Eating American, All Day and Every Night I have been cooking since as far back as I can remember, and am hoping to study Hotel and Restaurant Management after high school. Culinary Arts has played a tremendous role in my high school career, so it was without difficulty that I landed on my Senior Year Project; I have known since the moment I signed up for SYP that my project would be in some way a reflection of my love of cuisine and cooking. Since then however, I have been pressed to find a way of incorporating this passion into a Senior Project that reflects not only my experience in the culinary field, but also my interest in foreign and regional relations. After much consideration on how to combine these two relatively different interests, I finally found a project that would be able to highlight both these skills without placing an enormous focus on either. My project is, ideally, to write a modern cookbook based exclusively off of foreign Americanized dishes.
Throughout the 3rd and 4th terms, I will be researching, reviewing, testing, and collecting recipes that have formed the motley lovechild that is American Cuisine. While there are countless cookbooks and restaurants advertising “New American Cuisine”, a refined form of classic American dishes, few explore the opposite. For my senior project, I am hoping to work with contacts in France, Nicaragua, and Burkina Faso in order to trace how dishes seen as classic and traditional in those foreign countries translated over into the American identity. My cookbook will, unlike most “American” recipe books, focus on these foreign dishes rather than their Atlantic correspondents.
For the month of February I will be staying with a host family in Paris, France with the French Exchange. Although an integral part of the exchange is assimilating into the host-family’s life and attending classes at Ecole Massillon, the partner school, I will be spending the majority of my free time amassing recipes and items that are “effortlessly French”. I am currently establishing contacts at several small restaurants, cafes, and bakeries in the Paris area, from whom I hope to collect original recipes to be revamped for my cookbook. In addition to these formal recipes, I am also planning to sample traditional French foods [read: eat a lot] while staying in the city, and experimenting with a more Americanized version of the dish while back in the United States.
Two weeks after I return from Paris, I will be shipping out once again to San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua to do essentially the same as I did in Paris. The greatest differences between these two environments are that Nicaragua is a third world country, and that the trip is a community service trip rather than an exchange. For this reason, I will be focusing less on refined restaurant-style cuisines and am planning to take recipes from residents of the towns in which we will be working. While this is less formal research, it is still integral to finding the link between South American and American culture [read: eating a lot].
By the time I am back from Nicaragua, I will have withdrawn from most of my classes and will be able to focus exclusively on adapting the recipes I will have amassed. It is at this point that I hope to use Senior Project as a venue to continue an in-school project with which I am already involved. Fiona Blyth’s AP French 5 class traditionally raises money for a school in Yako, Burkina Faso, which I am currently in the midst of. While we as a class are holding bake sales and small fundraisers, I am hoping that my Senior Year Project will allow me to extend these into a longer-term aid solution. For one, I am hoping to use the contacts I have already established in Yako to add West African dishes to the American Cookbook. Will my senior project focuses simply on the creation of this book of recipes, if I am able to have my work published I hope to use the profits to help aid students in Yako.
My only concern with this project is that I will end up spending an enormous amount of money in the developmental stage of the book. I realize that in order to ensure that all recipes are of a high standard, I will need to test and re-test every dish that is included. For this reason, I am setting up an agreement with the Tiger’s Loft Bistro at Newton North where I will be able to cook in their professional kitchen and sell any items I produce at a low price, solely so that I will be able to break even. I am also planning to apply for outside grants in order to cover the costs of food and the great travel expenses that I will be taking on for the project.
I realize the great responsibility and risk involved in taking on this sort of senior project; almost all of my field research has to be completed in the early weeks of term 3, when Senior Year Project technically hasn’t even gotten into full swing. I am also doing this without any pre-established connections, and am banking on being able to work closely with chefs who live, quite literally, thousands of miles away from me. Despite this, I have no doubts regarding my ability to work independently on such a complex and layered senior project. I have already begun working towards this goal, and fully understand the risks involved. I feel comfortable saying, with the utmost confidence, that I am not at all daunted or overwhelmed by the task at hand.
Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die. - Isaiah 22:13
Eating American, All Day and Every Night
I have been cooking since as far back as I can remember, and am hoping to study Hotel and Restaurant Management after high school. Culinary Arts has played a tremendous role in my high school career, so it was without difficulty that I landed on my Senior Year Project; I have known since the moment I signed up for SYP that my project would be in some way a reflection of my love of cuisine and cooking. Since then however, I have been pressed to find a way of incorporating this passion into a Senior Project that reflects not only my experience in the culinary field, but also my interest in foreign and regional relations. After much consideration on how to combine these two relatively different interests, I finally found a project that would be able to highlight both these skills without placing an enormous focus on either. My project is, ideally, to write a modern cookbook based exclusively off of foreign Americanized dishes.
Throughout the 3rd and 4th terms, I will be researching, reviewing, testing, and collecting recipes that have formed the motley lovechild that is American Cuisine. While there are countless cookbooks and restaurants advertising “New American Cuisine”, a refined form of classic American dishes, few explore the opposite. For my senior project, I am hoping to work with contacts in France, Nicaragua, and Burkina Faso in order to trace how dishes seen as classic and traditional in those foreign countries translated over into the American identity. My cookbook will, unlike most “American” recipe books, focus on these foreign dishes rather than their Atlantic correspondents.
For the month of February I will be staying with a host family in Paris, France with the French Exchange. Although an integral part of the exchange is assimilating into the host-family’s life and attending classes at Ecole Massillon, the partner school, I will be spending the majority of my free time amassing recipes and items that are “effortlessly French”. I am currently establishing contacts at several small restaurants, cafes, and bakeries in the Paris area, from whom I hope to collect original recipes to be revamped for my cookbook. In addition to these formal recipes, I am also planning to sample traditional French foods [read: eat a lot] while staying in the city, and experimenting with a more Americanized version of the dish while back in the United States.
Two weeks after I return from Paris, I will be shipping out once again to San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua to do essentially the same as I did in Paris. The greatest differences between these two environments are that Nicaragua is a third world country, and that the trip is a community service trip rather than an exchange. For this reason, I will be focusing less on refined restaurant-style cuisines and am planning to take recipes from residents of the towns in which we will be working. While this is less formal research, it is still integral to finding the link between South American and American culture [read: eating a lot].
By the time I am back from Nicaragua, I will have withdrawn from most of my classes and will be able to focus exclusively on adapting the recipes I will have amassed. It is at this point that I hope to use Senior Project as a venue to continue an in-school project with which I am already involved. Fiona Blyth’s AP French 5 class traditionally raises money for a school in Yako, Burkina Faso, which I am currently in the midst of. While we as a class are holding bake sales and small fundraisers, I am hoping that my Senior Year Project will allow me to extend these into a longer-term aid solution. For one, I am hoping to use the contacts I have already established in Yako to add West African dishes to the American Cookbook. Will my senior project focuses simply on the creation of this book of recipes, if I am able to have my work published I hope to use the profits to help aid students in Yako.
My only concern with this project is that I will end up spending an enormous amount of money in the developmental stage of the book. I realize that in order to ensure that all recipes are of a high standard, I will need to test and re-test every dish that is included. For this reason, I am setting up an agreement with the Tiger’s Loft Bistro at Newton North where I will be able to cook in their professional kitchen and sell any items I produce at a low price, solely so that I will be able to break even. I am also planning to apply for outside grants in order to cover the costs of food and the great travel expenses that I will be taking on for the project.
I realize the great responsibility and risk involved in taking on this sort of senior project; almost all of my field research has to be completed in the early weeks of term 3, when Senior Year Project technically hasn’t even gotten into full swing. I am also doing this without any pre-established connections, and am banking on being able to work closely with chefs who live, quite literally, thousands of miles away from me. Despite this, I have no doubts regarding my ability to work independently on such a complex and layered senior project. I have already begun working towards this goal, and fully understand the risks involved. I feel comfortable saying, with the utmost confidence, that I am not at all daunted or overwhelmed by the task at hand.
Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die.
- Isaiah 22:13