Food History

One of the reasons I like the Absolute Write Blogchain is because you never know what the person before you is going to talk about. This means that every single time I participate, it give some new insights for my own life. Today, the insights may very well be for my own research and teaching as well. (more…)

I need to do you an index to take you through the Regency year. I keep meaning to do it and life keeps catching up. I rather suspect I ought to do you that index in the next few days. I now have a pressing reason.

What’s my pressing reason? And why do I suddenly sound like a character from Cold Comfort Farm? (more…)

I’m in the middle of all sorts of serious stuff for my other selves. The historian is editing a significant Medievalish article, for instance, and the science fiction/fantasy writer is judging an award thingummy along with a zillion other judges all of whom are wiser and read faster and think more deeply than I do (at least at this moment – tomorrow I hope to be more on top of things and then I’ll feel less overawed). What this means is that my day has run out of time. I can hardly fit cooking dinner into it, much less contemplating how sour cherries can be put alongside scotch steak in an historically correct and palate-tempting fashion.

I’ll be back in the food history zone soon, I promise. I have a paper to write in the next few weeks, after all, and one that has already made some people in my vicinity jumpy. It will be presented on my behalf in Sydney in November, the day after Australia’s Federal elections. At that moment I will find out that nothing I do is ever quite as controversial as I think it might be and that my life is uncomplicated and simple and really very straightforward. Then I’ll sit down and write a fairy tale about castles in Spain, to reflect the depths of my delusions.

This is a very long way of saying that you need something charming and entertaining to make up for my strange state of mind. And it’s no use telling me I’m always in a strange state of mind, because people tell me that about twice a week and it makes no difference.

I have rice paddies for you, as you’ve never seen them before. Food can be art, you see. And it can be pretty ordinary to look at, as well. Click on the link for the amazing and wondrous and look at the picture for the more mundane. And if you need more food in your day, it’s about time I introduced you to another food blog (I might start doing more of this – one can never have too much food or food history in one’s life). What’s cool about this blog is that it shows you the sort of food that leaves cool wrappers and strange mementos to tantalise the food historians of the future. I can’t get more theoretical than that today, I’m afraid. Editing beckons.

Ingredients as art.

Today is the calm before the storm. You know, one of those days when you have things to do and enough of them so you ought to be quietly rather busy for about ten hours, but you know that tomorrow is going to be positively frantic and the day after that improbably long and busy and you just don’t want to push things? Well, today is that day.

What do I do on days like this? I invent recipes, of course, using sound historical principles. I could argue (to make everything look relevant to food history) that this is another example of how recipes change over time and new classics become established, but me being lazy doesn’t create classic recipes.

The other thing I could do is give you an entirely irrelevant foodie link to someone else’s blog, to throw you and make you think that I know what I’m, doing. I suspect that’s a good idea and I’m making sure that the link is more historical than this post.

Mind you, the fact that today my mind is less-than-focussed doesn’t mean that my cooking wasn’t historically inspired. (more…)

I have a shocking case of insomnia, so I’m doing Tuesday’s post now and I’ll do Monday’s post late Monday and then everyone will be entirely confused except me. I never get confused. And yes, this is one of those occasions when truth lies in every sentence but the last one. I did intend to write a Tuesday post on a book Kaaron Warren (horror writer extraordinaire) brought me from Fiji and I didn’t intend to get insomnia.

Let me avoid more confusion and move to cool stuff.

(more…)

The Absolute Write Blogchain is an unpredictable beastie. A group of writers each taking their prompt from the previous writer in the chain means that the topics can go anywhere. Normally food makes an appearance - and it did early on - but just before the chain reached me, it turned philosophical. Jim at the DeathWizard Chronicles has given me a hard act to follow. I sometimes talk about the higher meaning of food (you don’t have to click on this link, it’s basically to show that I occasionally have a brain and can almost reach platforms of higher thought) but to link from someone else’s discussion of mindful meditation to food history is a stretch.

Or it ought to be a stretch. Maybe. But maybe not.

The way we eat reflects who we are. What we eat also says a great deal about us. I once met a Buddhist monk who told me to be aware of living as I ate and to be aware of all the different moments and actions and sensations involved in the eating. This awareness of such a fundamental activity as eating might just be a variant of mindful meditation.

Judaism has something similar. Kashruth has many functions and one of them is to keep us aware of who we are as Jews, all the time.

Maybe that’s why I’m so obsessed wth food. For me, food is how I reach those higher planes.

Jim gave us this lovely quote:

“In the end
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go?�

Living in your own body, appreciating the sensations, experiencing the precise moment you are living in - all this can be part of eating. Whether you use the food to cling to experience or to live it to the fullest and then let it go is a matter of cultural background as well as personal choice. It most certainly is part of our food history.

Monks had their fast days in the Middle Ages to remind them not to focus on corporeal matters - they used food as a tool for heightening an understanding of reality through denial. One Ancient Roman philosophy did exactly the opposite: you live every moment and you eat and have sex and generally enjoy life as proof of it.

There are so many ways of reaching the same goal. That goal is an experience of life. Of making the most of every moment.

I think this calls for chocolate. Eat it while fully focussed and aware of every microsecond of smooth richness, then breeze on over to A View From The Waterfront, to see where this chain goes next.

awchain, mindful meditation, food history

Today I have lots of memories and recipes and thoughts about people and food to start your week off just perfectly. It is, in fact, a very food history edition of Carnival of the Recipes.

Shawn is the co-ordinator and I want to start with her food memory, since I, too, co-ordinate a carnival and it helps me appreciate the work she puts in. She says ” My mother always made it for us - and now it’s become one of my staples too.” Yum! .

That’s the easy bit of presenting peoples’ memories: start with the ones you know. Don’t you do that? When you’re talking with people about food, start with the friends and family and start with the dishes you share?

What works in a live conversation and sparks more memories and ends up with deep discussion into the wee hours over hot drinks or wine doesn’t work so well in a blog, so I’m going to order this post by the tried-and-true method of creating a menu. (more…)

Don’t run and hide your eyes at the word “Blogchain.” This particular blogchain is a series of posts by writers, each of us taking an idea from the previous writers and seeing where it leads us. The post before mine was by Jim Melvin. He talked about organic vegetables and picky eaters, which leaves me so many possible paths to travel I may need to think a moment to find one.

Our notion of what makes a good diet changes over time. (more…)

One of the most interesting current trends in food history (according to my very biassed self) is how many people care about a particular aspect and want to make sure that we’re informaed and that the knowledge isn’t lost. What’s really fascinating is that there’s an audience for this. One of the most-used parts of this food history blog, for instance, is the growing number of recipes about scones and biscuits.

There are museums of cutlery and cookbook collections. There are collections of childhood memories and there are displays of fashion in school lunchboxes. Most of these I’ve already looked at at least briefly.

Food is important to us. It’s not just a matter of nutrition. There are memories of place and time and social patterns. Foodways help preserve who we are and how we live in the world, and they also help us live in the world. Formal afternon tea in Australia is full of unwritten codes that help particular social groups communicate and remember and bond.

So where does a potato museum come into this? it shows us some of the ways that potatoes have been grown and eaten and thought about over the years. The pototato has a complicated history but not (for Westerners) a long one.

It’s worth checking out and thinking about.

What’s really interesting is that there’s enough information out there, and enough interest in potato history, for the museum folks to maintain a potato blog. There’s nothing humble about recent spud history.

food history, potatoes, potato museum

There are a lot of food carnivals with links to fascinating blogs and interesting recipes. Or was that interesting blogs and fascinating recipes? Sometimes it’s one, sometimes the other, and sometimes it’s both.

The Kosher Cooking Carnival this time round has gone one very sensible step further. What the host has done is turned nearly two years of posts into a table. You will find recipe links to an array of Jewish food and culture, including some you’ve met here already. And it’s all just in time for Jewish New Year!

Note: I am not to blame for any weight you put on through enjoyment of these recipes.

food history, carnival, recipes, Jewish food, kosher food

I’ve been having so much fun with this blog that I’ve decided it’s time to share some of the pleasure in writing about food.

Send me a few hundred words telling a food history story and you could win a great prize. I’m not talking wider food history here: I want family stories. They can be serious or funny or sad. With each story I want at least one recipe.

You can enter as many times as you like, but each person can only win one prize. If I really adore entries and they don’t win one of the three terrific prizes donated by Suz’s Space, I reserve the right to award an ebook to show that the stories were special or the recipes delectable, even if they didn’t win (I will also give judges that option).

I will blog entries. Copyright for all stories remains with you, but you have to be willing to let your stories remain on my blog - if they’re stories that you don’t want to be read, then please don’t send them.

Email all stories/recipes to me (using the contact button on the right of this page) by 1 August. I will finish blogging all the stories/recipes by 15 August and the judges will decide on the three best after this. Make your recipes mouthwatering and your stories delicious and you could win one of the three prizes that Suz’s Space has kindly donated (Suz has also donated the postage - visit her online shop - she has some cool stuff!).

What can you win?

1st Prize
A set of 6 serviettes and 6 placemats
ABC Delicious Magazine - Issue 25 March 2004
ABC Delicious Magazine - Issue 22 November 2003

2nd Prize
Set of non-stick kitchen implements
Super Food Ideas - Issue 60 June 2005
Super Food Ideas - Issue 45 February 2004

3rd Prize
Australian Gourmet Traveller
1 Apron (choice of 4 colours)

Who will be judging your timeless prose and mouthwatering recipes?

Suz from Suz’s Space (of course)
Farley from Wine Outlook
Jaime from The New Australian and Fiction Scribe (“Australia made me a foodie� she says – now she has to prove it)
Dave from Pop Buzz UK
Allison from Reality on Bravo

I can’t wait to read your stories!

food history, competition, family stories, Wine Outloook, Suz’s Space, Fiction Scribe, Pop Buzz UK, Reality on Bravo, recipes

Elizabeth Chadwick has written a really good post on the food in the Medieval life of William Marshall. Heroes, food, good writing, dreams of the Middle Ages: what more could you ask for?

Elizabeth Chadwick, food history, William Marshall, Middle Ages

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

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

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