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https://doi.org/10.51880/ho.v24i1.1141

Grandmas Project: memory and affection in the kitchen

Maria Leticia Mazzucchi Ferreira*

ORCID iD 0000-0003-3379-6378
Federal University of Pelotas, Department of Museology, Conservation and Restoration, Pelotas, Brazil

Abstract: This article proposes the analysis of oral narratives of elderly women through the Grandmas
Project program, which consists of 8-minute films made by grandchildren with their grandmothers
performing recipes that are associated with their biographical trajectories. In the intergenerational
encounter between grandmothers and grandchildren, a dialog is established in which memory acts both
as the motivation of each cameraman and as an evocation for the elderly women with their recipes.
Historical contexts, social plots, relationships with time and with their own bodies shape the memories
narrated by the grandmothers, thus constituting an open window to the past that is re-signified in the
present. The kitchen, the place where the video was made, is also a place of memory, affection and life.
Keywords: Grandmas Project. Cooking. Old age. Memory. Oral History.

Grandmas Project: memory and affection in the kitchen

Abstract: In this article, oral narratives of older women participating of the Grandmas Project are
analyzed, which consists of short films of eight minutes each produced by grandchildren together with
their grandmothers, who prepare recipes associated with their life stories. In the intergenerational
encounters between grandchildren and grandmothers a dialog is established in which memory acts as a
motivation for each filmmaker as well as an evocation for the older women in the revealing of their
recipes. Historical and social contexts, relations with time and one's own body, all shape the memories
narrated by the grandmothers, opening a window to the past which is given new meaning in the
present. The kitchen, the site where the filming is conducted, is also a place of memory, affection and
life.
Keywords: Grandmas Project. Cooking. Memory. Old age. Oral History.

* PhD in History from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUC-RS). Professor of
the Graduate Program in Social Memory and Cultural Heritage at the Federal University of Pelotas
150 FERREIRA, Maria Leticia Mazzucchi. Grandmas Project...

(UFPel). E-mail: leticiamazzucchi@gmail.com.

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In an interview with Anne-Marie Granet-Abisset, Philippe Joutard recovers what

would be the origin of his interest in oral accounts during his research on the
Camisard movement, the subject of his doctoral thesis defended in 1974. In the
interview, he recounts a specific moment, the Easter holiday of 1966, which took
place at his home in the Cévennes region of France, and his meeting with the local
pastor, Paul Bastian, to whom he credits his recognition of the oral tradition as a
thread from the past to the present, in constant updating. Thus, he recovers the first
steps of his trajectory in the field as an account of surprising discoveries:

We were going to very distant regions.... I remember well my first two or three
interviews. At first, I asked very precise questions, but soon, in a very empirical
way, I turned to semi-directive interviews, because I wondered if I wasn't inducing
answers and, in particular, formidable expressions, such as 'oh yes, we sucked this
history with our mother's milk', 'the Camisards were the Cathars of the past and
the communists of today', not to mention a whole series of reflections. It was
passionate, because there was an emotional tone, very lively, personal and visceral
[...]. The oral history that I discovered was interesting not only for what it said,
but for the way in which one could interpret what it said, that is to say, the
approximations with other periods, such as, for example, the phenomena of
camisardisation, narratives about elements that were not of the war of the
Camisards, but linked to the Protestant resistance during the Second World War.
(Joutard, Granet-Abisset, 2013).1

The camisardization to which Joutard refers could well be translated as this

long-term memory that erupts in the present in the form of narratives, legends,
myths, appropriations always constructed in specific social circumstances. But,
beyond that, and as the author himself lets us see in his recomposition of the
original moment, it is a memory that is transmitted "with our mother's milk". More
than poetic license, this expression refers us to the act of transmission conducted
here by the thread of the narrative. The metaphor of the connecting thread symbolizes,
as in Ariadne's myth, the possibility of return in the face of the labyrinthine paths of
memory, reducing the possibility of error, guaranteeing the recognition of the
impression on the wax block, the happy memory, as Paul Ricoeur (2000) points
out. However, the possibility of

1 In the original: "On allait dans des zones très reculées. Je me souviens bien de mes deux ou trois premiers
entretiens. Dans un premier temps, j'avais posé des questions très précises et assez vite j'en suis venu - de
manière très empirique - à des entretiens semi-directifs car je me demandais si je n'induisais pas les réponses et
notamment ces expressions formidables : " Mais oui cette histoire, on l'a sucée avec le leit de notre mère ! ", " les
Camisards c'était les Cathares d'autrefois et les communistes d'aujourd'hui ", ou sans parler de toute une série
d'autres réflexions. C'était passionnant car il y avait un côté émouvant, très vivant, très personal et charnel
mais surtout pour moi, historien, c'était par les questions que ces récits suggéraient. L'histoire orale que je
découvrais
Oral History, v. 24, n. 1, p. 149-169, jan./jun. 2021 151

error, the symbolic, interpretative and equally fictional dimension of oral narratives
poses itself to the historian as a challenge, but above all as a power, since "the errors
of memory are a source of truth", as Philippe Joutard (1992) states, leading the
researcher to seek to understand the very construction of the accounts, what is
incorporated in them as memory and what, when not evoked, constitutes
forgetfulness.
It is through the image of a thread connecting two poles, two times, that the
object of this article is constructed, the relationship between memory, oral history and
aging, based on the analysis of the Grandmas Project, idealized by the French
filmmaker Jonas Parienté in 2013. Inspired by the stories of his grandmothers, a
Jewish-Egyptian on his paternal side and a Polish-Jewish on his maternal side, both
of whom carried with them accounts of exile to France in the 1950s, Parienté
evokes the dishes of his childhood, prepared by his grandmothers, as a place of
convergence between memory, identity, permanence and rupture in migratory
contexts. In an interview with France3, Jonas Parienté describes the process of
filming, which, far from being interviews, are dynamic and affective interactions
between a filmmaker and his grandmother. In his words: "the idea is to start from a
cooking recipe and unravel the thread: who did you learn it from? In what context?"
The recipe becomes a narrative from which one very quickly arrives at 'tell me
about your childhood... how did you arrive in France?"2
Parienté recovers his personal experience as a grandson of immigrants, an
experience reworked in an equally migratory situation, when he starts living in the
United States, but, above all, from the birth of his son, as the factors that led him to the
elaboration of the project that constitutes a collaborative web series, involving
young filmmakers from different parts of the world with 8-minute videos made
with their grandmothers performing recipes that are part of the family memory.
Although the object of this article is not characterized as a formal research
experience with the use of Oral History, it is understood that, through it, it is
possible to understand other forms of apprehension of oral reports. In the Grandmas
Project, the activating element of such reports is the execution of a culinary recipe,
the expectation of sharing what slowly originates from the ingredients and the
reports.
The agent of the filming (grandchildren) proceeds to an experience of questioning,
of searching for indices, of the unknown of which, paradoxically, they are also a
part. Oral narratives function as an instrument of knowledge (of the recorder) and
recognition (of the narrator). In the process of filming the grandmothers, traditional
instruments of approach in history research were not present

ainsi était intéressante non seulement par ce qu'elle disait mais par la manière dont il fallait interpréter ce
qu'elle disait, c'est-à-dire les rapprochements, avec d'autres périodes, comme, par exemple, les phénomènes de
camisardisation, c'est-à-dire des récits sur des éléments qui n'étaient pas de la guerre des Camisards mais liés à
la résistance protestante durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale" (free translation by the author).
2 Available at: https://fb.watch/5_rsHSfjpP/. Accessed on: 7 Jun. 2021.
152 FERREIRA, Maria Leticia Mazzucchi. Grandmas Project...

Oral, such as the interview script, the techniques of approaching the interviewee and
the field diary, which are important means of recovering the "invisible/ inaudible"
traces of the interview. However, in the informal and familiar encounter between
grandchildren and grandparents, the contours of the dialogue between "interviewer and
interviewee" are perceived, in which "the roles change, change, it is not always the
interviewer who asks the questions, there are questions posed by the interviewee"
(Portelli, 2010), understanding the reciprocal link that is established between both:
the recognition of the uniqueness o f his life, on the part of the narrator, and the
search for the "widening of the field, for the contextualization of the testimony"
(Bordin; Casellato, 2020), on the part of those who place themselves in the position
of the memorial activator.

Grandmas Project: remember, cook, narrate

The program launched by Jonas Parienté can be described as an experience

between individuals marked by similarity - the same family origin - and by the
singularity of their social roles and generational distances. The symbolic territory in
which the meeting takes place is that of family memory which is, according to Anne
Muxel (1996), at the same time the set of records and narratives that act as a force of
cohesion of the group and, from the subject's perspective, lived as a personal
experience. Both group and subject reflect the different dimensions that act as a
framework for memory and the oral narratives that are generated from it, namely
the social and historical transformations that preside over each moment and the
permanence of references that constitute stable frameworks within personal
trajectories.
Because of this characteristic, in 2016, the project received sponsorship from
UNESCO, which recognized its relevance based on the principles of the 2003
Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. In the justification
for the sponsorship, the role of the recipes made by the elderly women is highlighted
as testimonies that "embody, in an intimate and delicious way, the great
transformations of the twentieth century: the Second World War, decolonization,
feminism, being completed with the operation of collecting and recording these
experiences by the generation of grandchildren, who are led to question and dialogue
with this history and reappropriate it".3
Five of the 12 episodes available in the first season of the project were
analyzed,4 following the criterion of being older women with a migration history.

3 Available at: https://www.chaireunesco-adm.com/Jonas-Pariente. Accessed on: 7 Jun. 2021.

4 The episodes were produced between 2015 and 2018, but some of them do not specify the year. In
Oral History, v. 24, n. 1, p. 149-169, jan./jun. 2021 153

these cases, we chose to use the year 2018.

154 FERREIRA, Maria Leticia Mazzucchi. Grandmas Project...

familiar. In the foreground is the name of each recipe prepared: Marillenknödel by

Suzanne Achache-Wiznitzer, 87, filmed by Mona Achache, France-Austria;
Chouchouka by Ninette Zagury, filmed by Elsa Lévy, France-Morocco; Kneidler by Julia
Wallach, 93, filmed by Frankie Wallach, France-Poland; Mehchi by Rosa Maluf Milan,
97, filmed by Mathias Mangin, Lebanon-Brazil; Molokheya by Suzi Parienté
(Nano), 83, filmed by Jonas Parienté, France-Egypt.

"The fall and winter of life are as long as

the spring and summer" 5

It is with this reflection that Sonia Debeauvais (2018), born in 1924 in Denmark,
ends the filming done by her granddaughter. In the narrow kitchen of her old
Parisian apartment, this nonagenarian, who died two years after the making of the
video, questions the very idea of the time of life, youth and old age which, measured
chronologically, are equal in terms of units, but apprehended and lived differently.
The idea of duration, from the perspective of a flow perceived as a continuum
without ruptures, is one of the principles of Henri Bergson's (2011) theory on time,
and defined by him as "the real duration is what has always been called time, but
time perceived as indivisible",6 that is, the perception of inner life does not
correspond to a time fractionated in years, months, hours, but to an uninterrupted
flow in which changes are experienced not as discontinuities, but as a succession of
inner states. This perspective of subjective time, neither fractioned nor spatialized,
underlies the idea of continuity, but, as in the thought expressed by the elderly
woman, "winter is very, very long, especially when you are old", and from this
statement one can deduce the representation of a long time of decline, a time that
expands into a future without projects, without a defined objective, as revealed in her
interview (Sonia Debeauvais, 2018).
The evocation of the seasons of the year as representations of the ages of life
places autumn as a prelude to winter, a season of short, dark days, conducive to
retreat, a metaphor for old age as a phase of few goals and greater wear and tear on the
body, as the protagonist presents to us. The relationship we establish with time
transits between a linear rationality, since externally we are measured by calculations of
years lived, and another tending to a spiral, or the idea of a river that

5 In the original: "L'automne et l'hiver de la vie sont aussi longs que le printemps et l'été" (free translation by
the author).
6 In the original: "Durée réelle est ce que l'on a toujours appelé le temps, mais le temps perçu comme indivisible"
(free translation by the author).
 Oral History, v. 24, n. 1, p. 149-169, jan./jun. 2021 155

runs without paying attention to the changes in the environment.

All the women filmed by their grandchildren or great grandchildren, within
the framework of the Grandmas Project, are in their 80s at the time of filming. How
can we represent this stage of life? With which descriptors can we define it? What
lexicon should be used to name it?
If we consider the statistical graphs on population ageing, it can be seen that
the increase in the world's population over the age of 60 is growing exponentially,
demonstrating a trend towards longevity on almost all continents. Data from the
World Health Organization (WHO) indicated that, in 2020, the number of people
aged 60 or over would be higher than that of children under five years old and that,
by 2050, 80% of older people would live in low- and middle-income countries, that
is, developing or underdeveloped countries,7 totaling over 2 billion people,
something around 30% of the world population. In Brazil, the population over 65
years of age will be between 25-30%,8 setting a huge contrast with the life
expectancy of Brazilians at birth, which in 1940 was 41.5 years and 51.6 years in
1960 (Berquó; Baeninger, 2000).
However, although demographic data point to a higher life expectancy of the
world population, this process is heterogeneous, since it involves different factors
that condition a good living and, therefore, a good aging. Such factors are related to
living conditions, government policies aimed at the elderly population, but also to
forms of cultural understanding and the social framework of aging.
Thus, if we can numerically establish categories of longevity, such as Third
and Fourth Age, such categories cannot be seen as absolute data, as they cannot
account for the complexity of our relationship with the time of life, nor with the
social and cultural conditions that directly affect each person. There are increasing
difficulties in measuring a long period of existence - the logic of the four seasons of Mrs.
Debeauvais - in categories that seek homogeneity and regularity within them.
Thus, how to define old age and, consequently, how to define the exact time
frame that inserts us in it? Without adhering to the totalizing discourse of statistical
data or even biological premises, we are led to think of old age using the same
principle of Pierre Bourdieu, when he stated that "youth is just a word", that is, by
an "abuse of language" one tends to subsume, under the same concept, social
universes that have practically nothing in common (Mauger, 2001). By formulating
semantic categories that seek to account for states of being, youth

7 Available at: https://www.who.int/fr/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ageing-and-health. Accessed at:

8 Jun. 2021.
8 Available at: https://population.un.org/wpp/Maps/. Accessed on: 8 Jun. 2021.
156 FERREIRA, Maria Leticia Mazzucchi. Grandmas Project...

of life, we are also conditioned to constantly update them, given that such categories
are placed as normative references formulated within the culture and public policies
that affect such references. Thus, in a society regulated by the logic of production
and modulation of time spent working, retirement was considered, between the
1960s and 1970s, the initial milestone of the "third age", a phase that would precede a
dependent old age (Caradec, 2008). Such references have been called into question,
since retirement does not necessarily indicate a disconnection of the subject from
the world of work, either due to the need to obtain greater resources, due to
insufficient benefits, or due to the use of time in other activities, not necessarily
paid. Likewise, not all older adults over 80 years of age have poor physical and
mental health conditions, which would lead to a progressive state of dependence
(Caradec, 2008).
The videos that make up the Grandmas Project present a meeting between
grandparents and grandchildren within an intergenerational relationship in which
family memory, both on one side and on the other, is the element that presides over
the choices made and acts as a connector between the two subjects.

"The house of fire": meetings in the kitchen

In the image that comes to mind when I think of my great aunts, they are in the
kitchen that was at the end of a very long corridor, for me as a child. It was a big
kitchen, but a little dark, and they were always there, at the edge of the stove
stirring a pot of jam, at the edge of the table writing down some order... they had
their backs arched, and the scent I still feel today is of sugar cooking in the syrup
(Maria Alice Coelho Muccilo, great-niece of the "Cordeiro sisters", 2007).2

In the quote above, the space appears formatting the memory. A space inside
the house, itself as a frame of an affective memory. It is in Maurice Halbwachs that
space, as well as time, constitute frames of memory that is produced in the present
moment of individuals. No memory materializes outside the frameworks set by
society, outside interaction with other social beings and outside spatial frameworks.
Space provides regularity and stability to memories,

9 Interview conducted on 02/14/2007 by the National Inventory of Cultural References (INRC) Tradições
doceiras de Pelotas e Antiga Pelotas. This interview is part of the Inventory material, but has not yet
been published.
 Oral History, v. 24, n. 1, p. 149-169, jan./jun. 2021 157

space understood by him in both the material and symbolic sense. When the
members of a group disperse, it is the common thought associated with the places
collectively lived that makes them "remain united through space"10 (Halbwachs,
1997, p. 196). Space acts as a sense of immutability and orientation in the changes
that arise in the course of life, and is configured in the fabric of relationships
between individuals in a group. The spatial framework that shapes gastronomic
memories, in general, consists of the domestic kitchen and, in this case, the
grandmothers' kitchen. These are functional kitchens, whether in a house in a rural
area, in an old apartment or even in modern apartments, whose furniture ranges
from the basics for preparing and storing food to larger spaces with more sophisticated
equipment. Being in the kitchen, in the context of the program, is more than
anything a record of the memorial encounter, and this is the line that led to the
reading of the videos made for the purposes of this article.
The kitchen as a place of creation presents a wide range of sensory stimuli,
such as odors, tactile sensations, tastes. In this place, the elderly women move,
sometimes with agility, demonstrating the full mastery of the activities inherent in
cooking, sometimes with the difficulties that the long-lived body imposes. Old and
biographical, modern and functional, each kitchen can be analyzed as a microcosm
in which the time of life passes in the rhythm of daily tasks, but also of the memory
residues that remain there. The kitchen is, par excellence, the place of ordinary
practices modulated by an "indefinitely repeated time of common life" (Certeau,
1996) in which gestures, objects and spaces participate and reflect elements of a
social and cultural order, experienced by subjects in their singularities. In this
perspective, Meah and Jackson (2016) analyze how memories are mobilized in this
domestic space - a kind of contact zone between the intimate and private dimension
with the public and mundane dimension of the house. Thus, objects, odors and
other sensory elements configure "a complex topography of domestic life" and "a
repository for memory and nostalgia", becoming "places of memory" that, if, on the
one hand, question the meaning of memory as a founding element of national
identity in the sense proposed by Pierre Nora, on the other hand, refer it to the
interior of lived experience informed by categories such as social class, gender,
ethnicity and family, individually more relevant than national identity (Meah;
Jackson, 2016 ).
In the Grandmas Project, filming takes place in domestic kitchens, where
grandmothers circulate, sort and mix ingredients, executing recipes that are linked
to family memories. "If you prepare dishes like my grandmother's, I will certainly
be happy": with this phrase, François Mitterand welcomes his new cook, Hortense
Laborie, at the Elysée Palace, in the film Les saveurs du Palais (2012). Inspired by
the

10 In the original: "ils restent unis à travers l'espace" (free translation by the author).
158 FERREIRA, Maria Leticia Mazzucchi. Grandmas Project...

he trajectory of Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, the first female chef in the presidential

residence, the character's evocation of nostalgia for the food prepared by her
grandmother, even if as fictional rhetoric, is based on the very conformation and
consolidation of olfactory memory, a memorial modality that is closest to sensations
and affective records. In a survey carried out by Joël Candau between 1996 and
1999 with 503 students from the University of Nice, with the aim of assessing which
olfactory memories were spontaneously evoked, a rate of 85% of the answers was
obtained referring to pleasant olfactory memories, linked to childhood and family
(odors and perfumes of parents and grandparents, family home, Sunday meals,
sweets, etc.). Such memories, as the author states, are like impressions that are
preserved throughout our existence (Candau; Ferreira, 2015), establish links with the
affective treatment of information and, for this reason, are strongly associated with
memory coding and the evocative act.

Grandmas... between recipes and memories

Marillenknödel
Knödel are dumplings made from boiled potato dough filled with apricots, inside
which a sugar cube is placed, and cooked in boiling water. Suzanne Achache-
Wiznitzer, who was born in Vienna in 1929, makes the recipe. Her short biography
reads:

I've traveled across the century and Europe, it's hard to cut it short! My mother was
a scandalous woman. She went to cafés, played cards for money and constantly
lost what she had. She died of cancer in 1937 and was buried in Vienna. In 1938,
I left for France. My father and brother were deported in 1942. By chance, I met
Madame Chesneau,11 who was opening the door for all the children they didn't
know what to do with and at the end of the war I stayed with her for a year."
(Suzanne Achache-Wiznitzer, 2017).

The film opens with a shot of Suzanne's face in the f o r e g r o u n d and a phrase
she utters, attributed to De Gaulle, saying that "old age is a shipwreck"12 in the sense
that "you have no more professional activity, you have done what you have done".

11 Suzanne Achache-Wiznitzer is a witness to the "hidden children", children of deportees during the
period of Nazi persecution who, especially in France, were welcomed in boarding schools, family
homes or other places intended to fulfill the role of "substitutes for parents" who, in most cases, never
returned from the death camps (Achache-Wiznitzer, 1993).
12 In the original: "la vieillesse est un naufrage" (free translation by the author).
 Oral History, v. 24, n. 1, p. 149-169, jan./jun. 2021 159

had to do, you lose economically, you lose strength. It is surviving for the sake of
surviving, and when the pleasure of surviving becomes null, we die silently" (Suzanne
Achache-Wiznitzer, 2017).
Suzanne is a doctor, already away from her professional activity; the way she
handles the objects and the preparation of the recipe reveals a past in which her
hands were far from the chores of a kitchen. Of her culinary skills, which she describes
as very precarious: "there are two or three dishes I know how to make... my mother-
in-law's couscous, and I know how to make it well... I vaguely know how to make
carp à la juive, but nobody likes it, especially my children... and I have definitely
given it up... I make couscous, which is not my religion" (Suzanne Achache-
Wiznitzer, 2017).13
After the Marillenknödel is finished, while smoking a cigarette, Suzanne
reflects on never having made Austrian cuisine for her children, regretting that they
were never able to enjoy it. It is clear here that the notion of "Austrian cuisine"
appears as a missing link to a past marked by the history of a Jewish family involved,
like so many others, in the tragedy of deportation.
At the end of the filming, it is from the kiss given by the granddaughter that a
more hopeful tone seems to come, "that, you see, is ten years of life that you give
me" (Suzanne Achache-Wiznitzer, 2017).
The encounter between two generations, one whose past time is felt in the
body and in the relationship with the present, and the other, who seeks these vivid
traces of the past from the present. If the generational milestone separates them in
time, it brings them closer together, in the end, in affection.

Chouchouka (cooked salad)

Salad containing frozen peppers, tomatoes, garlic, pepper, olive oil, marinated
and slow-cooked ingredients. The recipe is made by Ninette Zagury, born in
Casablanca and living in Paris. Although she no longer cooks, she has given her
grandchildren a notebook with several exotic recipes: chouchouka, dafina, makhzina
(Ninette Zagury, 2018).
In the scene, the granddaughter flips through the recipe booklet in which there are
several titles in Spanish, "from the Jews of Spain", as Ninette says. The camera films
her hands chopping garlic and pouring a packet of frozen peppers and canned
tomatoes into the pot on the stove. To her granddaughter's remark about frozen
peppers being a deviation from the original recipe, Ninette says, "I've been using
them like this for a long time, they're better". As the lens glides across the counter
of the kitchen work area, we see prosaic objects such as a pot with marks of use, a
dishcloth on which cutlery and crockery rest after washing, a scene that hardly
indicates a more intense food preparation activity.

13 In the original: "Ça tu vois, c'est 10 ans de vie que tu me donnes" (free translation by the author).
160 FERREIRA, Maria Leticia Mazzucchi. Grandmas Project...

– You don't cook anymore? asks the granddaughter.

– No.
– And you don't miss that?
– No, because it's not practical, I get sick of it.
– And the taste, the palate, don't you miss that?" insists the granddaughter, to
which Ninette replies: "the palate, of course... I forgot... I turned the page"
(Ninette Zagury, 2018).

By declaring that she has given up this past, "turned the page", in the sense of
realizing that life in the present no longer supports what was once her passion -
cooking - Ninette establishes this renunciation as the boundary between one time
and another. Without regret, she recognizes that she did not pass on the culinary
know-how to her daughter, "who never wanted to learn and now it's too late"
(Ninette Zagury, 2018).
The pages of Ninette's recipe notebook are unfolded in front of the camera,
allowing, by simply reading the titles and ingredients, to see the Mediterranean
cuisine in which she learned some secrets of Moroccan cuisine, which refers to the
fairs where products such as olive oils, peppers, cinnamon, oranges, saffron are
living cultural elements, contrasting with Chouchouka's recipe in which we read that
the peppers are Chez Picard, a franchise of frozen products that exists throughout
France, seen as the opposite of good and slow traditional cuisine. Between the past
and the present, which is wider due to fewer occupations, and paradoxically shorter
due to irreversible aging, the adapted Chouchouka prepared by Ninette stands as a
libertarian attitude, without regrets.

Kneidler
A recipe from Eastern European Jewish cuisine, made with chicken and
vegetables that form a stew in which matzo balls are inserted, a kind of flour and egg
meatballs, cooked in boiling water.
The film opens with Julia, "mammy d'amour", as her granddaughter informs
her, walking around the apartment. In quick shots, we see personal objects, such as
a pair of winter slippers, a pot with instruments, such as tweezers and scissors,
another with cosmetics, combs and hairbrushes on the bathroom counter, perfumes,
mirrors, the lipstick that Julia puts on her lips, elements indicating a still vibrant
vanity. In subsequent shots, we see her already wearing a kitchen apron with the
inscription Yiddish mamma, referring to her Jewish origin. The recipe, as a symbol of
this living Jewishness, is presented by her granddaughter in the background saying
that the Kneidler is for her a kind of askhenazi passport.
Julia, as introduced by her granddaughter, is "a 93-year-old super
grandmother. She is a Holocaust survivor. We laugh, drink, talk, gossip, but also
fight like two best friends."
Julia begins the preparation of the recipe by peeling the vegetables with a knife.
Such a seemingly banal gesture reveals itself as a habit acquired in a place of
Oral History, v. 24, n. 1, p. 149-169, jan./jun. 2021 161

suffering,
162 FERREIRA, Maria Leticia Mazzucchi. Grandmas Project...

the concentration camp. Julia says: "In the camp I worked for two months in the
kitchen peeling baskets of potatoes and there I learned how to use a knife to do it" (Julia
Wallach, 2018).
The experience in Auschwitz is approached by Julia in a less tragic way, as a
traumatic memory that, as a form of survival, had to be reframed. The camp runs
through this woman's narrative, it is in the act of removing the peel from vegetables,
in the question she asks her granddaughter if she will not film her number inscribed
on the skin of her arm, "barely visible", in the words of her granddaughter, "let's say
he's wrinkled, he's old", says Julia in a jocular tone, or when referring to the hair that
would be bad:

[...] before I had good hair, I have a photo of when I was little, I think I was six,
my hair was all wavy, but I think it was the camp that ruined my hair. I had wavy
hair, they shaved my head and a year later I had typhoid and had to have my hair
shaved again. My companions said 'let them shave your hair and then it will come
out beautiful'; they shaved it twice, but the third time I didn't let them and now
they are curly like this. (Julia Wallach, 2018).

Likewise, memories are activated by the act of preparing a dish that alludes to
her Polish origin and the harsh living conditions in that country: "I don't know
what it was like in France, but in Poland, you were poor and you saved everything
for Shabbat, everything you needed, to dress well, everything, everything, the suit had
to be very clean, the sheteil, the wig, everything had to be clean, everything new"
(Julia Wallach, 2018).
The war and the experiences associated with it appear as memories that
explain the present, such as learning English. "I learned English from the American
soldiers... I had lessons, a teacher" (Julia Wallach, 2018).
In the preparation of the Kneidler, a personal history is revealed which, as
Halbwachs (1997) states, finds an echo in the social fabrics. Referring to her family
origins,14 Julia evokes the life of a poor Jewish family in Poland before the Second
World War, the difficult conditions that did not prevent the full fulfillment of religious
rituals, the fundamental axis of dignity and identity, the deportation to Auschwitz,
the deadly fate of more than a million Jews, the conditions of life in the
extermination camp marked by disease (typhus that affects Julia, an 18-year-old
teenager), by deprivations of all kinds, by humiliation, by horror and annihilation of
the psychic, moral and physical integrity of the internee. This indelible mark of a
life

14 Julia Kac,maiden name.born on 14/06/1925,in Paris,deported on 23/06/1943 to Auschwitz. Available

at: https://ressources.memorialdelashoah.org/notice.php?q=fulltext%3A%28Julia%20
Wallach%29%20AND%20id_pers%3A%28%2A%29&start=1&rows=1&from=resultat&sort_
define=&sort_order=&rows=. Accessed on: 7 Jun. 2021.
Oral History, v. 24, n. 1, p. 149-169, jan./jun. 2021 163

brutally abducted from her imagined course appears in the number tattooed on her arm,
a record that accompanies a lifetime, intermingling with the marks of time that
wrinkle the skin, evocations of a time of extreme suffering15 that culminates in her
return to Paris and living with the American soldiers.
The film concludes at the table, like the other programs. The table as the place of
meeting, of family memories. Here, it concludes with a toast saying lehaim, which
in Hebrew means "to life".

Mehchi
A traditional Lebanese recipe made by Rosa Maluf Milan,16 it was given the
name Charutinho in Brazil and can be made with cabbage or vine leaves, as
prepared by Rosa. The ingredients are vine leaves, minced beef, white rice,
tomatoes, Syrian pepper, olive oil. The leaves are passed through boiling water so
that they can become pliable when rolling the meat mixture with the other
ingredients, and once rolled, the Mehchi cooks for two hours.
Rosa's world is entered through the image of the sky glimpsed from her bedroom
window. The camera glides through the pieces of a large apartment, antique and showy
furniture that inform the wealthy condition of the residents: family photographs, a
grand piano, an oratory in a piece at the end of a long corridor, an old column
clock that adorns the same scene, in which Dona Rosa appears, walking with
difficulty, announced by her grandson as his 97-year-old grandmother, born in
Brazil, of Lebanese family,17 and whose recipes, for him, who lives in France,
although of Lebanese origin, evoke Brazil.
In the kitchen, Dona Rosa removes the rings from her aged hands, preparing to
start the recipe. With dexterity, she manipulates the vine leaves that are wrapped
with the meat. Rosa's relationship with the preparation of dishes is revealed within
the molds of a Lebanese family with a strong culinary tradition, but also with
memories that refer to suffering, such as the figure of the cook of her childhood
home, Hani, who prevented the girls from accessing the kitchen. "I didn't like her,
she was stupid with me and my sister, she only liked boys" (Rosa Maluf Milan,
2015). The cultural trait of a society where the male figure prevails also appears in
Rosa's speech, when she states that she also prefers men, even though she has only
had female daughters: "because God didn't want me to... I had the first son, but I lost"
(Rosa Maluf Milan, 2015).

15 Available at: http://rescapesdelashoah.org/julia-wallach/. Accessed on: 8 Jun. 2021.

16 Rosa Milan, born in 1917 to a family of Lebanese origin, found in work a way to cope with the death of
her beloved husband at the age of 48 (Rosa Maluf Milan, 2015).
17 Some cultural elements of Syrian and Lebanese immigration in São Paulo can be found in references such
as Oswaldo Truzzi (1997, 2008) and Marcia Maria Cabreira (2001).
164 FERREIRA, Maria Leticia Mazzucchi. Grandmas Project...

Milan, 2015).
In the process of transmission of culinary knowledge, the "Arab-Lebanese"
tradition, as she identifies, the figure of her grandmother appears as the one who
provided her introduction to the world of cooking: "I learned from my
grandmother... I sat in the kitchen, on a stool and watched what she did... my
grandmother, Azize, who was a sweet grandmother, I loved her" (Rosa Maluf Milan,
2015). From an intergenerational perspective, the relationship of affection with the
grandmother, mediated by food, reappears in the grandson who, when opening the
filming with Rosa, informs that his childhood memory is associated with the dishes
prepared by her.
At the end of the meal with the Mehchi, Mrs. Rosa sits back on the sofa and
closes her eyes, perhaps diving into memories of so many other moments of conviviality
that made possible the recipes she prepared, in the spirit of a woman who imposes
herself on a society in which she was not predestined to do so.

Molokheya
A recipe of Egyptian origin, executed by Suzi Parienté, with the main
ingredients being meat (chuck) and molokheya leaves, a bitter green herb, which,
together with other spices and ingredients, result in a stew of high nutritional value.
Suzi, or Nano, as she is affectionately called by her cameraman grandson, was born
in Egypt in 1933 and "has two goals in life: to fill her fridges and those of her family.
their grandchildren. And that's enough" (Suzi Parienté, 2018).
After a brief phone conversation, in which the grandson announces that he
will meet her the following week, the film begins with Nano already in the kitchen,
wearing an apron, a cap on her hair and separating the ingredients of the recipe
that, this time, will be taught to her grandson. As she moves between the stove and
the table, the trajectory of this woman, born in 1933 in Cairo and lived there until
1956, is told by her grandson, who puts in the foreground the story of his father,
who was two and a half years old when the Jews were expelled from Egypt due to
the Egypt-Israel war and the Suez Canal crisis. Nano's recipes are, in her words,
"my only tangible link to Egypt... when she cooks, her accent, her stories, the
ingredients she uses, make me travel to an imaginary Cairo, a city that I don't
know, but which nevertheless defines me".
While letting meat and molokheya turn into stew, Nano opens the fridge and
freezer and takes out ready-made and frozen dishes to supply, as seems to be his
great satisfaction, his grandson's fridge. Between one dish and another, he evokes
fragments of his life, much of it spent in a domestic kitchen, preparing meals for the
family.

I did the matric, an exam like Bac here, it was serious and if you had the matric
you could enter the university, I wanted to do pediatrics. But dad said that a girl
doesn't leave her parents' house and it's the father who decides what his daughter
will do... she didn't
Oral History, v. 24, n. 1, p. 149-169, jan./jun. 2021 165

give me orders, he said. I didn't go to university and I got married when I was 18
(Suzi Parienté, 2018).

The narrow confines of a family with a Muslim religious tradition appear as a

way of defining destinies.
It is in the kitchen, however, that free choice is fully exercised, which can be
seen in the use of industrialized tomato paste, "without colorants, without
preservatives", as she says showing the packaging to her grandson. "And do you
believe that what they say is true?", he asks, to which Nano answers "yes", the yes as an
expression of the freedom to choose the tomato paste already purchased "without
preservatives, nor colorings", even if this is just a label, and not the traditional method
of pressing tomatoes, a long and laborious process, suppressed by her as a gift given to
her old age.
Nano fries grains so that "the perfume of the coriander comes out well". The
coriander goes into the pot with the molokheya stew, to which he adds "two cubes",
two ready-made spices, another pragmatic update of a traditional recipe.
The odor that one can imagine as a result of this infusion seems to be a
memorial trigger for the grandson, who concludes the filming with Suzi Parienté
(2018) by placing himself in an experience of immigration and estrangement.

[Jonas Parienté] - So that's it, I'm rootless. I didn't tell you, but on my mother's
side, my family is Polish. My uncle and aunt were born in the USSR during the
Second World War, and my mother, who was born in Paris, learned Yiddish and
Polish before learning French. I filmed my grandmother to remind me, for
knowing her tiny ingredients links me t o my family's origins. Cooking recipes.
An accent that turns French into a Slavic or Arabic language. Fragmented pieces
of narratives. So Molokheya is a bit of me. It's like a mirror. I am Paris and I am
Cairo. I am Arabic and I am Yiddish. I film so as not to forget. I cook to transmit.

Cooking, memory and narrative: fragments of grandmothers' lives

The association between cooking, memory and narrative is one of the most
stable and evident. The act of preparing food brings with it strongly memorial
elements, both at the narrative and non-verbal levels. At the non-verbal level, two
modalities are related to the study proposed in this article, both passing through the
body as a vector of memory. The first is that which can be observed in gestures, in
body movements, derived from multiple learnings.
166 FERREIRA, Maria Leticia Mazzucchi. Grandmas Project...

throughout life, characterized by repetition, internalized as a low-level memory, the

protomemory, in the definition of Joël Candau (2011, 2020), or procedural
memory (Izquierdo et al., 2013). The characteristic of this memorial modality,
besides being constantly acting on the most unconscious level and through
repetition, is its strong capacity for sharing. When we observe the movements
performed by the cooks, particularly those who are the subject of the videos
analyzed, we see that they are repetitive movements, made without the evocation of
this know-how being triggered. The gestures are similar to the different cultures
that each of the women brings with them. This procedural memory is followed by
sensory memory, which is evoked by association. "And suddenly the memory
appeared", moved by the taste of Madeleine dipped in tea, Proust goes back to his
aunt's house in Combray, in a memorial incursion activated by a sensory stimulus:
the little cake dipped in tea. This, which we could call sensory memory, combines
elements of olfactory, gustatory, tactile and visual memory, faculties that are essential to
the act of executing a recipe and then repeating it, always seeking to recover the
original form recorded in memory. Similarly, some sensory associations lead to
semantic associations (Deroy, 2013), such as representations verbalized by
grandchildren associating the perfume and image of food with memory, or even "the
Kneidler as askhenazi passport", and "the Cairo I do not know", as expressions of
identities informed by food.
In terms of the oral narrative itself, this is forged in the act of executing the
recipes. It is by preparing the vegetables that Julia evokes her trajectory marked by
deportation and life in the concentration camp; it is by executing the traditional
Egyptian recipe that Nano speaks of her life, of the ban on pursuing studies, of the
prohibition on working outside the home, imposed by her husband. Also, it is by
rolling the vine leaves that Rosa alludes to the prominence of the masculine in Arab
culture, or the reference to the difficulties of transmitting to her daughter the
culinary knowledge associated with Morocco, in Ninette's kitchen. The life
trajectories appear in dense fragments through which one can deduce information
about the contexts to which they are linked.
The guiding thread of these memorial immersions are the recipes, all of which
are associated with the biographical stories of these women and their grandchildren.
Through the recipes, the social frameworks such as space, time, rituals, family,
religion, as well as the encounter between two generations - grandmothers and
grandchildren - are perceived. Analyzing culinary practices in Italy, Fortunati (2015)
observes that recipes can be seen as a cultural object, in the sense that they reflect
forms of relationship with food and eating that are structured within the culture
itself, but also as heuristic instruments to analyze the living conditions of women,
domestic work, ways of doing and the permanences and ruptures that occur over time.
At the same time, the recipes, as they appear in the Grandmas project, "make it
possible to construct anchor points of imaginary identities that mitigate the effects of
uprooting".
Oral History, v. 24, n. 1, p. 149-169, jan./jun. 2021 167

(Sherman, 2017, p. 3). Articulating different temporalities, the recipes executed can
be understood as evocators, supports for memory, reminding, a category employed
by Paul Ricoeur based on Edward Casey's "three mnemonic modes", and which, as
Ricoeur states, there is no better way to define it than by associating it with the term
remembering: "this makes me remember that, makes me think of that other"
(Ricoeur, 2000, p. 46).
As a parallel movement to the identity or even nostalgic sense of the recipe,
there are adaptations, modifications, whose objective is to make them more
practical, simplified, less exhausting in a phase of life in which there is no longer the
daily obligation to cook. In the time of retirement, the aging of the body and the
urgency to live what one still has to live, cooking by choice, freeing oneself from the
efforts of the past, is an act of autonomy and liberation. Speeches like Julia's, saying
that she has not prepared the recipe for more than three years, or Suzanne's, stating
that cooking has never been her forte, or even Ninette's, giving up the flavors of the
past in the name of the right not to have to go to the kitchen, are expressions of this
kind of inner resistance, the right to live as one decides to live.

Multi-handed cooking...

The inspiration for this article, the Grandmas Project, made it possible to
experience access to the life narratives of elderly women from a different
methodological path than what is usually done when in a situation of meeting between
researcher and interviewee. In the gastronomic experience that involves the program,
several categories of analysis are identified, making it possible to transform each
video into an incursion into two universes, that of grandmothers, in their narratives,
and that of grandchildren, in their memorial and affective experience.
The figure of grandchildren appears, in this context of Grandmas, as one of
the poles of an intergenerational encounter that reinforces the idea that it is they,
and not the second generation, who end up fulfilling a fundamental role of memory
entrepreneurs (Michel, 2010), engaged in memorial searches related to identity
processes and relationship with the past.
Although the Grandmas Project does not present itself as a project based on
the Oral History method, the way it is organized, in terms of approach and the
possibilities it leaves to perceive in the relationship between subject and historical
and social frameworks that make them perceive in their trajectory, authorizes us to
defend it as an example of application of this methodology. To this end, we rely on
Michael Frisch (2016a), in his profound questioning of the limits and paradoxes
that involve Oral History, among which a very restrictive use of the interview,
approaching it as a fact that ends in itself, the paradox of orality that, although it is
at the center
168 FERREIRA, Maria Leticia Mazzucchi. Grandmas Project...

of the very existence and justification of the method by the interview conducted,
ends up becoming a kind of secondary or accessory file, the "dark and deep secret"
that designates the contradictory form of our relationship with the moment in
which we establish a listening relationship with the one who speaks. Still, and as
another paradox that the author points out to us, we are faced with what he
addresses as "direction" or "essentially linear tapering", a stage that presupposes a
decoupage of the raw material resulting from the interview, a kind of sorting that,
according to our initial objectives, is able to separate what will or will not be
included in the text intended to be the public document.
In response to these paradoxes, which can be analyzed as vulnerabilities of the
method, or even as a kind of habitus of the craft, internalized behaviors that become
part of our repertoire of actions, Frisch points us to other possible ways of exploring
the countless possibilities that the "digital age" brings us, in the sense of proposing
the interview as a strongly open space, expanding to the maximum what translates
to us as the "post-documentary sensibility", which leads us to think of a final
product that, however, can be constantly explored, that generates clues, that is not
only translated by the descriptors which, as translators of an interview, we authorize
ourselves to establish.
"Explore", more than "search", this is the formula that Frisch (2016b) points
out to us as one of the horizons that open up the new (and not so new) virtual tools of
extroversion of what we do, allowing encounters of subjectivities and affectivities,
going beyond the "raw and cooked", a perfect formulation that allows us to leave
the formal interview and move on to "the mess in the kitchen", an expression used
by the author to designate this expansion of the oral document as a space for user
interaction. Exploring, searching, entering the "intimate space" of the interview:
these are movements that are in perfect agreement in the act of filming the
grandmothers, in the 8 minutes in which Michael Frisch's "digital kitchen"
materializes in a real kitchen in which, as a living expression of the author's "shared
authority", together the one who films and the one who is filmed cook, hands are
mixed kneading the food, cooking smells are shared, spices and utensils are
combined and, in the end, the dish is tasted, tastily conceived in this process of
"bricolage", in which different actors and voices build a product. In this process, the
distinctions between the listener and the narrator are tenuous, almost imperceptible.
The evocations to memory start from different appeals, sometimes from the
granddaughter's remark about her hair, which leads the grandmother to a foray into
a difficult past lived in a concentration camp, sometimes from the realization, made
by another grandmother in front of the apricot dumplings, that she had rarely made
such a recipe of Jewish tradition for her children.
We can apply Frisch's ideas to the meeting proposed in the Grandmas Project
and also propose a certain slippage of our understanding of the Oral History
method, seeking to situate it within these new forms of communication and even of
communication.
Oral History, v. 24, n. 1, p. 149-169, jan./jun. 2021 169

contingencies that led to the adoption of "new perceptual and cognitive modes
activated in the production of online interviews", as Santhiago and Magalhães (2020)
rightly state, in view of the limits and restrictions imposed by a pandemic situation
and consequent social isolation. We do not have the encounter between two bodies,
we cannot gauge expressions and emotions through gestures and looks, however, we
can, by refining the idea of "shared authority" and sensitivity towards the other,
transform the "cold" space into "hot", free use of the expression created by Serge
Barcellini.18
Finally, Grandmas Project leads us to reflect on how old age is represented in
our contemporary societies, sometimes medicalized to avoid the natural process of
time on the body, sometimes sweetened with new semantic categories to define it,
sometimes as a social problem, rarely as a possibility of learning and transmitting
knowledge. It is this last perspective that led to the elaboration of the Grandmas Project,
and, since life is dynamic, as is memory, today it has already become a reminder of
those grandmothers who now survive in memory.

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Received on 28/02/2021.
Final version resubmitted on 28/04/2021.
Approved on 28/04/2021.

Source of funding: nothing to declare.

Conflicts of interest: nothing to declare.