This month we are delighted to welcome Rachel Chan to the Innerpeffray blog. Rachel is a Masters Student at the University of Stirling and guest curated an exhibition with us as part of the university's Making the Most of Masters programme.
Cookery as
heritage
Food is a big part of my life.
Growing up in Hong Kong, a culinary capital, I can find different kinds of food
easily. From Hong Kong street-food, traditional Chinese cuisines, Asian
delights, to high-end French dinner, the only thing you have to do is go out
and taste them all. So, moving to Scotland is a big change for me. Eating out
is expensive so I mostly cook dinner myself, and I like to explore different
recipes online. And when I first came across the opportunity to work with the
Library of Innerpeffray, I was given the freedom to choose a topic I am
interested in, and I decided I want to do something related to cookery.
Cooking is so integrated into our
daily life we seldom realise it is our heritage. Perhaps we all have that
Grandma’s recipe which has been a tradition to cook during family gathering. My
grandmother taught me how to make a perfect cup of milk-tea, which she learnt
from her father when she was young. When my grandmother worked in the family’s
café, she used evaporated milk to make milk-tea; but now I use soy milk because
it is a healthier choice. Recipes pass down to us from generation to generation
with personal alteration in respond to the changes in society; and it is
through these old recipes we can learn about the societies in the past.
Preparing the exhibition
I had a lot of fun preparing the exhibition in the Library.
The first thing I did was to browse through the Library catalogue to search for
cookbooks. Apart from cookery books, I also read through books that I did not think
I could find recipes in. Recipes appeared in all kinds of books, gardening
book, magazines and even dictionary. It is a perfect example of how different
the book contents were in the past compare to the information we consume in
present days.
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| Crab from Poisson, by P Belon 1554 |
I enjoyed reading books at the Library. Nowadays technology
is so advanced, we have so many ways to read. You can read it on a tablet,
access ebooks, or even listen to a book. But the feeling of holding an actual
book and flipping through pages remain the best way, in my opinion, to interact
and connect with the literature. Reading books at Innerpeffray Library allow me
to not only study the literature, but also to study the printing and
typewriting in the past. The information is as important as the literature itself
in understanding past societies.
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| Cookery for Every Household, by F Jack, 1914 |
After sometimes spent on reading and taking notes, I
started deciding the content for the exhibition. I got a lot of help from the
volunteers at the Library as they know more about the books than I do, and they
know what will be interesting and appealing to visitors. The basic was to pick
out the books for display, the more difficult part was to decide which pages to
show. Books are very special objects, we can only show two pages at once, so we
needed to choose somethings eye-catching and easy to read. With cookbooks and
tool-books in the past this is difficult, as they were practical and did not
have much illustrations. Eventually we decided to use illustrations from other
books and rearrange some recipes from the cookbooks to visualise the
exhibition.
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| The Red Deer, by HA McPherson 1896 |
The final step was to put up the exhibition. With all the
materials prepared, I tried to draw up plan on the layout for the exhibition.
Yet the final product looks quite different from my plan. As one of the volunteers
said to me, ‘You will never know what works until you put them in the case.’ And
we did prepare and plan for extra materials, and the exhibition turned out to
be satisfactory, at least to me. I hope it is a fun and interesting exhibition
to the visitors. This reminded me when I was holding an event during
undergraduate; even after months of preparation, there were still unexpected issues
and changes. The only thing we can do is to prepare beyond required. As Winston
Churchill said, ‘Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.’
Working at Innerpeffray Library
One of the reasons I chose to take
the opportunity to work at Innerpeffray Library is that I love books. My family
love reading, and I like to be surrounded by books. Being a student for the
last five years, I have spent a fair amount of time in universities’ libraries
researching. Innerpeffray Library is different. When in the Library, you can
feel a personal connection with the book you are reading. Imagine in a quiet
afternoon, you are sitting in the library, reading a book of your choice. The
sun slowly enters through the window and the warmth making the room cosy. This
is an experience you can rarely get in any other library.
I enjoyed working at the Library a
lot. It was a unique experience to work with books and manuscripts. But what
makes the Library special is the people: the Keeper, the volunteers and the
visitors at the Library. Lara is an amazing keeper of books; she knows
everything about the books in the Library. She is very nice, and she taught me
many things about handling books and manuscripts. The volunteers are lovely and
friendly. Like Lara, they have extensive knowledge of the books in the Library and
I sometimes got distracted from my book while listening to them introducing
books to visitors. Apart from doing my research, I simply enjoyed talking with them
on different subjects. From the drinking of tea, to discussion on history, to
sharing life stories, meaningful conversations always make me happy. Visitors of
the Library varies, but they all love books and are passionate about them. Sometimes
the conversations between the visitors and the volunteers were so intriguing I would
stop reading my book and listen to them.
It has been a wonderful time working
at Innerpeffray Library with Lara and the volunteers, and I hope to return to
the Library sometime, perhaps as a visitor and explore the rest of the
collections in the Library.
