Food History

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.