Sjellik and the 75 years of Jan van Eyck Academie

 

The Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills is a participatory, mobile museum where artists, citizens, and farmers share stories about their relationship to food and the landscape. Comprised of The Outsiders collective in collaboration with Casco Art Institute, they operate vehicles that physically and symbolically convey ideas about food sovereignty, ecology, and relationality to different local publics. By visiting farms and food producers and connecting heritage skills to present challenges, they create tools for listening and dialogue that connect environmental care with art and critical pedagogies.

Travelling Farm Museum’s latest iteration centers around the figure of the mooswief (Limburg dialect for “vegetable woman”), an expression used to describe rural women who in the past would come to Maastricht to sell their goods at the weekly market. Each year a larger-than-life marionette of the mooswief is hoisted up a pole in the city’s market square to inaugurate the Carnival festive season. Just as Carnival celebrates the return of light and a renewed spring, the mooswief has come to symbolize fertility and a deep connection to the land. Shepherding her spirit along this journey are memories and lore of sjellik, a once ubiquitous but now largely disappeared local cruciferous vegetable.

Formerly a wagon covered in mirrors to blend into the surrounding landscape, the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills now bears a kaleidoscopic image of the Maastricht city border and its neighboring farmlands. Accompanied by a soundscape of the countryside, The Outsiders move as mooswiefs through the public square, engaging those around them in a conversation about food, heritage, and the possibility for a common future.

For the 75th Jan van Eyck anniversary we cooked a communal meal together with the Food Lab and served to the guests. Here Sjellik was roasted on the bbq and served with asparagus and mushrooms. Further we took the Sjellik home and pickled the leaves. Here is the recipe: Take the sjellik leafs and wash them carefully. Remove the midribs by cutting them with a knife. Bring water to boil with a pinch of salt and add the leaves. Boil for 10 min. In the meantime prepare your pickling pots by sterilizing (also boiling in hot water) for 5 minutes. Include the tops of the pots. When ready reserve. When the leaves are boiled, zeef them and you can start to fill the pots by adding a spoon of sea salt, spoon of sugar, and herbs that you find interesting. Add vinagre. I added coriander seeds. You can also add garlic. When the pot is full add boiling water and close the pot with the tops. Be aware that all the superficies needs to be clean, otherwise microbes can enter and ruin the whole process. When the pot is full, turn it upside down and leave for a day. Conserve and cool places or refrigerate.