La cocina como tecnica cultural/Cooking as a Cultural Technique: Rosetta Cuadernos/Notebooks 7

The Rosetta Notebooks are published as part of an innovative project at the Mexico City restaurant led by Chef Elena Reygadas.

Each volume offers a short, incisive text written by a renowned scholar who explores aspects of food culture, health, and environmental concerns.

Chef Reygadas notes:

I’m convinced that we should also consider our work as cooks beyond its hedonistic function. In a world like ours—devastated by climate change, social inequality, systemic violence, sexism, racism, and the degradation of political life, to mention just a few of many ills—a restaurant should provide a platform for reflection and positive contributions to society.

In volume 7, a professor of media history at the University of Basel in Switzerland, Markis Krajewski, working in collaboration with Margaretha Jungling, a Swiss artist who also trained as a chef at Relae in Copenhagen, presents the outline of a proposed book. The book’s subject will be an 18-course banquet, each dish presented in a formal order and with a ceremony which has gone out of vogue in the last century.

Krajewski’s motives for reviving Baroque-era dining rituals seem closely tied to making people as conscious of the symbolism and import of what they are eating as members of the European ruling class once were.

Pamphlet. 40 pages. Black-and-white photographs. In Spanish and English.