Food History

Between storms and other sundries, today hasn’t been a day where much has happened on the food history front at my place. Well, except for cool announcements about radio interviews. There was a flurry of phone calls over that one. One from the radio station to me and then one from the university to make sure I got the message. A small flurry. Or maybe it was just that I was flurried on the phone.

What I have up my sleeve (and have had for a long while but keep finding other topics I need to post about) is a bunch of fascinating websites with more information about aspects of food history than you can shake a whatever at. I’m not sure what you should shake at websites. Pastry brushes, maybe?

Today’s is a kind of advertorial site. It’s three extra words from a book of food definitions. Why I like it, is that one of those words is myrrh and another is spikenard. I have a particular soft spot for myrrh and spikenard (beyond the obvious – that I can spell them). Spikenard is an ingredient in my favourite recipe for hypocras and both it and myrrh smell rather gorgeous in perfume.

I didn’t know that spikenard was native to the Himalayas. If you look at Dalby’s article on it (on the webpage I linked to a moment ago) you will find that it’s carried in bales. This, also, I didn’t know, but it makes so much sense. It’s a very grassy stuff, spikenard.

Myrrh isn’t grassy. In fact, it’s resin from a tree. It looks a bit like a rock, but when you hold it in your palm and warm it, it gives forth its scent and you realise just how unlike amber it is. Or isn’t. Amber is, after all, fossilised resin. Which makes me wonder. If we found fossilized myrrh with a mosquito that had just dined on dinosaur blood, could Jurasic Park be remade with fragrant dinosaurs? (I think that last joke meant that the storms have officially melted my brain.)

Ted Hobday is the Chief Guide at Brogdale. Some of you may remember that a while back I met Canberra’s apple guru and found out about historical varieties and managed to purchase some medlars, to boot. When I was considering who I ought to interview next, someone from Brogdale was the obvious choice. Most of us can’t get to the UK and see the amazing collection, but we can go online and admire their wonderful photographs and hear what someone who works with them has to say. Ted Hobday is the perfect person.

Can you please tell us about Brogdale? What does it do? How does it work? (more…)

I asked Cindy Renfrow if I could interview her for my interview series and I emailed her some questions. Instead of normal interview answers, she sent me a letter for you, so I’m going to give you her thoughts without even a proper introduction. Explaining who she is would be gilding the lily, anyhow, since she explains things so beautifully clearly. Needless to say, I own one of her books.

“Hello!

My name is Cindy Renfrow and I’m the author of A Sip Through Time, A Collection of Old Brewing Recipes, and Take a Thousand Eggs or More, a Collection of 15th century recipes. I’ve always been interested in foods of other cultures, (more…)

Readers have made several important comments in the last few days, some through email and some in the comments section. If I have written a post you find interesting (I can dream!), then it’s worth going back after a few days sometimes and seeing what comments readers have made, simply because some of the best insights come from you out there (I keep wanting to say ‘you lot’, but it’s not respectful).

Yesterday, Julie said, (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

Today, I have something rather special.

Martha Carlin (who you ought to remember from my earlier posts on her work) has kindly agreed to answer a few questions. I asked her at a totally bad time of year, with university just beginning, so she had to fit it in amongst everything, which makes it a double hapiness to have this interview.

Professor Carlin teaches history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is one of the world’s leading food historians. Her particular focus is the Midde Ages. I was going to point out how much of a superior and civilised human being this makes her, but it’s pretty obvious how crucial understanding the Middle Ages is to understanding the present, so I won’t.

Thank you, Professor Carlin!

Question 1: How is food history different from the sort of history most people learn at school?
(more…)

I’m exceptionally and extraordinarily clever and have come down with the latest virus. The chief symptom is that all I want to do is sleep.

I found a really interesting article on the relationship between coffee and European political history for you to read while I do all this sleeping. I’ve given you a picture of chocolate truffles, to go with the delectable coffee history.

It’s far too long since I introduced you to a community cookbook, so I’m making up for it by giving you an extra-interesting one. The Barossa Valley is one of the world’s top wine-producing regions and it’s far too long since I visited it. My copy of the Barossa Cookery Book was produced by Barossa News Print, Tanunda (Tanunda is such a perfect name for a fantasy character - one day I shall invent a fantasy world using Aussie town names for all my characters, I swear). My copy is a little battered and well-used and it was one of the very first books of this kind that I ever owned.

You will be pleased to know that the book contains ‘1000 selected recipes from a district celebrated throughout Australia for the excellence of its cookery” and “Every recipe of proved merit and signed as such by the donors.” Also that the proceeds from the book went to the Tanunda Soldiers’ Memorial Hall. It cost 2 shillings and was a small brown paperback.

I have the fifth edition, and print numbers had reached 30,000 copies. One day I must find out just how many have been printed to date. It’s still very much in print, you see. The current edition is number 33, though the book’s now published by the Barossa Regional Gallery. It still has 160 pages and I bet it still has that rather fab recipe for green tomato pickle. My copy has pictures that look vaguely 1930s/40s (and one of the major editions was 1932) but apart from that, there’s no clear way of dating it. Unless Wartime Pudding recipe is indicative.

It’s such an important piece of culinary history, that it has an article all to itself in History Australia (v. 3 No. 2 December 2006). Angela Heuzenroeder talks about the cuisine in its context, discussing the fusion of German and English cultures in the cuisine. You can find the article here (it costs).

Tomorrow I’ll give you a couple of the recipes from this book. It’s hard to choose, so if you’ve got favourite recipes, just ask. Otherwise I might hunt out some biscuits or scones, to add to my little collection of biscuit and scone recipes. Also, maybe a jam recipe, so you can have your scones the traditional way, with jam and cream.

food history, Barossa, cookbook, cookery

Yesterday (or maybe the day before - term is about to start and my life is tangled) I gave you a link to Professor Martha Carlin’s food history syllabus. Today I would like to link you to her home page proper. This is because the background of food historians - what their other specialisations are, where they train, where they work, who they are - feed into their food history. Understanding of the past doesn’t operate in a vaccuum - the people who transmit the knowledge and the understanding to the rest of us are as important as the knowledge they transmit. Foodways are - after all - about people.

food history, Martha Carlin, food historians, foodways

I get asked quite frequently what university students study when they study food history. I don’t teach undergraduates (I teach evening classes - it’s part of the strange fiction writer/historian co-existence), but I found a rather nice syllabus on the web that tells you all you want to know. It’s a good course taught by an excellent scholar. For Australians, the closest you can get to this is in Adelaide.

I’m not much good at giving the latest buzz and finding out what’s new in the world of food history. It’s about time I reminded you of the wide world of food history and food historians and sent you to a site where you can find out more, if that’s where your inclination lies. I’m not going away. I will continue to blog my food obsessions and my research and thoughts and teaching and lots of recipes, same as ever, but if you want just a bit more, this is a good place to start.

Todays’ website describes the cookbooks we are about to lose (as opposed to the innumerable ones that are already lost) and a particular program that intends to save them.

Most of the work of culinary history is done very quietly - take a moment and admire this particular labour. Without this program some cookbooks would be gone and all their lore and foodways would be lost to the future.

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