Paper short abstract:

The paper will discuss cooking practices of Russian women married abroad as a way of making homes, constructing their immediate social surroundings and reformulating their identities in migration.

Paper long abstract:

In the world of increasing mobility, it is crucial to understand how people create connections to places. Meanwhile, food is a fundamental way to develop symbolic meanings feeding local identities, national belonging and communal bodies. Cooking is also a practice associated with making families and home. In (im)migration especially, if we take into account people's experience of displacement and homelessness, cooking can be seen as a meaningful work of overcoming this feeling of uncertainty. Culturally defined food is promoting traditions in immigrant communities and families; it is a way for mobilising group solidarities and supporting intimate relationships in families as well. However, the meaning of cooking food in immigration can be explored wider.

In this paper, I want to discuss one more function of cooking food that I observed among Russian women in (im)migration: a communicative one. It is not surprising in the case of women with a Russian cultural background. Firstly, kitchen is a female's place of domestic work and production; secondly, it is also a culturally marked space of informal communication. The women's food practices I would like to discuss not necessarily appeal to their ethnic or national cooking traditions. They cook various foods addressing their food ideology, cooking skills and migration experience. In this way, they also express and reconstruct their gender, class, religious belonging and social position in immigration. Exchanging home-cooked food with each other, they expand their kitchen production to the immediate community, consolidate it and at the same time outline diversities in it.