Women's Narratives, Migration, and Mobility to Understandings of Moroccan Cuisine

What is it about?

This article recounts the narratives of three Moroccan women for whom migration and mobility were significant factors in the formation of both national and class identities, specifically when it comes to food and cooking. These histories highlight a tension between consolidating national cultural styles and tastes within a bounded geographical unit (the nation-state) and the centrality of migration and middle-class mobility within and across national borders to that process. Asking women how they learned to cook, and about the culinary influences of their mothers and grandmothers, makes it clear that despite dominant understandings of food as rooted in place, locality, and landscape, notions of what makes food "Moroccan" are shaped as much by travel and migration as rootedness in a particular place.

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Why is it important?

Scholars have long recognized the importance of everyday life to understanding the formation of modern nation-states and national cultures. Culinary culture offers especially rich insights into these processes, but the nature of culinary practice poses a challenge to researchers: namely, much of it exists not in conventional archives or written texts, but in embodied knowledge, learned gestures, and oral tradition. This article outlines a method for conducting “kitchen histories,” an ethnographically oriented oral history methodology focused on memories of kitchens and cooking.