Alimentary Imagination: five books on culinary creation within the artistic practice

Following on from the book Midweek Recipes, artist Jess Elliott Dennison brings you a collection of joyful dishes for exploring across the weekend.

With chapters on Breakfast, Lunch, Afternoon Baking, Dinner and Pudding, these are the flavours and methods for when work is on pause and there’s more time for connecting with your ingredients, kitchen and company.

From sherbet-y lemon curd for spreading over toast in the morning to roast pepper, charred silverskin onion and Parmesan crostini for midday, and spaghetti and oregano meatballs followed by blackcurrant pavlova with lemon and bay custard for the evening—the whole weekend is laid out before you.

Written, tested, photographed and published in Jess Elliott Dennison’s studio in Edinburgh.

FatBoy Zine is a self-proclaimed greedy attempt to document Asian food and identity. Released annually, each issue focuses on a specific theme—either a particular place or a larger, more abstract concept. FatBoy interviews artists and chefs, and commissions writers and artists to help bring each issue to life. Recipes feature alongside each issue, though the team behind it is ever-changing in order to properly represent each theme.

For issue 6, exploring the theme Multi-Heritage: Together, Not Apart, FatBoy Zine speaks to sculptor and artist Hannah Lim, who uses the design style chinoiserie to explore the balance of European and Asian culture; Ramael Scully, head chef and owner of Scully St. James, who uses his diverse heritage to create incredible food; Christina Chan, owner of Choy Division Farm, an upstate New York farm that specializes in growing Asian vegetables in the US; and Chef Abby Lee of Mambow, one of London’s most successful restaurants

The recipes in this issue can arguably be explained as having multi-heritage—using ingredients or techniques that are a result of migration but are now considered true to the culture that embraced them.

What do you eat while you work? For the third edition of the Studio Cookbook series, Hato Press extended an invitation to collaborators, friends and creators we admire to share a dish they enjoy as part of their working day.

The featured recipes are influenced by taste, team and resources – think: minimal cooking equipment, make-do utensils and dwindling energy. There are sweet treats, speedy reheats and communal stews cooked over open fires. Dishes made on deadline, for recovery from a long day, or to share with friends, inspiring collaboration. We feature two conceptual cocktails and one mug of boiled water.

Spread across four chapters – Snacks, Mains, Sweets and Drinks – the Studio Cookbook’s 37 recipes range from the down- to-earth and delightfully convenient to the outlandish and eclectic.

Lentil Space. Recipes from Artists’ Homes is a compilation of recipes from the Arab world that were presented by artists for Mophradat’s online cooking show Lentil Space.

Adapted from its namesake online program produced by Mophradat, co-curated by Mai Abu ElDahab and Reem Shilleh, from 2021 to 2023, this book is a celebration of the varied cuisine of the Arab world and its relationship with inherited food practices and the cultures of cooking and talking about food.

With contributions by Adam HajYahia and Haitham Haddad, Deena Abdelwahed, Laila Hida with Amine Lahrach, Mohamed Abdelkarim with Abla elBahrawy, Nadah El Shazly, amongst many others, this cookbook includes recipes chosen and prepared by the artists in an intimate setting coupled with stories both personal and about their art practice.

Charlotte Koopman has run a kitchen for the past 15 years and has always responded to both crises and festivities by cooking. ‘There Is in the Kitchen’ is a look at how to begin writing, which turned out to be not that different from preparing a meal. Both are prose bordering on poetry, both speak in a multitude of languages.

‘There Is in the Kitchen’ is a series of essays, an inventory of what coexists in the kitchen, a larder stocked with particular interests. Ranging from the singular- Mandarino Tardivo di Ciaculli or Pistacia Terebinthus to the expansive- the cross- rhythm, close encounters, seasonality.

Charlotte Koopman (1975, Groningen, NL) is co-founder of the kitchen collective Otark, established in 2009. Besides cooking a weekly Sunday breakfast for 13 years, Otark cooks in different rhythms and contexts and with changing line-ups, responding to film, sound, language, the weather. Otark has a strong preference for Handwork / Close-ups (the near) / Off-beat (the far out) / Slow-mo / Slapstick / Roots and Leaves. Otark works with foundation versus the wind, home cooking on the go, and works, like cooks do, within the framework of a timeline, rhythm, repetition, seasonality and transience. Charlotte Koopman writes, reads, draws and photographs, but always from the kitchen.