ABSTRACT
Diasporic populations arriving in the United States often find that their cooking traditions and cultural sensibilities do not align with the built environment of the American kitchen. By studying three working-class multi-generational Hmong-American households in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this chapter illustrates how the Hmong-American families readapt their kitchen spaces to conduct traditional cooking, bringing a unique sensorial experience and an informal materiality to the domestic space. The families utilize new cooking ingredients and techniques to re-create traditional Hmong foods and invent new ones. This research introduces readers to an unexplored yet vibrant spatial aspect of Hmong-American culinary experience.
