Cuisines: Reflets des Sociétés
Review by Barbara Santich
Marie Claire Bataille-Benguigui and Françoise Cousin, eds.,
Cuisines: Reflets des Sociétés.
Paris: Editions Sépia-Musée de l'Homme, 1996. Pp. 462, abstracts in English.
This collection of texts by eminent anthropologists and ethnographers (mostly French or based in France) was
published to coincide with an exhibition, 'Histoire des Cuisines', held at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris in 1996/97.
In no way a catalogue of the exhibition, it was intended rather as a complement to the visual experience,
an interpretation by means of the written word.
Igor de Garine's introduction gives a rapid overview of many of the subjects discussed at length in subsequent contributions
and also offers an interpretation of 'cuisine.
Opting for a standard dictionary definition, 'the action of preparing foodstuffs for the purpose of their consumption',
he notes that 'cuisine' is the pivot between obtaining the food and consuming it though the term can also encompass
preceding operations including preservation, storage, and preliminary preparation.
'Cuisine' being the subject of this book, however, he proposes a limited definition: Cuisine refers to the
post-storage-cum-preservation phase of kitchen-to-table activities, consumption of the prepared dishes taking place
within a relatively short time.
The essays are grouped under three main headings: Products, tools and gestures; Food and drink as
expressions of identity; and Festive cuisine, rituals and representations.
There is wide geographic variation in the origins of the societies described (they include Papua-New Guinea, but not Australia),
which range from 'primitive' and pre-industrial (New Guinea) to highly industrialised (modern Spain, Lebanon).
Several of the contributions discuss culinary adaptation and evolution — for example, the charcuterie products
prepared after the traditional slaughter of the pig on the island of Réunion, where boudin (blood sausage) is
seasoned with chili.
An article on the food of Afghan refugees in Pakistan offers another view on the effects of globalisation.
Though rations are precisely calculated to meet nutritional requirements, they do not match cultural expectations;
wheat, for instance, is an ever-changing blend of grain from numerous donor countries instead of
differentiated dryland and irrigated varieties.
While hardly historical, Cuisine: Reflets des Sociétés delivers exactly what its title promises:
insights into the ways in which food, cooking and eating shape, and are shaped by, civilisations.
Barbara Santich is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of History, the University of Adelaide.
The second edition of her Apples to Zampone will appear in October.
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