All the recipes for the dishes served during the first and second experiments can be found in Appendix 1.
Experiment 1
For the first experiment, which took place in the beginning of April, I chose five basic ingredients: spelt, barley, linseeds, kapucijners (Dutch grey peas), and parsnips. The food of the experiment was meant to portray the period of the year known as the ‘hungry gap’, that is, the time when the last winter vegetables have been consumed, and the spring vegetables are not yet ready to be harvested (The Community Farm, 2021). At this time of year, traditionally, only a few ingredients would have been at hand: a few overwintered roots left in the soil, and some dried grains, seeds, and legumes.
With such a limited choice of ingredients at hand, I pursued the idea of trying to transform them in as many ways as I could think of. Here are some examples of the treatment I gave to each ingredient while designing the experiment (not everything made it to the final dishes, of course):
- Linseeds: sprouted, toasted, or mixed into sweet and savoury doughs and batters.
- Parsnips: baked into chips, steamed and puréed, cooked and fermented with a sourdough starter, raw and fermented in a salt brine, or used as a starch in an amazake preparation.
- Spelt and barley:
- As flour: in breads and cakes, or fermented with a sourdough starter.
- As whole or pearled berries: fermented into koji (then fried, or used in a miso or amazake preparation), sprouted, or toasted and boiled.
- As porridge flakes: cooked into porridge, fermented with a sourdough starter.
- Kapucijners: as a hummus, as the main ingredient of a miso, or sprouted.
As can be seen above, different fermentation techniques were used to approach the ingredients, as I consider these some of the best ways to complexify and coax out new flavours of the same ingredient. I set myself the challenge of including all five basic ingredients in the three dishes, which were meant to nevertheless have a very contrasting flavour.
The three dishes that were finally served were:
- Parsnip purée with kapucijner miso, served on a piece of spelt and barley porridge sourdough bread and garnished with toasted linseeds.
- Kapucijner and wild garlic hummus, served on a piece of Danish-style sourdough bread with spelt, toasted barley berries, and linseeds, and garnished with a parsnip chip.
- Parsnip spelt cake with kapucijner miso and linseeds.
Experiment 2
Because of the results of Experiment 1 (which are discussed in the section Mediating elements. Crossmodal correspondences), I decided that my focus point for Experiment 2 would be texture, both culinary and musical. To have several contrasting textures was therefore one of the starting points during the creation of the recipes for its different dishes.
The beginning of autumn symbolising plenty for me, I decided that I wanted to include an element made with a fresh vegetable, one made with grains and seeds, and one made with mushrooms.
I knew that I wanted something crispy, and since the parsnip chip had proved one of the most popular elements of the first experiment, I decided to again make a root vegetable chip, this time with beetroot, however, which I judged to represent the season better.
My starting point to determine which types of textures I would use for this experiment was mostly conditioned by the musical material (more on this in the section Mediating elements. Semantic matching). I knew that I wanted something light and airy, something crispy, and something coarse and flaky.
After reading some of the work of Ferran Adrià (2004), who has been a great pioneer in finding and exploring different culinary textures, I decided that a culinary foam or ‘espuma’ would be the best to conform to the adjectives ‘light’ and ‘airy’. I decided to make a wild mushroom foam, since August and September are generally the best months for mushroom foraging in the Netherlands. After a long period of trial and error, however, I was not able to make the kind of foam I was hoping for with agar, which seemed the best vegan alternative to gelatine. I decided to give the audience of the experiment the option to choose between the mushroom foam, which I ended up making with gelatine, and a vegan mushroom patê, which could fulfil a similar role in the experiment (albeit with a different texture). Only one of the participants chose this vegan alternative, so the results of the experiment were not substantially influenced.
Lastly, I wanted to have an element in the dish that would feature grains and seeds in some form. As I was thinking about texture, I had the idea of making a paratha, a type of Indian flatbread bread made with ‘atta’, a very finely ground wholegrain wheat flour, usually layered with ghee or another type of fat, which makes the bread very flaky. I substituted the wheat with a more local grain, spelt, and chose for cold-pressed sunflower seed oil for the fat, the taste of sunflower seeds being a symbol of late summer in my imagination.
Four Bites of Autumn
I will elaborate less on the food that was served during the public performance Four Bites of Autumn than on that of the experiments, because the recipes were created and cooked by the staff of Bij de Roos, the café in Delft where the performance took place. The general philosophy of this research regarding seasonality and locality was respected as much as the practical circumstances allowed. The four dishes that were served during the performance were the following:
- Pumpkin and carrot soup with pumpkin sourdough bread.
- Rye sourdough bread with apple syrup.
- Pecan bread (originally intended to be a chestnut bread, which was not possible due to availability) with parsnips and pears.
- Rose cake.
It was important for me that this performance would be affordable and accessible for a range of different types of guests, including students. Presenting four homemade, delicious yet simple miniature dishes, which were made with excellent but not terribly expensive ingredients, seemed to be a good way of creating a memorable experience that would allow me to play with structure in a similar way to a tasting menu, while keeping the price of the experience reasonably low.
The food
Paraphrasing Wendell Berry’s famous statement that “eating is an agricultural act” (1990, pp. 145-52), Michael Pollan affirms that “it is also an ecological act, and a political act, too” (2006, p. 11). Our choices in what, when, where, and how we eat have a weight that goes beyond the mere act of nourishing ourselves. I was very conscious of this when I set out to research the topic of pairing food and music– very conscious of the fact that there would be no ‘innocent’ choices in the food that I would serve my audience during the research experiments. Before I started creating the different dishes and composing the music, I would have to ask myself and respond to the following questions:
- What sort of food would be eaten during the experiments? I decided to use ingredients that had undergone as little processing as possible, that were produced as close to where I was as I could manage, that were fresh and in season, and that were exclusively plant-based. Each of the experiments would also feature at least one locally foraged ingredient, the ultimate expression of seasonality, in my view. The food would take the shape of one- or two- bite dishes, similar to the tapas I had grown up eating and loving in Salamanca, my home city in Spain.
- When would the experiments take place? Since I had decided to perform two research experiments and I had a bit less than one year to carry them out, I decided to space them about half a year apart. One took place on the 2nd of April 2022, the other one on the 24th of September 2022. I decided for these two moments because they coincided approximately with two changes of season: from winter to spring, and from summer to autumn, respectively.
- Where would the experiments take place? For logistic reasons, I chose to carry out the experiments in one of the studios at Amare, the location of the Royal Conservatoire The Hague. These studios are mostly used for musical performances and, as I wanted the format of the experiments to resemble the experience of a concert rather than that of a restaurant dinner, this seemed appropriate.
- How would this food be eaten during the experiments? I wanted to imbue the eating during the performances with the quality of ritual, and wanted the act of eating to carry a dramatic expression that would invite to a more mindful eating experience (more information on this can be found in the section Mediating elements. Ritual).
Since I have never worked in the food industry, but am merely a home cook, I decided to acquaint myself with the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) principles in order to ensure the safety of the food I would be preparing for the experiments. HACCP is defined as “a system which provides the framework for monitoring the total food system, from harvesting to consumption, to reduce the risk of foodborne illness” (University of Rhode Island, 2023).
Why seasonal food?
Around six years ago I started taking the seasons into account when cooking. It was first through the books of Nigel Slater and later through the philosophy of the Danish restaurant noma and that of its head chef René Redzepi that I fell in love with the idea of telling a story about the time and place one found oneself in through the food that one ate and served to others. Discovering all the beautiful root vegetables that I could easily find in the Netherlands and that I had never encountered in Spain (such as Jerusalem artichokes, salsifies, parsnips, swede, yellow beetroot, black radish, and all kinds of turnips) made me feel connected to this new country I was living in, in a way that I had not been able to experience before. I also began to learn more about the edible potential of the nature that surrounded me, and foraging plants and mushrooms helped me to relate to my environment even more and feel at home in a place that was starting to feel less and less foreign.
Intentionally sourcing my ingredients from local producers helped me connect to people I would have otherwise never met, it enriched my social circle, and ultimately also contributed to my feeling of belonging in and to this place.
Binding myself to the rhythms of the seasons changed my relationship to and perception of time. The arrival of spring, with its longer and more frequently sunny days, suddenly also meant the promise of asparagus, sweet peas, and broad beans, and the relief of the brassicas and root vegetables I had been feeding on for months. It also meant that I could watch the shoots of wild garlic and common hogweed grow until they reached the right size to harvest them– that I could watch them flower, go to seed, and then die away until the following year. By the beginning of autumn, after having had my share of courgettes, aubergines, tomatoes, and bell peppers, I would be longing for exactly those cabbages and roots I had been so tired of only a few months before.
Lastly, limiting myself to using ingredients that were in season made me a much better and versatile cook. As is discussed in the section Mediating elements during the creative process, constraint spurs creativity. I could no longer rely on my one or two go-to recipes for each vegetable that I would cyclically return to, because I would have eaten the same every couple of days. Instead, I learned to find variety in the few ingredients that were available to me at any given time by exploring different preparations and manners of processing them.
My wish to combine food and music in live performances was to a great extent sparked by the desire to share this experience of connection and belonging, of expectant yearning and creative joy, with others. I tried to incorporate the ideas of locality and seasonality as much as possible in the form of the research, and decided to design it in such a way that it would orbit around the axis created by two experiments, separated from each other in time by half a year, each showcasing some seasonal and local ingredients.
