Is The Oven On?
Is The Oven On? A Manual Arts High School Cookbook was written by the students of Mr. Ochoa’s Culinary Art Classes at Manual Arts High School in Spring 2024
Introduction
How food develops and changes with time is fascinating to me. When a new person makes a dish, they add their name to the family or local history of that dish. When each person makes it, even if it’s from a recipe, they make changes that reflect their own tastes, like a culinary game of telephone. Maybe the change is a subtle one, like adding a bit more salt to a step, or drastic like omitting a step, but it’s all with goal of improving or perfecting what they consider to be their ideal version of a dish. Sometimes there’s a lot of emotion connected to recreating the original version of a recipe, but it’s those bittersweet notes that season the food and push us to reach out for those flavors we have in our memories. Hamburgers didn’t always have cheese. Someone had to come around, tired of having a cheese-less burger, thinking that a slice of cheese was the one thing that would make a burger perfect. Or something as simple as eggs. Someone out there had to deviate from the original way people ate eggs to get to variety of ways we eat eggs today. That’s the magic of food, but something I had never experienced first hand until the creation of this cookbook.
My family is Salvadoran. We have our set menu of culturally Salvadoran recipes handed down from some family source lost to time. There are a few changes here and there made by some of my extended family, mostly due to lack of skill and taste (sorry family), but all recipes are done fairly similarly. While working with Mr. Ochoa’s classes, I found myself making connections with students with similar cultures, recalling those flavors I’d come to know from my familys’ version, only for those memories to be altered by the big little changes their families made. At first I was taken aback, like when someone corrects your pronunciation of a word you’d only read in books. El Salvador as a country is so small that it was hard to wrap my head around the different versions of the same dish I grew up with. The more differences I saw, the more beauty I saw in the subtle changes from dish to dish.
The students were tasked with sharing a recipe for a dish whose smell, taste, or process to make it transported them to a different time in their lives. Many shared their favorite family dishes. Unfortunately for the rest of us, some of those dishes are a heavily guarded family recipe. In those cases, the students tried their best to replicate as much as they could remember.
In helping them realize their stories and dishes, I was also able to create new ones of my own that I’d like to share so I can keep them forever:
-Listening to a whole class argue about the number of hot sauces on the WingStop menu with a student. He argued there was only one.
-Listening to students debate “water cornbread” with that same student. He remained unconvinced “water cornbread” was real despite how many students tried to convince him otherwise.
-Explaining what a pie was to students who had never seen a pie in their lives, then watching them perfectly lattice the crust from an image off of google.
The title itself is based on a memory I have of being in the class. The pilot light on the stoves the students use are very temperamental, so Mr. Ochoa would have to remind the students to make sure the oven was on before putting anything in.
Every time I look at this book, read the writing shared within, I’ll be transported to the memories I have working with this class. I hope that in trying to make these dishes and reading their stories, you too are able to make new memories with food.
–Marco Beltan, 826LA Writers’ Room Coordinator at Manual Arts High School