Food History

Where we come from colours how we read recipes and how we walk through markets and what we do with the food we cook. This was brought home to me when I did some gentle armchair travelling.

Food History (the blog, not the discipline!) is nearly a year old and I was doing a bit of a stocktake so I could think of where to take it for its second year. I’d assumed that most of you reading this are in the US and Australia, with just a few from Great Britain. I was right in numbers terms - 50% of you come from one of those three countries. There are more of you from the US than anywhere else, in fact. When I worked this out, I gave a little round of applause for you taking my Australian spelling and grammar and food measurements in your stride.

The big thing I discovered in my little armchair voyage was that the blogworld is a big place. I’ll put a list of the countries you come from at the end of this post. You need to remember that this is just a week’s statistics - so some of your countries may not be listed. If you want to be added to the list, email me using the contact details.

There’s a reason you may want to be added. It’s about time I did food history posts on all your countries. I can’t do this at once: the list is way, way too long. I’ll do one or two posts a week. I promise I won’t get rid of any rants, or information about recipe tests, or recipes from my grandmother, or interviews. I especially won’t stop finding biscuit and scone recipes for you, since they’re almost as popular as the rants. I post seven days most weeks, so there’s enough space for everything.

Mostly I’ll work down the list of countries alphabetically and do a post about something food historyish from each. For Poland I might do a post on a wonderful book I have, for instance. For one of the South American countries and for the Indian sub-continent I might talk about the glorious flavours we get from their spices.

If there’s a particualr topic you’d like to hear about for a country, then tell me in the comments or email me. And if you want your family stories heard or your favourite traditional recipes shared, please feel free to send them using the contact form. It will help all of us understand cuisines better if we have a balance of home cuisines and what books say about things.

Below the list of countries, you’ll find a list of languages. You can send me posts in any of those languages. I can’t write them, but I can read them and I would be entirely delighted to hear what your local market has to offer and how you intend to cook it, or what you eat on festive occasions (with recipes!). I’m especially interested (naturally) in biscuit and scone recipes.

This is my New Year’s resolution - to broaden my food world and have immense fun sharing it with my readers.

List of countries:

Argentina, Aruba, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Fiji, France, Germany, Greece, Grenada, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Papua, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and Montenegro, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey

List of languages: English, French, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, German

food history, countries, New Year plans