It hardly needs to be argued that cookery books-whether heavyweight tomes of general culinary practice or fleeting pamphlets of promotional recipes-are important primary sources for food historians and sometimes useful sources of illustrative material for other historians. A few famous works, such as those of Apicius and the Isabella Beeton, have attracted intense study. Others, including the contributory recipe collections that began to appear in the nineteenth century, have received much less attention. The use historians make of cookery books varies from mere sources of illustrative examples through impressionistic surveys to close analysis of text, content and style-and as with all sources, must be informed by an understanding of the nature, context and limitations of the material.
This paper draws on my research in the late 1990s into print media and the development of an Australian culture of food and eating, which included exploratory use of a database as a research tool for analysing commonalities and changes in cookery book contents. It outlines the general method, reflects on its successes and limitations and discusses its potential for further application. These observations are illustrated by a more recent case study of the Cookery Book of Good and Tried Receipts' published by the Women's Missionary Association of the Presbyterian Church in NSW. While modest from a gastronomic point of view, the Presbyterian book is an important primary source for Australian food history. It was one of the first contributory collections to appear on the local scene, remained in print for a century, and was frequently revised and reissued. Subject, as always, to interpretation, it gives a time-lapse view of a section of Australian food culture. (Although outside the scope of this paper, it also provides some insights into the life and times of the organisation which sponsored it.)
Frances Bonner, English Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland.
"Cookery Books as Television History"
Cookery shows were some of the earliest television programs to combine instruction and entertainment, long before the term infotainment was coined. They also produced spin-off merchandise, in particular cookery books by the television cooks (later to become celebrity chefs). A major sub-section of the field of cookery books for the second half of the twentieth century is composed of books by television presenters, before, during and after their stint on the box, but cookery programs have not been of high priority with those saving Australia's television heritage. In the difficult field of television history, working with a very patchy archival record, especially in Australia, cookery books can constitute one of the sources to draw on to examine how television operated in its early decades.
In this the fiftieth anniversary of television starting in Australian (well, in Sydney and Melbourne) an examination of cookery books can illuminate both early television and the relationship between food and popular culture. As much as possible the books examined will be Australian and relate to Australian programs, but examples from other English speaking cultures will also be drawn on, not least to follow the career of Graham Kerr, arguably the central figure of early Australian food shows. Other writer/presenters considered will include Bernard King and Peter Russell Clarke.
The paper will look at the relationship between Julia Child's (available) US TV series The French Chef and the accompanying book to establish grounds for conjecturing about the articulation of advice and instruction between the two media, before considering instances of books where few other traces of the TV show remain, as is the case with very early Graham Kerr. Television-related cookbooks also serve as valuable aids to viewers' memories in trying to recapture aspects of the contemporary reception of the early cooking shows.
Benjamin S. Buckland, The University of Melbourne
Eating Authenticity.
The American Food Writer M.F.K Fisher wrote fifteen books and countless articles during her long career. Works like the volume on French Provincial cooking she co-authored with Julia Child, and the delightful evocations of the French "at table" in works such as Serve it Forth and The Gastronomical Me, changed, without doubt, the tastes and the mores of her American public. The impact of her work, however, goes far beyond the kitchens of her many readers.
As Brillat-Savarin -and the celebrity chefs that follow in his footsteps today- have always understood, cookbooks play a key role in the codification of culture and of class. Key to this codificatory function has always been an affirmation of "authenticity", an affirmation that seeks to reassure the reader that what they are reading, or cooking, or thinking is "the real deal."
Like the well-studied semiotic relationship between the tourist site, the guidebook and the tourist, the cookbook acts as a mediator between its reader and the unknown, pointing out, not only what is there, but what is good to eat and above all what is authentic.
It will be argued here that, by writing at the important, and at the time cutting-edge, juncture between food-writing and travel-writing, the early work of M.F.K. Fisher was able to exploit this function in two genres at once, playing an important codificatory role, not only in the way Americans ate, but in the way they viewed France itself.
Liane Colwell
Cookery Books as Culture: from Ethnic Diversity to Cookbooks as Theme Parks?
This paper examines the cultural, sociological and economic context of the emergence of ‘ethnic cookbooks’ in Australia in the mid to late-1970's, viewed as a product of migration, nascent multiculturalism, and increasing international travel. In particular, the paper examines Charmaine Solomon's The Complete Asian Cookbook (1976) and Tess Mallos's The Complete Middle East Cookbook (1979), both of which sold in the hundreds of thousands. As much as both books drove increasing consumption of "ethnic" cookbooks, I argue they also acted as principle catalysts of social and cultural change in that period. However, I also look at how, in the last thirty years, "ethnic cooking" vacated the driving seat of culinary change. No longer do we see a continuity of "ethnic" cuisines at the cutting edge of culinary (and cultural) innovation, so much as a proliferation of various, and sometimes eclectic styles, produced for a hungry consumer market: "regional," "fusion," "raw," "organic," the list goes on. Are these merely fads inspired by the profit motive?; themes cultivated in cookbooks for entertainment and diversion? What function does this more recent "eclecticising" of contemporary cookbooks tell us about cultural life in the present? To offer some answers, I examine the current publishing climate with special attention given to a range of trends which seem to "inspire" such cookbooks: cash rich/ timepoor consumers, celebrity worship, time compression, the entrepreneurialisation of the chef, and health and lifestyle faddism.
Nathalie Cooke
What's on the Page, What Isn't, and What Just Came to be
Looking Through Four Canadian Cookbooks
This paper emerges from a larger study aimed at identifying forces that influenced the shape and reshaping of the daily meal in Canada. In order to identify the roots of Canadian cooking -its longstanding characteristics and moments of significant change- this larger study examines revisions in successive editions of major Canadian cookbooks (of both official languages) and shifts in role and image of influential culinary figures (defined as those responsible for major culinary institutions or trends). Given time constraints, the proposed conference paper will be far more limited in scope.
Specifically, I propose to look closely at the publication history of four significant Canadian cookbooks: two English-Canadian and two French-Canadian. Practically speaking, I'll treat these as two pairs of texts: Catharine Parr Traill's Female Emigrant's Guide (1854) and La nouvelle cuisiniere canadienne (1850) were among Canadas earliest cookbooks; and The Home Cook Book (1877) and Directions diverses donnees par la Rev. Mere Caron (1878) contributed to the establishment of a distinctly national culinary tradition.
What's on the Page? First, I'll justify my choices, on the basis of their extraordinary sales figures and longevity, as well as the sheer number of successive re-editions.
What Isn't? Next, I'll scrutinize their significance as social, historical, cultural indicators. Particularly revealing, of course, are the editorial decisions: what editors choose to change or not to change over the course of successive re-editions says much about the socio-historic and socio-economic moment in Canada and, in the case of the French-language cookbooks, French Canada.
And What Just Came to be. Finally, I'll question the reliability of these primary texts as sources of information about descriptive practice. They are clearly indicators of prescriptive practice, and make explicit the expectations of the home caregiver of the contemporary moment. But how can we use them as reliable evidence of descriptive practice? One answer is that, as investigative scholars, we are forced to read far more than the recipes: we must look closely at the stains and splatters of the pages, check for wear and tear, hunt for photographical and anecdotal evidence – all with an eye to distinguishing the context of textual reproduction and reception. As readers, in other words, we must learn to read between the lines and through the pages in order to catch a glimpse of life in Canada's early kitchens.
John Fitzpatrick
Jewish cookbooks and Jewish histories
A prominent strand in the analysis of "national" cookbook histories appears to take as its central problematic the relationship between the gradual broadening of literacy within a given society and the gradual strengthening within that society of a distinctive complex cuisine - associated particularly with the growth of an urban bourgeoisie, and distinctive in regard to both peasant and aristocratic food cultures. This analytical approach may be described as evolutionary, progressivist and internalist - in the sense that it concentrates on charting the gradual evolution and internal logic of the literacy-cuisine relationship over many centuries of development.
This paper will argue that the relationship between the Jewish cookbooks and Jewish histories runs directly counter to the complex of assumptions sketched above., Taking Claudia Rodens distinction between a "standard" Ashkenazi food culture and an "arbitrary" Sephardic grouping, it will argue that cookbooks expounding the Ashkenazi ‘standard’ enshrine in print the cooking of a particular (and relatively recent) time and place - which is remarkable, against the broad sweep of Jewish histories, for its lack of association with either urbanization or female literacy. Its importance in contemporary Jewish cookbooks stems less from long-term internal evolution than from external shocks, discontinuities and displacements in 19th and 20th century Ashkenazi history.
In conclusion, the paper will briefly consider whether these propositions about Jewish cookbooks and Jewish histories merely reflect very specific features of the Jewish diaspora experience, or whether they are relevant to the broader concept of ‘national’ cookbooks and "national" cuisines.
Duncan Galletly
On the Acquired Characteristics of old Cookery Books
No sooner has a newly printed cookery book left the printing press than it begins a process of decay. Passing through multiple hands, and perhaps generations, it will suffer chemical self-destruction, the effects of the environment, and the physical and chemical trauma associated with human contact.
Years later, when found on the shelves of a second hand book dealers, it will have altered significantly from its initial state. It may have acquired scuffs, marks, stains, inscriptions, food, inclusions of paper and dried flowers, and a range of scribbles and drawings. The cover, spine, plates, leaves and quires may be torn, detached or missing and subsequent attempts to repair or protect the cookery book may be obvious.
In general, apart from very old handwritten additions to cookery books, the greater the degree of change the less the book’s "value"; change is usually considered undesirable, the book becomes unattractive in comparison to copies more closely resembling the original state.
However while some qualities are undoubtedly lost, we can also consider that another quality has been gained – importantly we can consider that the book contains information. The state of a book must reflect not only its original form, but also its subsequent history. Given that much interest is placed on the use of cookery books it may be useful to attempt to derive some aspects of use from non-original acquired characteristics.
Using a collection of early cookery books this paper examines physical state, inclusions and manuscript additions in an attempt to derive possible inferences.
Roger Haden
Culinary Assuagement and National Aspiration: Reading the Cultural Imaginary in, A Book of Mediterranean Food (1949) and The Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook (1950)
Cookbooks, or rather their contents, do not appear fully formed from the minds of their creators. Certainly not in the case of "Betty Crocker," the fictional author of the famous Picture Cookbook! Nor are they books only about cookery. Cookery books communicate feelings, values, desires, and cultural aspirations in addition to their assumed role as practical guides. Moreover, cookbooks are the products of particular times and a specific culture: the latter being a term which denotes ideas as much as it does practices, the imaginary as well as the taken for granted, dreaming as much as eating foods. Cookery books are texts which give "ingredients," even "recipes," for both (cultural) imaginings and (culinary) realities.
Taking two very different cookbooks, produced at the same time, one in the US, the other in the UK, this paper offers a comparative analysis of what might be called the cultural "background noise" of cookbooks. It offers a reading and analysis of the very different cultures which produced these iconic culinary texts. It reflects on the importance of cookery books as a galvanising force which can both shape and reinforce popular beliefs, values, and sentiments.
Kerrie Handasyde, Melbourne College of Divinity
Community Cookbooks in Churches of Christ
In Churches of Christ the liturgical foods of bread and (non-alcoholic) wine are the central focus of each worship service, which is often followed with a cup of tea and a biscuit or slice. Harvest thanksgiving festivals have tied working lives to the spiritual. Providing food to the needy or raising money through selling cakes, pies and lamingtons have formed the backbone of women’s church social service. In this food-rich context recipe books were often produced for fundraising purposes, evolving out of the shared experience of eating and the food preparation undertaken by women cooking for the annual calendar of church dinners and picnics.
This paper, part of an MA thesis in progress, explores the material evidence of church recipe books for the insight they offer into the life of the worshipping community that produced them. It sets a selection of cookbooks from Churches of Christ congregations in historical context, reading them for evidence of social bond, gender roles in changing times and, with the many verses and poems deliberately setting these books apart from secular offerings, as religious literature.
Angela Heuzeroeder
Searching for Australia's First Regional Cookery Book
Thinking of Australia as a collection of regions has generated much research and discussion in the past few years. Regional food must surely occupy the most public space in this discussion, and chefs travelling around Australia to present local dishes regularly appear on our television screens.
Australian regionalism is not new, however. Because of its size Australia was always occupied and settled in a series of regions and people in those regions had their own tribal loyalties long before they thought of themselves as Australian. Separate regions, given greater
definition by the formation of local council districts with boundaries defined on maps, began to lend their names to Australian cookery books in the first half of the twentieth century.
This paper is an attempt to find early regional cookery books. It will establish some criteria for determining the attributes of a regional cookery book. It will then examine a small selection of examples taken from the Bibliography of Australian Cookery Books Published
Prior to 1941 compiled by Bette Austin and produced in 1987. Apart from searching for evidence of regional character in the books, the paper will speculate about which was possibly Australia's first regional cookery book.
Jennifer Hillier
The past ain't what it used to be: Cookery books as nostalgia
One common criticism of the contemporary cookbook industry is that it panders vicariously to the desires of jaded urbanites for simpler and more "authentic" lifestyles. As Alan Saunders puts it: "your average large, slim, glossy cookery book may show you pictures of farms, fieldworkers and so on, but it has about as much interest in the realities of food production as Marie Antoinette had when she put on a bonnet and made like a shepherdess." The bulk of cookbook production since the early 1980s certainly bears out Christopher Lasch's observation that "a society that has made nostalgia a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today." However, "nostalgia" has become, along with "tradition" and "authenticity" a postmodern catch-all criticism for concerns with ‘the world we have lost’ or, more correctly, the world we are losing. Contemporary sceptics are quick to detect the whiff of "nostalgia" in not only the latest ‘slim glossy cookery book," "villa" cooking school travelogue or "Tuscan and Provencal transplant narrative" but also the classics like Elizabeth David and Patience Gray.
Contrary to this view, I suggest that such authors are not guilty of the charge of "empty nostalgia." The post-Second World War flowering of cookery and gastronomic works often had more in common with the impulses which gave rise to the sociological imagination (and the imagination of social history) in the early nineteenth century, when conservative social critics tried to grapple with the early impact of the industrial revolution and argued that "tradition" and an "appeal to the past" might throw important light on contemporary life.
Dr Alastair Hurst and Dr Lara Anderson, The University of Melbourne
Cooking up a Nation: The Recipes of Emilia Pardo Bazan.
Emilia Pardo Bazan (1851-1923) is the only nineteenth-century Spanish woman writer to be admitted to the literary canon by her contemporaries. Her prolific opus, more than 800 publications including novels, short stories, articles for the press, and essays on literary criticism, participated in the nation-building project traditionally associated with the male authors of her generation, a group known as the Restoration authors; the Borbon monarchy had been restored to the throne in 1876, just three years after the fall of the short-lived First Republic of 1873.
In 1913 Pardo Bazán published La cocina espanola antigua y moderna [Traditional and Modern Spanish Cookery] a unique contribution to Spanish gastronomic discourse. This collection of recipes has been all but ignored, as it does not fit in with the accepted reading of her work as "masculine" in form and content. However, as this paper will seek to demonstrate, her food writing also reflects the same cultural and intellectual aspirations as her canonically inscribed works. On the one hand the traditional recipes of regional Spain are privileged, consonant with contemporary nationalistic agenda, yet on the other hand, Pardo Bazan links modernity to French cultural, and in particular gastronomic hegemony. Her collected recipes illustrate therefore the cultural bind typical of the Restoration movement in which Paris, the acknowledged capital of modernity, at once promises "progress" and undermines Spanish national and cultural autonomy.
Raelene Inglis
Magazine Recipes: Marginal or Mainstream?
Cookbooks are becoming acknowledged as artefacts inscribed with cultural value, and thus worthy of academic endeavour. Recent scholarly investigations of this genre demonstrate that the overarching concept of a cookbook (a collection of recipes presented in written format) should be examined from different perspectives in recognition of the diversity of cookbook types, -such as authored, community, manuscript, and columns in magazines and newspapers. This paper focuses on the cookery columns in women's magazines and newspapers, highlighting the complexities and potential that such periodicals offer to questions about cultural transmission, contributor behaviour and food fashion trends. Usually commanding wide circulation and ready availability, women's magazines in particular present their readers with a variety of subject matter in compact form. The amount of information about food and cooking varies between publications and because of their somewhat insubstantial nature individual magazine issues or newspapers often pass out of general circulation unless the recipes are excised and preserved in a scrapbook. Viewed historically (in library collections), these columns demonstrate a wide variety of editorial styles, many maintaining a delicate balance between expert discourse and conversational chat with editors and contributors becoming enmeshed in on-going dialogue and interactive debate. In contrast, community-contributed cookbooks, once they are published, become static representations of their community and remain unmodified. As a dynamic interface between contributors and editors these magazine cooking pages frequently show significant responsiveness to consumer enquiries and document fairly closely the introduction of new ingredients, dishes and trends into the wider community. Often original (or presumed original) recipes appear in cookery columns before inclusion in community cookbooks and in this more interactive format readers are able to report problems or query new methods and/or ingredient proportions. In this paper several recipes are tracked from their initial appearance in food columns of women's magazines and newspapers to their inclusion into community cookbooks. These recipes were analysed for rapidity of transmission, susceptibility to modification, assimilation and longevity in an attempt to understand the role these publications play in the development of culinary knowledge.
Margaret Kelly
Sharp Cooks: a personal Journey through my Grandmother's recipes
Sisters, Julia, Martha and Jane Sharp were born in the mid north of South Australia in the 1880's. Apart from my grandmother Julia who moved to Adelaide upon her marriage, they spent their lives in rural South Australia. Their recipe books, handwritten complete with index, dating from about the 1920’s and earlier, reveal much of how they lived through drought, economic depression and war. The frayed yellowed pages have now been entrusted to me.
The collection of recipes looks very different from those of modern times. The emphasis is firmly on cakes, biscuits, puddings, jams and relishes. Meat and vegetables are hardly mentioned. Some are plain everyday recipes; others are elaborate confections for special occasions. Quantities are large by our standards and often there is very little in the way of method only a list of ingredients.
My paper speculates as to why these differences are apparent and narrates my adventures in testing these receipts from the aptly named Batchelor's Buttons to a horrible concoction called Boston Cream. I also describe some of the social gatherings where these dishes were enjoyed.
Some of the recipes, e.g. ammonia biscuits, show the influence of my grandmother's Silesian German in-laws. Others use ingredients that are relatively unknown today like citron and mazina. All illustrate the self-sufficiency and prudent housekeeping of our foremothers.
"Kitchener Kartoffel Kloesse" and "Curry for Canada": Nationalism and multiculturalism in mid-twentieth-century cookbooks.
This paper will explore recipes and cookbooks as markers of Canadian identity especially during the nineteen fifties and sixties.
This is a pivotal time in the history of Canada, leading up to Expo 67, the international world's fair held in Montreal as a celebration of the country's centenary. At the Expo site, restaurants at the numerous international pavilions presented versions of national foods for visitors to taste, authenticated by allusions to long-standing culinary traditions, by having foods specially imported from the motherland, and by inclusions of traditional artefacts within the eating spaces. Two restaurants in the Canadian pavilion offered up distinct versions of culinary identity. One, in a room with aboriginal-esque artwork on the walls, menu and dishes, served foods derived from indigenous products such as whale. The other, decorated in distinctly sixties modernist style, served an amalgam of dishes such as Seafood Newburg along with Tourtiere. This bifurcated approach suggests dual priorities—on the one hand, to seek out a uniquely "Canadian" culinary identity, and on the other, to highlight the nation's multicultural dimensions and promote international foods as compatible with larger practices of modernity.
Cookbooks of the era reflect this dual resonance, but manifest it in different ways. Whereas a few recipes and cookbooks introduce readers to unusual indigenous ingredients, the more common strategy is blatantly or tacitly to saturate dishes whose origins are presented as traceable to other countries, with distinctly Canadian overtones. Hence we see Kitchener Kartoffel Kloesse, in the Laura Secord Canadian Cook Book of 1966, which is described as derived from a German dish but also as a variation of Poutine Rapee, a dish prepared by French-speaking Acadians in Canada's eastern province of New Brunswick. (Laura Secord is a national retail candy company that produced the book in partnership with the Canadian Home Economics Association, an organisation of home economics professionals established in 1939.) Working at a much more modest scale, community cookbooks, produced as local fundraising projects by parishes, schools or other charitable organizations, and containing recipes submitted mostly by homemakers, nevertheless show a similar tendency. One such example by Mrs. R. R. Blake comes from a collection called Personal Recipes assembled to fund a Presbyterian charity in Montreal: called Curry for Canada its ingredients include curry powder, leftover roast lamb, moist coconut, lemon or lime, and gravy or soup stock, the latter for which Campbell's Mulligatawny Soup is offered as a suitable alternative.
As plans for Expo drew near, during the centenary year itself, and also in the aftermath of the festivities in Montreal, Canadians sought means to generate a national identity fit for a country entering a mature stage of growth, despite a small and broadly disbursed population in a huge country, despite substantial ethnic and cultural diversity and extensive immigration, despite proximity to the United States (it was during this period that Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau described Canada-US relations as a mouse in bed with an elephant), and despite the rumblings of French nationalism in Quebec during this period of the Quiet Revolution. What is fascinating is how this process played out in the context of food, both through deliberately proscriptive, hegemonic venues -the Canadian pavilion and certain national organizations- and in the spontaneous writings of individuals whose enthusiasm was simply to share recipes and support local projects.
Prof. Helen M. Leach, University of Otago, New Zealand
What Do Cookery Books Reveal about the Evolution of the New Zealand Pavlova?
The history of pavlovas in New Zealand is far more complex and intriguing than the simplistic argument about their origin suggests. In past episodes of the debate, the media have resisted the notion that recipes evolve, and instead demand an inventor, a time, a place, and a single concept. For the first time a quantitative approach to the history of pavlovas reveals the complex nature of this evolution over the period 1926 to 2000. Analysis of a database of 653 pavlova or closely related recipes from New Zealand cookbooks, together with a database of meringue recipes dating back 1782, reveals
the application of the ballerina's name to at least three different types of dish between 1926 and 1929
the evolution of four main sub-types of meringue pavlova between 1929 and 2000
a period of accelerated variation after World War II leading to the appearance of six pavlova variants between the late 1940s and 1980s
influences at various stages of their evolution from the United States and Australia
a significant change in the context in which they were served as shown in their re-classification from cakes to desserts
interaction between domestic and commercial production in the evolution of several variants
the impact of new technology, leading to major changes in methods of mixing
appropriation of other recipes under the name pavlova
active input from both domestic cooks and food professionals in solving the problems of cooking meringues
the likely prototypes of pavlova meringues and their international analogues.
Janet Mitchell, University of Otago, New Zealand.
What's in a recipe? Pavlovas from selected New Zealand cookery books 1939-1987.
The modern New Zealand pavlova is a soft centred meringue cake decorated with whipped cream and fruit. Although the recipe has changed over the years, the name pavlova in NZ cookbooks has been mainly associated with a basic meringue mixture that consisted of egg white, sugar and usually vanilla.
The precursor of the modern pavlova recipe in NZ was published in the N.Z. Dairy Exporter Annual in 1929. It contained the basic meringue ingredients and corn flour. By 1934 there also existed pavlova cake recipes with vinegar. In 1939 the popular Edmonds Sure to Rise Cookery Book published its first pavlova recipe which included the basic meringue ingredients, vinegar but no corn flour. The 2005 edition included a pavlova recipe, not only with vinegar and corn flour but also with water. As well the instructions for shaping, cooking temperature and time had been modified.
This paper examines the major forms of the pavlova recipe that appeared in New Zealand cookery books from 1939 to 1987. Six basic types were prepared and cooked, their exterior and interior characteristics documented and an explanation of these attributes tendered in terms of the ingredients, proportion of ingredients, method of mixing and shaping, cooking times and temperatures.
It was found that notable changes in these attributes related to changes in technology, especially the use of an electric beater, better control of oven temperatures, and silicone coated paper for lining the cooking tray. Changes in characteristics due to changes in ingredients were also observable. The development of a soft centre could be attributed to the addition of water and vinegar as well as to better control of the cooking temperature and time. Overall it would appear that although the various recipes for pavlovas evolved from a meringue mixture, the addition of new ingredients, changes in the mixing and cooking method and the decoration of the finished product, resulted in a creation that became a New Zealand icon.
Deanna Pucciarelli, University of California, Davis.
The Dietary Use of Chocolate as Told Through 19th Century North American Cookbooks
The objective of this paper is to establish the historical significance of chocolate and cocoa's medicinal use from 1850 through 1910 as told through American cookbooks; and, to determine the impact dietary advice, as told through cookbooks, had on the general public.
An early account, The Natural History of Chocolate, translated and published in 1730, outlines commonly held medicinal beliefs of early America [islands]. On writing on the medicinal properties of chocolate, Brooks translates that the Spaniards erroneously define chocolate as cold and dry, and that "these prejudices have from the Spaniards passed into other Nations"
(Brooks 1730). Did, as Brooks translates, 19th century North American women, as primary caretakers of the family's health practices, adhere to the medicinal theory of hot-cold, wet-dry, and was chocolate part of the preventative or healing culture of this time? The answer is yes, and the evidence can be found in 19th century North American cookbooks. Moreover, within sections titled "Cookery for the Sick and Convalesce" cookbooks are a means for filtering dietary advice to the general public while giving voice to "Other." With chapter titles such as "Health of the Mind" and "Running a Household" these books provide the context in which we understand women's, and as an extension society's, perceived cultural norms.
Interestingly, health information today is also predominately transferred through women's popular literature. By researching and analysing 19th century cookbooks as a means of giving voice to women we can then compare the dispersion of homeopathic, dietary advice over a century and a half by comparing the magnitude of influence that both channels had/have over North American society's dietary behaviors.
If cookbooks were a resource for women during the 19th century in caring for their family, and health magazines capture today's female audience, the 21st century medical community can use this analysis to understand the cultural context wherein health messages were, and are, sought after and integrated into the lives of women and their families.
Paul van Reyk
Thamboom Hodie, Lumpraya Curry and Blancmange.
"Not quite the Same, not quite the Other, she stands on that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out."
Trin T. Minh-ha. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation. Gender and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge 1991, p74.
Ada de la Harpe, my maternal grandmother, would probably by underwhelmed, if not downright tetchy, that I have chose to open this paper with a quote that puts her in the role of the "third world" "hybrid" "subaltern" woman of Trin's observation. And yet I don’t have any hesitations in doing so; not for her, nor her "race," Sri Lankan Burgher, nor for that matter for placing myself on that same threshold, albeit as a hybrid man. The Sri Lankan Burghers are the product of intermarriage between the Dutch, Portuguese, and some French military and commercial men (and these marriages were very much gendered in this way) with Sinhala and Tamil women.
This paper looks at Ada's personal recipe book and attempts a postcolonial reading of it for what it might tell us of how Burgher women in particular negotiated this position of hybridity within the colonial programs of their European forebears.
Richard N. S. Robinson, School of Tourism and Leisure Management, the University of Queensland.
Charles Arcodia, School of Tourism and Leisure Management, the University of Queensland.
Dom Rizzo, Executive Chef/ Owner, Mondo Organics, East Brisbane.
Reading colonial cookery books to understand domestic antipodean hospitality: A case study of Mrs Lance Rawson's Cookery Book and Household Hints (1890).
Currently, there is an emerging body of literature concerned with tracing the origins of Australia's hospitality industry. Yet this research is concerned with colonial hospitality attitudes rather than the managerial operations of emergent commercial establishments. The State Library of Queensland recently hosted an event showcasing a variety of collection and loaned cookery books of national and international worth. Among them was Mrs Lance Rawson's Cookery Book and Household Hints (1890: 3rd Edition). This paper reports on the findings of two content analysis case studies of Mrs Rawson's, particularly to extract contemporaneous interpretations of colonial domestic (as opposed to commercial) hospitality.
The principle purpose of this work is achieved by engaging in a dialogue with the text's original author, as free of time and space permutations as possible. Hermeneutics has been successfully applied as an interpretative tool, to a range of tradition laden significant texts from the biblical, to legal precedents, to musical scores. A hermeneutical approach assists in the (constructive) deconstruction of texts so that the reader may use the text as a portal into the past (its values and assumptions). This is achieved by oscillating between the text in part, and then as a whole, yet acknowledging the cultural and temporal baggage brought to it by the reader. The hermeneutical cycle is then complete when the text's quintessence can be applied, or at least understood, in the present.
From preliminary readings it is anticipated the findings will present a number of themes: the embedded notion of host-guest relations, especially as it transpires in "the bush"; the earliest impacts of indigenous and ethnic minorities on food production, its consumption and hence private hospitality; and evidence of a range of issues concerned with the management of a household.
Just as researchers have sought to identify an antipodean cuisine, this paper is a launch for understanding the origins of colonial hospitality, albeit from a private perspective, the findings of which might assist industry in grappling with a regional service culture. While other works have traced the evolution of hospitality in Australia from the domestic to the commercial, this paper attempts to do so via the medium of textual analysis, underpinned by a hermeneutic interpretative paradigm.
Barbara Santich
Edward Abbotts Tasmania
It is rare that a cookbook reflects contemporary events -which, in their turn, eventually become history- as closely as did Edward Abbott's The English and Australian Cookery Book, published in England in 1864. Abbott's work can be seen as a scrapbook, an assemblage of extracts from a diverse range of books and newspapers published in the nineteenth century, but to the extent that he reports on his time and place, and its personalities, he is also documenting a period of Tasmanian social (and gastronomic) history. This paper examines Abbott's work as a complementary resource for the study of Tasmania's colonial history.
Isabelle de Solier
Foodie Blogs: Cookbooks, Recipes and Gustatory Identities.
The practice of "blogging," or keeping a weblog that records the events of one's everyday life, is a relatively new cultural practice which has been enabled by the information technology of the Internet. Such blogs offer individuals a space of self-representation in the public sphere, in which they put their lives on display for others to see, interact with, and pass comment on. The food blog has become an increasingly popular genre of blogging, particularly in Australia, where there were at least fifty-three food blogs at the end of 2005, twenty-four from Melbourne alone; and there is now an international annual award for the best food blog. This paper will explore the potential of digital methodologies for food studies, using the food blog as a way of examining the role played by cookbooks and recipes in the production of the gustatory identity of the "foodie." Drawing on a range of Australian blogs created by self-declared "foodies," the paper will analyse both the ways in which they use cookbooks published by others; and how the internet allows them to become authors of their own culinary discourse, through the textual and photographic documentation of their recipes. It will examine how these various practices are harnessed to the bloggers' projects of self-representation and self-stylisation as foodies.
Dr Sian Supski, Curtin University of Technology, Perth.
Chop, taste and read: Examining the diary cookbooks of Stephanie Alexander
Since 1985 Alexander has published ten cookbooks — nine written by herself including two editions of Stephanie's Menus for Food Lovers and The Cook's Companion; and one written in collaboration with Maggie Beer, Tuscan Cookbook. The two books I will examine in this paper are those written in diary format — Stephanie's Seasons, which was published in 1993, and Stephanie's Journal published in 1999. The diary format is an unusual way to present a published cookbook — women have used this method, most commonly in manuscript cookbooks, but these manuscript cookbooks were never intended to be published (Newlyn 32). This is what makes Alexander's diary cookbooks unique — they were written with the intention of being published.
In this paper I will analyse the significance of women's writing through two traditionally gendered forms of writing — diaries and cookbooks (Edwards 55). I will also explore a particular genre of cookbooks — diary cookbooks, or what Kelly has classified as "autobiographical cookbooks" and how such books provide a means of incorporating aspects of a writer's everyday life with cookery writing and recipes (257). Importantly, the diary cookbook allows the writer to explore the minutiae of everyday life, including cooking and eating, whilst simultaneously articulating the performance of multiple identities — in Alexander's case, as entrepreneur, mother, restaurateur, friend, writer, daughter, community leader, activist and chef.
Peter Strawhan
The Premier Did What? Don Dunstan and his Cookbook
In November 1976 Don Dunstan was perhaps a little below the peak of his political curve as South Australia's best known Labor premier when, of all things, he published a cookbook. Apparatchiks In the local Labor Party were aghast at this latest fling of the artistic gauntlet by their unpredictable leader.
It was bad enough in April of that fateful year, when he launched his own commercial recording of Desiderata and other poems. Although somehow, that event fitted in well enough with Dashing Donnie's reading of the Ogden Nash words to Camille Saint Saen's Carnival of the Animals, performed by orchestral players from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Even though he chose to recite his lines seated astride an amiable elephant from Taronga Park Zoo. The elephant, appropriately enough, was named Serena and the performance took place on the 22 August 1976.
Even the notorious episode of his famous pink shorts, modelled for the press photographers on the hallowed steps of Adelaide's Parliament house one memorable day in 1972, had been spun into the Dunstan mystique.
But egad, a cookbook, one was tempted to say, that really took the cake, and a prize cake at that! A locally published cookbook, that sold some 40,000 copies over a few months from late 1976 to about mid-1977, is surely worthy of our attention. So too is the place of that cookbook in the history of Australian gastronomy. Other questions to be addressed in my paper include the why, the what, and the how of Dunstan's most successful publication.
Michael Symons
"The cleverness of the whole number": The golden age of Antipodean baking,
1890-1940
About one hundred years ago, Australian and New Zealand women took control of their own cooking in an unrivalled burst of domestic creativity. They produced Lamingtons, Anzac biscuits, Afghans, the Pavlova and many other cherished cakes and biscuits. They also supported such legendary books as the Schauer, Presbyterian and Barossa (Australia) and the St Andrew's, Edmonds and Aunt Daisy (New Zealand). What these recipes and books might lack in culinary refinement, they more than make up in social and cultural interest. Tracing the pathways of iconic recipes through the bibles tells us about both, and helps chart the culinary awakening. Lessons can be drawn about regionally-based community networks and political associations.
Jane Teal
How hot is hot?
Flour, spit, hands, heat on your face and brown paper were all reliable
methods of ascertaining oven temperature before the advent of the
temperature gauge and the thermostat. This paper will investigate,
through an examination of community cook books from the South Island of
New Zealand, whether these new fangled scientific inventions had any
impact on the recipes for cakes and biscuits which are contained within
them.
Dave Veart
The Cookbook Goes to War: New Zealand Cookbooks 1939-45.
The Second World War was an event clearly visible from the kitchen and it has left a rich legacy of cookbooks relating specifically to the abnormal conditions affecting New Zealand's food supply during this time. This paper examines the response of New Zealand's recipe writers to the restrictions placed on cooks by food rationing, the departure of large sections of the workforce to serve overseas and events as diverse as the Government’s commandeering of all the large fishing trawlers for use as minesweepers.
The paper will discuss how the groups and organisations who produced the cookbooks responded to these wartime restrictions in differing ways. Responses varied from community groups who carried on writing recipes regardless of outside events to government health professionals who appear to have seen the opportunity to control people's diets as the silver lining in a grey wartime cloud.
The paper also examines the use of the cookbook as propaganda and as a way of connecting New Zealanders with "Home" and the restrictions under which British cooks laboured at this time. To this end the implications of the reprinting in New Zealand of the British patriotic cookbook Anthology of Puddings will be discussed.
Finally the paper will examine the cookbooks produced at the very end of the war which made the first attempts at describing the new foods to which people had been exposed as a result of overseas service, by refugees or by the thousands of American troops who were stationed in the country from 1942 onwards.
