Food History

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

I started the day with a really fun food history interview, which I’ll blog about properly as soon as it’s webbed. I’m ending the day with a fiction-related interview. If that’s not enough reading for you, there’s another interview here. I do love the tendency of US interviewers to use my title :). It makes me feel extraordinarily educated.

The trouble is (as you might have guessed) tonight I don’t feel quite as educated as usual. No big insights into food history. I’m in the almost-over-virus-and-can’t-move-or-think stage of the week

It’s been a big week for insights (despite cold and virus and other impediments to normality): I had that paradigm shift earlier in the week and I’ve been processing it ever since. I have a much better understanding of the difference between what we think about a country’s food and the reality of that food and how they interplay.

There will be more insights, because over the next few days I’ll be preparing my half hour talk on “Ancient Food” for Australia’s National Science Fiction Convention. I think I promised them kosher butchers, suicidal gourmands and Medieval Viagra. I don’t know what that promise will lead to, but if it’s entertaining, iIll blog it.

Enjoy your extra reading tonight, and I’ll get back to ordinary programming just as soon as I can muster a bit more energy.

Today was Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea. I was teaching, and so the closest I got to it was walk through the tail end with my class. It was interesting to watch the class’s response to it. I told them that of course they could all join in if they wanted, showed them the brochure (it’s a charity fundraiser) and then said “But I’ll keep teaching while you’re away.” Each and every one of them chose to stay in class. This was the highlight of my day.

The lowlight of my day is my virus having returned (which means I have unintentionally shared it with two classes - sorry folks!). I have a lovely fever. I’m taking my sick self back to bed and I’m leaving you with the Carnival of Australia and with a cool website to visit.

I keep telling food history students that if they want to time travel, they need to be super-careful about what they eat. The Unadulterated History of Food Dyes tells you one of the reasons why.

Today I feel like exploring the difference between exotic food and the everyday. As you might guess, it’s pretty subjective and very strongly culturally/regionally/family based. When I teach about this I normally tell the story of the rabbi who banned pineapples in his congregation, because they were so unfamiliar he couldn’t place them on the food spectrum. Today I want to try a slightly different approach. I want to explore (briefly) four blogs and see how what they say in their everyday posts illuminates the subject.

Let start with Victoria Garson, who gives an overview of the food possibilities for mothers’ day in San Diego, CA. It’s a good place to start because the post was about a foodway that screams ‘exotic’ at me. Why are restaurant brunches exotic? My mother won’t even eat breakfast in bed on mothers’ day - a phonecall and a cup of tea is all she wants. Whether we go to restaurants for big events is very much driven by family habits.

Let’s move from that to the more familiar. Mark Woodgate at All About Fatherhood gives a list of things not to do for Mother’s Day. The things he suggests as ‘ought to be done’ are closer to home than the brunch out. They’re familiar for more people simply because when he suggests a picnic we can replace the word ‘picnic’ with the stuff we know and love for picnics. Our own customs back up his words and so his suggestions are homey and comfortable. My favourite picnic might be exotic to someone else (chicken sofrito, pitta bread, chummous and tabouli, for instance, served in a Thai layered container that keeps each food separate) but the word ‘picnic’ makes us think of the familiar and hides family and cultural and regional differences to an extent. People who don’t take picnics wouldn’t be deceived into familiarity, of course.

Bobbi Chukran, guest writer at FictionScribe, points out that for writers the details are what counts ( say this regularly on my other blog - every now and again I rant about ‘telling details’ and their use in world building - this is why I chose Bobbi’s post). This is just as true for foodways as for fiction - it’s the detail that creates the sense of the familiar and help us identify with a food. The exotic is partly exotic because we don’t have that familiarity and link to the details. If you sample a dish and can say exactly where the cook has gone wrong, you know the dish is part of your foodways and is no longer exotic.

It all comes down to familiar vs unfamiliar. When global warming was something none of us were familiar with (see Environmental Talk for more on global warming) we treated it as something exotic. You know, not part of our lives. As we learn more about it and how it touches us everyday, it becomes more familiar. One day taking measures to cut down on global warming will be a standard part of more people’s lives, just as one day you might eat chicken sofrito on a picnic. Or maybe not.

The trick is that there is a continuum. At one end is the impossibly exotic. Food so strange it’s something we think aliens eat. At the other end is the stuff of everyday life, so familiar we don’t think twice about it.

I should have given you a recipe for Anzac Biscuits on ANZAC Day. I feel a bit bad about that, because it’s Australia’s holiday to remember the war dead from the disastrous Gallipoli landing. Why do I feel guilty today? Today Mexico is remembering an entirely different battle, the Battle of Puebla in 1862.

The big difference is that Australia gambles, drinks and has memorial services on ANZAC Day (New Zealand does the same thing, but without the gambling) whereas Mexico and countries linked to Mexico tend to focus on food and family and general merriment. Here are links to a bit more information about the holiday.

I’m not going to give you any recipes today, because another 451 blogger has developed a complete meal for the occasion. Start with Elementary Chef’s menu. Work your way back through the linked posts and over the next few posts Stephanie will talk you through the food prep and leave you to enjoy your party.

I do wonder what the French do on Cinco de Mayo, given that they lost that particular battle. Maybe they make bad puns. I’m carefully restraining myself from making puns about mayonnaise sinks, for instance (sinks de mayo).

Next year I might give you a biscuit recipe and talk about ANZAC Day - the Cinco de Mayo looks like a great deal more fun, though.

PS I know I linked to Texan chilli, but the truth is that chili is regional. The reason I linked to Texan - since people have asked - is because it gave us the chili that much of the rest of the world knows. There are quite specific and authentic chilis for the whole region, including Mexico. I have a really interesting recipe for an Arkansas chili, which I intend to make as soon as the overnight temperature hits zero.

food history, Cinco de Mayo, chhilli, chili, ANZAC Day

My mild practical joke was yesterday and I am a sober and serious historian today, working on a paper on Australian Jewish foodways for a July conference so I thought you’d like a small collection of interesting links. They’re each and every one of them chosen for different reasons. All of them relate to food history, of course.

The first link perhaps needs some explaining. It’s a reference table for historians (and possibly historical novelists) and shows grain prices over time. What’s really cool about this sort of thing is that you can look at grain prices and find out about food and society and whether society gets the food it needs. Riots and misery result when basic foodstuffs can’t be had and changes of government can be forced when the society puts the blame squarely on government. Think of the English Corn Law or the earlier Assizes. One day I might do a post on the Assizes and another day I might do one on the Corn Law and its history, but in the interim, take a look at Richard Unger’s grain price pages.

I realised this morning that I haven’t put nearly enough chocolate on these pages, so here’s a web entry that has some gorgeous eighteenth century chocolate pots. I want me one of these. I’m curious to taste the effect of the frother/molenillo (the wooden device that slots into the lid) - right now I use a hand capuccino frother or my blender, but I can’t know how near or far I am from the correct texture until I taste it made properly.

The next link is an example of a type of site I want to see more of. It’s the food specific to St Louis (excuse me while I break into song - in fact ignore me while I break into song, because my voice sounds nothing like Judy Garland’s. On a good day I sing on key, and that’s the most you can hope for.). What’s cool about this site is that it lists some of the foodstuff that the people of St Luis treasure as part of their culinary history. You can argue all you like about what food came from where and when things were introduced, but until a great deal more local histories are done we don’t even know a small percentage of what foods people claim as their own. The French do local pride in food particularly well, but St Louis has a rather impressive list of foods that have historical resonance for them:

Toasted Ravioli
Gooey butter cake
Prosperity sandwich
Pork Steaks
The Concrete
Peanut Butter
The Slinger
Provel ™ cheese
St. Louis style Pizza
St. Paul Sandwich
Brain Sandwich
Soft drinks - Whistle™, Howdy, 7-UP™ (its first name was “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Sodas” - very catchy)
Ice Cream in a Cone
Hot Dog on precisely the right bun
Iced Tea
Hamburg Steak as a Sandwich (Hamburger)
Cotton candy (what us other countries call fairy floss)
Crab Rangoon
Bar-B-Que
Ham Steak
Bissinger’s™ chocolates

The great thing about lists like these is the minute we read them we think “But I know of such and such that was earlier” and “I know where they got that from.” And that’s the point. We need local claims so they can be substantiated and then we can look for patterns in what was eaten and when. We can find out who ate fairy floss and who ate cotton candy. We can look at different varieties of barbecue and work out what regions shared the same tastes.

If your town has a website that delves into the food it likes, invented or is proud of, I would love to see it. Same with local cookbooks. History is all about evidence, and there’s a lot of gorgeous material that never gets past the local school fete. This website is why St Louis is my favourite city this Monday.

The last website for now is one that balances the recipes for a Medieval dinner I gave a little while back. It’s a menu for < a href="http://www.kateryndedevelyn.org/eng1intr.htm"> fourteenth century meal.

Which reminds me, the next test for the Regency Gothic Banquet happens to be at my place and on my birthday. I think that after the meal everyone might enjoy my favourite fourteenth century hypocras recipe. It will mix periods in a shocking and delightful way.

A group of bloggers at 451 Press is busy looking at each others blogs and getting to know each other. We thought it was a good idea. My blog-to-look-at this week is Mom is Teaching and it has provided an unexpected bonus.

Yesterday I promised you a recipe from Dr Morse and I promise I will give you one, but Summer’s latest post has reminded me why I started collecting ephemera (technical term for leaflets and pamphlets and stuff) in the first place: leaflets and pamphlets and stuff are exceptionally good for teaching. I often add a leaflet or something to my briefcase for class and plan a lesson that will include hands-on contact with the past. I especially do this when I teach subjects such as family history, because it really helps bring the history alive.

In Summer’s case - looking for activities for home schoolers - this gives her an eleventh way of keeping homeschooled children busy.

Pieces of paper have words. Words have meaning. Extracting the meaning from an old leaflet is a wonderful way for children to discover the past and to interact with it. If they’re very lucky, they might try out some recipes from a page entitled “Biliousness” and discover why layout really does affect how we read a text. Lessons in publishing, in the past and in people. What more could you want? Apart from a recipe, of course.

Raisin Pie

Two cupfuls of seeded raisins, one cupful and a half of boiling water, half a cupful of sugar, two tablespoons of cornstarch, two tablespoonfuls of grated lemon rind, juice of one orange, one tablespoon of grated orange rind, one cupful of chopped walnuts. Cook raisins in boiling water for five minutes, pour into it sugar and corn sarch, which have been mixed. Cook until thick, remove from fire, and add other ingredients. Bake btween two crusts. Walnuts may be omitted, if desired. All measurements for this recipe are level.

First the ‘thank you.’ I was rather surprised to see Food History in the list of the top 100 Aussie blogs, but it is there and the only reason I can think for it being there is people reading it, which means you. Thank you!

Today I want to introduce you to another little leaflet. I bought this in Katoomba last year. This is the kind of leaflet that appears by happenstance, when you’re doing something else. In Katoomba I was writing a novel and was doing research in a second hand shop. The leaflet gently slipped into my hand and told me firmly “Buy me.”

It’s not very big: sixteen internal pages. It has a foxed and faded pink paper cover which says “Cooking Recipes and Home Hints Published by the Proprietors of Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills.”

The back has calendars for 1927 and 1927 and proudly announces “Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills. Australia’s National Remedy.” Date and country all nicely laid out, with the publication printed in Pitt Street, Sydney. Despite this, Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills were from the US, apparently originating in Buffalo, NY in 1854. Project Gutenberg has put up a history of the pills and the patent medicine business they were a part of. It’s worth checking out.

What I love about this pamphlet is its incredibly bad layout. Let me give you the headings first. There will be recipes later, so be concerned.

Made in Australia By Australians for Australians.

Disordered Liver
Are you an Indoor Worker
Headache
Bilious Attacks
Always Tired
Indigestion
Biliousness
Save Money
Woman’s Daily Duties
Nervous depression
Comstock’s “Dead Shot” Worm Pellets
Comstock’s Nerve & Bone Liniment
Keep your system in fighting trim

Just typing that in exhausted my nervous sytem. There was a message in them, not very subliminal. We’re told “Bilious Attack” then given recipes. The recipes can wait till next time. In the meantime I intend to worry about a sentence my mind keeps framing which goes “Women’s Daily Duties Nervous depression.”

This is a little note to let you know I’ve been nominated in two categories for the Blogger’s Choice Awards (actually, three categories, but the third is for my other blog. If you have a few minutes and feel like voting, I hope the cute icons below will take you to the right place. You’ll have to register and login first, but there is much bloggy goodness to explore, so it’s worth it.

PS This announcement doesn’t replace my regular Thursday posting, I promise. I might include a bad joke in the post later as a kind of celebratative torture, though.

While I’m thinking about longterm slow-but-small projects, there is my little collection of biscuit and scone recipes which one day will be big enough to help me work out the geographical limits of the terms biscuits and scones and a hundred subtle interpretations appertaining unto each of the words. Or maybe it will just provide many yummy recipes. Either is good.

Anyhow, another 451 blogger (Kelly, of Kidsdish) has kindly added to my little haul. Her biscuits are of the Southern US variety, so not sweet and not at all hard. I always thought that biscuits made like this were just poor scones, but the recipe is quite different. Lard and buttermilk. I’m not sure about the lard - but I might follow Kelly’s recommendation and make them with vegetable shortening. I can’t even imagine what they’ll taste like with butter and molasses. Warm in this autumn chill, I suspect.

The contents of school lunchboxes haunt me.

When I was in Melbourne, the museum had a display of school lunchboxes past and present and you could see them lined up against a wall. Sandwiches, health food bars, drinks, carrot sticks, apples, cheese sticks. I missed the Sunny Boy (everyone’s favourite drink when I was in primary school - triangular long life packs that I only ever notice now in UHT milk sachets).

Kids dish has started a conversation on lunchboxes present. Things are different where she lives (Kelly is in the US) and part of the fun of the school lunchbox for her is quite obviously translating the potpourri of organic vegetables in her box of vegetables into something that can be enjoyed by children in a lunch box.

It’s all about translation. For Kelly the translation is from organic box to lunch box. For my sisters and I when we were young it was what we were comfortable making: we did our own lunches - we started learning to cook when we were four, from memory, so buttering bread and putting things on it and closing it and cutting it was achievable from very early primary school. It wasn’t just what our cooking skills could achieve, however, it was also what we were happy having other kids comment on. The limits on the translation in both cases include what are available and what parents will veto.

If you call this stuff “history of childhood nutrition” it sounds dead boring. But if you turn and ask someone “What did you have in your lunchbox when you were nine?” everyone gets involved in convoluted analyses and explanations and the history of the mundane turns out to be much more fun than the deaths of kings. After all, kings don’t die that often or that interestingly, but you never know what’s going to be in a stranger’s school lunchbox. Opening the lid is always just a little bit astonishing.

The Coffee and Tea festival is now up at A Thought over Coffee. Enjoy!

I was 2/3 of the way through a long post about Anne-Marie Nicols and Women’s History Month when my computer misbehaved and ate the post. It must’ve been the mention of chocolate within it and the analysis of why it was highly unlikely that choc chip cookies could have been invented much before they were actually invented. Nothing else explains the sudden gobbling sound and the disappearance of the post.

Anne-Marie has a series of Women’s History Month posts - one very foodie - starting here. Don’t wait for my computer to behave - just enjoy them now!

Kaaron Warren and I are in the middle of wondering about how edible jellied substances are when used in conjunction with savoury food. This is largely a matter of fashion. Right now, in Australia, we haven’t seen aspic or its equivalents in many circumstances for a while. It looks passing strange and inedible. Not to all Australians, but in general.

Because of this conversation, I find it hugely essential to demonstrate that aspic and jellied savoury food is an important part of our past. It was more so in the US than in Australia, but Australia didn’t escape the craze either. It wasn’t so long ago, either. Recent enough that it entertains me that the thought of aspic makes a horror writer go ‘ick.’

You can find some pictures here. Given the title of the book they accompany, what I’ve said above, and the comments that go alongside the pictures, I believe my work here is done for tonight. Not all of these recipes should be tried at home, bu there is some most excellent use of jelly in there.

Publications by major libraries are often worth looking out for. The Huntingdon Library, for instance, has published The Cornucopia, Being a kitchen entertainment and cookbook, containing Good Reading and Good Cookery from more than 500 years of Recipes, Food Lore &c. as conceived and expounded by the Great Chefs & Gourmets of the Old and New Worlds between the years 1390 and 1899 now compiled and presented to the public in a single handsome and convenient volume. The title describes it perfectly. I wouldn’t like to have to remember it all for a quiz night, though.

What amuses me about this volume is that it is meant to be like the fun pre-twentieth century compilations. It has a bit of that feel, in page set-up, in the choice of illustrations, and so on.

Except that it reads a bit like blogged selections from the old recipe books, brought together in one volume. This isn’t a problem. Blogging, after all, is our replacement for the newspaper snippet and the scrapbook and the almanac and the essay collection. Judith Herman and Marguerite Shalett Herman have measured the modern sensibility rather well. In fact, they have done extraordinarily well, because this book first came out in 1973, well before the advent of blogland.

This post is not a book review. It’s a passing remark about how blogs have taken a particular kind of printed material and claimed to make it new. It’s a statement of the joy of continuity in the written word and especially the written word of culinary history.

Cookbooks and household compilations more than most other books are infinitely bloggable. I could give you a recipe a day from my grandmother’s cookbook or I could take my 1848 Dictionary of Practical Receipts and put it up here, section by section and it would fit perfectly. There’s something about our cultural shaping of recipes and their surrounds that perfectly fits the blogosphere and that has meant a near-seamless transfer in form between books such as this and how we blog recipes and thoughts of the culinary past.

The shapes of culture are so very cool. Excuse me while I go away to explore my library and find more blog-ancestors.