Food History

On Saturday I went to see an exhibition of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at the State Library of Victoria. There were some great books on show, and many I had met already, in other place, at other times. None of them were cookbooks. This reminded me of things I know, but that I don’t articulate nearly often enough.

Just because more of a certain book survives, doesn’t mean that this book is more important in people’s lives. It might have survived because no-one read it. Think of the book that you get given as a present and cant get rid of because it reminds you of someone. As your favourite cookbook gets dog-eared and torn and loses ages and eventually gets replaced, the gift endures, unchanged and in perfect condition.

In the manuscript exhibition, most of the displayed books were religious. Yet there was an example of a cheap medical guide (cheap t produce, relatively speaking) which represented a zillion lost everyday manuscripts.

We don’t have many books of recipes for the Middle Ages. In fact, they are incredibly rare and special. This doesn’t mean that people didn’t cook. It might mean that recipes weren’t written down, or it might mean that what they were written on didn’t survive the ravages of time. Think of the zillions of community cookbooks that exist in there here and now (I have wise friends who have added to their number for my birthday): these cookbooks don’t survive easily. When I was trying to find one last surviving volume of the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia Cookbook (the original one, from fifty plus years ago) none of the women who had owned it could find a copy, nor could any library. Yet it had been printed and loved and used and quoted.

I’m trying to say that we can’t judge the importance of a cookbook by how many of them there are. We have to look for more evidence. I’m not saying it very well because my mind is still pondering those amazing Medieval manuscripts.

It’s about time I opened my book of secrets. Yes, I have a book of secrets. The reason I haven’t mentioned it much is because, like all the best books of secrets, I had temporarily mislaid it. For at least two years I temporarily mislaid it. How this happened in a two bedroom unit is obviously related to it being a book of secrets and not a normal volume at all.

It chronicles some of the major developments in my own personal foodways and was what got me started in thinking that food is part of our history and is not just comprised of nutrition and taste and texture (or poor nutrition, bad taste and odd texture – so much depend son the cook and the culture and the training of the palate). I started it in 1977 and I began adding family recipes and foodways when I left home in 1979. About 50% of my favourite recipes are in it, and another 45% in my brain. I use cookbooks for the other 5%. This means that this old diary is entirely crucial if anyone were to look at my foodways the way I have examined my father’s mother’s family’s.

It’s also important because I didn’t start my scholarly interest with an historical approach. As I keep saying (because I like saying it), I am an historiographer by training, albeit one with some ethnography and archaeology and paleography and codicology. I care as much about how thoughts come together as what they give back to the reader from how they’re formulated as I care for the thoughts themselves. This means it’s important to me to know where a lot of little changes come from and how their expression changes. I always teach the development of how recipes are written to my students, which says something about how important it is to me.

To be consistent, it’s important that I share where I come from so you know my biases and also my favourite recipes (well, the ones I wasn’t sworn to deep secrecy on). I want to share how I read cookbooks and other texts with culinary information in as well as sharing the actual subjects I work with and my thoughts of the day.

If I spent hours writing long blog posts on the theory, it would send you to sleep. This might be good if any of you suffer insomnia, but it’s a tad dull. Instead, for the next few days (excepting Saturday, because I’m playing with time on Saturday) I shall give you a selection of recipes from certain periods of my life, starting from 1978. You can think it through yourself if you want to and discover how things have changed for me since my teens. If you don’t want to do the thinking, then you can just cook some simply wonderful recipes. Does that sound fair?

If you were checking this page at exactly the right second, you would have noticed a timeslip. Saturday’s post appeared three days in advance, and has now gone back to its true home. Sneaky piece of writing.

One of the reasons many people are fond of reconstructions such as the Conflux banquets or those done by those cool people of the Tudor Kitchens project at Hampton Court is because there’s often a feel attached of playing with time.

Instead of stepping into a time machine, we pretend we’re elsewhen. Most of the time it’s not history we’re playing with, but with times that might have been. The history of our perfect dreams. Sometimes those dreams have a certain reality to them and sometimes they’re more like fantasy.

It’s like reading historical fiction and fantasy, except that we walk in the world, nibbling at a meat pie, or snacking on sweets.

For me, this dreaming is something else entirely. Part of me tells stories and part of me analyses them. When I analyse them, it’s to find out about people in the past and to help me to understand people in the present. Understanding is what it’s all about, really. Seeking the patterns of the past and making sense of them for the present. That’s the intellectual side.

Humans, however, are not made of intellect alone. The mouthfeel of a cake that has been five hundred years forgotten – that’s an emotional feel. Harder to analyse, because I’m still developing tools for it. Other people have tools – but I learned the historical styles based on text analysis and sight, not mouthfeel, so I’m working as hard as I can, finding out how I can link my brain with senses of smell and touch and taste.

Human worlds are moderated by our senses. This is why food history is so important. It’s another path to understanding. Added to more traditional approaches to history, it can illuminate and help the heart understand where we come from and maybe, just maybe, where we are going.

Foodways link us with our younger selves. The create bridges across time and space.

This week I’m doing a bit of a clean out. My cupboard is a bit emptier. There’s no flour, no yeast. I’ve thrown out the very few things that were past their use by date and, if I have time, I’ll haul the last bits of food out and reline the shelves.

This is an annual event. I come from a kosher household, you see, and one big thing about kosher households is Passover. So this week my links with my childhood are through tidying my own kitchen a bit. I can’t leave it untouched, but I really don’t feel up to the megasort and clean much of the rest of my family does.

From Saturday night, the foodways bridge across time isn’t quite as alone. So many of us. A whole big family drifting in and out of each other’s presence. We eat fabulous dinners, and my mother’s macaroons and lots and lots of buts and dried fruit. My father used to threaten that we would turn into nuts. My stepfather has his own jokes.

What do these foodways do? They reinforce our family culture and remind us of where we belong. They keep recipes alive and make sure that even the relatives who don’t get on will talk once or twice a year. It’s a time to forge new communities and to reforge establishing ones. And the preparations are the time we rewrite those bridges in our mind and think about who we are and why these things are important to us. For some people they are and for some they aren’t. For some families they are and for some not.

This is the heart of cultural variation and finding our place in the world. Food counts.

I didn’t forget you yesterday. I was too emotionally exhausted to write.

It seems strange to say that, because the exhaustion arose from my teaching. Food history is one of those subjects that we tend to associate with our senses and not our emotions. All history, however, is about people. Sometimes the history of people is overwhelming.

Last night we talked about lost histories and how they are recovered, we talked about why a group of women would write down their favourite recipes while starving to death in a concentration camp, we talked about how a lost cuisine was re-established by scholars from Inquisition records and what happened to the people who underwent those investigations. In short, we talked about how food can help us understand the tragedies of history.

We also talked about the way into the records that give us this information and some of the ways they can be interpreted. We discussed the difference between a personal note (using my grandmother’s book) and fully-written recipes. Partly this is because the cuisines of the lost Jews is perfect fodder for this, but partly because either next week or the week after we’ll be exploring the rise of the modern cookbook. I wanted my students to understand that private notations and records weren’t replaced by formal cookbooks, but live alongside them.

My class compared the tragic food notes of the concentration camp women with my grandmother’s private notes with my private notes and we discussed cultural differences and stereotypes, expectations (what we read from recipes and what we’re looking for when we read private notebooks), changes in foodways. All sorts of things.

Big stuff. A lot of material for two hours. My class is normally boisterous but last night they were quiet and thoughtful. I rather suspect they were as emotionally exhausted as me.

I’ll give you an extra day to ask any questions that have occurred to you recently, given my own slowness. I’ll do my best to answer them tomorrow. You can ask questions in the comments section to any post (and if they get caught up as spam, email me through the contact thingie just below the bio) or you can simply email me.

Today is the day of the blogchain. Some of you will have met the blogchain before, others will be here because of it. For everyone else, it’s when a group of writers link to each others’ posts, using the previous one as inspiration. This month’s chain has been rather rollercoastery for me because the first few writers were talking about dogs, and I had this horrible thought that I would have to talk about dogs as food (and maybe their significance historically) which is not something I really want to talk about, to be honest. I was lucky, though, and dogs and cats faded just in time.

Polenth was before me in the chain and said “If the post is about eating bumblebees or cute froglets, I’m going to cry. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

What do I do? I have recipes for frogs and even recipes for dogs, but I won’t give them to you. The thing is, each and every culture has its prohibited areas and all these are no-go for most of us. These prohibitions are legacies of our food history. It means that some things bring us to tears when we think of them as food and some bring us to nausea. These emotions are sometimes linked to the actual foodstuff and its qualities (see yesterday’s post!) but are equally often linked to how we’re brought up and how we see food. What I love doing is tracing the growth and change in these sentiments over time. When a pet becomes food and when foodstuff turn into cosseted cuddlies – these are important to know. Why the changes happen are even more important. They help us define some very fundamental aspects of ourselves.

Now I wonder how Spontaneous Derivation will handle the next link in the chain?

Secret Government EGGO Project
Fantastical Imagination
For the First Time
Virtual Wordsmith
Polyspace
My Life, You’re Welcome to It
Polenth’s Quill
Food History
Spontaneous Derivation
Spittin’ (out words) Like a Llama
Fresh Hell
SLAKE
Forbidden Snowflake
Virginia Lee’s Vagaries

Today I was thinking about sweetness.

I visited one of those shops that specialise in imported food, to check out what they had and to work out if I could use it for teaching. The shop had so much more sweet stuff than savoury that I started thinking about how the colonial foods of each country helped
shift regional cuisines into various levels of sugar in a diet.

The US, for instance, had more sources for sweeteners than Australia from quite early on. australia grew corn, but didn’t use it as a source of corn syrup (I need to find out if the erly US colonists did, to be honest – I might be making assumptions here). There was honey and there was sugar, mainly imported and sourced from cane.

The US around the same time (and if we’re talking about the british colonies in Terra Australis then we’re abolustely tlking about the united States of America – its political adutlhood runs very closely alongside Australia’s early European settlement) had sugar, honey, maple and possibly corn. There might also have been other sweeteners – I’m away from my library today and so I can’t be certain. The minimum number of sources for sweetener, however, are still more than were available in early Australia.

My very subjective feeling is that US food tends to be sweeter than Aussie, by and large. I’d love to know anyone else’s thoughts. Is US candy and chocolate sweeter, on average than that of Australia, or maybe than the British equivalent? Or have I taken too much time off and need to get back to proper history?

Tonight, my class and I spent some time in the Middle Ages. I handed out groups of books and clusters of students examined topics such as etiquette, finding evidence in literary sources and comparing cuisines. Then we took a break and ate the delicious late medieval stew one student had made and some fruit cake from Mrs Beeton. We also taste ume tea (thanks to a student, who thought we would be interested – which we were!) and a few rarer spices.

I’ve taught Medieval food so many times before (and some of these students were the recipients of my teaching) that I decided to spend the second half of the session trying a new approach. I talked about some of the underlying factors that make regions what they are. Why butter and not olive oil, why pigs and not cattle. We also talked about seasons and where people got their food and access to traded products.

If all this sounds unexciting, that’s because I’m wilting with fatigue now and can’t communicate the entire fun of the class. It’s a great class to teach because students get so involved in it. They’re a bright group, with a bunch of specialist interests that really fit what we’re doing. What’s curious though, is that I find we look at the big picture a lot. Some classes want the prices of spices or the amount of this or that – these students look happiest and ask the most joyous questions when they can sort out basic principles.

The next class will challenge that a bit. We have a week’s break and then we look at how cuisines get forgotten, intentionally or otherwise. It will be difficult emotionally, I suspect, but we’ll cover some important principles and some fabulous cuisines: it won’t all be tragedy and forgotten souls. It will counterbalance today, which was all about the larger patterns underpinning European cooking and how they helped create the food we eat today.

I talk a lot about historical trends in Australian cuisine, but I don’t think I’ve given you short and simple digest of what happened. Short and over-simple, but it will help make sense of my witterings when I wander off into bush food or start talking fusion cooking.

Once upon a time, Australian food was dull but worthy. That time wasn’t so long ago. Think of the ad I gave you the other day “Football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.” The seventies, and ‘roo was only on the menu in certain parts of Adelaide.
British food was such a defining part of our cuisine that you can still say to someone “I grew up a meat and three veg person” and they will know exactly what you mean.

There still is an underlay of this food. It’s the firm base that holds all the exciting fusion cuisine together, perhaps. You can see its influence at the food events where comfort is more important than taste. Children’s parties, for instance. Some of the continuing favourites for Aussie children’s parties are birthday cake (of course), fairy or other winged cakes, chocolate crackles, fairy bread, cocktail sausages and sausage rolls (with tomato dipping sauce), snack food (chips and twisties and other healthy delights), jelly (especially green jelly with chocolate frogs drowning inside), cheese hedgehogs, meringues. If you need recipes for any of this, please say. If you see the list and want to scream and run then my diagnosis is that you’ve been to a children’s party recently.

Dull worthiness doesn’t define our cuisine any more, but it’s still important. It’s impossible to understand Australian food without it.

From the 1940s we adopted continental European cakes as if they were our dream food. Baked cheese cake and vanilla slice. They didn’t displace scones and fruit cake – we just enjoyed more types of cakes.

Starting in the 1960s, we have layered and meshed many other cuisines. Greek and Italian and a strangely deformed Chinese food were the first. From there we branched out, and today’s exciting fusion cuisine is one of the most exciting internationally. We use ingredients from everywhere and create recipes that break new ground every day. From our own native bushfood to spices from Asia to cakes from the Mediterranean, everything adds to the amazing modern Australian melting pot. Underlying it, however, and holding it together are still the same British basics from the beginning of modern Australia.

Today I’m all about cultural dynamics over long periods of time. Since most of this concerns facets of history other than food, I won’t go into it, but since it’s haunting me, I thought you might like something a little related.

On the food front, Australia has tried to define its food history at various times. Many countries do. Self-definition is hardly a unique phenomenon. What’s really interesting, though, is that the definitions occurred in Australia just as a national food awareness exploded. The moment when the amazing fusion food coalesced is the exact same one that an advertising jingle was released that listed our national emblems. They apparently were ‘football, meat pies, kangaroo and Holden cars.’ You can see it for yourself here:

Back then, the meat pie was just the meat pie. Old-fashioned – white flour pastry with a solid beef or lamb filling. These days meat pies are full of everything from curried vegetables to steak and kidney. It’s still a part of our food culture, but it has changed to meet a more sophisticated country.

In Adelaide you can still buy pie floaters, where the pie is served upside down on a plate of mushy peas. I’ve been told it’s a great delicacy. The rest of us shake our head at such antics and argue about how you put the sauce on and the best way to actually eat the pie. We also argue whether gourmet pies are really dinkum. And while we argue about authenticity, we walk through the supermarket passing six or eight packs of old-fashioned meat pies. So far, they have outlasted every single food fashion. This probably explains why they were used as part of an advertising jingle in the 1970s.

I rediscovered something cool today. Blame apples.

Evidence is only as good as our ability to interpret it. Some types of evidence we give a bunch of authority to. Magisterial-looking monographs, for instance, make far too many people nod their heads in agreement without considering the research and thought and general reliability of the book. Someone who sounds as if they know what they’re talking about or wears the right clothes is more often assumed to be credible than to be talking for the sake of talking.

Basically, we carry with us a series of expectations when we come across information about the past. Some of them are based on our formal education while some of them are based upon what our culture has taught us. We tend to assume, for instance, that authority comes in suits and so we give just that much more credence to a salesperson who is respectably dressed.

Where do apples come in? One group often given low credibility is elderly people who say “In my day…” I say it often now I’m middle-aged, just to get a laugh. The laugh shows that the phrase and anything that follows is not nearly as likely to be believed as an earnest statement by a man aged 40, wearing a cool suit and carrying a briefcase. “The apple tart was special,” a friend said recently. “There’s nothing around like that anymore.”

The trick is that this friend isn’t old at all (I was playing with someone’s mind – probably my own). She was referring to a quite specific type of apple used to make a quite specific type of pastry in a very precise part of Arkansas. She knows the folk history of that apple tree and can give you a precise description of the apple. I was able to locate its relatives from her description. She is a reliable witness and there as never any doubt about that. So memories can be reliable sources of food history.

Yesterday I bought some older style cooking apples (not omnipresent Granny Smiths). Anyhow, I stewed some because I was too tired to fix anything more complex and besides, I had tasted one of the apples last night with my class, and I rather thought that slow stewing would create some interesting textures. I picked up some very fine cream to go with it.

When the time came to eat it, I wasn’t hungry. I thought I ought to taste it, though, in the interest of proving that elderly people who kept telling me how much nicer apples were in their day were wrong.

The complete bowl is inside me. It doesn’t matter how un-hungry I am, when an extraordinary flavour comes I find I can suddenly eat. The evidence of the old folks who talked about the stewed apples of their childhood was very sound.

I think the trick is to find out if they’re talking generically or about a specific taste memory. I think the other trick is to admit that anyone’s memory of a flavour or an event is just as likely to be accurate as an expensive monograph. Accuracy, after all, isn’t just a matter of footnotes. In this case, the elderly people who reminisced about apples all had apple trees in their gardens when they were young, and those apple trees were very probably the same variety as the ones I just cooked.

Tonight’s food history class was really fascinating. I have students who have a lot of background knowledge in their own areas of interest and who love sharing it. It makes classes interactive and fun. It also means that I come out of each week with just a little more knowledge, which is a good thing.

The theme for the night was “The Age of Exploration.” I explained that I didn’t think there was one, but that exploration and conquest and invasion and trading posts were really important for understanding some of the dynamics in food history, and that “The Age of Exploration” was a cool tag to hang these concepts on.

We talked about understanding the difference between the first time a foodstuff hits a population group and the actual acceptance of the foodstuff by the wider population. We looked at a lot of different sources to find out just what sorts of food might have been taken up in different countries and what foods could have been but were not and we established a sequence of things that probably had to be in place for a major new ingredient to be introduced into a particular culture. I brought along an iced tea from the Philippines to illustrate the sequence.

We talked a lot about North American plants and South American plants and Australian and the English diet. I managed to say ‘mangel-wurzel’ at least once.

During half time, we ate a cheese dish based on Cato’s work and my favourite Medieval brie tarts, both cooked by students. The schedule of who is bringing what food is beginning to look impressive. The class excursion is almost organised. And, to add joy to contentment, next week I get to teach food in the Middle Ages.

Since each and every way I turn right now I find bushfoods, I thought I should inflict the same thing on you. Not that it’s an affliction for me, since I have packets of herbs and spices, ready to cook, but for you, you get to hear anecdotes and then decide whether or not you want to cook with the ingredients or contemplate their history or ignore my post and hope for maybe a decent historical biscuit recipe tomorrow, to make up.

I’ve chosen just two herbs to introduce you to today. There’s a reason for this. Popular lore has it that the early British settlers used tea tree when there was no tea to be had. Apart from this and some rather good stories about native animals from a slightly later period (which I need to check up, since I suspect I’m teaching Colonial Australian food in a few weeks) the general feeling about Australian native ingredients is that we’ve ignored the bush and ignored the foods of indigenous Australia until very, very recently.

This turns out to be only half true. The early settlers used herbs like salt bush (Atriplex nummularia) and sea parsley (Apium prostratum) and then later settlers replaced salt bush with rosemary and sea parsley with common parsley. These two herbs are in front of me now, since they were part of my swag from the Show.

Maybe the move away from local ingredients and to European plants was due to homesickness. Maybe it was a distrust of the strange environment they now lived in. Maybe it was linked to the change in attitudes towards the original inhabitants of this land: the first settlers accepted that they were invading and their leaders tried to respect at least some of the indigenous rights; later settlers developed an acceptance of the concept of Terra Nullius and denied people a depressing number of human rights.

I’m going to keep my eyes open for evidence of the two shifts and see if I can work out if they happened at the same time or were linked in any way. If I find anything, I’ll let you know. I won’t have time to actively research it, though, so it may take a while before I can piece out a pattern.

Watch this space.

Once upon a time (which means over a week ago), I wrote a post about a special revolution happening with Australian food. I alerted you all to the history-in-the-making that is our bushfood industry.

My timing was totally impeccable, because when I went to the Show I found all the ingredients I had hoped were about to hit the market. The ones I had been dreaming of cooking with, less than two weeks earlier. What’s more, I got to talk to Jill and Denis Richardson, the couple responsible for making these ingredients available.

It gave me a small but important dynamic in how this bushfood revolution is happening.

They’ve realised that the problem with Australians enjoying bushfoods in the past wasn’t just being able to obtain ingredients easily and inexpensively, but the lack of recipes to go with them. Each and every packet of spices and seasoning mixes that A Taste of the Bush sells has a recipe with it. If you want more recipes, then the company sells inexpensive cookbooks. They also promote other people in the industry. Our conversation turned to luminaries such as Ian Hemphill and I began to get an inkling of just how tight the bushfoods industry is and how everyone has to work together if these foods are going to be fully integrated into Australian cooking. Jill also knows a fair amount about what local herbs early settlers used before they established their English-style gardens.

This was quite an amazing experience for a Medievalist. One of the things I look for when I research is cultural dynamics. My key area is how things change and why things change and whether participants are conscious of the change they’re provoking. To be in the middle of a change and to talk to change agents then to suddenly realise that I’m becoming a minor change agent myself in this area puts an entirely different spin on the limits of using written sources when the writers are dead, which is what most historians do.

My biggest realisation is that widespread cultural change can come from one very dynamic but rather small source, if it’s influential enough and consistent enough. This makes sense of the whole rise of Arthurian literature in Western Europe. There was probably a small but consistent group of writers linked to just a very few courts, and they changed the world of our imagination for centuries.

I need to think about this a great deal more. My other history has fed into my understanding and interpretation of food history a great deal, but this is the first time things have gone the other way. I need to think about how to identify those dynamic forces a bit further and what other causes of widespread changes may exist.

I have no doubt I’ll get back to this, but in the meantime, I’ll enjoy cooking and teaching with my bushfoods.

The greatest treasure in my nine wonderful new sachets is salt bush. Salt bush lamb has been on my secret cooking agenda since I was about thirteen. No-one I went camping with could identify salt bush for me, which was a source of constant annoyance. Now I can make my salt bush lamb.

Life is happy. My brain is occupied with interesting thoughts about the dynamics of cultural heritage and next time I go shopping for meat, lamb is on the menu.

On Friday I went to the Royal Canberra Show. All Saturday I admired my swag. Just now I realized that I hadn’t told you so many important things about my visit.
I did a lot of learning at the Show. My photos will come later, so I might do you a photo-heavy slide show in a few days. Until then, you’ll have to be satisfied with knowing that the way cows and goats are judged is very different to the way cats are judged. And that I got to talk bush food. Right now, though, I want to talk about meat on the hoof, which is not bush food at all.

The Royal Canberra isn’t a place for pets, in fact. Despite it taking place in the city, it’s a rural show. It’s where all the getting-together happens for the whole of NSW, which is funny, because it’s not actually in NSW. This getting-together is mostly to do with making sure you have evidence that your animals are the best breeders and will produce the outstanding meat, milk and wool the industry needs.

The animals we saw were very different to the Belted Galloways at Mountain Creek Farm. They use the land differently, for one thing. For another, they are being actively bred to put on weight quickly to cut down the time between birth and the abattoir.

These animals aren’t the sort you put on growth hormones or who are rushed from birth to death. The idea is that the put on healthy size quickly, not that they grow unnaturally. What the Show judging does is make sure that the weight they put on is safe, really. The animals are judged for their proportions and their capacity to hold size (among other things). The beautiful liquidity of their eyes is not a factor.

The breeders love their animals. They talk proudly about them. This means that the Show helps share ethical standards and care as well as keep quality high for the market.

Those blue ribbons are important to meat history. Trace them back and we can see how meat tastes and types develop on the hoof, and how animals are treated and how the great isolations of the Aussie bush are broken down once a year. There is more food history in those blue ribbons than you can shake a hoof at.