Food History

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