READING THE RECIPE: SUBSTANCE, STYLE, AND STORY WITH GENEVIEVE VILLAMORA

Join Genevieve Villamora and Bold Fork Books for a 6-Week Generative Workshop: READING THE RECIPE: SUBSTANCE, STYLE, AND STORY. READING THE RECIPE will meet on six consecutive Wednesday evenings from 6:30-8pm beginning March 5, 2025.

ABOUT THE CLASS

Before measuring the first ingredient, before picking up a whisk, the first step in cooking a recipe is to read it. In this workshop, we will dive deep into the fundamentals of this written form. This is a class for cooks of all levels who love words as much as they love to eat. Together we’ll aim to deepen and enhance our experience of cooking by cultivating a multifaceted understanding of the recipe - one of the most basic and accessible tools for learning about the culinary world.

The class will map out the building blocks of recipes with the goal of understanding what makes one flop and another succeed. Using this framework, we will practice analyzing and troubleshooting the text of recipes together.

We will read a range of writers - from Emily Meggett and Alice Waters to Andy Baraghani and Cynthia Shanmugalingam - to help us recognize the different ways they imbue their culinary philosophy and narrative voice into their writing style. By analyzing the form of the recipe, we will tease out the larger stories that writers are trying to tell about food.

With this fluency in the language of recipes, students will head to the kitchen. In the hands-on portion of the class, students will cook 2 different recipes (at home), and report back to the class with their assessments. The final weeks of the class will give students the opportunity to be on the other side of the recipe - as the writer! Each student will leave the class with their own original recipe.

One full scholarship slot will be made available to a student. Please email events@boldforkbooks for more information.

Course Schedule:

• WEEK 1: The Sum of Its Parts: The Building Blocks of the Recipe: We'll do introductions, set goals together, discuss the building blocks of a recipe, and practice “diagramming” recipes.
• WEEK 2: What makes a recipe go wrong…or right? We'll talk about the substance of recipes. Together we'll dig deep into what you can do to remedy a flawed recipe and discuss the hallmarks of recipes that deliver successful results. 
• WEEK 3: Reading Between the Lines: What else is in a recipe? What makes up a recipe’s style? What does the writer say, omit, or assume? How do the author’s style choices affect how you cook the recipe? 
• WEEK 4: Recipes as Storytelling: You cooked a recipe at home between weeks 3 and 4! How did it go? Was the result of the recipe what you expected? What feedback would you have given the author of the recipe? Was the author trying to tell a larger story through their recipe? If so, how did they do it?
• WEEK 5: Writing is Revising: This week we’ll share and discuss the first drafts of our original recipes. Why did you choose to write this particular recipe? What challenges did you encounter while writing it?
• WEEK 6: Recap and Review + Potluck!: We'll celebrate what we learned, share our recipes, and reflect on our 6 week journey together.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Genevieve Villamora has been obsessed with food since she plucked a serrano chile from a steaming hot bowl of sinigang when she was four years old. In 2015, she opened Bad Saint, a tiny Filipino restaurant in Columbia Heights, which she co-owned and operated for 7 years. At a time when Filipino food was surprisingly unknown in American food culture, Bad Saint garnered national and international attention for its celebration of Filipino cuisine’s brash, pungent, and complex flavors. In 2016, Bad Saint was named the #2 Best New Restaurant in the U.S. by Bon Appetit and received a 3-star review from Pete Wells in The New York Times. Both Food & Wine and Esquire name Bad Saint one of the Most Influential Restaurants of the Decade in 2019. Genevieve currently serves as Chair of the Book Committee of the James Beard Foundation’s Media Awards. She has appeared on Bon Appetit’s Food People Podcast and NPR’s Code Switch Podcast. She has adapted recipes for The New York Times and the Smithsonian’s Annual Food History Weekend. A Chicago native, she has made her home in Washington, DC for the last 30 years. She lives in Columbia Heights with her husband, son, and three cats.