Five Perspectives on the Second International Conference
Mack Holt: A Global Perspective
An international group of participants included scholars from Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as a large contingent from Australia. The topics covered by the various participants were truly global in nature. Although, as expected, there were many presentations that focused exclusively on Australia (7) and Europe (12), there were a number of others (6) that analysed the interaction of food and/or drink between various parts of the globe. Especially interesting were the papers that focused on how European settlers brought their foodways with them into Australia, with the result that the cultures of food and drink in modern Australia are an amalgam of European, other Asian, as well as indigenous cultural practices. And an impressive number of presenters (10) focused on more generic topics that allowed them to do comparative analysis on a global scale. These topics included women and food, recipes and culinary history, food in film, and wine and gastronomy. Thus, a principal emphasis of the conference was how central food and drink are to every culture in the world and how significant they are to constructing every culture's identity. Chronologically, the various presentations covered the entire gamut of the historical past from ancient Greece and Rome up to the present (and even the future). Above all, the various papers presented at the conference made it abundantly clear that the provisioning of food and drink to an ever-increasing population in the future will require much more attention to how our planet has constructed its cultures of food and drink in the past.
Mack P. Holt is Professor of History and Director, Honors Program in General Education, at George Mason University.
Andrea Cast: Gender and Drinking
Drink is fundamental to European foodways. The rich drank wine, the holy drank water and the common people drank too much. Many of the papers at the conference raised these issues. However, economics, religion and class were not the only defining factors in the drinking decisions people made. Gender was also a decisive force in shaping drinking patterns.
Chad Ludington’s paper "’A Good and Most Particular Taste:’ The Rise and Meaning of Luxury Claret in England, 1702-1730s" discussed the role of class in English drinking of claret. He demonstrated that late Stuart international politics interfered with aristocratic wine drinking. As claret became rare, obtaining it was a sign of wealth, privilege and taste. Apparently, aristocratic women did not share in this good taste. Claret was a gentleman’s drink, but gentlewomen drank white wine and sherry. Their drink was not a statement about their wealth, power and good taste. Gentlewomen’s drinking choices did not coincide with their husband’s; they had a different message.
Diane Kirkby’s paper "’Beer, Glorious Beer:’ Gender Politics and Australian Popular Culture" directly addressed the gendered nature of drinking in twentieth-century Australia. She described the public bar as a male space full of decisively masculine bonding rituals to which the barmaids were the only female witnesses. She also discussed the demise of this male preserve and the domestication of the front bar. Men proved their masculinity among other men by drinking in the front bar. The sexual revolution of the 1960s not only liberated women but also challenged the identity many men found in the six o’clock swill.
Three papers discussed medicinal drinking with material relevant to how men and women used alcohol to care for themselves. My paper, "For Your Health: Early Modern English Medicinal Drinks," examined the seventeenth-century medical fad of the "spring purge". Every spring thousands of people, mostly women, diagnosed themselves with scurvy so they could partake in a cure involving up to three pints of ale a day. In "Captain Cook’s Beer: The Antiscorbutic Use of Malt and Beer in Late Eighteenth-Century Sea Voyages" Brett Stubbs discussed how Captain Cook held on to the notion that beer was an antiscorbutic medication even though his experiments were inconclusive. He perpetuated the use of an ineffective but traditional treatment. Finally, Frances Thiele provided a look at how nineteenth-century travellers used alcohol on sea voyages. In "Champagne and Peppermints: The Use and Abuse of Shipboard Fare by Nineteenth-Century Travellers To and From Australia" she told how the women in first class tried to preserve a sense of normalcy during their voyage by continuing the polite customs from home, including their drinking customs. All of these papers discussed how men and women felt alcohol affected their health and mental wellbeing.
The papers touching on alcohol and gender covered all aspects of drinking and the wide variety of ways gendered alcohol patterns manifest themselves in society. Whereas Ludington addressed the idea of what people drank as a gendered construct, Kirkby demonstrated the gendered divide in where they drank. I discussed women using alcohol to purge a disease they most likely did not have. Stubbs addressed men refusing to let go of a cure for scurvy that did not work because they believed in the restorative powers of alcohol. Finally, Thiele suggested the role of drinking in cultural, class and gender distinctions by showing how important it was as part of a cultural script of normalcy. All of these papers suggest people wove what they drank, where they drank and with whom they drank deep into the core of their identities.
Andrea Cast is nearing the completion of her PhD dissertation on Women and Alcohol in Early Modern England.
Troy Clohessy: Wine
One of the major themes of the conference was wine, and four of the papers focussed on wine. One of these was conceptual in nature, and the other three discussed various aspects of the history of wine, one from the English perspective and two from the French.
Leif Aune is a Norwegian wine importer and hospitality lecturer with a restaurant background. As a result, his paper "Wine and Dining: Metaphors for Enchantment in a Post-Modern Society" was not rigorously academic, but it certainly led to vigorous discussion of favourite wines, restaurants and memories concerning such. And I think that was his point.
Chad Ludington, a graduate student at Columbia University, presented a paper titled "A Good and Most Particular Taste: The Rise and Meaning of Luxury Claret in England, 1702-1730s", which was, he informed me, culled from the second chapter of his dissertation. Ludington discussed how taxes and tariffs restricted the wine trade between France and England, so much so that port from the Iberian peninsula replaced claret as England’s most popular wine in the early eighteenth century.
After mentioning how embarrassed he was to be discussing French wine in the capital of Australia’s wine state, Mack Holt presented a fascinating paper on "The Political Economy of Wine in Early Modern Burgundy". As indicated by his title, Holt’s focus was "the inter-relationship between politics and the viticulture-based economy". For example, local magistrates frequently oversaw the grape harvest and meted out unusual punishments to offenders prosecuted for disrupting proceedings or harvesting early. He emphasised how much influence and political clout vinegrowers wielded especially in Burgundy. And I think everyone present agreed with Holt’s suggestion that the old Burgundian tradition of "rewarding" voters who turned out at local elections with free wine should be adopted here in Australia.
The last paper on wine was Rod Phillips’ paper "Taste, Terroir and Trade: The Re-Invention of French Wine in the Nineteenth Century". Phillips began by explaining how two key factors left the French wine industry in complete tatters towards the end of the nineteenth century: defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and the ravages of phylloxera. The reputation of the French state was shattered by the defeat, and this was reflected in the French wine industry, the "golden age" of which came to a grinding halt. The reconstruction of France as a nation state became inextricably linked with the resurgence of its wine industry, and political, cultural and commercial factors led to the now universal identification of France with its national beverage, wine.
According to Phillips, closely connected to the re-invention of the image of French wine was the concept terroir. The literal meaning of terroir is "soil". However, it has evolved into much more than this and is now taken to mean the total environment in which a vineyard exists. In France, terroir has legislative force in the system of appellation contrôlée.
Troy Clohessy is a graduate student writing a PhD dissertation on the history of the wine industry in the Coonawara.
Sarah Shepherd: The Peasantry
Peasantry, a multi-stranded theme, ran as a current through the conference, interwoven through subjects as diverse as potatoes and printing presses, gender politics and gastronomic philosophy.
Peasant foodways are characterised most strongly by their ties to the earth. Close personal involvement in food production means cyclic rhythm in work and diet, including the ebb and flow of plenty and want. This tradition, as we understand it, reflects the values of frugality, regionality and adaptability. Of course, these virtues rest ineluctably on a politics of power in which the peasant is fundamentally vulnerable. This element of the peasant tradition was also a premise, theme or tension in many of the papers presented.
Teresa de Castro's references to regional politics in early modern Castille pointed toward the extreme power of the elites over the peasantry who produced their food. However, Andrea Cast's analysis of springtime alcoholic purging practices and Mack Holt's account of political statements made by sixteenth and seventeenth century wine workers in Bordeaux suggested that the peasants had their own subversive tactics, ways of a) making their point and b) having fun.
One of the leitmotifs of this theme was change: challenges to the peasant tradition and adaptation over time. John Fitzpatrick pointed out the revolutionary role of the potato for the Maori in colonial New Zealand, and Andrew Ratledge reflected on the changes wrought on British workers' diets by colonial sugar imports. Colin Bannerman and Tom Jaine commented on the role of the print media in disconnecting foodways from the oral traditions of the peasant past and allowing the upwardly mobile, via cookbooks and print-media discourse, to formulate social, cultural and national aspirations through food.
Treatments of South Australian foodways revealed some of the classic elements of the peasant tradition, again under the leitmotif of temporal change. Angela Heuzenroeder emphasized the great continuity of bread-making and eating as a culture among Prussian migrants to the Barossa Valley. However, contrasted with this was the adaptability that migrants had to display – different woods for firing the oven, different grains, yeast sources and climates all represent influences of the new region upon the final product, the loaf.
Norris Ioannou's account of the foodways of a more recent migrant group, the Greek Cypriots, reveals similar forces at play. Here, peasant foodways are expressed by homegrowing foods from the old country, use of all available food sources, and community cooperation in pursuit and enjoyment of the "real", remembered item.
Catherine Murphy's exposition of Central Market revealed it as a major locus for the continuation of remnant peasant food traditions in Adelaide. Fresh food, cheap and seasonal, provided by families often still with ties to the land, as well as a three to four generation attachment to their market stall, represents the closest that urban Australians can return to the old ways, but also contains the best elements of the new.
This tension of old and new is signficant, as the peasant elements of our food have survived by virtue of reinvention over time. Modern reappropriations of the "peasant" tradition were frequently on the conference agenda, often in discussion of the personalities who spurred such activities on – Elizabeth David in Britain and Don Dunstan in South Australia.
Jean Duruz' analysis of the new meanings of "homely" food in a destabilised and uncertain age seems to point towards the new role of "peasant" food values in the urbanised Western world. Her tracing of the nostalgic resonances of ruralism and tradition through commercial "food solutions" in suburban Sydney demonstrates how, in the twenty first century, our concept of the peasant past is bound up with lost ideals of "comfort" and "home". As Duruz points out, there are uncomfortable socio-political aspects to our modern "solutions". Labour relations, class issues and gender politics remain unconfronted, certainly in current efforts towards a "gastronomic manifesto". Until such issues are addressed within this field, the vulnerabilities of the peasant traditions will have been merely shifted onto the female, the urban and the poor.
However, as history indicates, peasant virtues are good survival tactics. More than that, Greek Cypriot communal frugality, nineteenth-century Prussian adaptability and the early modern Europeans' propensity for seasonal alcoholic release all represent fine ways of making a cuisine, a lifestyle and a culture out of the resources and opportunities at hand.
Sarah Shepherd is a graduate student writing her PhD dissertation on the food culture of German peasant migrants to North America and Australia.
Peter Strawhan: South Australia
Many of the papers at the conference included material on South Australia, but two papers focussed on the state: Noris Ioannou’s "Greek Cypriot Cuisine and Cultural Practices in Australia" and Catherine Murphy’s "Adelaide Central Market: Raw Ingredients of Cultural Digestion".
Cultural historian Noris Ioannou, well known for his work on and in the Barossa Valley, has now turned his attention to his own cultural roots by setting out to research Greek Cypriot cuisine in Australia. Ioannou arrived here in 1950 aged three, caught, as he says, between two cultures, an experience no doubt shared by many migrants. Fortunately for Ioannou, his work has provided the means for him to resolve the question of his cultural identity. As an Australian Greek-Cypriot he is clearly well placed to explore the characteristics of the indigenous cuisine brought here in the 1940s and to document its history in this ‘alien setting’. Already his research indicates that the local cuisine "isolated by geography from its formative roots, may retain a greater degree of authenticity than its contemporary Mediterranean expression".
Ioannou shared with us an early memory of a family picnic at the Belair National Park, his mother setting out quoftethes (meatballs), dolmades and tzatigi, while he noticed and envied the whitebread and iced cupcakes of neighbouring Australian families. One of the customs transferred to Adelaide was the collection of wild plants or greens for use in cooking. The Ioannou family was no exception and foraged for a variety of ingredients in the West Parklands, near their Thebarton home, including wild mallow (which Australians regard as a weed), wild artichoke, wild celery, carob pods, olives and fungi. Ioannou compared this "distinguishing feature of Greek Cypriot cultural behaviour" with the "making do" of our pioneers.
Ioannou summarised Greek Cypriot food as a "middle-eastern cuisine characterised by the use of ingredients specific to the island...in unique combinations". No doubt the book will be equally as informative and entertaining.
Catherine Murphy chose Adelaide’s Central Market as the subject for a forthcoming book and her paper encapsulated her research, as she stated, "food is a perfect way to appreciate and understand cultural difference". Adelaideans are indeed fortunate that what is reputed to be the best market in the southern hemisphere, certainly one of the oldest, has thus far survived all the attempts of time, bureaucracy, greedy developers and economic irrationalists to turn it into a sterile replica of your average suburban food hall. Murphy suggested that the Market is the exception to the general rule that "Australians have no deep sense of attachment to historical places".
One of the keys to its survival since 1870 is that the original four acres on which it stands was "bequeathed to the people of Adelaide in perpetuity;" a further two acres were added in 1889. At the time of the 1966 "redevelopment" the original, open sheds with their redgum posts and corrugated iron roofs were still the dominant feature. For many years ninety percent of the stalls were owned by farmers, who tended to sell their stall with the farm. Post-World War II immigration gradually helped to bring change, including Greek and Italian stallholders, who grew the produce "we now take for granted" in their market gardens. Even so, Murphy’s research has revealed a number of examples demonstrating a three to four generation attachment to this site.
Somehow the market "survived the turmoil of the early postwar years", along with the even greater threat posed by the advent of the first suburban shopping centre at Kilkenny. Perhaps the collective will of stallholders, combined with the needs of many thousands of customers and the shades of their predecessors, helped to avert the homogenising aims of developers. Adelaide, without its Central Market in the guise that we know it, would be a city without a soul. In Murphy’s words: "It’s theatre, it’s entertainment. Adelaide Central Market sets the table to feed a city. Feasting together at this banquet are the characters of time, place, styles, taste, food, cooking, health, family, work, childhood, migration and cultural digestion".
Peter Strawhan is a graduate student who is writing his PhD dissertation on Don Dunstan and food.
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