Hosted at Serendipity Arts Festival 2024
Facilitated by Afshan Mariam

Recipes aren’t just lists of instructions — they’re stories, memories, and cultural archives disguised as directions to a dish. Cookbook Chronicles: Reading Recipes was a warm, reflective session led by Afshan Mariam, inviting participants to explore recipes as literary, sensory, and emotional texts.

Participants were encouraged to bring along their favourite cookbooks, food writings, and cherished recipes — from stained notebook pages to beloved food essays — to read aloud, swap stories, and unearth forgotten kitchen memories.

Key highlights included:

• Shared readings of recipes and food writings, exploring their poetic rhythms, evocative imagery, and layered memories.

• Reflections on how recipes act as memory-keepers, cultural markers, and intimate instructions, carrying voices across generations and geographies.

• Conversations about what makes a recipe resonate — the texture of its language, the nostalgia of its instructions, or the story between its lines.

• A collective celebration of lush food literature, both contemporary and ancestral.

The session offered a gentle, communal space for participants to read, listen, and feast on words, reaffirming how recipes nourish us not just through food, but through the stories they hold.

About Afshan Mariam:
Afshan is an educator and facilitator whose work centres around food, memory, and creative expression. Through workshops like this, she creates spaces for people to connect with their personal and shared culinary histories.