From pot to loom: shared skills in cooking and dyeing
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Sonya Santos observes that the processes of traditional Mexican cooking and natural dyeing share surprising similarities.
She notes that actions like soaking, grinding, boiling, and fermenting are common to both practices. The creation of añil, a historical blue dye from the Indigofera plant, involves fermenting leaves to release pigment, a process mirroring how cooks prepare ingredients.
Santos explains that both cooking and dyeing require understanding ingredients and materials, knowing how long to cook something or how a fiber will react to a dye. Traditional artisans and cooks learned through observation long before scientific explanations existed. Preparing fibers for dyeing involves washing and treating them, similar to how cooks soak beans or nixtamalize corn, treating it with an alkaline solution. Both crafts also rely on tools like the metate (a stone grinding tool) and careful temperature control.
Macerating fruits for flavor parallels macerating plants to extract color, and fermentation plays a vital role in both food and dye production. Santos emphasizes that these skills weren’t born in laboratories, but through accumulated sensory experience passed down through generations, representing a shared way of understanding and transforming natural resources.
