Food History

First I have some news and then I have a cookbook to talk about.

My news is that I have a deformed postcard to give away. It’s a proof for the Conflux banquet postcard for this year. Karen (the Conflux chair) had a few extra made so that several people could proof them and when that was all done she gave the extras to me. Anyone who wants one can email me or post a comment below here before next Sunday. I’ll pull a name out of a hat. I’m happy to post it anywhere in the world. There are very few of these postcards round – all the finals will be correct in spelling, in ingredients, in proper names. If you know anyone who collects postcards, you might want to speak up.

As I promised yesterday, today’s book is about celebrities. At least, that’s what it claims. It’s the heart Foundation’s “Celebrity Cooks Collection,” which really makes it a nice collection of food writers who were active and known around 1995. It’s a very passing kind of fame, but no less interesting for that.

It’s interesting how the celebrities have been chosen. It’s basically one per major publication and each of them has associated with a region. They’re bldly claiming the increasing internationalism of Australia in the 1990s as their own.

What’s particularly curious about this is that not all cuisines have been normalised. Most Australians (me among them) don’t really understand Nonya cuisine (Carol Selvarajah of the Australian Gourmet Traveller) and certainly don’t cook it on a regular basis, for instance. Thai cooking (Kathy Wharton, New Weekly) has been Australianised and the Mexican cooking (Di Parkes, Slimming Australia) tends to be rather adapted. Moroccan cooking (Jill Dupleix, The Sydney Morning Herald), on the other hand, is somewhat trendy right now, as is any North African dish that can fit in a tagine. I’ve seen tagines on sale at every single gourmet cookshop I’ve been in recently, while I have seen very little Thai cookware, and when I bring my Thai tiffin to a picnic everyone exclaims at it.

It goes in waves, with a few dishes in each wave sticking. Sometimes a whole branch of cuisine sticks in a current trend, when there’s a population group in Australia to support it. Thus Greek cooking (Barbara Northwood, Woman’s Day) is friendly and familiar. I’ve had numerous conversations about Masterchef in recent days (since it finished very recently) and one question that cropped up over and over again was puzzlement: how could anyone not know the basic ingredients in moussaka?

Celebrity cookbooks help us trace who is notable at a given moment in time, and whose fame continues through many moments in time, but they also provide us with yet another yardstick for measuring food trends and seeing how they shape our society.