Food History

I promised recipes. The dateless missing-pieces sort that one only finds in handwritten cookbooks of unknown ancestry. That can wait. First I want to talk about the food history value of my new possession. Somehow I’m in historian mode today rather than cook mode. Everyone around me has been getting cute little historical lecturers on the strangest things.

So, what can I say about the book?

Firstly, that these recipes still have a lot of food history value, but they’re harder to interpret than – say- the equivalent from my grandmother’s handwritten cookbook. The difference is that the moment you know who the owner was (even the name and city of birth) you have a really good place to start researching. You can flesh out the recipes with dates of birth and death, details of family, and locate addresses where the person lived. Family history stuff.

Then you can take those details and flesh them out. If you have a street address you can find out local shops (from phone books and street directories and ads in local papers) for instance and you can check schools for enrolments. You can find reports of winning the scone category at a local fair, or a letter to the editor in the local rag. There are so many sources for modern history, once one has a name.

We don’t have a name, though. It’s from Melbourne and has two different writers, and that’s about all we know (unless there are notes inside – I’ll find out if there’s more data as I mine it for recipes – close work on a document can produce miracles sometimes).

At least I can date the handwriting well enough so that we know the rough age of the owners, and that they were taught quite differently. Also fortunately I know when those styles of teaching changed for Melbourne (to be honest, I’m not sure I know them for anywhere else in Australia, and I only know them approximately for Melbourne even). So we know that the two writers were probably a generation apart. Probably.

The big limitation is that my actual period of expertise is not twentieth century Melbourne. I know a bunch about it because that’s where I’m from. I don’t know it as a specialist, though (except on certain subjects, which gets complicated). This means that something that would be entirely obvious to, say John Lack, is not necessarily easy for me to see. It also means that I don’t know when I’m letting my biasses get the better of me.

On my home turf (the Middle Ages) I have spent so much time working out how who I am affects how I interpret things that I can see things in more complexity and write more dynamic history. Here, on my emotional home turf, I’m in danger of wanting to see things certain ways. It’s a constant learning curve and will always be. It’s something that’s basic to an historian’s job, too.

It’s all about learning, isn’t it? Tomorrow will be recipes. They’re lurking….