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OPEN CALL – A Menu and its Leftovers: Finding the Voices in Jeddah’s Food Histories

Applications are now closed.

Food researcher Salma Serry will be leading a series of workshops that look into the unique voice of Jeddah’s food culture: one that is personal to individuals, part of their memories, portrayed in family photos, within cookbooks and ephemera, transferred through family recipes, and those that are enjoyed while walking the streets of the city.

The program calls for researchers, artists, writers, chefs, and individuals with interest in food history to take part in a series of workshops that aim to research, document, and reflect on the untold histories of food in Jeddah and Saudi Arabia at large.

The workshops will take the form and sequence of a five-course menu: the welcoming coffee and dates, then the appetizer, the soup and salad, followed by a main course, and finally –  dessert. By looking at local food sites, community cookbooks, personal histories, and archival material, participants will apply various research methods to unravel the ways that food, history, and culture are interconnected.

The programme culminates in a collaborative published work, conceived as the “leftovers,” i.e. testaments to the research conducted during the workshops.

For any questions, please send an email to [email protected]

About Salma Serry

Salma Serry is a food researcher, writer and filmmaker. Her work focuses on reinterpreting history and reapproaching culture through the lens of the food culture in Egypt and the Arab Gulf. She documents and archives historical cookbooks, menus, and ephemera on @sufra_kitchen, inviting others to her everyday research journey.

Image Credit

Rawae’ al-Tabkh al-Arabic, c1980s. Al-Maktaba Al-Alamiyya