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Rochdale Arts & Heritage Centre holds a richly varied collection of around 1,500 works of art of regional and national significance. The Arts and Heritage Resource Centre houses the collection of museum objects and art gallery collection which is entrusted to Touchstones. A vast selection of social history, international artefacts, paintings, sculptures and much more make up this collection spanning millions of years, from fossils to modern art works.
The museum collection has a focus on collecting from the local borough to ensure the history and representation of life and local people are preserved, as well as an international collection donated to the museum from various private collectors. The art gallery collection has works dating back to the 1400s, from Italian masters to modern artists who enrich our collection and shine a light on the artists who have exhibited in Rochdale over the years.
The community curators went on a tour of the museum store, meeting collections staff and viewing items that relate to cooking, from Egyptian ceramic jars for storing flour and grain, to Victorian pastry cutters and industrial sweet moulds. As rich and varied as they are, the collection objects present a particular culture and a limited view of heritage, so The Dining Room Project is about looking at what is absent in the collection, whose voices aren’t represented in the items that are in the store and how we, as an organisation, can bring in new voices.
After looking round the store, Tilly, a member of the collections team showed the group items from the Herbarium Collection, a collection of plant material that includes rice samples and seaweed. The group moved through the collections from the tools used to cook food and the objects used to store it, to the question of what we eat. Alongside the rice and seaweed, Tilly also showed the group items of food packaging and tinned goods including dried milk, custard powder, pea packets, root ginger and caraway seeds. Conversations flowed around what to make with the ingredients, different approaches to making rice pudding from Pakistani to Bangladeshi recipes, to food pantries in Rochdale recommending people use pudding rice to make a cheaper risotto.
We touched on possibilities of pickling. Caraway seeds are a pickling spice, individuals in the group or their relatives and friends, grew white radish, as well as cabbage and memories of their fathers making sauerkraut en masse, using mangles to press out the liquid from the leaves.
We thought about growing something together and plan to return to pickles and collective growing further along in the project.
Going shopping
We took a look at what we can buy in Rochdale, visiting Polish and Pakistani supermarkets, thinking about the differences of foods on offer, the similarities of products marketed to different customers and global food pathways. We started to unravel where our food comes from and the journey it takes to get to the UK, questioning where the local alternatives are.
Shopping habits and cultural etiquettes were discussed, remembering how it was to visit the Asian supermarket as a child and the expectation that you had to behave. The group shared who in their household does the shopping now, and if that has changed from their parents. We thought about what we ask people to bring back for us when they have been somewhere else; apple tea and vanilla from Morocco, sweets from Pakistan, tinned fish from Lisbon. We find things to fit in our suitcases.
We thought about local producers and small scale businesses that don’t seem to be in Rochdale anymore – milk men, egg men and the black pea man on his bike – as well as what is still here: bakers and halal butchers. We realised we eat according to different seasons; UK strawberries and Pakistani yellow mangos and saag leaves, celebrating change in growing seasons from a distance.
The group shared recipes they knew by heart, talking about the ingredients, how to know when it’s best to buy any particular vegetable, or where to get halal or other meat and why they chose this recipe in particular.
“Does anyone ever measure anything?”
“No!”