the toki pona cookbook manifesto

by lipamanka

First we must ask ourselves: what does it mean to cook in a language? Often when I cook, I don’t even use language. I just add the ingredients in the right order and do the right things to them and make something delicious. Of course the part of our brain that evolved for language is still used for this - the way I categorize words in english and the way I categorize spices are the same. But is this cooking in English? Or is it just cooking?

When cooking from a cookbook, it’s useful to have visuals. Cookbooks without words and only pictures have been made, so language isn’t needed for teaching cooking. However, language is a very valuable supplement to facilitate pedagogy in cooking (it helps teach cooking). So instead of thinking of a toki pona cookbook as a proof that you can cook using only written instructions, perhaps a toki pona needs pictures to be most effective, and that’s okay! So do cookbooks in other languages.

Second we must ask ourselves: what does it mean to cook at all? Does making toast count as cooking? Does making instant ramen count as cooking? Does opening up a yoghurt container count as cooking? What if you add a teaspoon of jam? What if you make your own jam and add it to store bought yoghurt? I’m sure everyone will draw the line differently, or not at all, but we need to remember this is all in the context of toki pona.

So what is cooking, in toki pona? Here’s my answer: cooking is something you do to make food. It’s a type of pali. Or perhaps a type of seli. Or some other toki pona word. But broadly, if you’re doing something that will lead to you eating, it doesn’t matter if it counts as cooking or not for a toki pona cookbook. For this reason, cookbooks don’t have to follow any anglophone concept of what “cooking” is. One recipe could be how to make stir fry from scratch, and the next recipe could be suggestions for what toppings to put on instant oatmeal. And something in-between might be baking a pie with a store-bought crust, or pancakes from a store-bought mix.

toki pona values the day-to-day, so a toki pona cookbook would describe what cooking might look like day-to-day. It wouldn’t be a book you pull out once every few weeks when you need to impress guests—it would be a book you learn from until eventually you can cook on your own. Its goals would be to be useful to the person using it, offer recipes from a perspective of healthy variation, and incorperate elements of cooking from around the world. For example, instead of measurements, it would describe the function of each ingredient, and the cook can learn how much of each ingredient they like. Or for baking, it would use ratios by weight.

I am Jewish, and I’m a heritage Yiddish speaker. One Yiddish phrase that comes up a lot in my life is “shit arayn.” “shit” means “put” and “arayn” means “in,” so this phrase literally means “put in.” But, similar to most Yiddish phrases that survived in non-Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities, such as my family, shit arayn has another meaning. My grandmother’s grandmother would scold my grandmother with “shit arayn” whenever she pulled out the measuring cups. Just put it in, don’t use measurements. Shit arayn. This is because in order to make delicious food, you don’t need to measure. In Jewish cooking, unless you’ve cooked it a dozen times already, every time you cook a traditional dish, it’s an experiment. Your chopped liver might come out a bit eggy, and you might like that! Your matseballs might be too firm to your liking, and you’ll know what you need to do to change that next time.

I’ve talked to lots of people from around the world, and while not universal, this “shit arayn” method of cooking is very common. It fits my experiences of day-to-day cooking, and I think it’s a good basis for a toki pona cookbook. Here is a list of design goals.

No measurements. Instead of “one quarter of a teaspoon of salt,” add a chapter explaining what salt is and what it does and how to salt things properly. Instead of using measurments for baking recipies, choose recipies with simple ratios and demonstrait them visually (see point 2).
Take advantage of visuals. Instructions in any language are suplemented well with visuals. In a toki pona cookbook, we can use visuals for the things we don’t want to use toki pona for. three drawings of cups of flower, two drawings of cups of sugar, one drawing of a cup of butter. None of it is labeled. If that type of notation might be confusing, write a chapter about it. Asside from that, visuals are also incredibly helpful if they illustrate the actions being described by the toki pona.
Use sitelen pona. It just looks nicer. You could do it with Latin but like why? sitelen pona is just so much better. (It should be monospaced and either hand-drawn or using a font that follows the proportions in pu, for legibility sake. The typography of such a cookbook is incredibly important.
Include all sorts of difficulty levels. Something as easy as “cottage cheese bowl” makes the cookbook immediately accessible. Slowly the recipes can get more complex until we have something like homemade dumplings. Recipes ramp up, and each one teaches a new skill.
Incorporate elements of cooking from around the world with attribution. I find it very important for a toki pona cookbook to be globalist. toki pona is spoken around the world. Its speakers have a large variety of cultural practices.
Have variable recipies. Some ingredients might be hard to get ahold of, so the recipes chosen should be able to use substitutes. For example, sago pudding, while delicious and amazing, might not be practical because sago isn’t accessible all over the world. Bunny chow might be a better choice because it can be made with meat or lentils or any other filling.
Explain cooking concepts. Finally getting a grasp for cooking is an amazing feeling, but it doesn’t come from cooking directly from a strict recipe. toki pona encourages the day-to-day experience of humans, and by the end of the book a user should be able to take bits and pieces from different recipes and invent something new that tastes good.

Now how do we talk about food in toki pona?

I cook a lot, and I have a lot of thoughts about how we talk about food in general, and how we talk about food in toki pona as well. The first thing to mention here is that "kule" can be used for flavors. Now, let's explore a few very important aspects of cooking and how we can talk about them in toki pona.

Ingredients, heat, umami, and freshness. I think that mentioning ingredients and the process of cooking is generally useful. You can describe any fruit or vegetable using kili and kasi. You can describe their color. When food gets hot enough, it changes color. This is because of caramelization and the maillard reaction, which make food grow darker in color. Describing the color can help convey the concept of umami pretty well, because umami increases with those reactions. Most umami condiments are also dark in color, like soy sauce, but some ingredients aren't necesserily, like miso paste and msg. Fresh flavors, like tartar meat and raw or lightly cooked/blanched vegetables, can be described as "lete" or "sin," because "lete" can mean "unprocessed" and "sin" can mean "fresh."

Bitter flavors, spicy heat, and pungancy. jaki can mean bitter pretty easily if you don't like bitter food (which most people don't). Because of the reaction that capsaicin (the spicy pepper compound) has with your tongue, you could say that if feels like your mouth is seli even though it actually isn't. Likewise you can use lete for minty flavors that make your mouth feel cold. All types of pungancy come from compounds in plants that the plants produce to prevent animals from eating them. Humans have evolved tolerances to them so that they can eat more types of food. It's evolutionary advantagious to be able to eat onions, so the humans that were resistent to allicin survived where those who weren't didn't. Nowadays, this means that we enjoy the flavors and seek them out. With this knowledge, using "utala" and "pakala" to describe the flavors of things like ginger, hot peppers, and bitter plants can be really useful.

Salt. I have a bad habit of assuming that everyone automatically knows that all food needs to have some salt in it and I don't really bring it up in toki pona that much! In reality, not everyone knows that. In fact, a lot of people consider it a spice, on the same level as paprika, black pepper, and coriander! I can't relate to that, but if you want to describe it, you can use the word for "powder" if it's especially fine, and if you can see the individual crystals, you can even use kiwen. Salt is usually white, so walo can be useful too. As for the flavor of salt, salt is so delicious because it mutes the unplesant aspects of pungant flavors, like the ones discussed in the previous paragraph, while emphasizing and empowering the pleasent flavors. This is why ALL FOOD MUST HAVE SALT. Do not skip the salt. Please. I'm begging you.

Acidity and sourness. Yellow and red fruits tend to be sour, so you can use jelo and loje with kili and describe the telo that comes from them. I've noticed that a lot of english speakers say that acidic ingredients "cut through" the flavors, and I like this description, but to tokiponize that concept I would say that the acidic ingredient brings flavors together (ona li wan e kule ale). Most acidic ingredients are liquids, so that can help a lot. Acidity can also help balance salt, which is a relationship you can discuss by using "sama" for "balanced."

Oils and fats. Heh can you tell I really like Samin Nosrat? Her cookbook ("salt fat acid heat") changed my life. Anyway. Fats are particularly important because they hold flavor compounds in our tastebuds. If food is bland, it's often because there isn't enough fat in it! Most aromatic compounds are oil soluble, but a much smaller portion of them are water soluble. You can describe this relationship by calling the fat you add either a ko, kiwen, or telo, and use "awen e" to describe what it does to the flavor compounds, which you can use kule for.

Grains and bulk staples. pan! pan is great. You can talk about any grain with pan. For legumes on the other hand, there's some disagreement. I think if you pointed to chickpeas and called them "pan," people would probably understand, but it might be a little weird and not as understandable as using pan for rice. Staple grains are actually from all over the taxonomy of plants. quinoa and farroe and wheat are all very different taxonomically, but we treat them the same culinarily. Think about in what ways beans stand out from other edible seeds and see if they're different enough for you to not use the word "pan." If they are, the why will guide you on how to talk about them. For me, pan works pretty well!

Aroma profiles and region of origin. Different ingredients are used in different cullinary traditions. For example, sumac isn't used as frequently outside of the middle east, and complex layering of spices is often associated more with south asia and east africa than with Europe. Bok Choy and sesame oil are used far more in east asian cooking, and tamarind and lemongrass are pretty squarely south east asian. Ube screams "I'm Fillipino!" and cured fish reminds us of northern Europe. Sunflower oil is from eastern europe, olive oil is from southern europe, butter is from western Europe, ghee is from south asia, niter kibbeh is from Etheopia, and so on. Different dishes are composed of ingredients that when combined in specific ways remind us of places. There's nothing wrong with bringing up one of these places in toki pona! If I'm cooking misir wot, I can totally say "ni li moku pi ma Isijopija" (this is etheopian food). If I say that, either the person knows that "ko loje" is likely berbere (or some berbere-based sauce), or they wouldn't know what berbere was in the first place and I'd have to explain that anyway. If I say "ni li moku pi ma Kanse," when I mention a ko laso you'll probably imagine herb de provence, but if I say "ni li moku pi ma Lipen (Lebanon)," you'll probably think of za'atar instead. If I mention japan and mention wrapping pan in a black lipu, you'll think of sushi, but if I mention Greece you'll think of grape leave wraps. If I am talking about a food with a selo made of pan and an insa made of soweli and kili, depending on what country I bring up, you may think of pierogis, samosas, gyoza, enchaladas, raviolli, or momos.

Aromatics. The way foods smell is really important because of the way it interacts with the way humans enjoy food. Using "nena" and "kon" to mean "nose" and "scent" respectively is very useful for talking about the smells of food. Most aspects of the way food tastes that aren't one of the five flavors (salt, sour, bitter, umami, and sweet) are directly from our sense of smell.

Emulsion is the mixture of a fat based ingredient with a water based ingredient. Emulsions require emulsifiers, such as compounds found in milk, mustard, egg yolks, and garlic, that thicken and homogenize the sauce. Emulsions are usually closer to telo than ko, but not always! Mayo is much more of a ko than a telo and it is an emulsion of oil and the water in an egg yolk.

Texture. Here are some non-exhaustive examples of how to talk about textures in toki pona. "sijelo" is used to talk about the materials of various objects, so it works here very well to talk about texture. Crunchy foods are cruncy because of the sound they produce, so you can use "kalama" to describe crunch. If something is buttery and smooth like chocolate and melts in your mouth, you can use "kama telo." If something is fiberous like celery or the bottom of a stalk of broccoli, you can use linja to describe the fibers, and you can use awen to describe them getting stuck in your teeth if they do that. If something is sandy, grainy, mealy, or something similar, you can use kiwen and lili together to describe all the little particles and emphasize the texture. You can use suwi to describe a tender or fluffy texture, but that might get confusing because suwi can also describe a sweet flavor. To get around this, you could say that it's suwi tawa luka, or use "sijelo" to clarify you're talking about the texture and not the flavor. But often food is both fluffy and sweet, so think about wether or not specifying these things is necessary, useful, or fun. "Chewy" describes a gentle resistance that food gives when you bite into it, and "tough" describes a strong resistance. so "utala" for that resistance and "wawa pana" for the level of pressure might be useful to describe that in depth, but in a pinch "ko" could work just as well if it's soft enough. "Creamy" is so frequently used to talk about foods with dairy in them, so describing milk can be really useful, but even if something doesn't have milk in it, you can use "sama" to compare it to the texture of cream itself.

Meat, poultry, fish, and other types of "proteins" (including plant-based!). When cooking, we tend to split up the types of food we make into different categories. While rice vegetables have some protein in them, we only use the word "protien" as a noun to talk about things like animal flesh and plant based sources of protein such as tofu, legumes (beans), fungi (mushrooms), and tempeh, which is a combination of soybeans (beans) and mycelium (mushrooms). Most well rounded meals will have a protein aspect to them. So how do we communicate this? In my opinion, the best way to talk about proteins as a category is with examples. "sama" and "soweli" are useful together, because all animal-based foods are high in protein. When searing meat, poultry, or fish, it may also be useful to know how to tell someone to turn off the smoke alarm. "pini" is a fantastic word for "disable".