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What can a list of ingredients, the techniques of cooking, imagery and design, the language and ideology used or mentioned in cookbooks, tell us about the past? Traditionally, cookbooks have been overlooked as legitimate literary and research sources, despite the rich stories they carry of human movement, trade, relationship to nature, technology and science, religion and politics, class and race as well as of the everyday life. In this practical workshop, Salma Serry shares her research on the cookbook genre as a site of research that can reveal various social, economic and cultural aspects of the lives of the people who wrote, published, read, and cooked from them.

This two-hour workshop provides practical experience, echoing the framework of Serry's research for the Jameel Art Center's Library Circles, in which, similar to cookbooks, she examines the menu as a source for researching the history of Dubai’s migrant communities. The workshop is divided into two parts, the first being an examination of cookbooks and application of research methods such as that of Barbara Wheaton, while the second part focuses on using the information from the first part to produce written work.