Welcome to Cookery Obscura!
At Cookery Obscura, I explore cooking techniques and tools to understand the history of our culture through food practices, and how we might possibly use or reinvent these for the future. Maybe some of these tools and techniques have gone extinct and they deserve a second life. Maybe they are as strange as they seem, but we continue to use them to this day. I will be looking back into our colorful collective past, documenting the means and methods of these tools and techniques through my writing, videos, podcasts, song and dance, whatever it takes to get the point across. So, if you happen to have a kitchen tool you can’t identify or if there is a technique of interest that you’d like me to examine, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line. I’m probably as curious as you are to figure it out!
About me:
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I am a local girl born and raised in Oahu, and after many years on the Mainland, I find myself back in Hawaii discovering the Big Island for the first time. As many of us here will attest, the Big Island is strangely absent of many dining options, in other words, this is not a foodie paradise. It is a stark contrast to my old life in Los Angeles, where at any hour of the day, you can find something delicious to eat. On the contrary, here on the Big Island, there is an unpoliced, voluntary curfew of about 8pm. When I visited Barcelona, 8pm was happy hour at restaurants, people were only just starting to trickle in. But guess what. I don’t mind the 8pm curfew. I am coerced to rummage through my eclectic cookbook collection and make the things I crave to eat. So I experiment a lot. I threw the first ever annual pie party in my tiny community; thirty-plus people came with a cornucopia of pies: chicken pot pie, berry galette, kimchi sausage quiche. I gave out prizes for the most delicious and most inventive, thinking that I had stumbled upon a new food culture phenomenon. But then I realized, I didn’t invent the pie party wheel here! I’m sure pie parties have been happening every other month since 1913, way before I even showed up. And I think that’s the point of this whole investigation. That everything we think is new really isn’t. But maybe food, and culture, and life is all about death and renewal. So bring your shovels, whether they be spoons or something else, and let’s dig in, shall we?