I was going down a route and kept hitting road blocks, and I felt like I had to keep bashing through them instead of finding and entire new route. I think I felt like I had to follow this route I had spent weeks going down, researching and putting time in, but it didn’t feel genuine.
During my 1-1 tutorial with Karl the day I returned to Uni something was mentioned which stuck with me and for some reason I kept thinking of.
“Food means a lot to you, it’s a big part of your life.”
I am a chef, I have been for a long time, and even if I decide in the future not to work in kitchens, food and being a chef is a large part of who I am. I haven’t embraced that part of me for a while, probably because it made my life hard for quite a while. I lost friends, lost myself, worked myself nearly to death, had relationships fall apart because of my career and I pushed people away because of it.
Now though I feel a bit different about it. Probably helps I don’t work 85 hour weeks any more at one of the most popular restaurants in London. Also I am now with my boyfriend who as I have stated before loves me and I do in return, and respects and looks after me. (Which after everything I have been through never thought was possible.)
I have a connection to food, and honestly I applied to University to run from my old life and that includes kitchens and being chef. So at Uni I wanted to forget that part of my life. But here I needed to embrace it.
Chicken Tikka Marsala is the UK’s National Dish. It is a Bastardised version of a proper Indian Curry.
I decided to look at this project a different way. I was fed up of thinking about what was expected and what was wanted and started to look at what I wanted, and what I wanted to explore, even if that meant going back to the beginning and starting again.
Over the last 2-3 centuries Indian and Asian food in general has become ever so popular, however food had to be developed from the English taste. Originally curry in UK was made by the British from what they learned and brought back from India however they had very limited spices so as the world became smaller with the invention of steam boats etc. Spices became more readily available and cheaper, and where brought back with also Indian Migrants and Curry was born (This is a real simplified version of the history).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8370054.stm
Food migrates as well and with people. To me food is a huge part of individual culture and community.
For instance, Kingsland Road in Hoxton/Shoreditch has an insane amount of Vietnamese restaurants there and they all appeared when we had a influx of Vietnamese migrants into the area introducing new food to us. Food is still migrating now. I work in an Israeli restaurant. A culture and food not many people know about, but I love. This food has become more and more popular over the last couple of decades. Think of the boom of hummus, and falafel. And of course we have always had the kebab (not specifically Israeli but Middle-Eastern) but more and more places are popping up introducing this country to it’s food, it’s culture, the country’s soul.
So my idea…I want to create a graphic narrative of the UK’s national dish – Chicken Tikka Marsala.