The immersive table (five recipes)

Experimentation of a surinamese Roti

‘Koningsdag wortel tompoes’

File:Tasting tompoes.png

First private tasting of the ‘Koningsdag wortel tompoes’ v2.

To start off 2019, The Soft Protest, Digest was invited as resident of the M4 Gast Atelier by fanfare Amsterdam.

From its studio, located on one of the central canals of Amsterdam, the collective followed multiple parallel tasks in order to design a range of both culturally and environmentally resilient dishes for the residents of the North Holland region.

Hereby, the guidelines followed by The Soft Protest, Digest throughout the month of January:
1) Pick one to two ingredients each. Thoroughly research its history, its contemporary use in dutch cuisine and its production in Holland.
2) Find the best regional producers of this ingredient, bike to their farms, taste, buy and include their products in the preparation of new resilient dishes.
3) Design a tool which would able the collective to negotiate, grade and compare both the cultural and environmental resilience of crops, dairy, meat products and new dishes.
4) Organise a few preliminary private tastings of the new dishes in order to confront them to a small group of dutchs” before publicly proposing them to the residents of the North Holland region.
5) Make every meal part of the overall research by cooking typical dutch dishes for lunch and dinner.

By following these guidelines, The Soft Protest, Digest was able to scan the culinary landscape of North Holland and design 5 relevant dishes.

May they be, at times, more resilient on a cultural level than on the environmental one (and vice versa), each of this dishes was meant to put forward a different mean of telling a story: as in the adaptation of a existing tradition, the secret fabrication of a new one, an homage to an historical event or a vernacular recipe.
These dishes were showcased to the public on the first weekend of February at fanfare Amsterdam. Each one of them, soberly displayed on its plate, was accompanied by a five minute audio presentation* of its story and the reasons of its resilience. Showcased on the wall as long receipts, each dish and each of its ingredient was evaluated (i.e. type of production, impact on the soil, carbon footprint, transport, wrapping, cultural relevance, etc…) and rated. To accompany the presentation, bite size tasters were offered to the public. On its way out, postcards displaying a picture of each dish as well as its recipe as well as little bags of dried sourdough** were up to grab.

Five new resilient dutch dishes

Click on name to read the story and recipe.

Notes

• These stories are still available today as podcasts on the Podcast app (by researching The Soft Protest Digest) or on Soundcloud.
  • This sourdough (labeled like a fictional brand named Sour Doc.) was meant to be reactivated and used as a starter in the making of the ‘Queen of Night, calvinistisch brood’.