Cookery Books as History
July 3-4, 2006
Presented by The Research Centre for the History
of Food and Drink
Venue: Art Gallery of South Australia
Thank-you to all who took part in Cookery Books as History. The Research Centre's next conference will be held in 2007. Watch this space!
Cookery Books as History
- Key-note Speakers:
Canadian cookery book scholar, Elizabeth Driver (Canadian National Archives Bio.) is the author of the soon to be published, Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks (1825-1949) (University of Toronto Press, December, 2006) and, A Bibliography of Cookery Books Published in Britain, 1875-1914 (Prospect Books, 1989). Elizabeth has also edited or co-edited five classic Canadian cookbooks, including the Robin Hood Cookbook (Whitecap Books, 2003), The Home Cookbook (Whitecap Books, 2002), and most recently, Edith Adams Omnibus -Classic Canadian Cookbook Series (Whitecap Books, 2005).
The second key-note address will be presented by historian and cookery writer, Laura Mason (UK), author of Sugar Plums and Sherbet: The Prehistory of Sweets (Prospect Books, 1998, PB 2004), Traditional Foods of Britain (with Catherine Brown, Prospect Books,1999), Food Culture in Great Britain (Greenwood Press, 2004) and Farmhouse Cookery (The National Trust, 2005). Laura's CV is attached: Laura Mason
Brief
Local
(Australian and New Zealand) and international scholars from a range of academic disciplines are attending this conference, which acknowledges the cultural and methodological
importance of everyday culinary discourse as a resource of social inquiry.
The
emphasis is on cookbooks, but the topic includes recipes from newspaper
columns, magazine lift-outs, television shows and internet cookery sites, or
personal and other collected cooking-related records (card indexes,
manuscripts, clippings, etc).
As social
and cultural artefacts, cookbooks illustrate family
ideologies, fashion, women’s roles, food marketing strategies (industry and
advertising), nutritional and dietary norms, values and assumptions, the
publishing trade, globalisation and more. The
conference offers papers ranging from methodological issues (how can old cookery books be used, and how
reliable are they?), to bibliographic
studies including discussions of specific cookbooks, trends in culinary history, examinations
of present and past culinary authorities, and "the cookery book" in electronic media.
Background (Michael Symons, member of
the Marsden Fund research group)
Australian and New Zealand
scholars have been turning lately to a hitherto largely untapped resource,
cookery books. Several higher degrees are recently or nearly completed in such
disciplines as history, English literature, anthropology and gastronomy, and
New Zealand’s Marsden Fund is backing several researchers in a three-year study
under Professor Helen Leach of Otago University.
Perhaps 13,000 and 3,000 cookery works
respectively have been published in the two countries since the 1890s. They
range from flimsy promotional booklets to Lady Hackett’s Australian Household Guide (Perth, 1916), which extends to 1136
pages (for comparison, Stephanie Alexander’s Cook’s Companion (2004) measures 1126 pages). Many excellent works
have disappeared without much trace, such as Melanie Primmer’s Up-to-Date Housewife (Dunedin, 1926).
Others have appeared continuously for a century or more, such as the Cookery Book of Good and Tried Receipts
[Presbyterian] (Sydney, 1895- ) and the Edmonds (Christchurch, 1907-). Sales of some titles are measured in millions. The
sampling of old recipes in Anne Gollan’s Tradition
of Australian Cooking (Canberra, 1978) and David Burton’s Two Hundred Years of New Zealand Food &
Cookery (Wellington, 1982) signalled the emergence of national culinary
self-consciousness. Colin Bannerman made a close study of the early period in Friend in the Kitchen (Sydney, 1996).
But much more can be learned.
This conference belongs to an informal series
that commenced highly successfully in Wellington (N.Z.) in November 2005 and
might not even conclude with a third conference in Dunedin (N.Z.) at the end of
2007.
Contacts:
Roger Haden:
roger.haden@adelaide.edu.au
Michael Symons:
duckpress@hotmail.com
DRAFT CONFERENCE PROGRAM
(doc 34kB)
ABSTRACTS
PAPERS
- Thank-you to all those who participated by contributing and/or presenting a paper at Cookery Books as History. A review of the conference will appear in the July issue of The Research Centre for the History of Food and Drink's newsletter. The papers were diverse and of a very high standard. As it is the intention of The Research Centre for the History of Food and Drink to publish a selection of the papers, presenters are hereby invited to revise and submit final drafts for peer review. The deadline for submission for peer-review is September 01, 2006.
- Those papers which were previously available as links on this webpage have now been removed from the site. It is hoped that final corrected drafts of papers will be made available on our website in due course.
- Anyone not wishing to make their paper available
or who has any other queries regarding the peer review
process, please email Roger
Haden.
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