Food History

It’s Saturday here, and I feel the need to share with you another of my grandmother’s fifties’ recipes. Since it’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere (and freezing cold in Canberra, just in case you were wondering) I thought you might like a cake recipe so you can feed the hordes of friends who are sure to drop in during the lazier summer days.

Nut Cake

1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon cocoa
1 teacup chopped nuts
2 tablespoon butter
½ cup sugar
2 eggs
½ cup milk
vanilla

Cream butter & sugar, add eggs, then milk & vanilla. Mix together flour, baking powder, cocoa & chopped nuts & add to mixture. Bake in a slow oven for ½ to ¾ hour. Ice with chocolate & sprinkle with nuts.

food history, recipe, nut cake

You can’t cook without shopping. Here’s a French market stall to show my personal favourite way of shopping. When I lived in France (not for very long, alas) I used to haunt the street markets. Markets are an important part of foodways!

Janet is The Old Foodie and has one of my favourite blogs. Every day something different, something historic and a recipe or two. By day she is a GP, but by night she follows her food history obsession. When her books appear (one on the history of the pie and the other on historical menus) I will let you know, I promise. In the meantime, she is my very first ever interviewee on this blog.

1. If you had to describe your blog and project in just a few sentences, what would these sentences say?

I write a short food history story every weekday; it always relates to an actual event of the day, and it always includes a historic recipe. It is always fun to write, and I hope it is always fun to read. I think of it as a hobby, rather than a project - which sounds altogether too weighty and important.

2. What inspired you to explore and explain food history via a weblog?

My son nagged me to do it, that’s the short answer! I started writing little food history stories as a writing discipline. I wanted to improve my writing, and to get more efficient at it, with a long-term goal of it playing a bigger part in my retirement (whenever that happens!). I decided to commit to sending little stories out every weekday to friends and family, to see if they appealed, and to get feedback. Pretty soon I found that my emails were being forwarded on to others who I didn’t know. From the beginning my son nagged me to ‘blog’ them. At that time I don’t think I even knew what a blog was. Eventually, to get him off my back by proving it was technically beyond me, I logged onto Blogger.com as per his instructions – and within a few minutes had a blog! I was so amazed I decided instantly to take the risk and go public. It has been – and still is – enormous fun. Naturally my son gives himself all the credit for my progress!

3. Can you tell us a bit about the history of your interest in food history?

I hated history at school, so I am constantly fascinated and delighted at my own interest in it now. I think I hated it because I was never interested in the sort of history that was taught in schools in the 1950’s and 60’s (certainly in England where I lived until I was 15) – I never cared about who won what battle or crown or whatever. And it seemed like so much rote learning of dates etc. That’s what I thought the study of history was. Criminal really, when you think about it – what a way to put students off history. Naturally though, I am interested in how real people lived, worked, ate, lived their daily lives – but they didn’t teach ‘social’ history when I went to school.

My interest in food history came about from my interest in food – which is also surprising too, as my mother never liked cooking (probably because my father was not remotely interested in what was on his plate), and was not a good cook (although a dab hand with pastry). Perhaps I became interested in food precisely because they were not! Luckily I then married a man who loves food, so the interest was encouraged. I really only started ‘studying’ food history about 10 years ago – not formally, but by reading a lot. I don’t have any academic qualifications in history at all. One thing I started doing – I have no idea why, now, as I am not a collector by nature – was to collect food history dates. I now have a monster I call my Food History Almanac (a grand title for a huge number of computer and paper files) and this is what I mine for my daily post ideas. An offshoot of this that now has a life of its own is a menu collection – I don’t own the actual menus, I have images, transcripts etc as it is the content I am interested in. I have about 6000 historic menus now, and every day in the year is covered multiple times.

4. What are your favourite entries (links and explanations of why they’re favourites would be good)?

I guess I like the ones that attempt to clarify or bust myths – like the origin of Chicken Marengo, or why Welsh Rarebit is really Welsh Rabbit. I love words, and like writing about how they help explain the history of a dish. I also like looking at the progress and development of a dish over time, such as in . If I can write a post that people find amusing, I like that too, and the recent Heavenly Beer story was popular – but what was particularly great about that one for me was that it inspired the mysterious (G)Astronomer to write .

The enthusiastic co-operative nature of blogging has been a surprise and delight to me.

5. What online sources do you like to send people to?

There are a few really great online resources:

Thomas Gloning’s Culinary and Dietetic texts is amazing.
Ivan Day’s site is also a terrific resource for English food.
The Food History Timeline is very useful.
Gode Cookery is very comprehensive.
Feeding America: the historic cookbook project is great for American food.

A lot of great resources are scattered, and take some finding. I have made up a list of the online cookbooks (over 500 so far) I have found over the years and posted it at
http://www.mydatabus.com/public/TheOldFoodie/z/Online_Historic_Cookbooks3.pdf
It is freely available for anyone to download - it is silly for us all to be independently inventing the wheel, isn’t it?. I have a few more to add to it when I get time, and can work out how to do it and keep the url the same (I did tell you I was a technical idiot, didn’t I?)

6. Tell us about your favourite recipes (historical and other).

At home, I cook a bit of everything. We have eclectic tastes. Over the course of a week we might eat Thai, Indian, British, or French or anything else. I like variety. I like trying new recipes. I don’t bake as much as I did when my two children were growing up and we always had a houseful of their friends – but I do like baking. I love making pastry, and my friends and family would probably say, if they had to choose, that my ‘signature dish’ is a meat pie! I also love making soup of any variety.

My favourite historic recipes are hard to choose. My brain jumps around eras and ingredients all the time. I love the recipes that would now seem new and ‘innovative’ on a modern dinner table, because I love the theme that there is nothing new under the sun, and everything old is new again. Something like ‘Fenkel in Soppes’ (fennel with saffron and sweet spices) from the Forme of Cury, for example.

Naturally I like things like gingerbread, hence the archive, and the very English idea of a savoury final course to a meal. Recently I’ve become interested in the development of Anglo-Indian food during the British Empire era. I think Anglo-Indian food is sufficiently different from both its roots to be a cuisine in its own right, not simply a bastardised version of either.

7. Can you tell us about your favourite food, historically? What draws you to it?

Pies, undoubtedly, are my favourite. Perhaps that partly reflects my Yorkshire heritage, perhaps because as I have said I like making pastry – and I fear it is a dying art. Also because the history of the pie is in many ways the history of grain-based cuisine. And I like eating them – good pies that is, not the commercial version.

food history, The Old Foodie, interview, foodways, cookbooks, food blogging

I gave my presentation at Convergence (the National SF Convention for Oz) on Saturday, but have only just woken up enough to report on it now. It was a wonderful, wonderful SF convention. It was, however, peculiarly Australian. There were two craft circles, for example. One was led by a knitting reviewer (a reviewer who knits?) and the other by a knitting and origami-ing writer. I found it curious that there were more knitters than folks in costume.

My talk went well. Conference room 2 started off half full and ended with people standing up the back. About a dozen people tried grains of paradise (which I touted as ‘Medieval viagra’) and about the same number stopped me in the corridor later to aks more questions.

The biggest issue was convincing people that food isn’t one-size-fits-all. Many people have preconceptions of what Medieval food is like and it takes me answering the same question from four different angles to convince people that maybe some of those preconceptions might possibly not quite reflect the reality.

What did I talk about? Basically, I took the description of the presentation that I’d given to the programmers and I riffed. I talked about how food bonds people and holds societies together, and how it can tear society apart. I discussed how historical cuisines can be used by writers to show vast amounts about the underlying society without the need to infodump and I gave examples. I talked about Apicius and the Middle Ages and I told my kosher butcher story. Everyone dutifully laughed in all the right places. I even heard someone describing my talk as ‘fun’ to someone else. It’s good when the scholarly can be fun - it’s even better when it can help fiction entertain: if someone asked me to do another talk of the same kind, I would be very happy :). In fact, I am very happy now.

food history, Convergence, SF convention

Not something likely to show in Australia anytime soon. I love this because it shows just how local some ads are and even some foodways, even when they look as if they might be a bit more universal. One day I should blog on some of the differences between US kosher food and Australian kosher.

Since I’ve started giving you food ads, it might be handy to check out this site. It’s a handy reminder not to take people’s claims without questioning. I know that it is meant to apply to analysing the claims of fast food places, but it applies to any food history: people present arguments and recipes and all sorts of things in a way that makes them feel good or look good or feel comfortable with what they’re doing. Food history is about getting behind this, to a certain extent, and understanding the cultural and historical reasons for things looking and tasting the way they look and taste.

Update: If you’re really unlucky I might blog about my presentation on Ancient Food at the Australian National SF Convention this weekend since it’s the reason why my posts have been so unwontedly short.

Today I feel you need to meet one of my favourite spices for cooking with game and other strongly flavoured meat. Juniper (juniperus communis) - German wacholder, French ginèvre, Italian ginepro - the spice used in gin.

Gin and tonic may be a fashionable cocktail today, but gin was the despair of the alcoholic classes in England (cheap, strong and readily available) during the industrial revolution. This notwithstanding, gin makes a good base for liqueured fruit.

It’s also got a far longer history than gin and tonic suggests. The plant is native to Europe and Asia and is still wild-harvested in some countries, mostly Nordic.

You can find some rather nice pictures and more information here.

food history, ingredients, juniper

I keep thinking that banana souffle is a seventies dish, but I found a recipe for it in my grandmother’s 1950s handwritten book:

Banana Souffle

Peel and slice 4 bananas & rub through sieve: melt 1 oz of butter & stir in 1 oz of flour & add 1 gill of milk, stir over fire till none of the mixture is on the sides of the pot. Take pot off fire and add the yolks of 3 eggs one at a time, stir in the banana pulp & ½ teaspoon of vanilla & 1 oz of caster sugar, stir well and add the stiffly beaten whites of eggs.
Turn into a well greased souffle dish. Bake for 20 mts.

PS The picture has nothing to do with the recipe. I looked at my shopping list and found a picture to reflect what I ought to be buying. It’s fun, so expect really inappropriate pictures from time to time.

food history, recipes, 1950s, souffle, banana

Your video for this week. I adore the soundtrack of this one.

My first podcast interview ever! If you wish to discover my dulcet tones talking about food history, check out the Baltimore Sun site. John Lindner rang me up last week and interviewed me: we had a whale of a time.

The blogchain is upon me. Niteowl foolishly wished that I would post about macaroni cheese, it being a comfort food and comfort being the current theme of the blogchain. Alas, my inner researcher surfaced, and I developed an unholy curiosity in what search terms have been used to find my blog in the last week and if any of them have an element of comfort food. Niteowl is entirely out of luck.

Firstly, no macaroni cheese. Not a scrap. Not even a hint of the fact that I’ve blogged on it already. It just does not appear in my search terms. If no-one’s looking for it, I don’t need to blog it. Niteowl is bereft of comfort, entirely.

He’s about to get more uncomfortable still, since using my search term list to look at comfort food breeds strange results. Also, as you might have guessed, he had the bad luck to run into Gillian in a very peculiar mood - I’m preparing my talk on Ancient Food for Melbourne tonight and seriousness is beyond me.

Back to that list of search terms from the last seven days.

Are bogong moths comfort food? Or are what they eat comfort foods? Certainly bogong moths appear a lot in my queries. I believe they’re good toasted, but I’ve never tried cooking them, despite the swarms that appear here very summer. I’ve blogged on them, too, and here’s the proof. Blogging and search terms alone don’t prove something is a comfort food, otherwise witchetty grubs would be way up there in terms of Australian bushfoods. I’ve not blogged about witchetty grubs yet - aren’t you relieved to hear this?

Maybe there’s a comfort period for foodies?

That might explain why I have so many queries about the Middle Ages (the other explanation is that I’m a Medievalist, which, while true, is way less interesting). The second most popular search term was “Medieval recipes” and the third was “Gothic tests” online. “Medieval feast” was unsurprisingly popular, given I’ve blogged a menu and recipes. Nothing to do with comfort food and everything to do with easy cooking. “Spices mixed with food in the Middle Ages” can only refer to that old furphy, that spicing hid spoiled meat in the Middle Ages. I ranted a bit about this a few months ago, intimating that some people might possibly have zombie ancestors, and it’s been a consistently popular search term since then. Why doesn’t “zombie ancestors” appear as a search term. Think of how many people would find my blog if they were hunting under “zombie ancestors.”

Sorry about the zombie detour. Back to normal blogging. Well, what passes for normal on a night when I’m preparing a talk that includes suicidal Roman gourmands and Medieval viagra. There are two more Medieval queries, though, which makes me think that the Middle Ages is our place of emotional safety, where we go to dream.

Another place of food safety is biscuits. Cookies to you lot on the other side of the Puddle (if the Atlantic is the Pond, then the Pacific must be the Puddle - perfect logic).

I get so many queries about biscuits and their history, on gem scone pans, on scones, on 1950s food. Mmm. I’m falling into nostalgia myself, just at the thought. This is where comfort food is. The 1950s. A Devonshire tea or even a high tea. A fresh baked batch of scones or a tray of biscuits. The scent of baking and a big brown ceramic pot of tea on the table, brewing.

While I dream of big pots of tea and fresh-baked scones, you get to think about Alaska. Not just across the Puddle, but further north than I am south. What’s really scary is that A View From the Waterfront’s weather may well be warmer than mine, today.

AW blogchain, comfort food, bogong moths, macaroni and cheese, zombie ancestors

Mrs Beeton was supposed to be a minor part of yesterday’s class. I wanted to spend more time on exploring why some cultures managed to retain foodways despite colonisation etc and others didn’t. All we got of that was about 20 minutes with a few interesting books. And it was all Mrs Beeton’s fault. My students kept opening various editions of her book and reading bits aloud or noticing interesting snippets. And then there was the scrapbook.

The scrapbook was from a high school version of Mrs Beeton the musical (which isn’t the correct name for it - it’s Mrs Beeton’s Book: a Music-Hall Guide to Victorian Living and was published by Novello in 1983) and we were sung small sections. Between that and the wonderful food, my lesson plan was entirely thrown upside down. And next week is the last week, so there’s a bunch of mopping up to do. Also a chocolate tasting.

I shouldn’t complain. There wasn’t so much historical theory in last night’s class, but we met a wonderful bunch of recipes and some amazing household tips. And I taught the big bit of theory - the huge change in cookbooks from the nineteenth century and their social impact. We also talked about the effects of industrialistion on the foodways of the poorer parts of populations.

Mostly, though, we had great fun. We worked out what sort of cake packed best in from-home packages sent to kids at boarding school in the nineteenth century and why a cookbook for the poor would recommend two stoves. And we talked about Mrs Beeton. A lot. I rather suspect most of the class sought bookshops and libraries today, to check out this.

food history, teaching food history, Mrs Beeton, foodways

Every now and again I participate in an Absolute Writers Blogchain because they’re tremendous fun. I get to meet new writers and their blogs and to travel the world without leaving my desk. For the first time, I’m participating using this blog (in the past I’ve used my other blog, because it includes my thoughts on fiction and writing it).

How does it affect you, as readers? Firstly, you get a nice list of blogs you can visit. From here until the chain is finished, every blogger will be doing special posts when their turn comes, one after the other after the other. When it’s my turn, I’ll link to the previous post and everyone else involved will visist here. Please make them welcome :).

This is who they are:

Virginia Lee: I Ain’t Dead Yet!
writing@cathsmith.com
hunt & peck
Life, Writing, and Other Things
periodically.org
Food History
A View From the Waterfront
Organized Chaos
Willibee
The Road Less Traveled
awchain

Over the last little while, various kind souls have sent me to various fascinating websites. Right now I’m doing a bit of a cleanup, which gives me an excuse to read the sites again and to share them with you. Every Monday in June and July I will sort a bit more of my ‘Favourites’ collection. If you don’t like what I’ve been holding onto, then send me sites you adore, and share them with everyone else.

Today’s site is related to literature, as so many good things are. It’s the recipes from the Aunt Dimity books. You can never have too many good recipes or too many good books.

Farley, who blogs at Wine Outlook, was discussing a waiter consulting her non-wine expert boyfriend on dinner drinks rather than herself, when she was obviously doing the actual deciding and was (less obviously, perhaps) a wine expert. On the same day on the other side of the world a friend of mine blogged that women had all the nice stereotypes and that feminism basically sucks. I’ll argue the stereotype thing with him offline, but the two are really handy in terms of pointing towards assumptions with strong historical foundations, assumptions that inform our everyday lives so profoundly that we often don’t even know they’re happening. Things like who cooks in a family, who keeps track of what groceries need buying, who serves at dinner when there are guests and who stays put and keeps the guests amused.

There’s also who gets remembered for what.

There are two common English surnames that reflect female food industry professionals: Baxter (a woman baker) and Brewster (a woman brewer). In historical novels bakers are usually male and brewsters are usually referred to with the less flattering designation of ‘alewife.’ Alewife is less flattering because in a bunch of literature alewives are described as argumentative louts. It’s also a kind of fish, which is not really relevant (unless an alewife cooks an alewife for dinner)? Two important surnames and we relegate them to the sidelines.

If that doesn’t intrigue you, try putting ‘wine’ and ‘women’ and ‘Medieval’ as search terms in Google. The major work that hits the top ten is actually about poetry from a male point of view (and I have that book and must blog it some day): studies on women and wine do not rank.

Google and surnames are historical sources. How we read the information and interpret it shows some very important stuff about how we bring the past into our own lives.

It’s all a matter of how we classify the past and the present. When we organise our memories and our group memories, what do we give priority to? Do we remember chefs (Escoffier, Taillevant) or Baxters? Do we treat men and women equally in our historical memory, or do we do what the wine waiter did in that restaurant, and assume that the male of the species will be our holder-of-key-knowledge.

The way we shape our remembrance of the past is the way we shape our present. Feminists and historians of particular groups aren’t saying “we want in” because of a case of benign neglect. They’re saying that it’s important that we reshape history because without this we’re stuck with injustices in the present: the body of material we use to base our judgements upon favours private householding for women and public approval for men. This doesn’t reflect human past so much as our way of looking at it.

Until we can get past the assumptions about women’s roles and men’s roles we can’t even begin to know a whole bunch of important historical issues, like the number of women soldiers in a given war, or the number of men who cooked for private joy.

If you can hang on til next March (Women’s History Month in Australia) I’ll do a series of posts on women in food history. If you want something before then (since it’s a long way away), just say and I’ll start talking about historiography and how we interpret our past. I was an historiographer before I turned to food history, and the biasses and underlying assumptions in everything from recipe books to service at a dining table are things I love to explore.

women, wine, food history, women’s history, remembering women, historical sources