Scribal Tradition: Recipe Cards & Gyotaku
After I posted this post on my gyotaku experience with the sea bream and baby octopus it occurred to me that there is a similarity between this form of printmaking as a food record and recipe cards as food records. Both of them document aspects of a meal, but they describe component ingredients in different modalities: the print is a visual modality, whereas the recipe card is a textual modality.
I don’t have anything profound to say about this, other than pointing out that in the same way that Japanese fishermen wanted to create records of catches that they were happy with, cooks that write down recipes also try to preserve and record dishes they are happy with.
It is interesting to compare these two types of records:
The goal of the cook writing down a recipe on a card is to learn through the recipe, to recreate it, to share it, to adapt it, to remember it.
The goal of the fisherman is to remember the catch, to share the mythology of the catch, to compare future catches against the fish image.
Anyhow, as you know from my earlier post I made some prints of fish that I purchased – for me the gyotaku experience recorded a story about me picking out a fish from a fish monger’s icebox. I did not catch the fish. But in a way I feel justified in making the print of the fish because it connects me to a sort of scribal tradition of storytelling. I might not be able to relate the ins and outs of angling for a sea bream, but I can share my experience of learning to appreciate a fish by actually spending time learning the nuances of its body and scales. For me, learning to make gyotaku prints is just another gateway into a more mindful approach to what I eat. Reflecting on the food that I eat (whether by writing about it or by capturing images of and from it) gives life to that food, lets that food tell me a new story; this is a way to record a story of the table.
To honor this scribal tradition I want to offer a free download of my gyotaku print of the sea bream that you can print and hang in your kitchen. Feel free to use it non-commercially on your blog with credit to RyanDewey.org.
Ryan Dewey - Kitchen Cognition 
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