Can cooking be about something more than just food? If you aim at using your Christmas dinner to make a political and social statement, rather than just showing off your cooking skills, Cooking Sections, is a research-practice founded by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, has prepared the perfect festive recipe. Cooking Sections has reinterpreted the original recipe of the Empire Christmas Pudding from 1928, adapting it to modern times’ spicy resources. The original recipe created by the Empire Marketing Board was made-up of ingredients from different British colonies, aimed at promoting the consumption of British goods. In this 2014 version, ingredients for the pudding have been sourced as in the original recipe: many ingredients are no longer available due to changing territorial conditions or economic policies that dissolve the notion of ‘origin’. Thus, substituting ingredients with those currently available is a way to track the changes in global food networks, turning the new recipe for the classic British Christmas pudding into an edible map. If you decide to turn your kitchen into a 9-hour steam bath, your holiday table may just turn into the perfect location for discussing the current geopolitical order.
