FORK TENDER is an ongoing documentary project, that began as a semester class assignment, focusing on the relationship between food, identity, and human connection.
Home is mom’s cooking. It is handwritten recipes and bringing back foreign ingredients instead of souvenirs. Home is also box mix Japanese curry and canned beans. Recreating the recipes we grew up with means experimentation, imperfection and shortcuts. The kitchen is a place of self-discovery. Young adults have to navigate independence simultaneously by connecting to their identity. They are not just learning how to prepare cultural recipes but to cook as a whole. When the responsibility of living becomes our own, home-cooked meals and family recipes are more time-consuming than meaningful. Certain ingredients are hard to come by. What grandmothers perfected becomes mediocre at best. Suddenly nostalgia tastes different. But where disappointment is great, so is the reward. New traditions form and cooking improves with practice. Food is experienced uniquely for everyone, but it is also universal. It sustains the soul as well as the body. The meals we once shared with family are served to friends. What we eat and how we engage with food evolves. And, sometimes, when we visit back home mom is already preparing something on the stove.
Dantes Martinez knows his way around the world, but not so much around his mother’s makeshift recipe book. The composition notebook is filled with neatly written instructions for meals Martinez requested his mother add when she sent him off to college.
“I’ve had a long week,” he said. “I want a taste of home.” His choice: his mother’s rice and beans with stew chicken, the national Belizean dish. When Martinez lived at home, his mother would assist in the cooking process. But now, making the meal taste authentic is more of a challenge.
corn in the bookshop garden
remnants of last season
roadside chicken coop
Angelica Ruzanova, a self-proclaimed "Russian from Uzbekistan," prepares an Uzbek tea spread
“I have a very romantic picture of my hometown because I spent many hot summers outdoors playing hide and seek. The elders, or parents, would be sitting next to us on the benches we handmade and snack on the sunflower seeds,” she said. The broken shells would be left on the floor for the kids to clean up the next day.
my parents as they prepare Thanksgiving dinner
ontbijtkoek, Dutch breakfast cake
As the year winds down and Christmas flavors come back in season, Norah De Zwart makes ontbijtkoek for the second time this semester. She uses Speculaas, the same spice blend as Biscoff cookies, and follows a recipe her mother found that she copied into her notes app. The finished product is warm, delicious and slightly raw in the middle.
Though Angelica may only share her living space with her sister Evelina, hospitality is ingrained in her. Tea, and the specific approach to pouring, is something especially prized. With anything requiring dishes, “presenting food is as important as how it tastes,” Angelica said.
mom's strawberry shortcake
feeding the family
late night cravings + spontaneous food runs
When interactions and the tangible parts of memories are no longer so easily accessible, they are cherished far more. The aspects that can be recreated also become far more important. Although people may never be able to recreate a moment, they can recreate a meal, revisit a place, or see the same people. Ruzanova loves to eat the sunflower seeds to this day, though she complains about her inability to eat them gracefully mid-conversation like the aunts and grandmas she grew up around.
“I remember the first time I was making the rice and beans I was calling my mom the entire time, like, ‘Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right?’” he said.
Martinez tries a few bites, pauses to send a picture to his parents, then resumes. Making his mother’s recipes are trial-and-error, but they taste better every time.
F O R K T E N D E R