Give the Gift of History & Culture
Teaching our children how to cook dishes from our own cultures is a gift we all pass down to our children naturally. However, have you ever thought about giving the gift of traditional cooking tools? Giving the tools used by our ancestors to cook foods we still eat today makes for a fun gift that can teach our kids about history and connect them in an even deeper way to the culture and recipes we share.
“Food glorious food” that’s what they say. Where does that glorious food come from? Nature gives us the best ingredients. Our ancestors made cultures. The combination of those two provides us with the best food that we can taste now.
What Traditional Tools Teach Us
Today parents teach children to cook using modern tools such as the blender and the kitchen mixer, a good idea because in today’s modern world we need to work efficiently. But I think it would be great to also teach our children about traditional cooking tools such as mortar and pestle, stone pounder, traditional pepper grinder, traditional whisk, or others. Through these traditional tools, they can learn things such as:
- They know how their ancestors cooked their food. I remember when I was a teacher, a kid in our class thought that ancient people cooked using a modern blender! Yes, of course, kids can imagine whatever they want, imagination makes them creative. But it will be good if they know the truth, the history.
- They’ll learn that stone can be used to cook as a pounder. And to cut a boiled egg neatly, you can use a sewing thread as a knife
- They learn to survive if the modern cooking tools can’t be reached. Such as when they are camping with no electricity to operate the cooking tools. They can use mortar and pestle or traditional whisk to make the cake.
Modern vs. Traditional
Nowadays, people in some countries still use traditional cooking tools. In Indonesia, some people think that food will be more delicious if it is cooked using traditional cooking tools. For example sambal, some people crush the chili using a blender and some people crush it using the mortar and pestle. The results are different, the one with the blender is a kind of puree, but the one with the mortar and pestle is more coarse. Most people like the coarse chili sambal. So does with other condiments.
Teaching young kids about traditional cooking tools will be great if you give them one of the traditional cooking tools as a gift. They will be so excited to learn to use it.
Related Post: Learning About the World through Cooking
Looking for other multicultural gift ideas?
Gift Guide for Teens Who are Global
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