No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe
... The Peruvian flavor profile motivates palates, pocketbooks, and purveyors and has cultivated Ramirez's own culinary nationalism. Overlooking flavor risks missing something elemental about Ramirez, his cooking, his inspiration, the food's popularity, and how flavor itself is an ever-evolving cultural phenomenon (Albala 2006(Albala , 2017Mintz 1985Mintz , 1997. ...
Dominant analytical frameworks in critical food studies literature often ignore or underplay the role of the senses for chefs and eaters. This article considers one Peruvian American chef’s efforts to translate Peru’s gastronomic boom and “Peruvian flavor profiles” for New York eaters. Through an emphasis on flavor, this article shows the kinds of binds such dominant frameworks create around chefs, particularly for those who labor under culinary labels such as non-European cooking, Latino food, or ethnic cuisine. Flavor offers more than the binary of virtuous hero or colonialist villain, and instead helps conceptualize taste and power as acts of digestion, highlighting the sensory web created through cooking and eating in gastronationalism. A focus on flavor also points us to the way in which the category itself has become a resource, an embodied sensation that is part and parcel of our social lives, the result of digesting creatures and worlds around us, shaping our selves, our bodies and our national imaginaries in the process.
... Food has increasingly come to be recognised as a mode that communicates a lot about culture and consumption, moods and emotion, taste and identity, hunger and privation, and hierarchy and discrimination. If the evolution of the Renaissance banquet has been studied as representative of social relations and etique e, class and table manners (Albala, 2007), a surge in commodity histories, that of a spice, a plant or a species of fish, (Kurlansky, 1998(Kurlansky, , 2003Coe and Coe, 2000;Turner, 2004) have added a different dimension to what constitutes food. If such histories tend to tell a story of triumph, a rags-to-riches tale where one humble fish, or mineral or plant fights aristocratic prejudices to find favour among one and all (Roy, 2010, 67), they also underscore the significance of food as commodity. ...
This volume offers a study of food, cooking and cuisine in different societies and cultures over different periods of time. It highlights the intimate connections of food, identity, gender, power, personhood and national culture, and also the intricate combination of ingredients, ideas, ideologies and imagination that go into the representation of food and cuisine. Tracking such blends in different societies and continents developed from trans-cultural flows of goods and peoples, colonial encounters, adventure and adaptation, and change in attitude and taste, Cooking Cultures makes a novel argument about convergent histories of the globe brought about by food and cooking.
... Food has increasingly come to be recognised as a mode that communicates a lot about culture and consumption, moods and emotion, taste and identity, hunger and privation, and hierarchy and discrimination. If the evolution of the Renaissance banquet has been studied as representative of social relations and etiquette, class and table manners (Albala, 2007), a surge in commodity histories, that of a spice, a plant or a species of fish, (Kurlansky, 1998(Kurlansky, , 2003Coe and Coe, 2000;Turner, 2004) have added a different dimension to what constitutes food. If such histories tend to tell a story of triumph, a rags-to-riches tale where one humble fish, or mineral or plant fights aristocratic prejudices to find favour among one and all (Roy, 2010, 67), they also underscore the significance of food as commodity. ...
This volume offers a study of food, cooking and cuisine in different societies and cultures over different periods of time. It highlights the intimate connections of food, identity, gender, power, personhood and national culture, and also the intricate combination of ingredients, ideas, ideologies and imagination that go into the representation of food and cuisine. Tracking such blends in different societies and continents developed from trans-cultural flows of goods and peoples, colonial encounters, adventure and adaptation, and change in attitude and taste, Cooking Cultures makes a novel argument about convergent histories of the globe brought about by food and cooking.
... All this putative prejudice against garlic did not deter its occasional consumption in haute cuisine. Garlic was used to flavor sturgeon or combined with truffles in recipes for Renaissance banquets (Albala 2007). Culinary aspects merge with the pseudo-medicinal. ...
A synopsis is provided for the roles of garlic in European and Mediterranean folklore, including folktales and medicine. Lore from southern Europe and the Mediterranean is contrasted with lore from northern Europe, including Anglo-Saxon traditions.
... 50 It is possible, therefore, that the authors of such books exaggerated the size, variety, and extent of the menus described for greater effect, although other sources affirm that there were aristocratic meals as lavish as some of the ones described. 51 The practice of service à la française -putting all of the dishes on the table at the same time, rather than serving in courses -highlighted the abundance of the menus. However, as in the example of conduct books, these cookbooks describe the habits of a very small section of society, so it is not clear how much we might legitimately generalize from them to make broader statements about consumption. ...
The metaphor of “the ghastly kitchen” of life science research, the places that, said the nineteenth-century physiologist Claude Bernard, stirred “the fetid and throbbing ground of life,” is well known. In the seventeenth century, the kitchen, and particularly the scullery, was the site of the slaughter, butchery, and dismemberment by carving of a variety of animals. The tools and techniques employed in these activities overlapped considerably with those of animal and human dissection. Dissection often took place in residences and the kitchen was the most likely place for this activity. This challenges historians’ identification of the kitchen as an exclusively female realm. The preparation of food and medicines occurred in tandem with experimental natural philosophy, sharing tools as well as the sensory apparatus of cooking, including tasting and smelling.
... 1393) and contemporary works. Ken Albala (2007) discusses the expanded role of pastry in Renaissance court meals, when sweet and savory pies and fritters were served for nearly every course but not to close the meal; these items were not considered desserts in the modern sense. Other scholars have focused on the refinement of the dessert course in the eighteenth century, including Philip Hyman and Mary Hyman (2000) who identify the visual transformation of desserts via cookbooks with illustrative color plates, and Barbara Wheaton (1996) who calls attention to the construction of decorative sugar figures, towers of fruit, and ices in the brief sections on dessert contained in her work. ...
Drawing from historical cookbooks, literary works, and contemporary sources, this article traces a shift in the conception of the French dessert course from an adjunct but fully edible form in the seventeenth century to a mainly visual element in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the current balance between edibility and “legibility” in iconic desserts. What was once simply fruit and then pure ornament is now at once delicious and symbolic. The essay argues that present-day desserts represent a merging of taste and aesthetics, with the “decoration” now in the form of a colorful and sometimes invented history. When the dessert course was democratized in the nineteenth century—open to bourgeois tables—specific dishes became “textualized,” codified by name and form and inscribed with origin stories that connect these dishes to French identity, making dessert both symbolically and materially accessible to a wider public.
Глибинні перетворення ранньомодерного періоду стимулювали зміни в гастрономічній культурі. Якщо Великі географічні відкриття привнесли нові продукти, то Реформація спонукала переглянути дієтарні обмеження, вжиток елітарних продуктів на кшталт дичини, прянощів і спецій та навіть практику іменування страв. Ця стаття сфокусована на аналізі трьох аспектів змін: структури кулінарних книг, назвотвору страв і використання кулінарної книги для політичної пропаганди у Франції та Англії.
The article explores the concept of sympotic poetics in European culture as a distinctive form of discourse. This tradition originated in the Greek civilisation during the archaic period as a technique for socialisation within aristocratic culture and subsequently developed in Roman culture during the imperial period. Sympotic poetics thrived in medieval and modern Europe, where new forms of literary games, rooted in the intellectual traditions of antiquity, emerged. The article examines the beginnings of scholarly literary discussion and reviews selected examples of sympotic discussion practices in European culture.
W podróży królewskiego bratanka Andrzeja Batorego do Rzymu stół stanowił przestrzeń zdobywania doświadczeń w różnych sferach. Podejmowany na dworach dygnitarzy Andrzej Batory poznawał etykietę i obyczaje stołowe renesansowych Włoch, organizując według podobnych wzorców własny dwór. Stół bywał przestrzenią prowadzenia rozmów dyplomatycznych, w czym młodzieniec realizował obowiązki poselskie. Toczone przy obiedzie dysputy z humanistami (takimi jak Marc-Antoine Muret) rozwijały jego umysłowość; muzyka i sztuki plastyczne towarzyszące ucztom z kardynałami i książętami włoskimi ubogacały gust artystyczny Batorego, a nowe potrawy – jego gust kulinarny. Spotkania z autorytetami religijnymi (Karol Boromeusz, Claudio Acquaviva, krąg oratorian), a także pobożne praktyki, jak: post, jałmużny żywieniowe i nabożne lektury przy stole, umacniały w końcu katolickie wyznanie młodzieńca.
Domestic animal usage remains a key problem in understanding Japan's premodern economy. Assumptions that religious and other cultural proscriptions limited the use of domesticated animals, and the consumption of meat in particular, from Late Antiquity until Westernisation in the nineteenth century remain widespread. However, the zooarchaeological record from historic Japan is patchy and the scholarly literature often uncritically reproduces state-centred ideas about agriculture and the economy. In this essay we critically review the ways in which historical and zooarchaeological studies of animal usage in premodern Japan have been impacted by broader cultural discourses. We examine animal usage from the Bronze Age to the eve of modernisation, broadly 1000 BC to AD 1850, in terms of a tension or dialectic between promotion and restriction by the state and other authorities. While the utilisation of animals for warfare and official transport was more closely controlled, other uses reflected a complex and often international political ecology that requires further analysis by zooarchaeologists.
This paper presents an investigation into parliamentary debates on consumer citizenship in early nineteenth-century France. This contribution aims to chart the competing political visions that emerged during the Age of Revolution negotiating the coming-of-age of (urban) France as a consumerist society with notions of citizenship, the common good and patriotic sentiments. By looking at two distinct moments of regime change i.e. 1830 and 1848, this paper features a comparison of how MPs and political elites perceived consumer behaviour, its social, economic and cultural effects and its desirability in different political constellations ranging from monarchical to republican. By consulting digital newspaper archives and critically using search terms on this large body of text, a historical discourse analysis of parliamentary speeches on how to align citizenship and consumption was effected that carefully reconstructs the ideological rifts and social dynamics characterizing the political life of the era.
This introductory essay provides a general reflection on the meanings of ‘French food’ and proposes analytical directions to explore this concept. While this expression is often associated with refinement, restaurant culture, and haute cuisine, in this special issue we are extending the frame of its meaning to explore the ways in which this category relates to processes of identity construction, especially in regards to ethnicity, class, and race. From colonial times in Northern America to contemporary France, French food and foodways have provided a central ground for the negotiation and display of group boundaries. Different kinds of French food, consumed by different actors in different contexts, could indeed assume diametrically opposite valences. Neither a specific set of culinary practices nor a shared and agreed-upon set of meanings, ‘Eating French’ rather constitutes a strategic lens through which the authors explore how various communities who identify as French have used culinary practices to negotiate and enact collective identities in various historical and cultural circumstances.
This conceptual paper articulates gastrodiplomacy in tourism as an area of study and policy. Gastrodiplomacy, the strategic use of cuisine in influencing perceptions of a nation, is positioned within the public diplomacy spectrum, and the intersections among food, tourism and diplomacy – in theory and practice – are investigated. The roles of food and tourism in nation branding are explored, leading to a detailed exposition on the multiple ways in which tourism is implicated in national gastrodiplomacy campaigns, as well as in grassroots “citizen diplomacy” involving food. The “ambassadorial” roles performed by people and the various “zones of contact” at which gastrodiplomacy in tourism is played out are identified as aspects of particular relevance for study. The paper calls for more integrated and holistic approaches to gastrodiplomacy in tourism, both in research and in policy, that address the tourism “foodscape” of a nation as a whole, as a realm of diplomatic potential.
This article examines the articulation between the senses of taste and sight through the representations of their organs, the tongue and the eye, in early modern Europe. The relationship between taste and sight first brings to mind gastronomical aesthetics, and the part played by the eye in the relish of beautifully presented dishes. The first part of this article is therefore devoted to exploring the taste of the eye (or the foretaste of sight) and highlights the harmony of taste and sight in early modern cuisine. However, the forms of reciprocity between taste and sight cannot be reduced to the sole figure of culinary aesthetics, which tends to blur the other multiple modalities that this sensorial association could reveal. The second part, the sight of the tongue (or the invisibility of taste), thus examines more complex layers of the relationship between the sense of sight and the taste organ, through a study of the representations of the tongue and of the gaping mouth in early modern visual culture. Drawing on early modern textual and iconographic resources and exploring: cookbooks; physiognomic works; conduct books; and also engravings and paintings related to the culinary arts, the seven deadly sins, and representations of madness and the fool in early modern visual culture, this essay argues that examining the representations of the sense organs is a suggestive way to explore the relationship between the senses.
Dinner, as the main meal in the West, is a symbolically laden practice. In this paper, we seek to better understand the cultural meaning of dinner by using a unique combination of a sophisticated quantitative methodology for studying non-linear dynamics and a careful interpretative cultural semiotic analysis. By using the Corpus of Historical American English, we retrieved the words significantly collocated with “Dinner” along 200 years. Using joint recurrence analysis, we have identified the words that synchronize with each other in a non-linear fashion and used them for constructing a representation of Dinner's semiotic field. By analyzing the graph, it was found that “Soup” is the main concept associated with the practice of Dinner along 200 years. The meaning of this finding is interpreted by proposing a semiotic explanation pointing to the “surplus” of soup in the semio-sphere of the Western culture.
Historically, the studies of classics have focussed on their use in education, the formation of youth, and have concerned themselves only indirectly or incidentally with the adult use of the classics for self formation. What I propose to do here is to look at the practices in which adults used the classics. What were these practices? They were performative practices—song and classical poetry recitals, storytelling, the reading of classics aloud to one another and discussion of them. These practices were concerned with texts, but there were others that involved other media—music both vocal and instrumental, food and drink, costuming, the viewing of sculptures and paintings, and the use of architecture—most if not all with classical connections. The use of these media in conjunction with one another had the effect of turning these practices into entertainments or spectacles, performances which the performers considered theatrical and didactic. The main institutional venue for these practices was some sort of daily or occasional meeting that involved food and drink and other performances. This is an institution that has a number of variants and a long and complicated history that interconnects the ruling classes of empires and kingdoms from China and India to Iberia, including, of course, the symposium of European antiquity. The locus for these meetings was, from early times, a garden-palace, a palace or pavilion with an audience and banqueting hall complemented by a garden of delights. Almost invariably the masters of these garden-palaces themselves considered these settings to be paradises on earth—exclusive places where those who were qualified by birth and divine connection could have some sort of experience of transcendence of the everyday world by engaging in a liberating practice of some kind—and encouraged others to think so. I refer to the garden-palaces as courtly paradises.
The article explores data on food consumption in mediaeval Sweden and discusses the implications with regard to living standards. The key question is whether food consumption was more plentiful and/or more varied during the late mediaeval era than during the early modern epoch. Based on two mediaeval account books, from the castles of Nyköping and Stegeborg, respectively, three conclusions emerge. (1) Compared to mid-sixteenth century royal farms and other institutions, the mediaeval accounts suggest that food consumption was less plentiful but probably more varied. (2) Over time, the proportion of beer in the budgets tended to grow at the expense of meat. Late mediaeval landlords were pressed by diminishing farmland rents. Swedish as well as English data are consistent with the view that lords were able to shift food expenditure from high-cost to low-cost calories. (3) Conspicuous food consumption did not play a prominent role in defining social hierarchy at Stegeborg castle in the late fifteenth century. By the mid-sixteenth century this had changed. Low social rank now gave access only to cheap beer of a quality far below that which had applied half a century before.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.