Fruits.
Labor.
The fruits of her labor.
No fruits for her labor.

Cooking and farming are both a science and an art. Expertise handed down for millennia is embodied in many areas of the world. Generations of cooks and farmers possess the body knowledge that transmits deep and abiding wisdom. Yet these domains and the labor that occurs in the kitchen or on the farm are uncompensated and/or considered unskilled.

Food is the source of both survival and culture. Women, often the primary carriers of food culture, are undervalued for their informal labor, nuanced food preparation, and healing knowledge. Cooking and farming, moreover, have often been portrayed as menial, passive, and unreflective endeavors despite their productive and knowledge-dependent nature. These skills are central to the reproduction, renewal, and innovation of cultural traditions.

Cooking and farming are considered menial tasks (“menial” from the Late Middle English, in the sense of “domestic” from Old French mesnee or “household”). They are also considered manual tasks (Late Middle English from Old French manuel, from Latin manualis, from manus, “hand”). In essence, cooks and farmers are key catalysts in the creation of new dynamic foodways. Both wield considerable power and control not just over the food consumption practices of a household but also over the creation of culture itself.

Today, cooking often only achieves “high art” status when performed by male chefs. To counter such inequity, I document the gestural vocabulary of skilled women who cook and farm daily. Invisible yet in plain sight, women nourish legions without fanfare. With their farm-to-table wisdom they exemplify culinary customs. Their adroit hands labor to cut, grind, knead, pound, pinch, and squeeze to shape and grow regal and routine foods.

Ancestral farming and foodways dwell in cooks and farmers. Their ecological knowledge is rarely written. Oral transmission, via acquired and practiced embodied knowledge, is a sophisticated way of knowing culture. Both farming and cooking are the result of an accumulation of past and present attention to place that involves all the senses.

Farmers save resilient seeds and push them into soil to grow the future. Cooks conjure dishes, nimbly incorporating old and new ingredients. Their location-specific combination of sensory perceptions, transmuted body knowledge, timeless gestures, and dynamic ingredients create what we call taste.

The cooks and farmers who reside in the old city of Fez, Morocco are no different. A culinary destination, Old Fez is like Queens, NY, a community of diverse cultures where I have developed the multimedia Queen Migrant Kitchens series. Old Fez includes Moroccans from all parts of the country: indigenous, new, and old generations, all striving.

In the Cookbook of Gestures series, I isolate Fessi (from Fez) women cooks and farmers’ agile motions to present meditative moments that reveal the dance of timeless gestures. The movements pulse. Gestures captures the virtuosity of unsung cooks. My photographs and films are multimedia meditations on the persistence of ancient sense-abilities—a way of documenting and celebrating silsila.

Silsila (Arabic: سلسلة‎) is a word meaning “chain,” “link,” or “connection,” often used in various senses of lineage. It may be translated as “(religious) order” or “spiritual genealogy,” in which one Sufi Master transfers khilfat to a spiritual descendant. The practiced gestures of cooks and farmers signify a link, silsila, back to the original, primordial hands of women.

In the photo series here, I pulled stills from one of five recipes. You see the hands of Najia, a woman of Fez descended from Arabs and Africans in southern Morocco, as she creates the delicate and refined ka’ab ghazal (gazelle horns). Using her multiple senses of touch, texture, smell, taste, and movement, she crafts almond-paste-filled pastries from practiced memory.

Her proficient gestures imprint forms and flavors as she systematically kneads an almond paste infused with flower essences, then makes the dough (also infused with flower essences). She completes the process by encasing the paste in dough and delicately pricks the horns with a needle to ready them for the community oven. The aroma wafts out into the street, filling the air with the scent of culture and a history of essential yet unsung labor.