Food History

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.

It’s a comfort food kinda day in Canbera. Nicole Murphy, the Chair of Conflux is visiting me this evening and - given she’s the kind soul who is running the Regency Gothic Banquet - I thought I’d ask her for a comforting recipe from her childhood. Think Sydney/Canberra, not too long ago. Think cold nights and tired days. Nicole’s mother would make pancake after pancake in the electric pan - they would put their favourite toppings on.

Now, I’ve already blogged pancakes, so I need to find you another recipe. Nicole’s mother also made spag bol (the Aussie version of spaghetti bolognese), so here it is.

Spag bol sauce

Brown onions in some oil. Add beef mince and brown. Add tomato paste, tomato sauce, worcestershire sauce and mixed Italian herbs. Add a little water and let simmer until the sauce thickens.

food history, spaghetti bolognese, spag bol, Nicole Murphy, Canberra, Conflux, mixed Italian herbs

Just a little extra today. A vintage food ad was mentioned on Boing Boing and I thought you might enjoy it. It combines so many of my interests into one small package: speculative fiction, food and history.

And some extra to add to the extra:

food history, Boing Boing, speculative fiction, advertisement, Jolly Green Giant The Kingsmen

There is great happiness to be found in archaeology. Archaeologists can find stuff that fits alongside the literary evidence for what people ate and how they cooked it to give us a more complete picture of ancient lives. Sometimes the amazing work of patient scholars reaches the popular press, and we can all share in the joy of discovery.

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.

Today, an article from the Washington Post that summarises an article from Science about a Smithsonian study. It appears that chili pepper has been in use or over 6,000 years. Not just used, but probably domesticated. This is seriously cool stuff - check it out.

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

Since I’ve started giving you food ads, it might be handy to check out this site. It’s a handy reminder not to take people’s claims without questioning. I know that it is meant to apply to analysing the claims of fast food places, but it applies to any food history: people present arguments and recipes and all sorts of things in a way that makes them feel good or look good or feel comfortable with what they’re doing. Food history is about getting behind this, to a certain extent, and understanding the cultural and historical reasons for things looking and tasting the way they look and taste.

Update: If you’re really unlucky I might blog about my presentation on Ancient Food at the Australian National SF Convention this weekend since it’s the reason why my posts have been so unwontedly short.

Over the last little while, various kind souls have sent me to various fascinating websites. Right now I’m doing a bit of a cleanup, which gives me an excuse to read the sites again and to share them with you. Every Monday in June and July I will sort a bit more of my ‘Favourites’ collection. If you don’t like what I’ve been holding onto, then send me sites you adore, and share them with everyone else.

Today’s site is related to literature, as so many good things are. It’s the recipes from the Aunt Dimity books. You can never have too many good recipes or too many good books.

This is the first in a series of videos about various foodays. They’re pretty self-explanatory.

The thing is, I looked at my dairy and realised I won’t be doing any fine research for the next month or two. No amazing and illuminating insights. Besides, foodways belong to all humans, not just those represented by the people I study. I won’t drop any of my regular features, I promise - this is in addition to books and recipes and interesting blogs and websites.

For the next little while enjoy a Friday night video - and have fun exploring some delicious foodways.

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.

A Pepsi ad for you, because I’m having a quiet day (what can be sexier than Bollywood stars?):

The medlar (Mespilus germanica) is a fruit like no other. It has to be almost rotten (bletted) before it’s edible, but when it reaches that stage it’s entirely delicious. I’m going to test this over the next few weeks (as I do whenever I can obtain this fruit, which is a bit hard to find in Australia) as I just purchased a vast quantity from Pialligo Apples.

I was arranging an excursion to the orchard with my food history class, you see. Jonathan Banks has many rare trees and we thought it would be a good way to end the course. As it will be. Somehow, along the way, he mentioned that his medlars were ready and I ended up buying them. Simple cause and effect.

Medlars are deciduous. They’re brown and look like something that ought to be fed to pigs. Let them blett and they taste like the best dessert apples served with cinnamon, cloves and a touch of molasses. Jonathan says they have been known since Roman times, but in my frantic search last night (I spent all of fifteen minutes searching - it was not a very thorough search) I only traced them back as far as Charlemagne. Charlemagne wanted people to grow them, along with a host of other plants. Charlemagne was lousy at recipes, alas, and the oldest recipe I have so far is from the late sixteenth century. Unless it’s in my Apicius - I haven’t checked there yet.

I need to do more research. The question is, do I need more medlars to encourage the research? I have more medlars in my loungeroom than I’ve ever seen in my life before (and this is after my students took pity on quite a few of them) and I’m contemplating getting more? Yes, there is indeed something special about medlars. They have a terrible reputation, though, and I’ll refer you offsite to read about that aspect: I like them too much to write evil things about them. Now I must hide them under my bed so they can rot … blett (sorry, medlars) in peace.

To keep you out of my medlar stash, here’s a recipe. It’s from Thomas Dawson’s The Good Huswifes Jewell, London 1596.

To make a Tarte of Medlers

Take medlers that be rotten, and stamp them, then let them sit on a chafing dish and coales, and beate in two yolkes of egges, boyling it till it be somewhat thick, then season them with suger, sinamon, and ginger and lay it in paste.

food history, fruit, ingredients, medlars, recipe, Medlar Tart