

TG: Probably in 2005 when I started thinking of myself as an artist. We had a restaurant, and I started using the space to do projects by then. It took hold when we had a restaurant called Duck Duck Goose in Saskatoon, and I started introducing food into my installation and installation work into the restaurant.

There’s an artist named Dean Baldwin—I think he’s a Montreal guy, and he has done a lot with food. He sort of turns his whole project into the opening party, and you know, I don’t hate that idea, so I started to work with that in mind instead of people just filtering through an exhibition but to have them stay and be engaged in it—something you can share and experience together. Working in restaurants, I also saw it as an opportunity to use food to keep people interested.

CP: Kuh, there seems to be your real kind of process-based exploration of materials in your artwork. You have used plants in your work, and I’m wondering about the sense of responsibility to care and if you think about food in the same way. The recipe you sent for the cookbook originally had text that acknowledged a collective exhaustion, and that even in such a state, one could make this dish and feel better. It felt very tender, and I wondered if you see a connection between that sense of care with food and your art practice. 

KDR: Definitely—that was my thought process with this recipe. I wanted to have something that was economical and democratic in some way, something that doesn’t require a lot of skill in the kitchen, but you could still have a good hot meal that’s not constrained by time. And it does not require too many tools or expertise. And I think a lot of that was also coming from my experience living in the Philippines for three years (2015–2018), where I was suddenly dealing with a kitchen that was not so familiar. And it was really about trying to find alternatives to a lot of the things that I was used to. I was also thinking about how these recipes translate in different cultures, let’s say, how can they be translatable with the resources here versus there? And so, I know cookbook distribution is more North American-based. Still, I also wanted to think about people who may not necessarily have access to specialty ingredients within our community. 

TG: I’ve worked with many Filipino people in the prairies, yet I rarely see a Filipino restaurant or grocery store. 

KDR: There are a lot of Asian foods that have been way more popularized early on compared to Filipino food. I think Filipino food has become more mainstream in the last seven years with restaurants and things. There’s certain foodstuff that has been very—what’s the word—not marginalized, but kind of made into almost a spectacle. Certain foods are considered gross when, in reality, it comes from racist ideas. Foods from different cultures can be deemed questionable if you’re looking at them from a specific lens, you know? But, Filipinos, especially because we’ve been friendly to the US, means that one of our strengths is adapting to Western culture. And so, it’s easy to be like, oh, okay, let me just adjust my diet accordingly rather than having space for those foods that we love so dearly. 

CP: Todd, for the cookbook, you submitted the recipe Floating Islands, a meringue with a caramel sauce that sits in a puddle of vanilla cream. Why did you want to offer that recipe? 

TG: There were two reasons: I was working on a version of it for my Maritime Museum project, and one of the dishes was going to reference a floating island. And then there was a Julia Child era of food, which I love—you know, Jell-O desserts with baloney in it, or a piece of fish with a quarter-inch of aspic jelly over it, it was sort of like this old tiny French thing before French food went clean in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. Before then, there were processed foods with heavy cream and buttery dishes. That way of eating doesn’t really exist—I mean, it does a bit, but you have to look for it. My mom recently looked through the cookbook and said, “Floating Islands, oh, the nuns loved that,” and I asked her what she meant. She said that she used to cook for an old folks home of nuns, and that was one of the things they would always ask for, so she would prepare it. This would have been twenty or thirty years ago. 

KDR: I love the title as well. When I look at your works, they’re like these icebergs, a reference to the Maritimes; it kind of harkens back to this kind of water culture or Naval aspect that has been very present in your work, including your exhibition at the Art Gallery of Regina. It reminds me of my question of how do you continue to think about your work in Saskatchewan, and you’re not so near the water. Has your work changed because of your geography? 

TG: Not really. I’ve tried living in a maritime place over and over, but it never really sticks. Maybe it’s because of my ancestors, like Norwegian, Swedish, and English people. Maybe it’s all this shoreline thing that is just, like, genetically stuck in me, and I can’t shake it. It’s not a super glamorous landscape wherever I am—like, Saskatchewan’s vast, but there are no mountains. There are no markers, no shoreline. This reminds me of this story I heard of young Saskatchewan men who joined the Navy in WWII. They said they were super comfortable just being out at sea and didn’t get that sort of cabin fever that many other people did because of the vastness. 

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I continued to ask Todd about Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Food,¹¹ an artist-run restaurant in 1970s New York City. I’m not sure why that project came to an end, but a social hub with an innate role to provide nourishment and flexible employment feels like an important space for artists today. He doesn’t think of Capsule (or his previous ventures) in those terms, but instead likens the menus to a collection of souvenirs of sorts—of places he and his partner have been and the food ideas they bring back and make adjustments to. 

Maybe these cookbooks are my version of Food—an approachable and egalitarian space to take shelter from the often-intimidating art world. When I think about what the cookbooks have brought together, I think of the stories that have been shared and the ones that haven’t yet but hopefully someday will be. It was soothing to learn how Kuh also longed for these sit-down dinners and how we shared in the aptly described genre of beige food, and how she made cookies for classmates, which was a way for her to fulfill what she craved. And I think about Todd’s partner, Megan Macdonald, and her conscious effort to create the structure for their children that I longed for and how she works to ensure it’s ever-present as a way of demonstrating love. It feels a bit fortuitous to have found kinship and part of ourselves in each other during this conversation with experiences that differ considerably. 

It turns out that maybe these recipe collections, in a way, have allowed us to turn away from our self-seriousness and share in the often-overlooked activities of our everyday lives. The making of these books has been an excuse to talk to people, and recipe documentation is an opportunity to notice everything that happens—to pay attention. To me, that is art, and lucky for all of us, it’s often delicious. 

You can find The Artist Cookbook online at www.theartistcookbook.ca. 

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The Artist Cookbook, edited by Carrie Perreault, is a two-volume collection, bringing recipes of 101 of your favourite artists from across so-called Canada into your own kitchen. Vol. 2, released in November 2021, is a vegetarian edition and promises to provide simple complexities at an entry-level skillset. 

Carrie Perreault lives in Toronto. She is a sculpture and installation artist who uses material inquiry to reframe childhood trauma into a state of investigation. By surveying the work through a feminist approach to autotheory, Perreault temporarily suspends the doubt she has thrown into the stories she has told herself and instead articulates them by creating objects and installations that reflect these conceptual intentions. Her practice involves a mode of creation— embodied disassociation at times—that sits between emotional immediacy and a process of gathering what has been lost. https://www.carrieperreault.com

Kuh Del Rosario is a Filipino-Canadian born in Manila and raised in Calgary, Alberta. Del Rosario completed her BFA in Painting at the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2001. Before starting Elmo’s House Artist Residency (2017-2019), Del Rosario spent over a decade in Vancouver, BC, where she was involved in the administration and management of artist-run studio/project space Dynamo Arts Association. She is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Concordia University. 

In Kuh’s practice, she utilizes materials accumulated from the everyday, alchemizing unremarkable stuff into new abstractions. Contemplating the passage of time, the language of things, the tensions between the natural and the synthetic, she answers questions on the cusp of expression. Ideas are challenged and activated in the studio, resulting in uncanny forms that might perform as offerings to the past and the future simultaneously. https://kuhdelrosario.com in uncanny forms that might perform as offerings to the past and the future simultaneously. https://kuhdelrosario.com

Todd Gronsdahl is an entrepreneur and visual artist who lives with his young family in Saskatoon. He and his wife, Megan Macdonald, launched and operated the award-winning Sushiro Sushi Bar, Duck Duck Goose Tapas, and now SuperOkay! and the Capsule Contemporary Art Project Gallery. 

Working primarily in sculpture and installation, using humour and narrative, Todd complicates official histories and legitimizes mythologies. Like an anthropologist speculates on an 

artifact, he hopes viewers will jump to conclusions about the work unearthing hitherto unknown “facts” that subvert official history. Todd has exhibited and attended residencies in Canada and abroad and has received support and awards provincially and nationally. https://www.toddgronsdahl.com

1. Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, single-channel video, black and white, sound; 06:09 minutes, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the Ford Motor Company, 2008.21.7, 1975, Martha Rosler. 
2. Thanks, Sara Ahmed.
3. Touch of India, 126 St Paul St, St. Catharines, ON L2R 3M2
4. Junction Fromagerie, 3042 Dundas St W, Toronto, ON M6P 1Z3
5. Yōko Ono, “Tunafish Sandwich Piece,” Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions + Drawings (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 
6. Later known as Bici Forbes and then Nye Ffarrabas.
7. “George Maciunas, “Invitation -Food & Drink Event,” 31 Dec. 1969,” IDEA Artæ + Societate/IDEA Arts + Society, 2018, 44.
8. Lisa Myers, “Noise Cooking: A Collaboration between Autumn Chacon and Lisa Myers,” Lisa Myers, https://lisarosemyers.com/artwork/3729188-Noise-Cooking-A-collaboration-between-Autumn-Chacon-and-lisaMyers.html.
9. La Cuisinière Républicaine, Paris, l’An IIIe de la République (reprint Luzarches, 1976), 14.
10. Frank O’Hara, “POEM,” Lunch Poems (City Lights Books, 2014),  19.
11. Sandra Zalman, ‘Eat, Live, Work’, in Sandra Zalman (ed.), In Focus: Walls Paper 1972 by Gordon Matta-Clark, Tate Research Publication, 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/walls-paper/eat-live-work.

This article is published in issue 39.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue