Every now and again on my other blog I open the floor to questions. I’ve just done that today and it suddenly struck me that maybe readers here had their own questions about food and food history.
Food history is long and complex, and there’s a fair chance that some questions will be beyond me. There’s also a fair chance that I can answer others, or at least report back later with an answer. We won’t know which is true about any given question until that question is asked.
From now, then, until Friday morning in anyone’s time zone (your time zone, my time zone, Antarctica Common Time Zone) you can ask any questions you want about food history. You can ask them as comments or you can use the email contact button near my bio. If I can answer them easily I shall and if I can’t, I’ll do my best to explain why an answer is difficult or impossible. This may be when we discover just how ignorant I really am!!
If this works, I’ll do it again. If it ends up with me in a puddle of hopeless humiliation, then I suspect I shan’t.
The thing is, that historians train using very narrow fields. It’s always a challenge translating what I know as an historian into approaches to history and to food that will be of interest to a wider public. The nuances of meaning of a particular word (one of my actual research areas) is really not frightfully interesting to most people. Cultural history does translate, as this blog shows, but there’s a difference between translating things I know and answering questions about what other people want to know.
This could be fun. Maybe. When I come out from my secret hiding place, I’ll let you know if it was fun.
March 25th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Ooo, I actually do have a question…or maybe not a question as much as I want to know more. My boyfriend’s mother, who is very Italian, makes this dish called Easter Pizza every Easter morning. I’m very *not* Italian and had never heard of it before. It’s yummy though - ricotta, sausage, egg, ham, and I’m not sure what else, all in a crust (more like lasagna than pizza!). I’d love to know more about it - where it came from, why people make it just for Easter, etc.
I suspect that you don’t make Easter Pizza, since it is a very Catholic thing to do, I’m told, but maybe you know something about it! I’ve been meaning to ask.