CHAPTER 2
Tools and Their Users
The tasks you do depend on who you are, and in a sense the performance of certain tasks makes you who you are.
—Ingold 2000, 325
When I began filming people’s everyday cooking practices, it was not on Kalymnos but rather in southern Illinois, where my student and collaborator Michael Hernandez and I worked with about half a dozen volunteers as we developed through trial and error our methodological approaches and battery of questions, trying to get at some of the different ways that cooking shapes the texture of people’s daily lives.1 At the time Michael, a keen observer of his friends, noted what he felt was a predictive correlation: the more fancy tools and gadgets a person has, the more expensive the cookware, the fancier the kitchen, the less that person actually cooks. This observation reminded me of something that Katina—a Kalymnian woman in her thirties at the time—had told me: that the point of buying new kitchen gadgets was to be able to carry them ostentatiously past your neighbors’ doorsteps to make them jealous, a sentiment they would hide with the formulaic phrase “May you have good luck with it!”2
Perhaps these observations play too easily into the popular prejudice that real cooking is done by hand. Perhaps this is a generalized version of the “deskilling” hypothesis, which in various forms laments the loss of human skill and its replacement by black-box, push-button machines that strip life of its humanity—the technophobia that seems to be part and parcel of modern society’s technophilia. Such views tend to lead to all kinds of ironies, as performer and social critic Mike Daisey points out in his one-man play about the labor conditions in Chinese factories that produce Apple electronics, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Daisey argues that we have never had more handmade products in the history of the human race, but “handmade” can in fact be its own nightmare when the price of human labor has been reduced to almost zero.
Of course, if we start from dichotomies like this, such as “traditional” and “modern,” “authentic” and “ersatz,” we won’t get very far except to say that it’s more complicated. Instead, here I simply follow some of the tools, technologies, and appliances that make up the kitchen environment on Kalymnos, and see where they lead. In this chapter I focus on a few specific items—knives, rolling pins, can openers, outdoor ovens, and the layout of kitchens. I also suggest ways that we can think of the body itself as a cooking tool, and what that might mean for our understanding of skill and deskilling. In considering these diverse topoi of kitchen engagement, I am somewhat eclectic in my approaches and inspirations, but at the same time attempt to argue that careful ethnographic exploration and observation of daily practice can yield important and often unexpected insights. While historians and sociologists have treated kitchen tools and especially kitchen appliances as texts to be read to reveal their often-gendered “scripts,”3 my interest here is in tools-in-use and what they can tell us about how the everydayness of cooking is negotiated. At the same time I suggest that the everydayness of cooking in fact opens up much larger issues of memory and identity, agency and embodiment.
OF KNIVES AND CUTTING SURFACES AND THEIR ABSENCE: WHAT I LEARNED FROM KALYMNIAN WOMEN CUTTING VEGETABLES
Let’s start by considering a brief extract of some of the first videos I shot on Kalymnos, titled “Cutting Medley” (video example 1), which compiles footage of Katerina Kardoulia cutting potatoes for a stew, Nina Papamihail cutting an onion for a salad, and Katerina’s granddaughter, known as Little Katerina, cutting zucchini for an omelet.4 While it had caught my attention that Kalymnians were cutting all kinds of things in their hands rather than on a hard surface, it made even more of an impression on me when I showed these videos to colleagues in food studies, some of whom had had professional training in cooking, and they were horrified. How could people cut in such an awkward fashion? They assumed that they were viewing experienced cooks, and while no doubt these cooks had many recipes and perhaps preparation techniques particular to Greece, my colleagues wondered why anyone would use such an inefficient method of cutting. Their queries brought me up short and really got me to take a closer look at Kalymnian cutting practices. It also got me to think about what we might mean by words like awkward and efficient.
On closer examination, I found that there is a style, a skill to Kalymnian cutting. In the case of the potato, notice how it is cradled in one hand and scored all the way across in two or three passes, and then with a wrist motion the knife is drawn toward the thumbs, which serve as a guide and balance. Effectively, the thumbs serve in the role of cutting board; only the thumb of the hand cupping the potato is used when the potato is large, while both thumbs are employed for smaller potatoes or once a larger potato has been partially cut. In the case of onions, one hand typically again serves as a cradle, while the loose wrist of the other hand is brought up and down in a repetitive motion to score a pattern of shallow cuts on the surface of the onion. Then the thumb is once again used as a guide to draw the knife across the onion while the cradling hand rotates the onion. It is not just vegetables that are approached in this way. In the case of loaves of bread, the bread is held against the chest and the knife is used in a sawing motion to score cuts in the bread that can later be fully separated by hand. I must admit that the first few times I was witness to this technique, it was rather frightening! It seemed to go against everything I had learned as a child about how to avoid injuring oneself with a knife. But in fact while motorcycle accidents are extremely common on Kalymnos, and danger seems to be courted in the ritual throwing of dynamite bombs at Easter and other important events throughout the year, I have never heard of people accidentally cutting themselves across the jugular.5
So there is method in this technique. One of the issues that made my food studies colleagues wince was that this approach to cutting seemed to preclude ending up with small, evenly shaped pieces. The use of a surface (cutting board or other hard surface) allows for greater balance, and in the case of bread, for example, one can use the surface as a guide for evenness of cut. In terms of vegetables being used for cooking, presumably evenness of shapes and sizes leads to more even overall cooking. (This is not such an issue for Kalymnian salads, in which uneven shapes seem fairly normative. And for stews, vegetables undergo lengthy cooking; Kalymnian vegetables are not cooked al dente, so once again the irregularities might not make so much of a difference).
However, to say that this technique is “not so bad,” or that it doesn’t make that much of a difference, is not to grasp its logic, why it has been passed down from one generation to the next in Kalymnian (and Greek) kitchens more generally. One issue, of course, is whether counter space is even available. Calling for a cutting board assumes that there is counter space to put it on, at the right height to facilitate such activity. Yet the prototypical “mother’s” kitchen consists of a space no more than five feet square, primarily with room for storage and a bottled-gas, two-burner stove. These kitchen spaces were not designed with counter space for cutting in mind.
The more recent “daughter’s kitchen,” by contrast, does have counter space, built of marble or other materials, as well as a standard oven, often missing in the mother’s kitchen. However, as noted previously, the daughter’s kitchen often opens on to a living-entertaining space, so in many cases it is not seen as the place for heavy processing or cooking of foods that have strong smells, and is more typically used for baking and preparing snacks. However, even when this kitchen space is used to prepare food (in the absence of a mother’s kitchen or simply out of some daily exigency), the counters are rarely used for chopping or other heavy food processing.
A further issue might have to do with the height of counters. I asked Katina Miha why she preferred to assemble food, roll dough for pitas, and undertake other processing activities at the kitchen table rather than on her counter surfaces, which seemed largely decorative. She responded that the counters were “off,” and weren’t “making me comfortable.”6 Many kitchen counters are built in with prefab cabinets bought from major furniture retailers, which come in standard sizes, though some women ordered lower cabinets to accommodate their height. I found that most counters were 90 centimeters (about 35 inches) in height. Built for Americans or northern Europeans, these counters create a challenge for Greek women of smaller stature, the kind of standardization of kitchen spaces that has long ignored the perspective of the female user, as documented by feminist historians of technology (Wajcman 2010).
I was struck by a story told to me by Neni Panourgia, an anthropologist of Greek descent, about her father building a kitchen in their summer home in the early 1970s. A trained engineer, her father had built everything to his own specifications (at the time prefab kitchens were much less common). When he had put in the counters, he asked his daughter what she thought of them, obviously quite proud of his handiwork. Neni responded, “They look great, but they’re too high.” He replied, “What do you mean, they’re too high? Counters should come up to the waist of an average-size person.” Neni asked, “An average-size male person, or an average-size female person?” This left him speechless.7
These reflections on counters are still based on the premise of an “ideal” transcultural working space. The universalism of such a view has its own particular history, as those readers familiar with the efficiency studies of Christina Fredericks, the “Frankfurt Kitchen,” and other twentieth-century attempts to bring the principles of “modernization” into kitchen spaces are no doubt aware.8 Perhaps there are other, more proximate reasons that Kalymnian women avoid using their counters for cutting. As I was thinking about these issues, I was also reading the work of Patricia Greenfield and her colleagues on Maya weavers. In developing the skills to become weavers, Maya girls’ bodies are trained in a number of ways, such as kneeling for extended periods with upper-body balance and stillness.9 While cutting in the hand is in no way as elaborate as weaving on the backstrap loom, it does involve a process of bodily training leading to proficiency in this technique (a few women noted that they always found it difficult, but I will discuss their cases later). Indeed, my colleague Neni Panourgia insisted that her mother, along with many other Greek women, could with practice use this technique to produce the kind of small, even-size results desired by my food studies colleagues. Consider, for example, the speed with which Polykseni Miha dispatches eggplants into even slices in the video “Polykseni Cutting Eggplant” (video example 2). It seems that the skill developed with other vegetables pays off when doing the kind of cutting for which a counter might provide no clear benefit. Instead, she glides the knife through the eggplant with a slight sawing motion, gently rocking her body forward to allow the slices to fall into a colander, and even pulling the last two slices through the knife while holding the already cut end.
Tim Ingold’s description of sawing a piece of wood provides additional insight into the skill of cutting in the hand. Ingold notes, “Although a confident, regular movement ensures an even cut, no two strokes are ever precisely the same. With each stroke I have to adjust my posture ever so slightly to allow for the advancing groove, and for possible irregularities in the grain of the wood” (2011, 52). He summarizes: “Cutting wood . . . is an effect not of the saw alone but of the entire system of forces and relations set up by the intimate engagement of the saw, the trestle, the workpiece and my own body” (56). In the same way, cutting Kalymnian style effectively replaces the solid balance of a cutting surface with the intimacy and control of the hand and object. Each cut is felt—not just by the hand that is holding the knife, but by the hand that holds the object to be cut—and allows for adjustments to be made as the hand rotates the object.
It became clear to me that cutting in the hand was a skilled practice, but what about its supposed “inefficiency”? As I thought more about this question, I realized that there were times when I might cut food in my hand—for example, if it was a particularly small item like a clove of garlic that I could hold over a pan, allowing the cut pieces to drop directly into the pan. Indeed, in the case of Katerina cutting potatoes in the “Cutting Medley” video, we see that she uses a bowl in a similar fashion, as a receptacle to catch the pieces of potato as they fall from her hand. By the same token, Kalymnians do use surfaces when they are cutting something very large: a sheep carcass or a large whole fish would certainly not be attempted “in the hand,” but rather on a table in the yard or on a counter in a daughter’s kitchen. So it is not that these techniques represent absolute differences, simply that they are the norm, the habitual, the everyday.
Other colleagues mentioned cooking traditions in other countries in which food processing might be done largely in a kneeling position. Perhaps what threw me off at first was that the first example I saw of this technique was Nina cutting an onion while standing over a counter, where it seemed to offer no advantage to hold the onion in her hand rather than lay it on a surface. When I saw Katerina sitting in a chair, facing me, cutting potatoes with a bowl cradled in her lap, things started to make more sense. I recalled Marcel Mauss’s notion of “techniques of the body.” He defined technique as an act “that is traditional and efficacious. It has to be traditional and effective. There is no technique and no transmission if there is no tradition” (cited in Narvaez 2006, 60). Efficiency, in other words, is defined not by some absolute standard, but through experiences within a particular social order, what Ingold calls a “taskscape” (Ingold 2000, 194ff.).
So, how does this cutting technique fit into the larger Kalymnian taskscape? As noted earlier, much of the processing of ingredients does not necessarily take place within the confines of the mother’s small kitchen itself. Rather, it might take place in the courtyard directly outside the kitchen area. Like Katerina, women often prepare ingredients while seated, potentially avoiding the back pain associated with standing for long periods. Cutting in the hand also allows them to socialize with family or neighbors while the ingredients are being processed. It is a technique for multitasking: processing ingredients doesn’t in this case necessitate turning one’s back on the environment around oneself. One can oversee other activities going on in the household, watch for passing friends or neighbors, even make processing food an occasion for sitting in a circle and sharing news and stories. This social aspect is also reflected in the tendency of family members to check in constantly with one another as a dish is being prepared, tasting and consulting on processes that they have enacted many times in the past.
It might be tempting here to draw a contrast between “social” Greek cooking and “asocial” American cooking. Surely, trends in kitchen design suggest a greater desire among Americans to make cooking a social activity that happens in the shared, public space of the home, rather than as hidden labor. Indeed, a Kalymnian might reverse the comment of my food studies colleagues, and marvel at the “inefficiency” of American cooking, which makes people turn away and bend down while trying to remain actively involved in the social surroundings!
However, for some cooks in the United States or western Europe, asocial cooking may actually be seen as a distinct advantage. To quote a scholar of taste reflecting on her own experience of cutting and cooking alone: “‘I took up cooking at a very early age out of need but I never liked it. Now, cooking is my stress buster. I meditate as I chop vegetables, each piece as perfectly cut as possible.’”10 As with any everyday activity, cooking serves multiple purposes, conscious and unconscious, explicit and implicit.
Richard Sennett has advocated viewing skill as a holistic process of negotiating a particular task, rather than something that can be analytically divided: “Rather than the combined result of discrete, separate, individualized activities, coordination works much better if the two hands work together from the start” (Sennett 2008, 164–65). One of his key examples of such hand coordination is the use of a cleaver in Chinese cooking to develop the skill to “cleave a grain of rice” (168). I would simply add that a holistic view of bodily techniques would draw on Mauss’s notion of the “traditional and efficacious” to understand how something that from a technical point of view may seem inefficient makes considerable sense in a larger social context.
ROLLING THE DOUGH: THE BODY AS TOOL
Growing up in New York City, I spent a lot of time at the pizza joint in my Washington Heights neighborhood. Owned by a Greek and run by a Dominican, this place taught me early not to expect “authenticity” to come in national stripes. I always enjoyed watching the tossing of the pizza crust and the ability of the pizza chef to achieve the desired thinness using simply rhythm and bare hands. Although I wouldn’t have phrased it in this way at the time, the pizza maker’s art seemed the epitome of “embodied skill,” exactly the kind of practice that can’t be learned by following a set of written instructions, only through a process of guided apprenticeship involving the slow discovery of the interactions of materials, tools, and one’s own body in the presence of a skilled master. It also suggests an interweaving of the senses in evaluating one’s progress, what Heather Paxson has dubbed “synaesthetic reason” (2011) to capture the combination of sensory and discursive knowledge that a craftsperson develops. In this section I extend my discussion of embodied techniques to understanding the sensory relationships among bodies, tools, and the material ingredients of cooking—in this case, dough.
As a youth watching pizza dough being made, I was not aware of Greek phyllo dough, or how much thinner that dough can, in fact, be made. Phyllo dough, however, is “opened” (as they say in Greece) not with bare hands, but with a rolling pin. On Kalymnos, rolling pins come in three varieties: two seem similar in size to rolling pins I have used in the United States, but they do not have separate handles with ball bearings or a metal rod to run on. Instead they are tapered, either into the form of a handle or simply so that the ends are slightly thinner than the middle. The other type of rolling pin represents more of a thin, long dowel, all one length with no tapering, and only about an inch in diameter.
When Polykseni and I sat down to make mushroom pies (manitaropites), she brought out both a long, thin one and a tapered one with a handle. As we were making filled pockets rather than a “pie,” we were breaking off small pieces of dough and rolling them out to about one-third-inch thickness. Polykseni, a nursery school teacher who lives in her dowry house on the hillside overlooking the church, cemetery, and upper neighborhood of Ayios Mammas, had told me rather proudly that she always rolls her own dough. But she quickly qualified this: “Well, not for galactoburico and other ‘pan sweets’ [glika tou tapsiou] like kopeckhi; then, of course, I use store-bought phyllo. But certainly for all the pies that I make . . . [she lists five or six different kinds of pies].11 And each time I make a different dough; I have four different recipes that I use.”
I realized that most Kalymnians I had observed making pies or pockets of various sorts would do it in two layers, a layer of dough for the bottom, some filling in the middle, and another layer on top. Galactoburico and other such pastries call for the multiple layers that require the extremely thin dough that you can buy factory-made and frozen in packages, which you must layer on very quickly and cover immediately with butter so that they don’t dry out. I’ve also seen Kalymnian women use this type of ultrathin factory-made phyllo dough as separate sheets to roll around cheese and mint in the shape of tubes. So when I was working on the mushroom pockets with Polykseni, it was simply an average thickness that we were going for. Indeed, Polykseni encouraged me not to roll the dough too thin, and to leave some dough around the edges when I folded it around the mushroom mixture, as she liked the taste of a little extra dough.
When I asked her whether she knew how to make the thinner phyllo, she said, “Of course,” illustrating quickly with the dough in front of her, “I can make it as thin as you want. If you put some flour on top, you can roll it even thinner.” She noted after rolling out the dough to about an eighth of an inch thick that you couldn’t get it much thinner than that “because it would tear on you.” This illustration was done using the thick rolling pin and a small piece of dough, which she then rolled back up into a ball, noting that she likes to have the doughy taste that results from rolling it out less. But as she encouraged me to try my hand at it, she also pushed the thin rolling pin in my direction, saying that she felt more comfortable with the thick one.
When it comes to rolling out phyllo (see video example 3, “Polykseni Making Mushroom Pies”), Polykseni and I use somewhat different techniques. Polykseni uses eight to twelve firm and distinct strokes for each piece, lifting the rolling pin between strokes. She opens the dough in one direction and then rotates it once before opening it in the other direction. While she makes several rotations on the first piece of dough, after that she simply curves off to the side with her rolling pin to keep it roughly rectangular. She doesn’t, for the most part, use the tapered handles, but grasps the rolling pin by the thicker part.
By contrast, my first tries are hesitant as I attempt to get a feel for the process, especially after being told by Polykseni, “Like anything else, there is a craft to opening [rolling] phyllo.”12 Instead of grabbing the pin firmly (more difficult to do with the thinner one), I put the pin on top of the dough and then attempt to extrude the dough by rolling the middle of my fingers over the pin with a rapid back-and-forth motion. The first one takes an excruciatingly long time; at one point Polykseni suggests that I haven’t rolled it long and thin enough, and that perhaps I should try with the thicker pin. But I continue on, turning the dough five or six times till I finally get it thin enough. Polykseni gives me careful directions and constant encouragement for how to fold the dough over the filling, noting that I have to make sure my folds go in far enough that the filling doesn’t escape out of the side. On the second try I haven’t made it long enough in one direction, so Polykseni first tells me to open it further; then when I do it more hesitantly, she puts her hand on the middle of the pin and rolls it out firmly. In part the different style of rolling is explained by my own lack of knowledge, in part by what seemed to be afforded by the thinner rolling pin, which didn’t seem—at least in my attempts—to lend itself to the kind of short, distinct strokes of the thicker one. However, much depends on what one is trying to achieve as well.
I observed Evdokia, in the kitchen of her small restaurant in the village of Emborios at a remote end of Kalymnos, opening phyllo using the thicker rolling pin as well. (See video example 4, “Evdokia Rolling Dough.” The noise in the background is from construction work going on nearby.) In this case, however, she is making not pockets but a larger piece of dough for a leek pie. It should also be noted that although she has had professional training at a restaurant and hotel program in Rhodes, when I asked if she had learned her techniques there, she insisted that she had learned from her mother, who is not Kalymnian but from mainland Greece.13
In this case she begins the process by using her hands to achieve a first opening up of the dough, stretching it with her hands at first slowly, and then faster and more rhythmically until it forms a basic round shape before she employs the rolling pin. Because she is standing over the dough rather than sitting down, she can put her whole body into the rolling process, using shorter back-and-forth motions that resemble a more practiced and confident version of what I was trying to do with the thinner pin, as opposed to Polykseni’s distinct strokes.14 As she opens it up a bit, she begins folding over pieces of the dough and then rolling them again. This, she says, is a method called sfoliata—layered like puff pastry—which makes the phyllo crunchier in the end.15 Each rolling involves the introduction of a bit more flour to increase the elasticity of the dough and make sure it doesn’t start to stick to the rolling pin. At certain points, in order to open up the far edges of the dough, Evdokia uses one hand on the rolling pin and the other hand for leverage on the countertop. In the end, the phyllo does take on a distinct round or rectangular shape, but Evdokia folds it on top of the leek filling, making something that more resembles a strudel than a traditional pie.
When her restaurant and pension is open in the summer months, Evdokia typically makes one or two such pies per day. I ask her whether making them so regularly makes the rolling of the dough automatic, or whether there is still a craft to it. She doesn’t respond directly, but notes that she has added a little too much yogurt to the batter for the dough, which is why the final phyllo has a few tears in it.16 She uses some extra dough to patch these tears, calling it a “trick” (patenta). Once again, the knowledge that Evdokia deploys can be compared to Paxson’s description of cheese makers, who engage in a “reflexive, anticipatory practice, guided by a synaesthetic evaluation of how the materials . . . are behaving and developing in a particular instance, as understood in light of past experience” (2011, 119). As Harry West, also studying cheese makers, describes it, “They engaged with the curd by making it, touching it, feeling it, pressing it in the form, and what is more by perceiving how it felt, how it behaved in their hands, and how it stitched together and aged into a cheese” (West 2013, 331).
I still wondered about the use of the thinner rolling pin. When I press Polykseni about her choice of the thicker one, she says that the thin one doesn’t suit her, but doesn’t elaborate. But my question does push her to mention northern Greek women, who are known to use the thinner rolling pin, “and they open their phyllos until they’re as big as this whole table! How do they manage it?” Indeed, the first time I had a pie (a leek pie) made by Georgia Vourneli, who was visiting the United States from the northern city of Thessaloniki, I noticed immediately the difference between her pies, for which she used four sheets of phyllo on the bottom and four on top, and the Kalymnian variety, which typically have only one or two. My graduate student Michael Hernandez and I did a series of interviews with Georgia about her cooking, and then filmed her making the leek pie. Georgia was staying in Carbondale, Illinois, at the apartment of her son (my student, Leonidas Vournelis), so when she saw that he had only a thick rolling pin she eyed his broom, asking if he could cut off the handle and use that to open her phyllo. He refused, so she settled for the thicker pin.17 This is how we described the process of rolling out the phyllo dough:
Using the palms of her hands, she began to roll the pin over the dough. The first few times, she rolled the pin quickly and in short strokes directly in front and away from her. Then she rolled the pin forward and to the right and the strokes became slower and longer. The dough was flattened to about three times the circumference of the original palm size. Once it reached this size, she rotated the flat dough a quarter-turn to the left. This was repeated until the dough was twelve to eighteen inches in diameter.
Thus far, the process was similar to what I observed with Evdokia, and, on a smaller scale, with Polykseni. But then began the second phase of rolling the dough:
In this phase, Georgia took the dough edge closest to her and folded it forward over the rolling pin. She then rolled the pin away from her, drawing the phyllo over itself as she pressed down. The forward motion flattened the dough and kept it in place on the roller. By this time, the top edge of the dough was on the rolling pin face up. Georgia flipped the rolling pin quickly forward and the top edge of the phyllo was flicked forward and then unrolled. This flicking motion allows the phyllo to move away from its original position to accommodate its increase in size. She then rotated the dough a quarter-turn to the left and repeated the steps until the dough was thin.18
Video example 5 shows Georgia rolling dough. One striking aspect of her method is that because the dough is rolled up against itself on the rolling pin, the rolling process allows the entire dough to be opened evenly. In this case, the dough itself becomes a tool, working in tandem with human hands and the rolling pin to stretch as thinly as possible.19 This is where Georgia complains in particular that “this [thicker] rolling pin isn’t helping me,” so she has to correct with her hands. This is because it is hard to get the dough over the lip of the rolling pin, and it can’t be wound around the pin as many times as with the thinner one, so it takes more repetitions of this technique to open the phyllo to the desired thinness. Note that she uses her hands to smooth out wrinkles, but also to stretch the dough a bit farther. If this is done with a thin rolling pin, the pressure of one’s hands on the pin is distributed more evenly and effectively to the dough that has been wrapped around itself multiple times.20
When Georgia described the difference between her technique and her mother Dimitra’s, another dimension of the relation of tools to the rolling process was revealed. While Georgia typically opened her phyllo on a table or counter, her mother used a special legless table—a sofra—which she cradled in her lap while sitting on the floor of her kitchen.21 While the sofra was a circle of the perfect size for rolling the dough, it also offered the advantage that I discussed before in relation to Kalymnian cutting techniques: Georgia’s mother could roll her dough while socializing with others, telling her daughters what other things to prepare, and monitoring the activity of the rest of the family as they moved through her kitchen domain.
In examining cutting and rolling techniques, I have been interested in getting at the unspoken, embodied habits that make them effective in the varied situations and demands presented by cooking. In relation to rolling dough, I have considered the sensory engagement with materials and tools that Paxson has described as a kind of “synaesthetic reason.” In the following sections I continue to look at technique in considering other tools of the Kalymnian kitchenspace. However, the focus shifts to more particular choices about using one type of object over another, and the narratives that these choices are embedded in, as they open up interesting perspectives on the role of kitchen tools in the negotiation of identities and memories.
FIGURE 2. Dimitra Kampouri rolling dough on a sofra (2007). Photo by Hercules Vournelis.
TOOLS, IDENTITIES, ENVIRONMENTS: KATERINA AND THE CAN OPENER
The video camera is an invaluable tool for this kind of ethnographic research because it can often take your observations in completely unexpected directions. Granted, the video camera is not some transparent window onto reality, and one must always be aware of its effects on any situation. But I was fortunate in working with Katerina Kardoulia, who became so used to my daily presence with the camera that she went about her everyday activities barely paying it any attention.22 So one day I was sitting in the kitchen filming Katerina preparing fish in a tomato sauce that she seasoned with herbs she kept frozen. My question about her keeping the herbs frozen leads Katerina to talk about her own forethought in preserving herbs in the freezer to have available for use year-round, including local herbs (one called maskalies) that she has foraged, and how impressed her neighbor had been at her forethought.
As she is talking, she begins opening a can of tomato paste with a knife-style can opener. Working the can opener around the can, she is creating a series of jagged spikes on the side of the can; but this process also provokes an internal discourse, which I analyze below. This was a moment in my research when I was reminded forcefully of the idea of the kitchen as similar to a tool shop. Janet Dixon Keller had suggested this analogy to me when I was presenting some of my ideas about food and memory at a seminar at the University of Illinois, before I began to analyze cooking itself. After the seminar she wrote to me in an e-mail, describing the work she had done on blacksmithing with her husband and collaborator, Charles Keller, “Your move to study smells and tastes as cultural mnemonics reminds me of our treatment of visible storage. The latter is simply the observation that artist blacksmiths store their tools in clear sight on the walls surrounding their work space. . . . This open storage provides constant visual access to tools, which can then evoke memories of past circumstances in which they were employed.”23 At the time I noted the parallel to Kalymnian kitchens, in which tools are hung from walls and all available visible spaces are filled, much as Dixon Keller describes the blacksmith’s shop. Over the past ten years I have begun to notice the same practice in fancy kitchens in the United States, in the form of pot racks that hang from the ceiling. This parallel of kitchen and tool shop, however, was brought home to me even more in Katerina’s kitchen than in any other Kalymnian kitchen that I observed.
Video example 6 shows Katerina opening a can. You can see the problem of the jagged spikes created by the can opener and how Katerina deftly solves it. Within arm’s reach in a kitchen drawer Katerina has a mallet, an all-purpose solution for problems of this sort. This specific tool had had another life as part of the leather-tanning shop that she and her husband had run for many years in their backyard, collecting the skins of the lambs killed at Eastertime on Kalymnos and turning them into leather bags of various kinds, wallets, even traditional musical instruments (mainly the sandouri). So there was a constant sense of potential flow between the kitchen and the tool shack that sat twenty feet away in the backyard. I had seen things flow in the other direction as well: Katerina’s son-in-law poking his head into the kitchen to find some oil to work on his motorcycle, for example. Taken together, Katerina’s kitchen fitted very well with Dixon Keller’s description of the blacksmith’s workshop, where the setting provides stimulation and easy access for “problem resolutions and strategic approaches to current production tasks” (Sutton 2001, 129).
Donald Norman notes that the complexity or simplicity of a particular tool is inherent not in the tool itself, but rather in the organization of a system of which the task at hand forms a part (2011, 41ff.). This provides a way to think about Katerina’s choice of the knife can opener, which fits within the larger set of tools that she deploys in her kitchen space and “simplifies” her life. Douglas Harper suggests that “making and fixing form part of a continuum” (1987, 21). This also speaks to Katerina’s practices. Even though he was talking about processes involved in “heavy” machinery, his description of the skilled practitioner as a problem-solver with a “‘live intelligence fallibly attuned to the actual circumstances’ of life” is very much in line with Katerina’s approach.
However, one might feel once again, in terms of “efficiency,” that Katerina’s method seems a bit odd. Here’s where a careful unpacking of what she says, and in particular the internal dialogue that she has while opening the can, is revealing. It took me a long time to follow accurately and translate everything that Katerina says in this video. Interpreting this section of the video was difficult not only because certain parts are muffled, but primarily because Katerina is moving back and forth between her own internal reflections and the voicing of both her daughter Katina’s view of the can opener and her own. Let me present the translation, along with some annotations, before commenting further.24
Katerina says, “Now we’ll see Katina’s [Katerina’s daughter’s] way of opening.”
She says this while she has started opening the can in her own way, but when she realizes this she changes the pitch and tone of her voice to indicate that she is speaking as Katina, saying, “Since we have the tool, grab it so that our hands are not ruined.”
Katerina continues to open the can, and then says, “So that I don’t slow myself down, I open it . . .”
She is looking for an adverb here and I suggest “correctly,” though I believe that she perhaps wanted to say “in my own way.” [Indeed, she copies my tone of voice, suggesting that she is simply repeating what I have said]. She then mutters something barely distinguishable about putting the can, with its jagged spikes, in the refrigerator, once again suggesting that she is taking her daughter’s point of view. Then she reflects on her critique of her daughter again, noting, “Yes, well, we have said all this before, she is ours, whatever we do with her, it can’t be helped.” She means that Katina is family, she loves her, and whatever issues Katina has, they don’t change that fact.
She then focuses on the can opener she is using and says, once again switching back to her daughter’s point of view, “You can eat your hands with this thing.”25
I ask for clarification and she repeats this phrase, nodding at the sharp edges of the opened can. Fully into Katina’s point of view again she notes, “Take a minute with the proper opener.”
Not having understood this back-and-forth flow between her own and her daughter’s points of view at this point, I ask, “Why don’t you get the newer kind?”
She responds to this question, taking it in stride, “I have one, Vangelia [her friend] gave it to me, I have it. I am not made comfortable by it. I am traditional [laughing]. A real traditionalist. What to say?”
Here the choice of a particular set of tools for a particular set of problems comes to represent an existential attitude. In these brief comments Katerina presents what is an ongoing debate between herself and her daughter, Katina. She recognizes the validity of Katina’s approach while at the same time complaining about her insistence, dismissing it as part of her character by noting that she is “ours” and can’t be changed. At the same time, the “rationality” of her daughter’s view that she is creating a hazard (“You can cut your hands on that”) is acknowledged by Katerina’s insistence that the newfangled can opener simply doesn’t suit her, and that a certain series of gestures, those that would mark her daughter as “modern,” are ones she’s not willing to adopt in light of her view of herself as a “traditionalist.” Interestingly, she uses the word epideksevomai to describe this. Epideksios is an adjective meaning “skillful.” There is no corresponding verb in either standard Greek or, to my knowledge, Kalymnian. Katerina has turned this adjective into a verb in the medial-passive voice, meaning that it is a verb that usually does not take an object. Thus, the word here might be translated as “When I am with the new can opener I am not a skillful person.” This suggests a recognition of distributed agency: neither she nor the can opener is responsible for this, but both together.26
In other words, the same action—opening a can—lends itself to interpretation and analysis at the level of both gesture and representation. It is an embodied skill, yes. Surely it is what is implied when Bourdieu suggests that skill is “not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is.”27 In this case, however, it is also clearly not an unconscious habit, as typically described by Bourdieu,28 but one that in this case has generated a discourse of old and young, traditional and modern, in the kitchen as approaches toward life. No doubt it should be noted that these are not static categories, and in other ways or in other kitchen situations Katina might label herself as “traditional,” while Katerina might wish to make claims for being up-to-date. Still, it should be noted that the can opener is not an isolated instance. Mother and daughter have had disputes in the past over whether to throw away old pots or continue to use them.29 Katina told me on a number of occasions how she enjoyed shopping for new kitchen gadgets, especially ones for baking. Even so, Katina would still make fun of what she classified as the wasteful spending of neighbors and those who are “show-offs” (oi faneromenoi), buying useless new kitchen gadgets. But she also expressed a sense of embarrassment at Katerina’s unwillingness to throw away at least some of the old, beaten-up pots and pans. Kitchen choices are existential choices. We will see this on a much larger scale in the next section, in which I consider a traditional, yet recent addition to Kalymnian kitchens: the outdoor oven.
BIOGRAPHICAL OBJECTS: THE RETURN OF THE OUTDOOR OVEN
Despite their debate over “old” versus “new” kitchen tools, I never heard Katina, or other Kalymnian women, touting particular brands of tools. Katina was content picking up any knife to do her cutting, and, as we’ll see in later chapters, this reflects a general attitude of seeing cooking skill in terms of adapting whatever is available to the particular task at hand. For the most part, Kalymnians don’t seem to treat kitchen tools as “biographical objects” that “tell the stories of people’s lives” (Hoskins 1998). In our U.S.-based cooking research Michael Hernandez and I looked at a number of cases in which specific tools played the role of “inalienable possessions” (Weiner 1992) for their owners, and were accompanied with dense narratives. As Michael and I described these objects, they “are valuable because they have been removed from the stream of commodities and have acquired an almost totemic personal and family history so that they could not be sold, but only passed down from one generation to the next” (Sutton and Hernandez 2007, 75). By contrast, although some of the objects that people on Kalymnos use to decorate their kitchens might have strong associations with the family members who had originally owned them (some examples for Nina Papamihail and Nomiki Tsaggari are discussed in chapters 3 and 6, respectively), or might simply create a generalized mood of “pastness,” by and large the cooking tools people use do not seem to be densely textured with stories on Kalymnos. While people might prefer one can opener or rolling pin over another, and these choices might have symbolic significance, I found no cases of favorite knives or pans as in the United States. The only objects that come close to being “biographical” are the clay pots used for preparing Easter lambs and the outdoor ovens in which they are prepared. The pots themselves are kept and passed down in families and, as we’ll see, sometimes removed from circulation for preservation. The ovens, on the other hand, tend to be a new feature of Kalymnian kitchenspace, though their existence refers to past times and previous practices. Taken together it is perhaps their association with Easter, the most important ritual occasion in the Greek liturgical calendar, that marks them out as special.
It wasn’t until the early to mid 2000s that I became aware of the growing trend of families building outdoor ovens in their yards. While outdoor ovens have always existed on Kalymnos, in recent times they tended to be thought of as a special feature, more likely to be found in homes of relatively wealthy Kalymnians or used by shepherds for cooking when they were spending time on the mountainside. So the demand for building these ovens could be seen in part as reflecting what at the time were rising economic fortunes on the island, and indeed throughout Greece prior to the economic crisis.30 But considering these ovens in more detail gives me a chance to connect concern with kitchen tools and their use to some of the other themes I’ve been suggesting throughout this chapter, that everyday (and ritual) kitchen tools are tied to questions of identity and memory. Other kitchen researchers have focused on kitchen remodels as a productive subject for getting at the values that people bring to their cooking environments.31 While I was not fortunate enough to have my research coincide with a remodeling project, I found that in talking to Kalymnians about the uses of and reasons for building outdoor ovens I was able to raise a similar set of concerns. In some ways, these ovens, like Katerina’s can opener, seem to be about existential choices concerning how to integrate the “traditional” into contemporary life on Kalymnos. But they also caught my attention for what they reveal about memory and temporality, and for the way they are often embedded in shifting family, friendship, and neighborly relations.
Outdoor ovens have two key functions on Kalymnos, one of which is a more “everyday” use, for baking dishes like moussaka or stuffed vegetables. Here the outdoor oven is simply an extension of the regular oven: Kalymnians could prepare these dishes in their regular ovens but choose to use an outdoor oven in order to improve the flavor of the dish. Previous to the spread of these ovens, Kalymnians might choose to cook a pot of greens on coals to give them a special, smoky flavor. Ovens make this easier, and allow for extending that smoky flavor into the process of making all kinds of baked foods. The second key use is for cooking Easter lamb. Here the outdoor oven is seen as a replacement for the baker’s oven, which is available for rent at most bread shops. Before the spate of new oven construction, most Kalymnians typically would take their lamb to their local bread shop for baking. Once again, taste is a major factor behind the shift, but the cost of using the baker’s oven (40 to 50 euros in 2006) is also a consideration.
The preparation of the Easter lamb in an oven is a Kalymnian tradition; in other parts of Greece, lamb is prepared on a spit. To prepare lamb in an oven requires an aluminum container that comes with its own cover, a makeshift aluminum container (a large empty olive oil container, for example), or, the most traditional choice, a clay pot (mourri). The pot, and sometimes the makeshift can, is sealed with dough, which is said to help circulate the heat in the container so the lamb cooks evenly. Some Kalymnians were still using these clay pots in 2006 when I collected much of this material. But for many who owned one they had taken on the status of an inalienable possession, and had been removed from use for fear of breakage, especially when out of people’s control in the public bakers’ ovens.
As one woman in her forties, a shop owner, explained to me,
Irini: I have the clay pot, but I’m trying to preserve it because it’s very old, valuable, so I don’t use it. I have a new aluminum casserole dish that I use instead. I don’t want to break it because it’s old, ancient!
David: From your mom?
Irini: Keep going . . .
David: Your grandma?
Irini: Keep going . . . three generations, four, or even more.
David: Did you grow up in this neighborhood, in this house?
Irini: Yes, I grew up here, as did my mother, and my children—a chain [alisida].
Irini’s comments give a sense of the connection of objects such as these to family and community memory. On Kalymnos, many kitchen objects might have a patina of age—as I describe for Nina’s kitchen in chapter 3—but as noted, there is less focus on specific kitchen tools than a general sense of attachment to the past through tools, recipes, and kitchen preparation methods. The exceptions are objects like these clay pots, old flour sifters, or other objects that have been by and large taken out of everyday use, and are now put on display on top of kitchen cupboards as part of a general kitchen ambience.
On the Saturday before Easter 2006, friends and family gathered in the courtyard of Maria’s house for the preparation of the oven to cook the lambs, not just for her family but also for several others. Maria’s grandsons and granddaughter had cleaned out the courtyard in preparation; Maria had been hard at work cleaning and stuffing their baby lamb, while her daughter Eleni prepared the expected snacks for the guests. The cleaning took place in the middle of the courtyard, as did much processing of ingredients, while in the meantime Eleni and Maria worked together on a stuffing of rice, tomato paste, onion, spices, and parts of the internal organs of the lamb, sautéed in Maria’s small kitchen. But it was Eleni’s husband, Stavros, who took the lead in getting the oven ready to receive the lambs. He filled the oven with wood and set it to burn. Maria offered advice about the balance of woods to be used, as different woods impart different flavors. Stavros’s male friends helped carry various things over to the oven, giving small bits of advice about whether the wood had burned down enough, among other things. When the wood was reduced to coals, all the men participated, but Stavros again took the lead in filling the oven with the roughly ten containers (all metal) of lamb to be cooked. Then came the bricking up. Stavros had extra bricks around the house and had prepared a mortar. Once again, the men gathered around, helping in small ways, but for the most part making comments such as, “Don’t miss that corner.” Once the bricking was done and no smoke still escaped, we were ready to relax and enjoy the booze, sausages, and other snacks, and listen to the dynamite throwing, which carried on throughout the afternoon in preparation for the big dynamite event that evening.32
The fact of Stavros taking charge of the process reflects that this is a typical outdoor ritual and thus coded more male than female. Even if the actual preparation of the lamb—its cleaning and the preparation of the stuffing—was still done by the wife and mother-in-law, the husband took charge in preparing and tending the outdoor fire, conforming to a seemingly universal association of men and barbecue. But during the process he received advice and help from his mother-in-law, Maria, and a few of his friends who were participating in the get-together. The one unusual gender association in this event was Stavros’s sons sweeping and tidying the yard prior to the arrival of the visitors, typically a female task. This could be associated with the nature of the event as a special occasion, so that the boys were pitching in to help while the female members of the family were otherwise occupied (their sister had been assigned to clean the indoor kitchen).
FIGURE 3. Katerina Kardoulia and Katina Miha stuffing the Easter lamb (2006). Photo by author.
FIGURE 4. Nikolas Mihas preparing the outdoor oven (2006). Photo by author.
FIGURE 5. Nikolas feeding the oven while his mother-in-law, Katerina, looks on (2006). Photo by author.
FIGURE 6. Nikolas bricking up the oven, while his friend gives advice (2006). Photo by author.
The relaxed nature of the event belied the careful calculations that went into whom to invite and whom to allow to cook a lamb in the oven. By 2006 Stavros and Eleni had had the oven for only a couple of years, and later Eleni recounted to me some of the thinking that went into its construction, and some of the issues that have arisen since they built it. A few extended excerpts of this interview give a sense of the complex social relationships that are encoded in an oven, as well as some of the different temporalities that Eleni invokes in her reflections on it.
At first we used to go to my brother’s. We were happy to be all together like that, family and friends together; we had a steady yearly count of who would come, and we went as if it were a holiday; some would bring cookies, the owner [her brother] would provide the oven, some would bring beer. But we gradually lost patience with each other and animosities developed among people; children would mess up the garden, some relatives would complain, the housewife always had to have the place clean and tidy, always be prepared to serve coffee . . . so it was a tiresome thing to own an oven at your own home. And then they decided to get us to leave—not out of meanness or anything, but they told us that since they had decided not to make lamb anymore, we would have to go the next year. I didn’t care. But is it not easy to go to a bakery and use their oven, because although you have to pay fifty euros, the end result is that it does not smell like Easter, like the natural smell of burning wood the food should smell like.
Here Eleni describes a memory in the imperfect tense, a memory repeated over a number of Easter celebrations. Because her parents had built the brother a house on the outskirts of town, they had enough land to include an outdoor oven in the backyard (prior to the recent rage for such ovens). Note that Eleni’s memory doesn’t actually extend back to the period of twenty years earlier, when they had to use one of the public bakeries for their Easter lamb, but instead to a relatively recent past since the building of the brother’s house. Like all memories, memories of food lend themselves to this kind of telescoping, in which the idealized aspects of the past are what are best recalled. It is interesting that Eleni claims that everything was initially harmonious. In doing so, she draws on a discourse about the past as a time of easy sociality and generosity, of closer-knit social relations that have been lost in the present, what I have referred to elsewhere as “memories of gemeinschaft” (Sutton 2001, 53ff.). Eleni then shifts to a different memory register, the sensory memories of taste, to talk about why she couldn’t imagine going back to using the bakers’ ovens. She slightly exaggerates the cost, but stresses the idea that in order to celebrate Easter, you must taste the tastes that have become Easter’s familiar, recognizable signature, thus tying the familiar sense-scape of Easter to sociability. These kinds of embodied taste memories are instantly recognizable on Kalymnos, drawing as they do on community discourses that stress the intimate details of the tastes of different foods. It is because of the value ascribed to taste, as noted in the previous chapter, that different methods and techniques of preparing dishes are given such significance, a theme that will recur throughout this book.
Eleni continues to describe their decision to build an outdoor oven, elaborating on the importance of her memories of taste:
And that is why I told my husband to build an oven for us. He did not want to because he knew what was going to happen if he did build it: that is, that the owners would end up being like invited strangers. I insisted, though. Mostly because of the taste. My kids tomorrow they will get married and there’s enough money to go around but there won’t be any taste if we did not have an oven. And the custom is only once a year and you have to live it in a nice beautiful way, you have to taste it, it is not part of your everyday routine. It is not like you do on any other occasion when you go to some other place and do it there; in everyday life in the old days we would find a bakery and we would bake our foods there when we did not have a regular oven at home, and it would taste good; but there is something special about lamb that requires it to be cooked in a wood-burning oven in order to be tasty.
This is quite a complicated passage, which shows a number of different temporalities at work in Eleni’s recollection. She begins with a memory of the decision to build the oven, which she claims was made based on her insistence, motivated by her own taste memories. This leads her to project her family into the future, imagining it with and without the oven and the proper taste of Easter lamb. She follows with a generalizing statement about the importance of ritual observance: “the custom is only once a year . . . you have to taste it,” once again bringing together bodies, tastes, and social contexts in a moral economy that is able to transcend temporalities, sometimes functioning in idealistic representations of the past. Finally, in switching between the second person and the first person plural, she also makes a statement that distributes the memory of different ovens among herself, her family, and the wider Kalymnian community. Note also that the building of the oven itself was not based on any manual or suggestions from a local home store. Rather, Eleni’s husband, Stavros, drew on his own embodied skill, as well as on the direction of his mother-in-law, Maria, who told me that she explained to him how it should be built, its dimensions, and so on, based on her recollection of her own mother-in-law’s now-defunct oven.
In the next section of Eleni’s narrative we move from the register of temporality to a statement about the significance of the oven to social relations in the present.
When we built the oven, at that time the kids were young and they did not have any mothers-in-law [referring to her sons who were not married, and thus still ate at home]. So we told a friend to join in because he was to go away next year. He did come, and he told us that he never wanted to leave. We invited another friend, Pantelis [the son of a neighbor with whom they have been close for a long time], and he said the same thing, too. And then, there is this cousin of ours who is crazy and wild and asked if he could come in. And we told him he could come in until the kids grew up and got married, and then he would have to leave. And we said the same to everyone. But no one would leave, and they would all argue with us. And now as a result I have to always be ready to treat people with coffee and octopus and other things [this year they made sausages], not so much because I have to, but also because I want to because it is the custom to do so. In the old days, in the old ovens, we fasted, baked, and joked, and though we were mad at each other, that is how we spent the time. Now people will get drunk, they expect alcohol and whiskey and beer, and we do provide them with that and we don’t even get any respect from them, even though we honor all our customary obligations . . . rather, they become annoying with their demands to bring in other people. We don’t have the space for other people. . . . In a couple of years we, the owners, we ended up having no space for our own pot. So this year was an upsetting one for us, but I hope next year won’t be the same, because I will let them know the rules in advance, or else we will have a Chicago-style drive-by shooting!
I have elided some of the details here to give a feel for the complex social negotiations that go into deciding who gets to use space in the oven, which can fit eight to ten containers. Eleni, in fact, spends much longer recounting the ins and outs of these negotiations, which are tied not only to decisions about one particular year but, once again, to thoughts of future reconfigurations and claims that people will make on their oven. In deciding whom there is room for, a balancing of different kinds of social relations comes into play. There are some relatives related through men (since women tend to be all included in the immediate family on this matrifocal island). In this case, that group includes Eleni’s husband’s brother and her father’s maternal nephew. There are close neighbors, and there are friends, including those in godparent relationships. All these different demands must be weighed and evaluated, which may put strains on the immediate family as different family members press for the inclusion of their connections. In this recounting we can see Eleni’s relation to the wider community of Kalymnos spread out against a landscape of past and future Easter preparations.
There is an interesting blurring of temporalities here. Aside from the nostalgia for more harmonious times past, Eleni is simultaneously looking back to her intentions when building the oven and forward to a future in which her sons are married. Thus she says, “When we built the oven, at that time the kids were young and they did not have any mothers-in-law,” which would indicate to an uninformed listener that they are now married; but at the time of the interview they were not even engaged. Thus past, present, and future temporalities are projected onto the locus of the oven. A second blurring of lines is that between people and the containers they bring to put in the oven. At various points she refers to the people entering or leaving the oven, rather than their pots. She also refers to the “landlord” of the oven, as if the oven itself were a home that was being invaded by outsiders. All of this metonymical switching is suggestive, giving the oven a kind of personhood, or agency, what some might call fetishism, but which I would argue is the simple recognition that the oven is a key site for reconnecting with the past and projecting into the future. In other words, the oven stands for both good tastes and good social relations, which may be always imagined as better in the past, but which Kalymnians might be able to reclaim through proper action in the present and future.33
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: TOOLS AND THEIR USERS
Peter Dormer writes about the knowledge involved in craft, “To possess it in any form is to see the world in an enriched way compared with someone who does not possess it” (1994, 95).34 I have been arguing that an approach that follows the tools and their users can reveal aspects of this enriched world that one might otherwise miss, from the importance of preparation methods that orient the body toward the surrounding social environment to the significance of tool and kitchen design choices in the play of Kalymnian ideas about the traditional, the modern, and the role of prospective memory in orienting people temporally in relation to their cooking practices. “Skillfulness” and “authenticity” are, of course, relative to a total environment in which cutting in the hand makes sense, while using a thick rather than thin rolling pin may not be as authentic as the practices of the pie makers of northern Greece. But this doesn’t reduce what Polykseni called the “art” of opening phyllo on Kalymnos to the particular requirements of Kalymnian tastes. Of course, even working with premade phyllo dough, though some Kalymnians might look down on it, requires considerable skill and embodied knowledge, a point brought home to me as I was writing this chapter when I noticed an article in the New York Times on working with phyllo (Landis 2012). I was excited to read it and see how a professional food columnist would write about the issues I had been thinking about. Alas, I had assumed it would be about rolling phyllo dough, but found that it was instead about how to use frozen, prerolled phyllo dough without letting it dry out!
My ethnographic subjects themselves are clearly aware of the significance of tools, as reflected in the distributed agency between humans and objects suggested in many of these interactions, including Georgia’s claim that the rolling pin “is not helping me”; Neni Panourgia’s insistence that women, not abstract “people,” use kitchen counters; Katerina’s phrasing that she and the new can opener together are not skillful; and Eleni’s subject-object reversals regarding her outdoor oven. Indeed, there is a sense in which tools are not thought of apart from the context of their uses, in the manner that one might say this is the ideal knife for chopping. When I asked Georgia and her mother (by phone) whether there were differences in using a thin or a thick rolling pin, they responded that the thin one and the dough rolled around it are good for making thin phyllo, while the thick one and the dough rolled under it are good for making thick phyllo. Tools, ingredients, and bodily skills and gestures are all of a piece, part of a larger potentiality of tools-in-use in the kitchenspace.35
My subjects are, nevertheless, also attentive to the risk of tool use in the kitchen, even if they don’t imagine the same sources of risk as I might: indeed, some of my informants had cut their hands while using a knife, but remembered more examples of this happening when they did use a counter or cutting board. So just as cooking involves skill and creativity, it also involves risk and danger: the risk of the failure of a dish and the danger of injury. Indeed, this is a reflection of the open-ended character that makes cooking cooking. For now it’s important to note that just as there are male activities of risk and value on Kalymnos, the most obvious examples being sponge diving and dynamite throwing, the kitchenspace holds similar dimensions for women.36 That is one of the reasons why, when Georgia talks of her mother’s phyllo dough, she lowers her voice in respect: “It’s so thin, you can see through it”; and why Katerina embraces her choice of can opener as part of her identity: it holds rewards as well as risks.
Cooking is a way of understanding the world, as Dormer said about craft, and Kalymnians are also aware of the significance of “knowledge” for cooking practice. But what is cooking knowledge, and how is it deployed in the process of cooking? What role do recipes and cookbooks or other media play in storing and disseminating this knowledge? How is cooking learned, and how is cooking knowledge transferred from one person to another? These are some of the questions to consider as we proceed to the next course.