Pop Up #10: Planet Earth
A short story by Sophia J. Wang, with photos by Shruti Garg and Gloria Zhu
The Oulipo were a group of French writers and mathematicians who created work through a set of rigorous constraints. These constraints were most notably and most prolifically upheld by Georges Perec, who wrote novellas in lipogram form, using only words that do not contain the letter e, then the opposite, novellas where the letter e is the only vowel used. One of my favorite authors, Italo Calvino, is cited as a prominent member of this movement. The point being, besides revealing a mind-boggling challenge (see: palindromes, pilish – the matching of the length of words to the digits of pi), is that limitations have no constriction on creativity or performance. Mince is in luck because we’re, admittedly, often resource constrained.
Of course, it’s a fool’s errand to stand proudly by resource scarcity. When Mince began, we paid out of pocket for much of the equipment, the cooking utensils, and the groceries. So, wherever we could save money, we did. We contacted dining halls to borrow plates and utensils. We cut our own tablecloths with bed sheets from facilities. We mounted our own tables using scrap wood and a bandsaw in the basement makerspace. Through these constraints, we were insistent about quality. We treated our situation less as cutting corners but more as searching for a path forward. It was about inertia.
I’m proud to report that Mince now owns plates and cutlery! We’ve moved forward by leaps and bounds since our start in Fall of 2022. Yet, that attitude of effective resourcefulness remains.
I shaped Mince around this perspective, and in late November, I wanted the pop up to execute better on these foundational principles.
All our events so far in the Fall were sponsored by our amazing friends at MISTI. This unaffiliated pop up was our opportunity to entirely define and execute a vision of our own. The theme and title of the event was Planet Earth. The theme was an obvious choice. I grew up most of my life with food and nature as staples. Most of my time at home nowadays is spent cooking dinner with my family, then crowding onto the couch to watch a nature documentary. We call it a night when David Attenborough’s voice slips into lullaby.
Before our family meal and ideation session for the Planet Earth pop up, I presented the following Oulipian rules:
1. Make it in the green. We’ve been in the red for most, if not all pop-ups, subsisting on generous grants and donors.
2. Make it green. Planet Earth would be our only vegetarian menu this semester.
3. Use 15 ingredients total, not counting pantry staples like butter, flour, seasonings, etc.
4. Cover a different biome in each course, amounting to five courses total.
We spent a week developing our dishes. Our recipes, sketches, and R&D sessions are below.
Tropical citrus salad with fennel, shallots, and basil oil
Jonathan and Pau. The juice was a blend of citrus with grated ginger.
Desert corn panna cotta with coconut curry sauce, brown butter crumble, parmesan crisp, and scallion
April and Sebastian. They managed to get a clump-free panna cotta using corn starch instead of gelatin, a legendary feat thanks to the mixing powers of April.
Woodland butternut squash soup with chai glazed squash, roasted seeds, caramelized shallots, orange, and coconut cream
Harry and Sophia. We used all parts of the squash here. The bigger chunks were used for the soup, which was beaming with warmth thanks to the spices. Smaller cubes were infused with a chai syrup. The seeds were tossed with salt and olive oil, then roasted.
Ocean Glazed eggplant dressed in beurre blanc sauce with “dashi” pearls and nori
Kamau. He worked some magic with these pearls. By cooling down oil and patiently dropping a vegetarian dashi mixed with agar-agar, you can convincingly create “roe” sans fish.
Tundra Olive oil rosemary ice cream with a balsamic chocolate sauce, seated in a basil grapefruit granita and pavlova nest
[Emily, Joann, and Vivian] The balsamic chocolate sauce is sure to rock your world. There is a pleasant, unique tang at the end of the rich chocolate sauce. While making this sauce, its … otherworldly scents … caught in the New House air conditioning system.
If you’ve been keeping score, that brings us to 15 ingredients with some generous accounting. Note the borrowing between courses. The brown butter crumble features in the desert and the woodland courses. Basil is rendered into oil form, then into a granita. The protagonist in one course transforms into a supporting cast member in another. The goal of the rule of 15 is not only resourcefulness, but transformation. If you repeat the same bold flavors, they too will tire.
A grocery list like this is comparably easier to shop for than the spreadsheets, organized by section of the store, we’ve used in the past to streamline this process. Instead, the Friday before our event, I walked calmly through the aisles of Star Market.
masters of napkin folding
To honor our first Oulipian rule achieved, we decided to prop each of these ingredients throughout the dining room. Our room would be a revived architecture lecture hall, the Long Lounge, just above Lobby 7. Without windows and devoid of any posters, the Long Lounge has quickly risen as one of Mince’s favorite venues. We’re able to transform and project a vision onto this space. Our décor, courtesy of Tananya, Zitong, and Freddy, consisted of floral arrangements on each table of eight. Grey stands would display the fresh produce later used on our guests’ plates. My favorite series, Our Planet, would be projected onto the walls, the episode corresponding to each meals’ biome playing in the background. A thoughtful, simplistic, and elegant approach to the meal.
We seat guests based on their answers to our lottery form. This time, we asked for their favorite fact about animals. I’ll list a few of my favorite responses:
· Sea otters hold hands when they sleep so that they don't drift apart.
· Sea anemones are not an-enemy.
· Hippopotamus milk is pink.
· Some jellies are immortal.
· A flock of flamingoes is a flamboyance.*
*Fun fact: a team of Mince members is also flamboyant.
our beautiful guests dining <3
A quick look into our seating process. We’ve gone down from a maximum of 4 guests on our reservation form to a maximum of 2, even encouraging people to sign up as lone diners. The main reason, core to Mince, is that we want to create a space for people to connect with one another, to connect with people they otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet in the frenzy of campus life. There is something disarming, vulnerable, warm about the dining room table. We believe that if all the other details are sorted out, your dinner per se, more space can be given to your dining partner, your table of soon-to-be friends.
Moreover, the easiest way for us to express care to our guests is in the thoughtfulness of the food, the service, and the environment. There is a confluence of details, an emergence we hope is evident to our diner, in explicit or implicit ways, that at its best, nudge our guests closer to connection.
an open concept kitchen…
If the basic, “a room is four walls” description of the Long Lounge makes you wonder, “where’s the kitchen?”, well that’s an excellent question. The kitchen is the electrical strip. We set up shop in the hallway outside the Lounge. We hauled over sous vide machines and stock pots. Most of our sauces had been prepped the day before. Our only dish that relied heavily on active heat was our Ocean course, which Kamau finished in the New House dorm kitchen before marching the roasted eggplant across a chilly campus in early winter, our fingers crossed that the dish wouldn’t lose too much heat.
Our menu
Two friends of Mince graciously photographed our event. Gloria (@riazh__) shot in film, and Shruti (@shrutigarg81) shot digital.
There’s the pleasure of dining, and the pleasure of serving the diners. Both are satisfying but they exist in entirely distinct ecosystems
During service, your singular focus is getting to the finish line. A snapshot: Jonathan and Pau furiously plate on two buffet style tables, arranging citrus with tweezers and chop sticks. After the first course, a small dishwashing army is at work in the bathroom and in the nearby cafe. A few members monitor the dining room for water refills, guests that need attention. They importantly track the pace of dining. When should we release the next course? In the hallway, hands are overlapping, hot stuff is moving to your left and to your right. When you hear the firm shout “behind,” don’t move or someone’s glass of panna cotta might crash. In the few minutes of rest after a dish leaves the kitchen and when the next needs to fire, we stuff ourselves with leftovers. A bite of olive oil ice cream here. A scoop of butternut squash soup there. Our photographers document the organized chaos. The brilliance of any dining event is that a world of (semi-)ordered distress lies just beyond the guests’ periphery, separated by a thin wall. I find tremendous beauty in this type of contrast, and although we have improved immensely in our organization and execution, evident in our calm, assured kitchen, that contrast will never entirely disappear.
tropical
desert
woodland
ocean
tundra
At the end of service, our entire team came out to thank our guests. We asked them to flip the menu. Tananya told me about a visit to an aquarium a year ago in Japan. At the end of the exhibit, against an enormous tank of blue, was the saying you read above. Our menu had the same message printed on its back. Now you might be thinking, “that’s awfully heavy handed.” You’re probably correct, but I believe emphatically in that type of purpose and care explicated. Interconnectedness is something food and nature share. It’s also something we share with each other during this period of college, in spite or perhaps because of our newfound independence.
During clean up, we played music, wiped dishes, polished off scraps, and laughed together. I am so grateful for whatever fortunate series of events led me to this group of people. I stumbled through much of college, but I’m convinced that if I had walked straight, I couldn’t have made it to the happy place I am now. This alone makes me believe in the grace of the everyday, these small moments, accumulated, connecting us all.
All my love,
Sophia
