JOURNALING PROJECT No. 2 – THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR/Checkpoint 2

"To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author... ...beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is 'explained' - victory to the critic." -Barthes Image Music Text pg. 147 I have been pondering the role of authorship in terms of my project expecially due to the collaborative and regionally/historically influenced nature of cooking. Who owns a recipie? and further who gets to decide what becomes the final iteration on it when countless versions with small tweaks exist. In the information era you can't even invent a new half decent recipie with out it being already created by some food influencer 3 years ago. I find in trying to make fun unexpected uses for fruit as the theme of my course meal, there may be something close to original, but what is to say I am not just frankensteining together 3 different recipies all invented by my predecessors that have subconsciously stuck in my head and can't truly call myself the creator? They say you can't imagine a completely unfamiliar face you have never seen and your brain takes bits and pieces from faces it has remembered and tries its best to make a human face in your imagination. To me, cooking is absolutely the same way, I will never discover a new ingredient unknown to man, and with the ammount of cooking based media I have seen, I almost feel like its a fools errand to try generating something I have never seen before. Here is a check in on my project progress as of late. I have made rough batches and samples of all 5 of my courses, making tweaks, iterations, and outright substitutions to certain ingredients that started out sounding interesting and ended up tasting alot worse. Two examples close in mind are that of the duck breast which is now chicken breast since I can't afford duck breast, and the goat cheese in the gelee, because well... I don't really like goat cheese and It sounded a lot better in my head than it tasted. Below are two images of courses I think are close enough to being conceptually done being the apple togarashi onigiri and the goat-cheese strawberry tartlet which now has a creamcheese mouse with cranberries and spices instead of goat cheese. Now I need to make one each of the remaining courses in their final, mouth approved forms and I will have something ready to display for the final checkpoint in a few weeks.

Comments

  1. Shelby StoddardApril 27, 2025 at 6:56 PM

    I agree with your question of "who owns a recipe?". Like when I say I love my mother's red velvet cake recipe is it her recipe or is it my grandmother, the person she learned it from, recipe or is it the person who made the first red velvet cake? Who do we give credit to?

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