Food History

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.