Academic literature on the topic 'Rolling out dough'

Development of fine motor skills is an important part of corrective work with children with autism spectrum disorders. The salted dough is well suited for this purpose: the dough can be rolled, kneaded, rolled out with a rolling pin, wiped through a strainer and grated, which causes a lot of interest in children and motivates them to the lessons. The stages and techniques of teaching children at classes within the creative workshop “We Shape the World with Our Own” in the Federal Resource Center for Organization of Comprehensive Support for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders are described. Recommendations are given on the use of techniques for working with salt dough.

The results showed that the SOP used was the SOP in the simplest form which only had a few activities and decision making. In the production process there are five stages carried out during the production process, namely, preparing raw materials, stirring the dough into a mixer, the process of rolling bread, the process of developing bread and the process of developing the dough ready to bake. Here the raw materials in the form of main raw materials namely wheat flour, capital in the form of owner's personal capital, machines in the form of tools used during the production process and work force are very influential during the production process because workforce is the main actor in the production of bread king. As one of the kingpin bread businesses in Samarinda, it is expected that the staff of the kingpin bread must continue to improve and maintain the quality of the production produced, that is bread kingpin and still maintain the quality of human resources namely labor. The most important thing must not be forgotten is that labor is a very very important factor of production in every production process that should be a benchmark to find out whether the system implemented has been implemented properly.

Urea treated Whole Crop Wheat (WCW) provides a stable, alkaline high DM forage, which is a potential replacement for, or complement to grass silage. Harvesting at about 600 g DM/kg facilitates both optimum crop DM production and energy concentration within the crop. Urea treatment (40 kg/t DM) at harvest prevents fermentation during storage, and may increase the crop digestibility. The nitrogen status of the forage as ammonia is also increased. The aim of these experiments was to investigate the feeding value of WCW for dairy cattle, when offered as the sole basal feed.A spring wheat crop (var. Axona) was cut at about 600 .g DM/kg (hard dough stage), chopped using a conventional forage harvester and stored in an outdoor clamp silo. Urea was added at 40 kg/t DM during harvesting. After rolling, the clamp was sheeted with polythene for 125 days until feed out.

Banana sale is an alternative food that is processed by drying. Traditionally, sale processing is done by drying, but some are smoked first with firewood, but this smoking makes the quality of banana sale less good. The business analysis study in this study was to determine the extent to which the banana roll business was profitable, to determine the profit and loss and sustainability of the business managed by UD Putra Roti Banjarnegara. This research was conducted at UD Putra Roti. The location was chosen because UD Putra Roti is one of the most popular food businesses in Banjarnegara district. The research was conducted in October – December 2020. The data collected in the study were primary data and secondary data. The data collected was then analyzed using data analysis. Data analysis methods used, namely: gross income, net income, depreciation of equipment, BEP, RC Ratio, BC Ratio and ROI. Processing of sale banana rolls at UD Putra Roti includes procurement of raw materials, sorting, slicing, arranging, drying, rolling dried bananas, cutting rolls, standing, making dough rolls, frying, draining, and packaging. The results of the analysis show that the sale of banana rolls processing business carried out at UD. Putra Roti is feasible to do with an RC ratio > 1, which is 1.39. BC Ratio of 0.39 and 39% ROI The ROI obtained is 39%, which means that each capital is Rp. 100, obtained a profit of Rp. 39.

Men in crisis Confused by society's mixed messages about what's expected of them as boys, and later as men, many feel a sadness and disconnection they cannot even name. (Pollack 1) The recent 'crisis in masculinity' has been punctuated by a plethora of material devoted to reclaiming men's 'lost' power within a society. Triggered by the recognition that their roles within our society are changing, this emerging cannon often fails to recognise men as part of a social continuum that subjectifies individuals within discursive frameworks. Rather it mourns this process as the emasculation of male identity within our culture. However, this self-help rhetoric masks a wider project of renegotiating men's power within our society. David Buchbinder for example, calls for an interrogation of "how men and various masculinities are represented" (7). As a consequence, male subjectivities are being called into question. There is now examination of the manner in which "power is differentiated so that particular styles of masculinity become ascendant…in certain situations" (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 52). In this way, male power is being problematised on many fronts. The desire to shore-up male power in the face of various 'threats' has called for a corporeal manifestation of masculine dominance. Men's bodies have been redefined through contemporary attention to physical sculpting and molding. This reanimation of the Superman ethic of embodiment is part of the hegemonic maintenance of masculine power in our culture. At the times of the greatest threat to male competence and control within society - social, political and economic restructuring, war and recovery - the body has been at the frontier of reasserting male power. This paper traces performances of superhero masculinity across men's bodies. As central 'creators' of their world, superheroes embody a mythology in masculine identity that shapes men as social and natural determinists within a society. In attempting to replicate this role, men are subjected to a rupture in the social fabric whereby their bodies move through a series of discursive frameworks in a contradictory tapestry that activates a 'crisis' within masculine identity. This paper seeks to open the seam between masculinity and power to examine how masculine legitimacy is negotiated on embodied surfaces. This trajectory is constantly stretched to its limits where men's bodies are in a persistent state of rebuilding. Henry Rollins forms part of the frayed edges of superhero identity. Simultaneously validating and undermining this mentality, Rollins creates a nexus of contradictory ideologies. Embracing a "rock-hard male body" (Robinson 11) in a powerfully built embodied reality, and at the same time deconstructing it, Rollins takes issue with men in their mythological role as centres of social reality and their power to create and control it. Rollins forms an identity that is shaped within discursive practices rather than the director of them. In tracing this performance through the "Liar" music video that features Rollins in the Superman role, this paper demonstrates the convoluted masculinity embraced by Rollins and the movement of Superman across his body. Between superheroes, war and bodybuilding, the aim is to trace how men are positioned as unproblematic agents of power, change and creation within the embodied myths of our culture. Bodies of knowledge Men's bodies have changed. While they have been the 'normal' against which women's bodies have been defined, this sense of normality has altered (Cranny-Francis 8). Foucault has consistently demonstrated how bodies are created and inscribed through cultural processes whereby discourses determine the shape and nature of embodied realities. Even though men are often centralised in these knowledge systems, it does not mean that they are immune to their influence. Men are insistently defined through metaphors of the mind. The proper man is a controlled man. In bodybuilding this relationship is activated in the repetitive and disciplined action of tensing and relaxing muscle. Defined as, "the toning and accentuating of muscles by the repeated action of flexing and releasing…particularly through the use of weights" (Carden-Coyne n.pag), it reifies a controlled mind restraining and shaping the physical form. During the Enlightenment thrust toward scientific rationalism, Descartes positioned an uncomplicated division between the mind and the body. Men spent their time purifying their souls and using bodies "as a spiritual vessel, a Christian container of morality and purity" (Carden-Coyne n.pag). They were shells that required discipline so the mind was not led astray. The mind was the controlling agent that subdued a disobedient embodiment. The extent to which this was achieved was the measure of the legitimacy and competence of a man. The currency of this corporeal state resonates most potently today through the phallus. As an extension of the phallus, the surface of the male body is a crucial site for the demonstration of embodied control. For the phallus is not very closely related to the possession of a penis as David Buchbinder argues when he suggests, "the phallus as a symbol, however, is not to be identified with an actual penis, because no actual penis could ever really measure up to the imagined sexual potency and social or magical power of the phallus" (49). Indeed, men's penises are "flaccid most of the time" (Buchbinder 48). They are fragile and soft. They rarely meet the 'supernatural' prowess of the phallus. Phallic power is related to the capacity to occupy the space of symbolic power effectively - to be embodied in a competent masculinity. Bodybuilding demonstrates a mastery over the self that articulates this discipline. The capacity to mobilise this control is linked to wider social power in which men are supposed to be privileged agents of creation and control in the political and economic spheres of life. Henry Rollins mobilises a mythos of masculine embodied control and corporeal hardness in his embrace of Superman. He is the epitome of phallic power and Rollins uses this character as a metonym to articulate the contradictions between the ideologies circulating through culture and the reality of lived experience. While Rollins mobilises a superhero musculature, the surfacing of his self masks a vulnerable masculine subjectivity that is embedded within distinct social frameworks. He uses the ideologies surrounding superheroes to create a dialogue between the reality of everyday life and the discourses that frame those experiences. Superheroes are resourceful, disciplined and righteous. They are sites of strength, moral virtue, creation and control. They often have super-powers, super-human strength, agility or speed that enables them to exist apart from regular humans. They occupy spaces removed from everyday life. However, their separateness from these realities is contrary to real men's experiences. Like the phallus, there is a gulf between the superhero ideology that men are supposed to embody and the reality of lived experience. Nevertheless there remains a constant struggle to build and rebuild the male body to the pinnacle of (super)masculine prowess. Superman is framed within the mind/body binary quite clearly. The control he exercises over his body reifies his calm and disciplined mind. His powerful physique, "represents in vividly graphic detail the masculinity, the confidence, the power that personifies the ideal of phallic masculinity" (Brown n.pag). His control extends across his self and out into the world. Rollins embraces this control through his own self-empowering rhetoric that litters his lyrics, spoken word and concert performances. He also most clearly embodies the Superman ideology through a life-long attention to bodybuilding. Introduced to weightlifting as a teenager, Rollins incorporates the Superman ideology into his subjectivity. He has been referred to as the "tattooed, muscled Ubermensch of serious rawk" (geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/4396/hrf.htm). He works his muscles to rebuild his identity after a disaffiliated, Ritalin-addicted childhood spent bouncing between divorced parents. The processes of disciplining his body and empowering the self are made clear through his relationship to his body and to the weights. Rollins believes in extending himself to his limits and beyond. Bodybuilding is the mattering map Rollins uses to construct a sense of self. He uses it to define who he is and to build his self-esteem. For example,"time away from the Iron makes my mind and body degenerate. I turn on myself and wallow in thick depression that makes me unable to function. The body shuts my mind down. The Iron is the best anti-depressant I have ever found. No better way to fight weakness than with strength. Fight degeneration with generation" (Rollins 257). In his embrace of the embodied power of Superman and the building mechanisms of weightlifting he is able to repair and regenerate his sense of self. He is able to transform himself into something new and different, thereby exercising power as an agent of change. This ethic of rebuilding hails an earlier time when control over the body needed to reestablish the coherent corporeality of damaged men within a culture. World War One redefined popular consciousness of men's bodies as the mechanisation of warfare ripped limbs from torsos and severed the relationship between a disciplined mind and the controlled body. Rebuilding battered bodies The first widespread conflict to use guns, shells and tanks produced the first evidence of neurasthenia, or shell shock (Carden-Coyne n.pag). Faith in evolution and human improvement was shaken to its core with the appearance of physically and emotionally broken masculinity. Men's bodies were dismembered and disabled - their minds were tortured. As a result Carden-Coyne argues, [t]he first world war significantly undermined confidence in the male instinct, by demonstrating that the primitive energies of the male body (virility, physical strength and aggression) were no match for modern technological warfare. A process of healing was needed to rebuild a masculinity of control and strength in these men. Faith in progress needed to be renegotiated and the damaged minds and bodies of men mended. Bodybuilding was seen as the most complete demonstration of embodied control. It required discipline and strength and so required the mind to order the body. Bodybuilding was embraced after World War One to repair the fissures in war-ravaged masculinity. It served, "to shape corporeal borders…against the sense of decay and uncertainty that permeated the 'air' of modernity" (Carden-Coyne n.pag). The strong body created a strong mind and bodybuilding in the post-war period also helped to more popularly render images of heroes. War heroes could be more easily framed in musculature. In popular culture, heroes shifted from aristocratic figures such as the Scarlet Pimpernel, to more everyday men. By 1938 the emergence of Superman comics positioned the ordinary-like man as superhero (Bridwell 6). The hard body had the capacity to make the ordinary man exceptional. Indeed, the superheroes of the twentieth century like "Tarzan, Conan, James Bond" (Connell 6) all depict a resilience and similar competence over all aspects of their lives. However as men's authority has been increasingly challenged within our society, embodied strength has increased in Superman to mirror the changes in the lives of these men. Postmodern paychecks World War Two also tore men's bodies apart. However with this war, the machine was reinscribed as saving rather than taking lives on the battlefield (Fussell 3). The development of the atomic bomb was attributed to, and celebrated as, man's ability to create and conquer anything (Easlea 90). By 1950 Superman comics depicted the man of steel withstanding a nuclear blast thereby validating the superiority and resilience of white, western masculinity and embodied hardness over the weak Others (Bridwell 10). Nevertheless World War Two chewed through men's bodies at an imperceptible rate. Despite the rhetoric of heroism and technological superiority, the reality of everyday battle was broken bodies. The ideology of the superhero served to mask the realities of this war. Despite the damage to the corporeal form, the heroic mythology of masculine identity served to reify a coherent embodiment and a clear mind. The mobilisation of this masculine myth masked the erosion of legitimate male power within culture. This resonates into the postwar period where a whole series of structural changes to the social landscape have radically redefined our social reality. The mechanisms men have used to define themselves have decayed. The rising empowerment of women, gay men and black men have problematised the centrality of white, heterosexual men in our culture (Faludi 40). They are no longer able to easily occupy a stable, silent centre in our society. As a result, there has been an attempt to reclaim the body and reclaim the competency that serves to define men as masculine. The rising interest in men's health and physical fitness on the whole, has lead to a reanimation of the superman figure. Men's bodies are getting harder and larger. Part animal, part machine Henry Rollins embraces the contradictions in heroic masculinity. He demonstrates an embodied control that is regimented through an incorporation of Nietzschean will. In this way he embodies the relationship between the superhero and contemporary masculinity. However, Rollins' Superman is not an Ubermensch (Nietzsche 230). He performs a problematic masculinity. As a result, Rollins deconstructs the masculine hierarchy by subverting, not only his own performance of masculinity, but all such performances. The "Liar" music video by The Rollins Band features Rollins in the Superman role. In this clip he interrogates different levels of truth and reality. For him, neither Clark Kent nor Superman is a valid model on which to base effective performances of masculinity. Neither of these men are heroes, rather they are simulations. The version of Superman that Rollins constructs is authoritative and totalitarian. He depicts a corrupt figure and flawed leader who is not in control and is struggling to meet the demands of his role. This performance of Superman deconstructs the myth of the male hero. For Rollins, this hero does not exist - or if he does - he is a "Liar". Henry Rollins both embodies and deconstructs the superhero identity. He forms a nexus around which contradictory ideologies in masculinity collide and are reworked into a radically subversive critique of the relationship between men and superheroes. For Rollins the superhero mentality masks the complicated ideologies men must negotiate everyday in which they are subjectified within contradictory discursive frameworks that demand multifarious performances. Rollins strips back the layers of masculine power to reveal the ways in which men are embedded within social structures that reflect and affect their reality. In this self-reflexive critique he performs Superman in playful, resistive ways. This Superman does not exist apart from everyday life, but is entrenched within its frameworks that can only produce flawed performances of a social ideal. For Rollins a superhero embodiment cannot wipe away the discourses that encircle men within our culture but is rather a reflection of the extent to which men are embedded within them. In negotiating the difficulties in masculinity, Henry Rollins deprioritises men's roles as super-human agents of control, creation and change within a society. He calls into question the validity of masculine power and reifies the contradictions in manhood. He hails an ultimately resilient and empowered dominant masculinity within a deconstructive rhetoric. He is mobilising a moment within our culture where men must redefine who they are. This redefinition must be less concerned with how men can reclaim the power they are currently mourning in the 'crisis of masculinity'. If we are to make lasting change within a Cultural Studies framework then it cannot end, but only begin, with the articulation of a diversity of voices. Deep, structural change can only be made if we examine how a powerful position is able to occupy an unproblematised node of commonsense. Men need to redefine who they are, their bodies, their minds and their performances to position a masculinity that is not separate from society, but that can exist coherently within it. References Bridwell, Nathan. "Introduction." Superman from the Thirties to the Seventies. New York: Bonanza Books, 1971. Brown, James. "Comic book masculinity and the new black superhero." African American Review. 33.1 (1999): expanded academic database [n.pag]. Accessed 9.4.2001. Buchbinder, David. Performance Anxieties. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998. Carden-Coyne, Anna. "Classical heroism and modern life: Body building and masculinity in the early twentieth century." Journal of Australian Studies. (December 1999): expanded academic database [n.pag] Accessed 9.4.2001. Connell, Robert. "Masculinity, violence and war" in P. Patton and R. Poole (eds.), War/Masculinity. Sydney: Intervention Publications, 1985. Cranny-Francis, Ann. The Body in the Text. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995. Descartes, Rene. Key Philosphical Writings. (Translated by E. Haldane and G. Ross) Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1997. Easlea, Brian. Fathering the Unthinkable. London: Pluto Press, 1983. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. London: Routledge, 1973. ---Madness and Civlisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. London: Routledge, 1965. ---The Order of Things. London: Vintage, 1972. Fussell, Paul. Wartime: Understanding of Behaviour in the Second World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Haywood, Christina and Mac an Ghaill, Martin. "Schooling masculinities" in Martin Mac an Ghaill (ed.), Understanding Masculinities. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996. "I Have Zero Sex Appeal." Melody Maker. (March 29 1997). geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/4396/hrf/htm. Accessed July 30 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche Volume 4, The Will to Power, Book One and Two. O. Levy (ed.), London: George Allen and Unwin, 1924. Pollack, William. Real Boys. Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 1999. Robinson, Doug. No Less a Man. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 1994. Rollins, Henry. "The Iron." The Portable Henry Rollins. London: Phoenix House, 1997.

I’ve always thought that I should have been a baker. The profession, as I imagine it, appeals to my romantic sense of the art: the thrill of being awake before everyone else with my fingers in a pliant ball of dough; the warmth of the baking ovens at my back, imagining, in between sips of espresso, the joy my fresh baked goods will bring the world as the people in it start their day. Destiny saw fit to set me on another path – that of tenure-track, assistant professor of American literature – and doomed my dreams of a baking career, along with the opportunity for any regular home cooking. With the exception of holiday and special occasion cooking, the nearest I come to my romanticised notion of being a baker is the seasonal session of jam-making. I choose jam-making over jelly-making because in making jam you utilise the whole fruit, as opposed to using only the juice of the fruit to make jelly. However, I console myself with the thought that it is now pointless for me, in this era, to wish to be either a baker or a jam-maker, since both jobs are far from my romanticised notions of them, having succumbed, for the most part, commercially, to the site of the factory and the industrialisation of the assembly line. In fact, why does anyone bother to make homemade jams when they can drive to the neighbourhood supermarket and buy a jar of it for less than half the price of what it might cost to make it at home? The answer to this question calls us to investigate the contemporary foodways of home fruit preservation and canning as they gesture to jam as a cultural sign system whose meaning surpasses mere physical nourishment. From the sixteenth century (when sugar became readily available to the general populace in Europe) until the Industrial Revolution, cooks “put up” seasonal fruits, as jam- and jelly-making used to be called, for three main reasons: in order to 1) enjoy them at other times of the year, 2) preserve an abundant harvest from going to waste, and 3) store them for possible future times of scarcity (see Wilson and Eden). However, with the Industrial Revolution came commercially prepared products at prices below the cost of the total ingredients for home preparation of such items (Hunter 140). In fact, cookbooks written and published after the mid-eighteen hundreds contain far fewer recipes for jams and jellies than previous cookbooks do, indicating the move away from home preservation of fruit condiments because of the ready availability of commercial ones (Hunter 140). By the twentieth century, it became simply unnecessary for homemakers to prepare jams and jellies at home. By this time, most Western countries offered consumers a year-round supply of fresh fruits (flown, shipped, or trucked in from somewhere else), as well as an array of choices in cheap, factory-processed condiments; and few households would have stockpiled jams and jellies to safeguard against food scarcity when agricultural subsidies by national governments guaranteed a surplus of production. So why is it that home canning, specifically the making of jams, has not disappeared entirely as a cooking practice? Its continued existence suggests that jam-making, as an art, has cultural symbolism beyond its mere preservation of fruit, and that a growing distrust of factory food products has provided a new rationale for jam-making at home, signifying it one of those “clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the net of ‘discipline,’” one of those “procedures and ruses of consumers [that] compose the network of an antidiscipline” (de Certeau xiv-xv). With the ready availability of jams at supermarkets, with no nutritional requirements of dietary sugar that require our daily consumption of it, and with no further need of it as a “travel” food (in its earlier history, jam was used to aid travel by sea without incurring scurvy, and as a food for military troops), the continued practice of jam-making in the home emerges in the twenty-first century with a different cultural identity. C. Anne Wilson, in her introduction to “Waste Not, Want Not”: Food Preservation from Early Time to the Present Day, identifies the apparent stakes in the continued practice of making jam at home when she states that freezing produce and making jam are probably the two kinds of preservation most often carried out at home. To some extent they link up with other present-day food trends, such as concern about the use of chemicals in growing and processing the factory-produced versions. Some of those who blanch and freeze their own vegetables have chosen to grow them organically in the first place because so many of the vegetables on sale in shops, whether fresh or frozen, contain the residues of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. (3-4) The stakes noted above by Wilson are part of a growing trend of resistance to industrialised process of food production. Another author in Wilson’s edited collection, Lynette Hunter, provides the historical context for reading jam-making as a form of cultural resistance. She states that Eliza Acton, a radical journalist, published her 1857 cookery book The English Bread Book as a way to take back control of bread baking processes; in other words, she wrote the cookbook “to address the problem of the adulteration of shop-bought bread by encouraging people to make their own” (141). Indicative of a large-scale historical shift in foodways, Hunter finds that Acton makes a similar argument about fruit preserving in her Modern Cookery book of 1868: Acton feels the need to make the same intentions clear for her section on preserving and scathingly criticises the ‘unwholesome [preserved] fruit vended and consumed in very large quantities’ by the shop-buying public. Acton’s stress on the ‘wholesome’ is a significant precursor of the direction that preserving recipes will take when they re-enter cookery books at the end of the nineteenth century. No longer can the housewife claim to be frugal when she uses preserving skills, but she can claim to produce more nutritious and healthy food. (141) Thus, Acton’s cookbook reveals a trend away from conceiving home preserving as a means to save money and toward viewing it as a healthier alternative to commercially produced preserves because the consumer maintains control over all steps in the process. However, in the twenty-first century, there is no nutritional need for jam-making in the home: contemporary proponents of healthy eating proclaim the nutritional values of fresh fruits, not those preserved in sugar, and marketing trends in jams reflect this with the advertisement of many “low sugar” or “no sugar” varieties. Hunter states that making jam at home appeals to cooks at the end of the twentieth-century because “there is the confidence of knowing exactly what has gone into the foodstuff: home preserving is the only sure way of evading major additives and of controlling sugar content, and so on” (153). However, with new varieties of low or no sugar jams available at this time, and with familiar brand names, as well as organic farms, producing organic lines of jam (many offering these for sale at local farmer’s markets or via the internet), Hunter’s argument no longer reflects a primary concern of the home jam-maker. Instead, consumers do not want a relationship with a faceless jar of jam whose conditions of production are beyond their control and whose ingredients and labour come from somewhere else. They want to maintain a relationship with their local landscapes. As Hunter writes, jam-making in the home permits us “to recognise quite precisely how the network of food distribution and supply, quality and quantity, changes from year to year” (153). The exchange of homemade foodstuffs may even suggest an economy of barter that thwarts the exchange of capital for goods. Thus, home jam-making in the twenty-first century breaks with earlier methods of this practice and comes to represent this contemporary historical moment. The practice of making jam at home is counterculture and radical if it seeks to resist the heavily advertised and marketed brand name jams and provide the consumer with a sense of agency and control over the processes of production. Although it may cost cooks more money and take more time than simply purchasing jam at the supermarket, every jar of jam they make themselves is an act of defiance, however small, because it refuses to put money into the pockets of multinational corporations. Here, to use the terms of Michel de Certeau in the Practice of Everyday Life, the consumer unmakes his own domination by developing practices of everyday life that “poach … on the property” of the corporation and factory owners. Making jam at home is one of the “‘ways of operating’ [that] form the counterpart, on the consumer’s … side, of the mute processes that organise the establishment of socioeconomic order” (xiv). Contrary to the romantic notion of baking with which I began this essay, where I imagine getting up early in the pre-dawn darkness to practice my craft, jam-making disturbs my sleep on the other end of the day: if I start a batch of jam at night after everyone is out of my way in the kitchen, I am frequently up until one or two o’clock in the morning with my fingers, hands, arms, apron, stove, and countertop coated with sticky smudges of jam, my face roasted from the heat of the hot steam coming off the liquid fruit and sugar mixture, and my stirring hand burned from its proximity to the rolling boil, imagining, as I sip my espresso, the joy my mattress and pillow would bring me if I were using them to sleep. Due to the amount of time, money, scrubbing, and lack of sleep associated with my late-night jam-making sessions, my relationship with homemade jam is a conflicted one; but one that I always manage to value whenever I offer a friend, neighbour, or relative a jar of homemade jam. This communal or social aspect of the place of homemade jam in gift-giving is perhaps one of the most enjoyable ways in which jam-making in the home thwarts global capitalism. References De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Eden, Trudy. “The Art of Preserving: How Cooks in Colonial Virginia Imitated Nature to Control It.” Eighteenth-Century Life 23.2 (1999): 13-23. Hunter, Lynette. “Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Trends in Food Preserving: Frugality, Nutrition or Luxury.” “Waste Not, Want Not”: Food Preservation from Early Times to the Present Day. Ed. C. Anne Wilson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1991. 134-158. Wilson, C. Anne. “Waste Not, Want Not”: Food Preservation from Early Times to the Present Day. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1991. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Houston, Lynn. "Putting Up with “Putting Up”: A Cultural Analysis of Homemade Jam in the Twenty-First Century." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/06-houston.php>. APA Style Houston, L. (Dec. 2006) "Putting Up with “Putting Up”: A Cultural Analysis of Homemade Jam in the Twenty-First Century," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/06-houston.php>.

Introduction In October of 2004, La Presse asked its Quebecois reading audience a very simple question: “What is your favourite cookbook and why?” As Marie Marquis reports in her essay “The Cookbooks Quebecers Prefer: More Than Just Recipes,” “two weeks later, 363 e-mail responses had been received” (214). From the answers, it was clear that despite the increase in television cooking shows, Internet cooking sites, and YouTube how-to videos, cookbooks were not only still being used, but that people had strong allegiances to their favourite ones. Marquis’s essay provides concrete evidence that cookbooks are not meaningless objects. Rather, her use of relevant quotations from the survey proves that they are associated with strong memories and have been used to create bonds between individuals and across generations. Moreover, these quotations reveal that individuals use cookbooks to construct personal narratives that they share with others. In her philosophical analysis of foodmaking as a thoughtful practice, Lisa Heldke helps move the discussion of cooking and, consequently of cookbooks, forward by explaining that the age-old dichotomy between theory and practice merges in food preparation (206). Foodmaking, she explains through her example of kneading bread, requires both a theoretical understanding of what makes bread rise and a practical knowledge of the skill required to achieve the desired results. Much as Susan Leonardi argues that recipes need “a recommendation, a context, a point, a reason-to-be” (340), Heldke advocates in “Recipes for Theory Making” that recipes offer us ideas that we need to either accept or refuse. These ideas include, but are not limited to, what makes a good meal, what it means to eat healthy, what it means to be Italian or vegan. Cookbooks can take many forms. As the cover art from academic documents on the nature, role, and value of cooking and cookbooks clearly demonstrates, a “cookbook” may be an ornate box filled with recipe cards (Floyd and Forster) or may be a bunch of random pieces of paper organised by dividers and held together by a piece of elastic (Tye). The Internet has created many new options for recipe collecting and sharing. Websites such as Allrecipes.com and Cooks.com are open access forums where people can easily upload, download, and bookmark favourite foods. Yet, Laura Shapiro argues in Something from the Oven that the mere presence of a cookbook in one’s home does not mean it is actually used. While “popular cookbooks tell us a great deal about the culinary climate of a given period [...] what they can’t convey is a sense of the day-to-day cookery as it [is] genuinely experienced in the kitchens of real life” (xxi). The same conclusion can be applied to recipe websites. Personalised and family cookbooks are much different and much more telling documents than either unpersonalised printed books or Internet options. Family cookbooks can also take any shape or form but I define them as compilations that have been created by a single person or a small group of individuals as she/he/they evolve over time. They can be handwritten or typed and inserted into either an existing cookbook, scrapbooked, or bound in some other way. The Internet may also help here as bookmaking sites such as Blurb.com allow people to make, and even sell, their own printed books. These can be personalised with pictures and scrapbook-like embellishments. The recipes in these personal collections are influenced by contact with other people as well as printed and online publications. Also impacting these works are individual realities such as gender, race, class, and work. Unfortunately, these documents have not been the focus of much academic attention as food scholars generally analyse the texts within them rather than their practical and actual use. In order to properly understand the value and role of personal and family cookbooks in our daily lives, we must move away from generalisations to specific case studies. Only by looking at people in relationship with them, who are actually using and compiling their own recipe collections or opting instead to turn to either printed books or their computers, can we see the importance and value of family cookbooks. In order to address this methodological problem, this essay analyses a number of cookbook-related experiences that I have witnessed and/or been a part of in my own home. By moving away from the theoretical and focusing on the practical, I aim to advance Heldke’s argument that recipe reading, like foodmaking, is a thoughtful practice with important lessons. Learning to Cook and Learning to Live: What Cookbooks Teach Us Once upon a time, a mother and her two, beautiful daughters decided to make chocolate chip cookies. They took out all the bowls and utensils and ingredients they needed. The mother then plopped the two girls down among all of the paraphernalia on the counter. First, they beat the butter using their super cool Kitchen Aid mixer. Then they beat in the sugar. Carefully, they cracked and beat in the eggs. Then they dumped in the flour. They dumped in the baking powder. They dumped in the vanilla. And they dumped in the chocolate chips. Together, they rolled the cookies, placed them on a baking sheet, pat them down with a fork, and placed them in a hot oven. The house smelled amazing! The mother and her daughters were looking forward to eating the cookies when, all of a sudden, a great big dog showed up at the door. The mother ran outside to shoo the dog home yelling, “Go home, now! Go away!” By the time she got back, the cookies had started to burn and the house stank! The mother and her two daughters took all the cookie-making stuff back out. They threw out the ruined cookies. And they restarted. They beat the butter using their super cool Kitchen Aid mixer. Then they beat in the sugar. Carefully, they cracked and beat in the eggs. Then they dumped in the flour. They dumped in the baking powder. They dumped in the vanilla. And they dumped in the chocolate chips. Together, they rolled the cookies, placed them on a baking sheet, pat them down with a fork, and placed them in a hot oven. This story that my oldest daughter and I invented together goes on to have the cookies ruined by a chatty neighbour before finally finding fruition in a batch of successfully baked cookies. This is a story that we tell together as we get her ready for bed. One person is always the narrator who lists the steps while the other makes the sound effects of the beating mixer and the dumping ingredients. Together, we act out the story by rolling the cookies, patting them, and waving our hands in front of our faces when the burnt cookies have stunk up the house. While she takes great pleasure in its narrative, I take greater pleasure in the fact that, at three years of age, she has a rudimentary understanding of how a basic recipe works. In fact, only a few months ago I observed this mixture of knowledge and skill merge when I had to leave her on the counter while I cleaned up a mess on the floor. By the time I got back to her, she had finished mixing the dry ingredients in with the wet ones. I watched her from across the kitchen as she turned off the Kitchen Aid mixer, slowly spooned the flour mixture into the bowl, and turned the machine back on. She watched the batter mix until the flour had been absorbed and then repeated the process. While I am very thankful that she did not try to add the vanilla or the chocolate chips, this experience essentially proves that one can learn through simple observation and repetition. It is true that she did not have a cookbook in front of her, that she did not know the precise measurements of the ingredients being put into the bowl, and that at her age she would not have been able to make this recipe without my help. However, this examples proves Heldke’s argument that foodmaking is a thoughtful process as it is as much about instinct as it is about following a recipe. Once she is able to read, my daughter will be able to use the instincts that she has developed in her illiterate years to help her better understand written recipes. What is also important to note about this scenario is that I did have a recipe and that I was essentially the one in charge. My culinary instincts are good. I have been baking and cooking since I was a child and it is very much a part of my life. We rarely buy cookies or cakes from the store because we make them from scratch. Yet, I am a working mother who does not spend her days in the kitchen. Thus, my instincts need prompting and guidance from written instructions. Significantly, the handwritten recipe I was using that day comes from the personal cookbook that has been evolving since I left home. In their recent works Eat My Words and Baking as Biography, Janet Theophano and Diane Tye analyse homemade, hand-crafted, and personal cookbooks to show that these texts are the means through which we can understand individuals at a given time and in a given place. Theophano, for example, analyses old cookbooks to understand the impact of social networking in identity making. By looking at the types of recipes and number of people who have written themselves into these women’s books, she shows that cookbook creation has always been a social activity that reveals personal and social identity. In a slightly different way, Tye uses her own mother’s recipes to better understand a person she can no longer talk to. Through recipes, she is able to recreate her deceased mother’s life and thus connect with her on a personal and emotional level. Although academics have traditionally ignored cookbooks as being mundane and unprofessional, the work of these recent critics illustrates the extent to which cookbooks provide an important way of understanding society and people’s places within it. While this essay cannot begin to analyse the large content of my cookbook, this one scenario echoes these recent scholarly claims that personal cookbooks are a significant addition to the academic world and must be read thoughtfully, as Heldke argues, for both the recipes’s theory and for the practical applications and stories embedded within them. In this particular example, Karena and I were making a chocolate a chip cake—a recipe that has been passed down from my Oma. It is a complicated recipe because it requires a weight scale rather than measuring cups and because instructions such as “add enough milk to make a soft dough” are far from precise. The recipe is not just a meaningless entry I found in a random book or on a random website but rather a multilayered narrative and an expression of my personal heritage. As Theophano and Tye have argued, recipes are a way to connect with family, friends, and specific groups of people either still living or long gone. Recipes are a way to create and relive memories. While I am lucky that my Oma is still very much alive, I imagine that I will someday use this recipe as a way to reconnect with her. When I serve this cake to my family members, we will surely be reminded of her. We will wonder where this recipe came from, how it is different from other chocolate chip cake recipes, and where she learned to make it. In fact, the recipe already varies considerably between homes. My Oma makes hers in a round pan, my mother in a loaf pan, and I in cupcake moulds. Each person has a different reason for her choice of presentation that is intrinsic to her reality and communicates a specific part of her identity. Thus by sharing this recipe with my daughter, I am not only ensuring that my memories are being passed on but I am also programming into her characteristics and values such as critical thinking, the worthiness of homemade food, and the importance of family time. Karena does not yet have her own cookbook but her preferences mean that some of the recipes in my collection are made more often than others. My cookbook continues to change and grow as I am currently prioritising foods I know my kids will eat. I am also shopping and surfing for children’s recipe books and websites in order to find kid-friendly meals we can make together. In her analysis of children and adolescent cookbooks published between the 1910s and 1950s, Sherrie Inness demonstrates that cookbooks have not only taught children how to cook, but also how to act. Through the titles and instructions (generally aimed at girls), the recipe choices (fluffy deserts for girls and meat dishes for boys), and the illustrations (of girls cooking and boys eating), these cookbooks have been a medium through which society has taught its youth about their future, gendered roles. Much research by critics such as Laura Shapiro, Sonia Cancian, and Inness, to name but a few, has documented this gendered division of labour in the home. However, the literature does not always reflect reality. As this next example demonstrates, men do cook and they also influence family cookbook creation. A while back, my husband spent quite a bit of time browsing through the World Wide Web to find a good recipe for a venison marinade. As an avid “barbecuer,” he has tried and tested a number of marinades and rubs over the years. Thus he knew what he was looking for in a good recipe. He found one, made it, and it was a hit! Just recently, he tried to find that recipe again. Rather than this being a simple process, after all he knew exactly which recipe he was looking for, it took quite a bit of searching before he found it. This time, he was sure to write it down to avoid having to repeat the frustrating experience. Ironically, when I went to put the written recipe into my personal cookbook, I found that he had, in fact, already copied it out. These two handwritten copies of the same recipe are but one place where my husband “speaks out” from, and claims a place within, what I had always considered “my” cookbook. His taste preferences and preferred cooking style is very different from my own—I would never have considered a venison marinade worth finding never mind copying out. By reading his and my recipes together, one can see an alternative to assumed gender roles in our kitchen. This cookbook proves a practice opposite from the conclusion that women cook to serve men which Inness and others have theorised from the cookbooks they have analysed and forces food and gender critics to reconsider stereotypical dichotomies. Another important example is a recipe that has not actually been written down and inserted into my cookbook but it is one my husband and I both take turns making. Years ago, we had found an excellent bacon-cheese dip online that we never managed to find again. Since then, we have been forced to adlib the recipe and it has, in my opinion, never been as good. Both these Internet-recipe examples illustrate the negative drawbacks to using the Internet to find, and store, recipes. Unfortunately, the Internet is not a book. It changes. Links are sometimes broken. Searches do not always yield the same results. Even with recipe-storing sites such as Allrecipes.com and Cooks.com, one must take the time to impute the information and there is no guarantee that the technology will work. While authors such as Anderson and Wagner bemoan that traditional cookbooks only give one version of most recipes, there are so many recipes online that it is sometimes overwhelming and difficult to make a choice. An amateur cook may find comfort in the illustrations and specific instruction, yet one still needs to either have an instinct for what makes a good recipe or needs to be willing to spend time trying them out. Of course the same can be said of regular cookbooks. Having printed texts in one’s home requires the patience to go through them and still requires a sense of suitability and manageability. In both cases, neither an abundance nor a lack of choice can guarantee results. It is true that both the Internet and printed cookbooks such as The Better Homes and Gardens provide numerous, step-by-step instructions and illustrations to help people learn to make food from scratch. Other encyclopedic volumes such as The Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking, like YouTube, videos break recipes down into simple steps and include visual tools to help a nervous cook. Yet there is a big difference between the theory and the practice. What in theory may appear simple still necessitates practice. A botched recipe can be the result of using different brands of ingredients, tools, or environmental conditions. Only practice can teach people how to make a recipe successfully. Furthermore, it is difficult to create an online cookbook that rivals the malleability of the personal cookbooks. It is true that recipe websites such as Cooks.com and Allrecipes.com do allow a person to store favourite recipes found on their websites. However, unless the submitter takes the time to personalise the content, recipes can lose their ties to their origins. Bookmaking sites such as Blurb.com are attractive options that do allow for personalisation. In her essay “Aunty Sylvie’s Sponge Foodmaking, Cookbooks and Nostalgia,” Sian Supski uses her aunt’s Blurb family cookbook to argue that the marvel of the Internet has ensured that important family food memories will be preserved; yet once printed, even these treasures risk becoming static documents. As Supski goes on to admit, she is a nervous cook and one can conclude that even this though this recipe collection is very special, it will never become personal because she will not add to it or modify the content. As the examples in Theophano's and Tye’s works demonstrate, the personal touches, the added comments, and the handwritten alterations on the actual recipes give people authority, autonomy, and independence. Hardcopies of recipes indicate through their tattered, dog-eared, and stained pages which recipes have been tried and have been considered to be worth keeping. While Internet sites frequently allow people to comment on recipes and so allow cooks to filter their options, commenting is not a requirement and the suggestions left by others do not necessarily reflect personal preferences. Although they do continue a social, recipe-networking trend that Theophano argues has always existed in relation to cookbook creation and personal foodways, once online, their anonymity and lack of personal connection strips them of their true potential. This is also true of printed cookbooks. Even those compiled by celebrity chefs such as Rachel Ray and Jamie Oliver cannot guarantee success as individuals still need to try them. These examples of recipe reading and recipe collecting advance Heldke’s argument that theory and practice blend in this activity. Recipes are not static. They change depending on who makes them, where they come from, and on the conditions under which they are executed. As critics, we need to recognise this blending of theory and practice and read recipe collections with this reality in mind. Conclusion Despite the growing number of blogs and recipe websites now available to the average cook, personal cookbooks are still a more useful and telling way to communicate information about ourselves and our foodways. As this reflection on actual experiences clearly demonstrates, personal cookbooks teach us about more than just food. They allow us to connect to the past in order to better understand who we are today in ways that the Internet and modern technology cannot. Just as cooking combines theory and practice, reading personal and family cookbooks allows critics to see how theories about foodmaking and gender play out in actual kitchens by actual people. The nuanced merging of voices within them illustrates that individuals alter over time as they come into contact with others. While printed cookbooks and online recipe sites do provide their own narrative possibilities, the stories that can be read in personal and family cookbooks prove that reading them is a thoughtful practice worthy of academic attention. References All Recipes.com Canada. 2013. 24 Apr. 2013. ‹http://allrecipes.com›. Anderson, L. V. “Cookbooks Are Headed for Extinction—and That’s OK.” Slate.com 18 Jun. 2012. 24 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/the_future_of_cookbooks_they_ll_go_extinct_and_that_s_ok_.html›. Blurb.ca. 2013. 27 May 2013. ‹http://blurb.ca›. Cancian, Sonia. "'Tutti a Tavola!' Feeding the Family in Two Generations of Italian Immigrant Households in Montreal." Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Ed. Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. 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