On Tuesday, November 5, 2019, over 50 guests from the Ohio State community participated in an event called “KACHKA: An Immigrant Food Experience.”

Award-winning chef Bonnie Frumkin Morales of Kachka Restaurant in Portland, Oregon, led students, faculty and guests through a cooking demonstration of two of her famous dishes: Salad Olivier and Sprat Butterbrodi (small toasts with homemade parsley mayo, sprat fish, boiled egg, pickled onions and an herb garnish). While everyone quickly realized making mayonnaise from scratch is harder than it sounds, Chef Morales gently guided the audience on how to recreate these two dishes with historic roots in her own family’s background.

Chef Morales’ family immigrated to the U.S. in the 70’s from the Soviet Union, and her cooking incorporates tastes and traditions inspired by the cross-pollination in that region — including influences from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Uzbekistan. Throughout the event, Chef Morales told stories of her father’s delicate and precise dicing of vegetables for the sumptuous, celebratory Salad Olivier and her youthful embarrassment at her immigrant family’s dinners of boiled beef tongue and potatoes.

The event was born from a long-term, collaborative teaching plan between Professors Philip Gleissner and Joan Flores-Villalobos. Despite their diverse academic trainings, both professors are immigrants and both work on histories of immigration. Most importantly, they both love food. They sought to create an event that would attract students from across their classes in immigration history, Latino history, the Eastern European immigrant experience, and U.S. women’s history, and make them think about the everyday sensory experience of migration. The goal was to have students and guests leave with a more concrete understanding of the role of culinary traditions in the life of an immigrant group in America and the skill to interpret seemingly quotidian practices as expressions of complex matters of creativity, history and identity. The cherry on top was that they’d also learn to cook.