see: open_sauces_reader

Page in progress until the 22nd of November 2008

This menu includes the speakers & their 'toast' topics, as well as the matched foods that they can use instead of a slide presentation…

The timing of the dinner is from app. 6:30PM - midnight.

By Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney

To celebrate the diversity and openness of food culture, FoAM organised Open Sauces – a tasting dinner as an experiment in restoring the original meaning of the word “symposium” – a place for meaningful, inspiring conversations, digression and celebration centred around food and drink. The evening unfolded in a sequence of evocative dishes, matched with drinks, improvised music and speakers. Each course was put together to reflect diverse associations between food, contemporary culture and our turbulent environment. They were created in collaboration with the speakers who used the taste, texture, scent, temperature or sound of a dish to illustrate their “toast.” Each toast was a minute long speech, question, story, or provoking statement which aimed to encourage conversation around a specific theme. As palate‑cleansers between courses, short musical pieces for the violin and hurdy-gurdy were played, creating rhythms and textures of sound to match the tastes and textures of the food and conversation.

This recipe is presented as a diagram describing the flow of Open Sauces, outlining the relationships between the food, topics and speakers that composed the event. The central thread of the diagram - comprised of arrows, circles, text and scribbles – shows the flow of the menu, whether a course had many elements or a single focus, whether the taste intensifies from one course to the next, or the particular subtleties explored in a course. This layer is the essence of the menu - it shows its rhythms and harmonies, combining the multi-course, multi-topic dinner into a continuous whole. Beneath the central thread are the names of dishes, notes about the primary ingredients and the concepts inspiring the theme in each course (e.g. beetroot or DIY Biotech), some of which were repeated, or reintroduced to help create a sense of consistency, as well as punctuation in the rhythm of the meal. The top of the diagram show pairs of speakers (e.g. WM → Wietske Maas) and the topics that unite them (e.g. scent and taste). The pairings of speakers and topics were determined to encourage particular discussions between the speakers and the guests that shared their tables. Alongside this high level recipe, many of the details were filled in with additional scores, maps, lists, notes and diagrams to help guide the cooks, performers, sommelier and maitre d'.

Amidst sharing and eating, the speakers toasted to food from different perspectives – artistic, cultural, technological, or scientific. From molecular gastronomy to fair trade, Ayurveda to permaculture, Open Sauces blended seemingly unrelated elements of our food-chain, bringing them together in the flow of the menu – each course building thematically and sensually on those before. The evening began in the wild, with discussions about urban foraging, then continued via cultivation through agriculture and biotechnology, paused to dwell on the nature of taste and scent, only to be grounded back in the practices of shopping and cooking, diets and health, and finally to be lifted up and twisted sideways in discussions of re‑appropriating urban waste in mobile kitchens, reminding adults that they can still play with their food.

More about Open Sauces can be found at http://opensauces.cc

Cocktail Upper

Beetroot air, jelly, crisps & mayo

• Toast: Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli - Urbanibalism: devouring metropolitan yeasts and other unsuspecting edibles in a city near you
  • Food: beer damper and other types of yeasty breads, with a pumpkin oil smear & fine dukkah dust (+ possibly butter emulsion, olive oil dust) + a taste of Ferment Brussels

• Reply: Allison Zinder - Concrete Honey: Between honey and a hard place
  • Food: Miel Beton with a colourful selection from the salad bar: north african carrot salad with candied violets + plantain & parsley salad with banana raita + crunchy tabouleh with parsley, orange blossom, pomegranate & dried olives

• Toast: Kultivator (M. Vrijman & M. Lindmark) on the parallels between provision production and art practice
  • Food: cauliflower & tonka bean cream with buckwheat-risotto (or couscous), gold-leaf & cauliflower chips

• Reply: Sneha Solanki - Reclaiming the nostalgia of kitchen science
  • Food: various living sprouts growing on agar-agar substrate of almond liquid, sprayed with sherry & olive oil vinaigrette

• Toast: Alok Nandi - Architecture of taste
  • Food: golgappa ball stuffed with a mixture of chantarels & dried apricots, with a harissa broth
• Reply: Maki Ueda - What happens if you don't close the pan when making a soup?
  • Food: 3 or 4 phases of pea & mint soup: gas, liquid, solid, (perhaps frozen)

• Toast: Femke Snelting - Decoding/encoding gestures: on open source and cooking
  • Food: Mock stoemp-saucisse: smoked tofu saussage with 3 stoemp variations (potato pureed with youghurt mousse, with a 'kuiltje' of chocolate & trumpets of death sauce, potato pureed with olives and dragon, with a kuiltje of mushroom ketchup, potato pureed with sauerkraut, with a kuiltje of smoked paprika & cinnamon jus
• Reply: Kate Rich - Recipe as a field report
  • Food: Feral trade course - Belgian endives cooked in coffee & Suze, with orange powder & buttermilk emulsion, roasted Molenbeek couscous with spices from various FoAM journeys

• Toast: Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino - Food and progress: a complex relationship of excess.

“To say that obesity is caused by merely consuming too many calories is like saying that the only cause of the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party.” - Adelle Davis

• Food: a crumbling architecture on a chestnut rice base, with roasted seasonal root vegetables (parsnip, jerusalem artichokes, salsify, turnips), steamed pumpkin and tempura of herbs, with a savoury chestnut and pepper tuiles

• Reply: Andy Strauss - Soupermobile to feed the masses
  • dessert (wal)nut paste (hé tao hú)

• Toast: f0amf0od team
  • Food: ginger, coffee & olive oil chocolate mousse, with white chocolate dust & two-coloured persian fairy-floss
• Reply: Stevie Wishart
  • coffee & tea: coffee & red wine jelly; earl grey panna cotta; mint tea mouth freshner;

/Downer cocktail/ /Chinese High-mountain tea/ /Bangladeshi Black Tea / Croatian Bush Infusion/

for the previous version see open_sauces_menu_2007