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Feminist Food Journal

An online magazine dedicated to a feminist food future

Feminist Recipes
for the Festive Season
Part of FFJ for a Friend

The holiday season can be a time of joy and celebration, but it also comes with an abundance of stresses: finding (and affording) the perfect gifts, navigating challenging social situations, balancing a bursting social calendar with the ongoing demands of work and family life, and serving that picture perfect holiday meal. For women, who shoulder the majority of the cooking, the cleaning, and the child-caring at home (as COVID-19 reminded us), the labour of facilitating festivities at this time of year comes on top of an already long list of to-dos. Add to this a (yet again) accelerating global pandemic and the sense of hopelessness and unease inspired by the year’s news headlines, you’ve got yourself a recipe for social, emotional, and physical fatigue.

Wound up in a capitalist system that tells us that our value stems from our ability to be constantly productive, it can be difficult to find time to get the rest required to overcome this fatigue – especially during the holiday season. I for one am finding it hard. I can’t remember the last time I stopped to breathe. Grappling with the low-level anxiety that for me manifests in constant list making, and the thrumming guilt that makes me feel like despite being on the brink of burnout, I’m still not doing enough, got me thinking about rest as something radical.

Black feminists, like Audre Lord, have have offered particularly powerful insights into self-care as a tool to fight oppression. More contemporary feminists of colour such as Tricia Hersey, the founder of the Nap Ministry, have taken the idea further arguing that rest can be a way to fight burnout culture, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Hersey argues that through these systems, bodies are commodified and our ideas about rest (who ‘deserves’ it) are distorted. Through naps (and rest more generally) she posits people can begin to reclaim their bodies and their “divine right” to rest. Liberation, equality, and justice, cannot be achieved from the exhaustive state caused by grind culture. A new system — one that fosters invention, imagination, creativity, disruption — will need to be grounded in rest. Although as a white, cis, straight woman, I cannot claim to understand the multiple burdens of exhaustion inflicted by intersecting systems of oppression, I find the idea of rest as a form of resistance compelling.

In the spirit of rest I am sharing three quick and easy recipes that will be accompanying me to holiday parties this season. If you, like me, tend to favour more elaborate culinary feats, consider giving yourself a break. Try something simpler and free up some time to close your eyes, plunge yourself into a hot bath, or do a little day-dreaming. I know the idea may hearken back to housekeeping magazines of a bygone era that were filled with time saving tricks for the perfect housewife, but I hope they will be received less as ideas for cooking you have to do, and more as suggestions to take part in the tradition of making and sharing food while also finding time to engage in radical rest.

- Zoë

Olives, farro, and chocolate — with a side of Radical Rest

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Feminist cocktails: to freedom, to the fight, and to bell hooks

Latkes, to me, are a precarious — if delicious and crispy — tether to old traditions largely lost in my family. Latkes are stumbling over the blessing as I light a menorah for gentile-majority tables, thankful that none of them can point out my uneven pronunciation. Latkes are thinking about whether I wish that my parents had put me in Saturday school despite being thankful to have grown up without the spectre of God. Or at least had put me in to something like Saturday school, just so that I would have a better idea of how to carry on religious traditions in a secular way. I’m not sure that makes any sense.

Still, I am sure that I made the right choice at age 13 when my mom offered me to either have a bat mitzvah ("but you’ll have to learn Hebrew and we barely have any living Jewish relatives to compensate you for your time!") or to visit London and Paris over spring break. On that trip I put my sneakered eighth-grade feet on a new continent for the first time and kept a diary that rated every crème brulée I ate out of one to five. My shame for being so poorly able to carry on the legacy of the Maccabees comes and goes each year, but the pride of cataloguing Paris’ sweetest treats — and by luck of the highest order, doing so just before I succumbed to a paralyzing fear of dessert for the remainder of my teenage years — is forever. At least, that’s what I tell myself. Could you pass the sour cream?

- Isabela

Latkes, a last tether to tradition

Butter tarts — their saccharine filling punctuated with pop of raisins and offset by the thick flake of their crust — taste to me like Christmas. Of course, nobody makes them better than my mum, who always smiles slyly as she feeds them to me for breakfast (“Is it Christmas?”) alongside my coffee. Little known outside of Canada, my mum takes pride in butter tarts’ quintessential Canadian-ness. Last year, because of the pandemic, I was unable to make it home for the holidays so I was glad that I had copied out her recipe, which comes from an issue of Saveur from March 2000. I made two dozen (warning: this recipe makes a big batch) during a virtual baking session with my mum, and proceeded to eat them all, unaided by my (supposedly) sweet adverse partner.

I recently learned more about the story behind the dessert I’ve enjoyed for so long. I should not have been surprised, given the gender dynamics of ‘traditional’ cooking and Canada’s colonial history, to discover butter tarts’ links to colonialism and patriarchy. Butter tarts, it turns out, were invented by the Filles Du Roi, young women sent to Canada between 1663 and 1673 by Louis XIV to marry, cook, clean, and procreate in support of France’s efforts to colonize New France. These women, faced with the limited resources of their new lives on the ‘frontier’, developed the butter tart out of simple and readily available ingredients.

This year, I’m lucky enough to be able be home for the holidays again and I’m very excited to indulge in (far too many) of my mum’s butter tarts. As I savor the gooeyness, I will be reflecting on this history and marveling at the rich stories hidden in the mundane all around us — and especially in what we eat. Butter tarts are an edible reminder of the intimate links between food and national identity and of the importance of interrogating these identities and the often exploitative, violent, and exclusionary histories that underlie them. Interrogating ‘Canadianness’ requires reckoning with this country’s abhorrent history of colonialism. The story of the Filles Du Roi forces us to furthermore think about the intricate ways in which the patriarchy and colonialism intersect to blur the lines between victim and perpetrator; these women were both the victims of a patriarchal system that exploited their reproductive labour for the glory of a monarch and perpetrators of a violent and racist campaign of dispossession. I don’t think this will temper their sweetness but perhaps it will make it more complex.

Butter tarts: a complicated sweet from the colonial 'frontier'

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