Cooking Up a Color Story

With color on my mind, this past weekend I cooked up a dinner party and menu with a color theme – the red, white and green of the Mexican flag. Inspired by the cookbook, Frida’s Fiesta’s – Recipes and Reminiscences of Life with Frida Kahlo by Marie-Pierre Colle and Guadalupe Rivera, I’ve been experimenting with the recipes and themes in the book. A very beautiful cookbook, the photos and stories are inspiring. The recipes. . . well, they remind me of my abuelita’s (grandmother’s) recipes, something very important is missing from most of them. The missing item is usually an ingredient, amount or technique that ranges between crucial to the success of the recipe to a minor taste problem. Maybe the recipe editor had more to do with this than Frida did, but nonetheless, reading her cookbook reminds me of my abuelita’s passionate artistic temperament (she was a concert pianist and gifted chef). The recipes that my abuelita gave me were always more of a suggestion than a solution.

Hispanic Heritage Month Sept. 15th thru Oct 15th – The Colors of Culture

Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month is an opportunity to celebrate the beauties and gifts the heritage of Hispanic culture as well as to acknowledge the mosaic of cultures that make up all of the U.S. The irony for me being an acculturated Latina born in Los Angeles is that I know that though Anglos from many cultures have representative crafts saturated with color, like Polish paper-cuts or Scandinavian tole painting, American Anglos will often focus on the colorful aspects of Mexican American visual culture while ignoring most of the subtle colors that are part of the same mix. To this day, there are no Latina visual artists licensing their decor lines at the supported level of acceptance any of the above Anglo artists have achieved.

Positioning Makes Perfect

Color use is not a slam dunk. I see this with manufacturers who put a “Latin Color Palette” on a set of sheets or towels, slap a Spanish name on it and expect that they’ve done their part reaching the Latino market. This is especially annoying when the front person isn’t obviously Latino. A few years ago Sears and Ty Pennington did this with a design in his licensed signature line of bedding.