Design Bites: A Taste of Culture (2025) is a publication design project that reimagines the contemporary South African cookbook through the lens of cultural heritage and decolonial storytelling. My contribution, A Cookbook Design that drew inspiration from my memories of traditional ancestral ceremonies within my family, where mothers and grandmothers prepared three-course meals for more than fifty people while dressed in imibhaco, the traditional attire of Xhosa women. In this work, I sought to highlight the often-unacknowledged role of Xhosa women as the backbone of our cultural practices, honouring their central role in sustaining both family and tradition through food. Using my mother’s recipe as an anchor, the design reinterprets the cookbook as a cultural artifact one that merges culinary memory with visual design to embody the lived experiences of women in Xhosa households. The patterns on each page and the colours that were chosen for this project speak on the predominant colours that the Xhosa culture. This project was a blast because I also got to see many other cultural recipes and read up on the stories that came with them.
The recipe that I had chosen for this project spoke a lot on the direction that I was going in for this publication, the recipe was chosen by my mother based on a meal she enjoyed to make and eat for the lunch of these ceremonies we would have ezilalini.