Food Culture, Food History before 1900 – serie

Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are was the challenge issued by French gastronomist Jean Brillat-Savarin. Champagne is declared a unique emblem of French sophistication and luxury, linked to the myth of its invention by Dom Pérignon. Across the Channel, a cup of sweet tea is recognized as a quintessentially English icon, simultaneously conjuring images of empire, civility, and relentless rain that demands the sustenance and comfort that only tea can provide. How did these tastes develop in the seventeenth century?,Commerce, Food, and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England and France: Across the Channel offers a compelling historical narrative of the relationship between food, national identity, and political economy in the early modern period. These mutually influential relationships are revealed through comparative and transnational analyses of effervescent wine, spices and cookbooks, the development of coffeehouses and cafés, and the 'national sweet tooth' in England and France.

This collection represents a new and significant contribution to the study of recipe books from the early modern period (ca. 1500–1800) by situating them in a broader European context, traversing Catalonia, Finland, French and German-speaking regions, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and England. Ten essays, including a critical introduction to the genre, trace the materiality of the books and the use of the instructions therein, investigating patterns of recipe collection and their evolution over time; the international transmission of recipes, ingredients, and artisanal knowledge; and women’s manuscript culture. The authors explore how localised traditions of book production and domestic record-keeping shaped the physical forms of the books, and how stains, folds, marginalia, items pressed between pages, and pasted-in additions reveal their many uses. The inclusion of new ingredients and the integration of foreign recipes point to the many ways in which people, food, ideas, and books travelled the globe.

Dante’s Gluttons: Food and Society from the Convivio to the Comedy explores how the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) uses food to express and condition the social, political, and cultural values of his time. Combining medieval history, food studies, and literary criticism, Dante’s Gluttons historicizes food and eating in Dante, beginning in his earliest collected poetry and arriving at the end of his major work. For Dante, the consumption of food is not a frivolity, but a crux of life, and gluttony is the abdication of civic and spiritual responsibility and a danger to both the individual body and soul, as well as the greater collective. This book establishes how one of the world’s preeminent authors uses the intimacy and universality of food as a touchstone, forging a community bound by a gastronomic language rooted in the deeply human relationship with material sustenance.

As the long sixteenth century came to a close, new positive ideas of gusto/ taste opened a rich counter vision of food and taste where material practice, sensory perceptions and imagination contended with traditional social values, morality, and dietetic/medical discourse. Exploring the complex and evocative ways the early modern Italian culture of food was imagined in the literature of the time, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy reveals that while a moral and disciplinary vision tried to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises of the sixteenth century and prescriptive literature, a wide range of literary works contributed to a revolution in eating and taste. In the process long held visions of food and eating, as related to social order and hierarchy, medicine, sexuality and gender, religion and morality, pleasure and the senses, were questioned, tested and overturned, and eating and its pleasures would never be the same.

In this book readers will find stories about medieval heresies and “magic” from an unusual perspective: that of food studies. The time span ranges from Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages, while the geographical scope includes regions as different as North Africa, Spain, Ireland, continental Europe, the Holy land, and Central Asia. Food, heresies, and magical boundaries in the Middle Ages explores the power of food in creating and breaking down boundaries between different groups, or in establishing a contact with other worlds, be they the occult sides of nature, or the supernatural. The book emphasizes the role of food in crafting and carrying identity, and in transferring virtues and powers of natural elements into the eater’s body. Which foods and drinks made someone a heretic? Could they be purified? Which food offerings forged a connection with the otherworld? Which recipes allowed gaining access to the hidden powers within nature?

In the Kitchen insists that the preparation of food, whether imaginative, physical, or spatial, is central to a deeper understanding of early modern food cultures and practices. Devoted to the arts of cooking and medicine, early modern kitchens concentrated on producing, processing, and preserving materials necessary for nourishment and survival; yet they also fed social and economic networks and nurtured a sense of physical, spiritual, and political connection to surrounding lands and their cultures. The essays in this volume illuminate this expansive view of cooking and aspire to show how the kitchen's inner workings prove tightly, though often invisibly, interwoven with local, national, and, increasingly, global surroundings. Engaging with literary and historical methodologies, including close reading, recipe analysis, and perspectives on gender, class, race, and colonialism, we begin to develop a shared theoretical and practical language for the art of cooking that combines the physical with the intellectual, the local with the global, and the domestic with the political.

This collection of nine essays presents new research exploring the significance and forms of labour involved in food production across the early modern world from c. 1500 to 1800. Ranging from the Netherlands to the Mediterranean Basin and from the Pacific to the Atlantic worlds, the volume opens up new directions in research on various activities that have received little attention, such as preserving, grinding, curing, and frying. These studies uncover historical actors engaged in the processing of different foodstuffs, whose embodied knowledge and work are often obscured in the historical record, and rendered even less accessible when performed by women. By interpreting genre paintings, revisiting well‑known documents, and engaging in hands‑on reconstruction research, the essays provide a more nuanced and fuller understanding of food production both in and out of the kitchen, while advancing long‑standing historiographical debates on gender, food, and work in meaningful ways.

This text offers a compelling historical narrative of the relationship between food, national identity, and political economy in the early modern period. These mutually influential relationships are revealed through comparative and transnational analyses of effervescent wine, spices and cookbooks, the development of coffeehouses and cafés, and the 'national sweet tooth' in England and France.

Colonial Caribbean Diets and the Creolisation of Food Practices (1780– 1890) approaches the topic with a comparative analysis of the British and Spanish Caribbean to give a fresh perspective on the history of the empires during the long nineteenth century. In order to examine processes of colonial encounters, negotiations, appropriations, rejections, mutual influences, and hybridisation, it discusses the following aspects: How did colonists react when they came into contact with unfamiliar foodstuffs and dishes? Did they reject or accept them? What did they say about food that was alien to their own culture? Did the colonists pursue specific strategies in order to accept these new foods and attempt to replicate the longed-for foods with which they were familiar?

Dante's Gluttons: Food and Society from the Convivio to the Comedy explores how the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) uses food to express and condition the social, political, and cultural values of his time

In the Kitchen insists that the preparation of food, whether imaginative, physical, or spatial, is central to a deeper understanding of early modern food cultures and practices.

Exploring a wide range of written discourse on early modern brewing and the material features and practices contributing to those conversations, this book demonstrates the considerable role that discussions of drink played in defining the boundaries of human life and action in England and beyond.The social meaning of drink was an ever-contested cultural site in the early modern Atlantic. From complaints about watered-down ale to suspicions around ingredients and imported foreign wines to the moral blame assigned to alehouses and inns for drunkenness and raucous behavior, early modern writers saw the fermentation process as just one of many sites in which drink signified change. Discussing beer and brewing meant defining the limits of human rationality, markers of individual and collective identity, and the nature of responsibility. This book’s interdisciplinary approach draws upon texts as varied as brewing manuals, manuscript receipt books, plays, broadside ballads, and joke books to show the two-way conversation between these complex cultural works and the materiality of fermented drink as a cultural artifact.This book will be useful for graduate students and scholars of early modern English literature and early American literature, food studies, food history, and material culture.

This collection of ten essays represents a new and significant contribution to the study of recipe books from the early modern period (ca. 1500-1800) by situating them in a broader European context, traversing Catalonia, Finland, French and German-speaking regions, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and England.

In this book readers will find stories about medieval heresies and "magic" from an unusual perspective: that of food studies. The time span ranges from Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages, while the geographical scope includes regions as different as North Africa, Spain, Ireland, continental Europe, the Holy land, and Central Asia.