Food History

Being an Aussie, I don’t have Thanksgiving. I can give thanks for wonderful readers, though, and celebrate (a tad late) with a wonderful bit of foodie Americana.

Laura sent me a good book. It’s a regional semi-tourist guide, semi-cookbook. California’s Golden Harvest Travel and Cooking Guide has all sorts of importance to someone like me. Firstly, I tend to forget that California is regional, because internationally it gets presented as all a bit the same. This is true of many places – how often do you think of Australia or South Africa or Canada as being just a little bit uniform? No country is all the same in all areas, and though some regions have more distinctive differences than others because of specifics in their history.

The thing is, I’m an outsider to California. One day in the State cannot and does not equal specialist knowledge. Tourist books such as this are a godsend, therefore. They don’t go deeply into things, but they do show how a region sees itself and how important its foodways are. It may not be showing any old cuisines, but it shows that food is valued and what sort of food is valued. It’s like a snapshot of cultural consciousness.

I also love that this book has “The Gold Country” as a subtitle, since I will be visiting the Australian Gold Country in January. One day I need to look at the cooking in the goldfields (I know a little about the Victorian goldfields and none about the Californian, so it might have to wait a bit). The fact that the Gold Rush is so important to this region that it unites them is fascinating, especially given that there are other unifying forces in their history. This sort of book show the sort of cultural choices groups of people make about themselves and how others should see them at that moment. They often don’t reflect the views of everyone, nor the complexity of culture in a region. They sometimes reflect the history (depending on how important the sense of past is) and sometimes not. Despite this, they’re a wonderful way to start exploring the food history of a region you’re not familiar with, because they do that snap-shotty thing.

Tomorrow I might just do a second post on this book, giving you a sense of how the subregions are presented in it, and maybe a sampling of the cuisine.

Thank you Laura!

PS Laura, I wanted to thank you the moment it arrived, but I was true to my promise of deleting addresses once I had sent the fridge magnets out and alas, I deleted all your contact details. So your private details are entirely safe from misuse, but I have to thank you publicly for the book and especially for the annotations. Thank you!