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Convergent Histories of
Food and Feeling
Edited by
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
COOKING
CULTURES
Edited by
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
Cooking Cultures
Convergent Histories of Food and Feeling
4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi - 110002, India
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First published 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Banerjee-Dube, Ishita, editor.
Title: Cooking cultures : convergent histories of food and feeling / edited
by Ishita Banerjee-Dube.
Description: [New York] : Cambridge University Press, 2016. | ?2016 | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identiers: LCCN 2016002560 | ISBN 9781107140363 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Food--Social aspects.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Culinary Cultures and Convergent Histories 1
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
Part I: Food, Pride, Power
1. Indigeneity, Alienness and Cuisine: 21
Are Trout South African
Duncan Brown
2. e Hummus Wars: Local Food, Guinness Records 39
and Palestinian-Israeli Gastropolitics
Nir Avieli
3. Rice, Pork and Power in the Vietnamese Village, 1774–1883 58
Erica J. Peters
Part II: Cooking, Cuisine, Gender
4. ‘Mem’ and ‘Cookie’: e Colonial Kitchen in 79
Malaysia and Singapore
Cecilia Leong-Salobir
5. Modern Menus: Food, Family, Health and 100
Gender in Colonial Bengal
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
6. Sweetness, Gender, and Identity in 122
Japanese Culinary Culture
Jon D. Holtzman
Part III: Food, Identity, Personhood
7. Local Foods and Meanings in Contemporary China: 139
e Case of Southwest Hubei
Xu Wu
8. From the Market to the Kitchen and Table: 158
Food and its Many Meanings in Dakar
María Guadalupe Aguilar Escobedo
9. What is Human?: Anthropomorphic Anthropophagy 177
in Northwest Mozambique
Arianna Huhn
Part IV: Food, Myth, Nostalgia
10. Ras el Hanout and Preserved Lemons: Memories, 201
Markets and the Scent of Borrowed Traditions
Jean Duruz
11. Culinary Myths of the Mexican Nation 224
Sarah Bak-Geller Corona
Contributors 247
Index 251
vi Contents
Lo, the pious are in gardens and delight,
Enjoying what their Lord hath bestowed upon
em, and their Lord hath protected them
From the punishment of the Hot Place
Eat and drink with relish, for what ye have been doing
(Qu’ran, 1939, 2, Surah 52, e Mount, 536;
cited in Peterson, 1980, 321)
An intimate association of eating with sensual pleasure in Muslim theology –
depicted in the Garden of Delights – had occasioned serious unease in the
Christian world that could barely digest the bonding of religion and sensuousness.
What caused immense concern was the fact that this ‘philosophy of gratication’
did not only promise joys aer death. It spoke of, indeed encouraged, the reaping
of pleasure in life by associating good life with good eating (Peterson, 1980,
321). is was in stark contrast to the austerity and temperance demanded of
Christians in this life as a step toward an angelic society in heaven (Peterson,
1980, 322). Hence, aer the Qu’ran was translated into Latin by the mid-twelh
century, scholars devoted themselves to the task of discerning whether this
association was real or allegorical. Others, however, found a dierent use for this
bonding of eating and pleasure in this life. An ‘upheaval’ occurred in the cooking
of the European elite from about 1300 CE, accompanied by a marked change in
the aitude toward food (Peterson, 1980, 317).
I begin the introduction on this note to divulge, at the outset, an important
argument of the book. e volume seeks to explore how food, cooking and
cuisine, in dierent societies, cultures and over dierent periods of time, are
essentially results of confection – combination – of ingredients, ideas, ideologies
and imagination, inected by relations of power and experiments with creativity.
Such blends, churned out of transcultural ows of goods, people and ideas,
colonial encounters and engagements, adventure and adaptation, and change
in aitude and taste, enable convergent histories of the globe kneaded by food
Introduction
Culinary Cultures and Convergent Histories
IshIta Banerjee-DuBe
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
2
and cooking that tell us about being and belonging, pride, identity, hospitality
and sociability, class and power, and nation and culture that are ever ready to be
cast in dierent moulds. ey also point to a convergence between the histories
of the world as one of ‘species migration’, whether through climate or habitat
change or population pressure, or through more active processes of human
intervention, and of food, eating and cuisine as being constituted by such mixing
and migration. e dierent chapters of the book look at the evolution of food in
distinct parts of the globe over dierent periods of time from diverse perspectives.
Yet, together they portray and convey the polyphony that surrounds food and
cooking, a polyphony oen subsumed by the aempted homogenisation that
underlies the construction of ‘national’, ‘natural’ or ‘regional’ cultures. In contrast
to such homogenisation, this book oers a tale strewn together from a variety of
smells and tastes, peoples and places and their multiple mixtures. e chapters
also highlight the importance of sharing and exchanging food as vital elements of
‘culture’ and sociability, elements that are oen used to mark social distinctions
and not erase them (Peters, 2016; Pilcher, 1998).
An early cookery book of Baghdad had drawn upon the Qu’ran to declare food
to be ‘the noblest and most consequential’ of the six human pleasures, along with
drinks, clothes, sex, scent and sound (Peterson, 1980, 322). e write-up on an
adventurous book on the history of food calls cuisine ‘the dening characteristic
of a culture’ (Fernández-Armesto, 2002). What makes food and cuisine tick
as the ‘noblest pleasure’, and the most signicant element of a culture? What
makes Indian food serve as ‘street food’ in Cairo and ‘court food’ in Isfahan and
yet remain a prop of national culture? How has ‘curry’, invented during British
rule in India, moved back and forth between India and England and come to
signify ‘Indian food’ in the world? is volume addresses some of these issues
in its aempt to track how peoples and cultures relate to food and cuisine, and
how such bonding shapes cartographies of belonging and identities. It explores
the elements and processes that go into the cooking of cultures, in which food
and cuisine are avoured by adaptation and innovation, transcultural and
trans-regional ows, and nostalgia and re-creation; and ‘national’, ‘regional’ and
‘cosmopolitan’ cultures, along with personhood, are concocted and confected.
e volume takes into serious account reminders that food, as an important
element of material culture, signicantly shapes individual and collective
identities (Palmer, 1998, 183) and that food is neither neutral nor innocent
but a product of dominant ideologies and power structures (Cusack, 2000,
208). Indeed, the rst essay of the volume examines and interrogates why and
how certain plant and animal species are constructed as ‘natural’, ‘native’ and
Introduction 3
‘indigenous’ as opposed to ‘alien’ and ‘invasive’ through human intervention
even before the process of cooking transforms them into food (Brown, 2016).
At the same time, it pays aention to how food is produced by means of a
delicate blend of emotion and creativity, nostalgia and aect, and cultural
exchange. Even while cultural exchange is unequal – and identity and emotion
surrounding food are permeated by established structures, power relations and
norms that condition subjectivities – ingenuity, resourcefulness, adaptation
and blending add vital avour and spice to cultures of cooking and buress
the cooking of cultures.
is work draws inspiration from incisive statements that point to the intimate
links between love and nurture, food and desire, and hunger and satisfaction.
Here are two instances. M. F. K. Fisher, the celebrated US writer on food, had
stated in the ‘Foreword’ to her now classic e Gastronomical Me (1943) that she
wrote on food, eating and drinking and not about more ‘serious themes’ such
as struggle for power and security because the ‘three basic needs, for food and
security and love’, are so mingled and entwined, that ‘we cannot straightly think
of the one without the others.’ A few years before the publication of Fisher’s
book, the humanist and nobel-laureate poet from Bengal, Rabindrantah Tagore,
had alluringly evoked the innate pleasures of love and care articulated in the
tender serving of food by the lover, an act that simultaneously satised the mind
and the body. In this poem titled Nimantran (‘Invitation’ published in Bithika,
1935), the poet had mused on how the expectant meeting with the lover was to
become more enthralling and complete if she were to serve delicacies garnished
by her care, and gratify thereby ‘the nest of desire that resides in the tongue’.
Such statements, made by dierent persons in distinct locations, serve as the
basic dough that gets baked in diverse ways in the dierent chapters.
Ambitious in terms of its range and scope, the volume straddles various
parts of Asia and Africa, and touches upon Australia and Mexico with tempting
references to Europe. It also covers the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-rst
centuries and themes as diverse as notions of indigeneity and wildness centring
on the trout in South Africa; power struggles over and through food and diet in
Vietnamese villages; ‘Hummus wars’ between Israel and Palestine, the distinct
meanings of local food in central China and their gradual standardisation in
restaurant chains; the role of women as procurers and providers of food in the
Senegalese capital of Dakar; the signicance of the domestic servant, the ‘cookie’,
in the development of colonial cuisine in Malaysia and Singapore; blending,
hybridity and nostalgia inherent in transplantations and reproductions of smells
and tastes of ‘authentic’ food from Syria to London, and from Morocco to Paris
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
4
and Adelaide. It also explores early aempts to create a well-organised menu and
‘modern’ cuisine in colonial eastern India that took the health of the family (and
the nation) as its central concern; the various moods, sentiments and meanings
associated with sweets in Japan; food taboos in Mozambique as critical markers
of personhood and ‘humanness’ as opposed to the ‘sorcerer’; and the dierential
deployment of myths in the construction of Mexican ‘national’ cuisine.
In brief, the volume covers almost all the important themes examined in
food studies over the last decade and a half: food and identity, food and power,
food and nation, food and (ritual) symbolism, food and gender, and food and
aect. Its distinguishing feature is the exploration of convergent concerns, as
well as divergent sentiments that mutually shape cultures of cooking and the
cooking of cultures through the construal of being and belonging in distinct
parts of the globe. e various essays ‘deconstruct’ food as a nished product in
order to lay bare the essential blend that gives meaning to food and cooking, the
‘origin’ creation, to use the words of Modhumita Roy (Roy, 2010, 67). In distinct
ways, the chapters track the course of plant, animal and human movement and
human intervention, transcultural ows dating back to several centuries, and
unravel the production of food and cuisine as premised, on the one hand, on
unequal relations of power and ideology, colonial encounters, and class and
gender relations, and on the other, on innovation and experimentation, love
and pride and inspiration that endow the everyday act of procuring, cooking
and consuming food with polyvalent signicance. e volume unpacks how
the inherently mixed nature of food and cooking shores and spikes up notions
of ‘national culture’, identity and personhood, and oen serves to perpetuate
established unequal social relations even while boundaries get constructed
and transgressed simultaneously. A combination of distinct lines of research
covering a large part of the globe makes the volume essentially rich – in smells
and avours, myths and metaphors, tales and bales, temptations and taboos,
and succulent savouries that enable juxtaposition and comparison and open the
way for convergent histories of food and feeling across the globe.
State of the art
e discipline of anthropology, we are aware, was the rst to take serious note
of food and eating as important themes of research. Early practitioners of the
discipline such as Raymond Firth (1934), Bronislow Malinowski (1935) and
Cora Dubois (1941) had commented on the centrality of food in cultures.
Historians of the French Annales School had also paid serious aention to
food and eating paerns from around the same time. A few decades later,
Introduction 5
cultural anthropology took the lead in emphasising the importance of food
and foodways for human societies and, by extension, for social sciences.
e classical writings of Claude Levi-Strauss (1966, 586–96; 1970; 1978),
Margaret Mead (1971), Mary Douglas (1971, 61–81), Sidney Mintz (1979,
56–73), Pierre Bourdieu (1984) and Roland Barthes ([1961] 1979, 166–73),
to take just a few examples, not only oered valuable ethnographic details
on food and underscored food and cuisine as crucial elements of culture and
personhood, but also reected on the capacity of food and cooking to serve as
codes that conveyed signicant social meaning.
Such writings were complemented by anthropological studies of particular
societies that analysed the role of religious symbolism in food transactions and
food taboos (Marrio, 1976, 133–71), as well as by cultural materialist works –
such as that of Marvin Harris – that rejected semiotics to insist on economic and
ecological factors behind the selection of gustatory elements by particular peoples
(Harris, 1975). Social and cultural historians contributed to this scholarship by
analysing food as an index of changing class relations or as a mode of sustenance
that nourished bodies and identities (Tannahill, 1973) for instance.
Works on nutrition, heath, agriculture and economics oered distinct
understandings of the value of food for sustenance, while important anthologies
examined the evolution of food in particular societies from historical and
anthropological perspectives (Chang, 1977). In addition, insightful analyses
of transformations of food paerns occasioned by industrialisation oered
comparative perspectives on food in dierent societies (Goody, 1982, 154–74);
innovative readings of cookery books commented on the changing congurations
of ‘national cuisine’ (Appadurai, 1988, for example); and experimental historical-
anthropological readings commented on how a particular element of food
contributed to shiing demarcations of the self from the other in a particular
culture (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1993).
Specic articles in journals of history and anthropology, such as Toby
Peterson’s ‘e Arab Inuence on Western European Cooking’ (1980), opened
new ways and consolidated research on food and cooking. A specialised journal
in French, Petits Propos Culinaires, started coming out from the 1980s; ‘e
Oxford Symposium of Food History’ oered a space for the exchange of ideas to
interested students; and David Burton’s e Raj at Table (1993) connected the
empire and the colony through avour and taste by oering a delectable social
history of the emergence of colonial dishes – the essence of curry.
Food studies got a tremendous boost from the end of the twentieth century
with the publication of a wide range of anthologies, interdisciplinary studies,
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
6
and journals dedicated entirely to food. e Oxford Companion to Food appeared
in 1999, accompanied by Carole Counihan and Penny van Esterik’s reader on
Food and Culture on the other side of the Atlantic ([1999] 2013). e Cambridge
World History of Food (2000) was soon to follow. Felipe Fernádez-Armesto made
a strong case to integrate food history as an integral part of world history in his
entertaining work, Near A ousand Tables, while Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A
Biography (2005) and Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (2006) enticingly
mixed recipes and their histories, chance invention and de adaptation, to oer
an account of the development of British-Indian cuisine and its move back to
Britain. Such British-Indian recipes feature recurrently and prominently in
‘Indian’ restaurants in England run primarily by Bangladeshis.
Appetite, Culture, Agriculture, Food and Foodways, Global food History, to
name just a few of the wide range of journals, strengthened food studies as a valid
and valuable eld of interdisciplinary investigation. is went hand in hand with
the participation of geographers, philosophers, psychologists, literary, feminist
and lm studies scholars in food studies. Together, they broke the preserve of
anthropologists, historians, sociologists and economists over food and cooking
and enormously enriched research on food.
Counihan and van Esterik credit feminist and women’s studies scholars with
bringing about this explosion in food studies. e insistence of such scholars,
argue Counihan and van Esterik, on the necessity of studying a ‘domain of
human behaviour so closely associated with women across time and cultures’,
helped foster an interest in food among many (Counihan and van Esterik,
2013, 2). is, together with the politicisation of food and a growth of social
movements linked to food, established food as a central element of human lives.
And once it gained legitimacy, the ‘novelty, richness, and scope’ of food opened
innumerable pathways for scholars to follow (Counihan and van Estenk, 2013).
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
etiquee, class and table manners (Albala, 2007), a surge in commodity histories,
that of a spice, a plant or a species of sh, (Kurlansky, 1998, 2003; Coe and Coe,
2000; Turner, 2004) have added a dierent dimension to what constitutes food.
If such histories tend to tell a story of triumph, a rags-to-riches tale where one
humble sh, or mineral or plant ghts aristocratic prejudices to nd favour
among one and all (Roy, 2010, 67), they also underscore the signicance of food
as commodity. Such studies moreover, are adequately complemented by many
Introduction 7
other studies of how what we eat gets constructed, identied and valourised, as
well as invested with meanings and emotion. If Laura Esquivel’s Como Agua para
Chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate), an edgy literary text alluding to recipes
for food and for broken heart (that also got made into a lm) represents the
play with love and cooking in literature, the inclusion of Fisher’s foreword as a
foreword to Food and Culture by Counihan and van Esterik demonstrate their
belief in the entwinement of love, food and security armed by Fisher.
e intimacy and intensity of food and feeling nd daily expression
in innumerable cooking and baking competitions, television shows and a
profusion of recipes in magazines, newspapers and journal columns, and a surge
in signature restaurants of chefs. Trips today, lament some and revel others, of
upper-middle class and rich people from various societies and places are not
measured any longer by what they have seen –museums or archaeological sites –
but by what they have eaten in which restaurant.
is work pays aention to this change of orientation from sight and sound
to smell and touch in oering another food tour across the globe, one that oers
insights into feelings and emotion, taste and choice, and struggle and adaptation
that go into the constitution of cooking and cuisine as central artefacts of culture
and society.
The palate
e volume oers a mosaic of the many meanings of food and cooking through
fragments of smells and tastes, markets and kitchens, restaurants and menus,
sharing and competition, and food taboos to chart distinct cartographies of
love and aect, being and belonging, and identity and power. It intends to
probe why people eat what they do, how they relate to food practices that
dene what cooking is, and the many ways cuisine relates to society and social
relations to see if one can glean a ‘culinary philosophy’ (Laudan, 2013, 1). At
the same time, it also wishes to unravel the construction of food and cooking as
blends and confection – of ingredients, innovation, spices, trans-regional and
cross-cultural interaction, power and ideology, adaptation and creativity, and
feeling and sentiment – that constitute cuisine as a vital element of social life.
e common thread that runs through the chapters is a consideration of how
food and cuisine enable people to articulate not just who they are but what
they want to be; and the interplay of intersecting processes and sentiments
that go into the making of people as persons and of groups and communities
as ‘cultures’.
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
8
e volume is divided into four sections, each with distinct yet overlapping
and crisscrossing concerns. e rst one, on ‘Food, Pride and Power’, includes
contributions on South Africa, the Middle East and Vietnam. It begins with a
suggestive essay by Duncan Brown on notions of indigeneity and wildness as
played out over understandings of the trout as an ‘invasive, alien species’ in
South Africa. Pointing to the fact that plant and animal species move, not just on
account of human intervention such as transportation, planting and stocking,
but also on account of habitat and climate change, Brown upsets simple notions
of indigeneity, endemicity and the right to belong from the beginning. He
sustains this further by analysing the Oxford English Dictionary’s denition
of ‘belonging’ as ‘[to] be rightly or naturally placed [… to] t a specied
environment, or [to] be not out of place’, to argue that the denition(s) make
an easy equation between ‘to be naturally placed’, ‘to be in the right place’ and
‘to belong’, an equation that is ‘heavily loaded with moral values’. Hence, such
denitions are both subjective and specic. e moot question, in Brown’s
reckoning, is what is given the right to belong and why. In South Africa and
other societies marked by colonial histories, such an issue in closely tied to that
of human identity. e binary divisions of ‘natural’ or ‘native’ versus ‘wild’ or
‘alien’, ‘nature’ versus culture’ are as treacherous as they are misleading because
they are predicated on biological models that exclude human intervention, and
do not take social or cultural activities like ‘cuisine’, ‘cultivation’ or imaginative
association, and moral values into account. Brown uses the debate on the
continued presence of trout in South Africa to creatively think through the
complexities that underlie conceptions of indigeneity, alienness, and identity
and advocates an understanding of biodiversity and belonging not in terms
of simple origin or autochthony, which is ‘deeply problematic’, but in terms of
(biological) interdependence and accommodation.
e second essay tracks issues of belonging and ‘naturalness’ by following the
conict (and camaraderie) between Israel and Lebanon over a shared culinary
passion: Hummus. is dip, of mashed chickpeas seasoned with tahini and lemon
juice, is ubiquitous in Middle Eastern public and private culinary spheres and is
extremely popular among Arabs and Jews. In 2008, hummus became the focus
of a heated debate between Israel and Lebanon over issues of cultural copyright
and national heritage and their implicit economic repercussions. Focussing
on these ‘Hummus Wars’, Nir Avieli unfolds a colourful tale of the enactment
of a series of culinary contests that aimed at the reication of hummus as the
key element of the culinary heritage of both nations. Proportion, rather than
avour, became crucial in this contest as Lebanon and Israel competed to set
the Guinness world record for the largest hummus dish. Avieli’s situated, spicy
Introduction 9
and ‘internal’ ethnography of one such contest in the Palestinian-Israeli village
of Abu Gosh highlights how cooking and cuisine transcend the social sphere
and straddle the political where they mediate and negotiate the construction of
national identities. Such processes again are muddled by the active participation
of ‘minority’ groups, Palestinians of Israeli citizenship who engage passionately
in the construction of Israeli identity and pride through gastronomy. Such
muddled passions together with the fact that hummus easily lends itself to
diverse appropriations and is essentially meant to be shared, leads Avieli to
ponder whether hummus has the potential to serve as a bridge between the
inhabitants of two warring nations and bring an end to enmity via commensality.
Erica J. Peters’ essay unfolds a multi-layered world of everyday strife and
control over food in Vietnam over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
starting with the state and going down to individual families in villages. If
Vietnamese rulers tried to control the countryside through food, oen puing
pressure on non-Vietnamese populations to change their eating paerns,
particularly during the time of civil war and food scarcity in the late eighteenth
century, their rivals made a bid for power by seizing government granaries
and giving rice to the starving people. In the nineteenth century, a new crop
of emperors made a new and distinct aempt to control and solidify ‘national’
culture through food, by puing pressure on non-Vietnamese people, not only to
change over to ‘Vietnamese food’ and agriculture, rice in particular, but to learn
to eat sticky rice with chopsticks. e imperial project of creating a ‘civilised’
national culture and cuisine was fraught with tensions. Apart from the fact that
a fragile economy where food scarcity was a recurrent feature made it dicult to
force people to fall in line, the composite mix of Viet, Khmer, Cham and others
in the south with very similar eating habits, made the project of civilising the
‘non-Viet’ people almost impossible.
e struggle for access to and control over food, arms Peter, was by no
means one of rulers versus subjects: it was played out in villages and within
individual households. If particular households competed to control major
butchering and banqueting rituals, members of a family fought over the daily
apportionment of rice. e sharing of food at common feasts was a way, not
of erasing boundaries of class and status, but of reinforcng them. Women, who
prepared the food for feasts and banquets, did not even sit at the common table
with the men. Such gendered norms got worked out in the way food – especially
sticky rice – was apportioned within the family. e emotional and physical
hunger and desire of women, their need for food and love, found articulation
in popular, irreverent poems composed by female authors. Using food as a lens
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
10
to unpack the distinct and minute gradations within class and social hierarchy,
this chapter oers a rich blend of economics and politics, gender and class, and
power and resistance in Vietnam over two centuries.
In the rst essay of the second section on ‘Cooking, Cuisine, Gender’, Leong-
Salobir emphasises the active and innovative participation of the domestic cook
and servant – the ‘cookie’ – in the development of ‘colonial cuisine’ in Malaysia
and Singapore. Arguing against readings that highlight how the British ate only
‘British’ food in the colonies in order to mark their distance from the colonised,
Leong-Salobir portrays an intricate world of multi-layered interaction between
the memsahib – the mem – the white mistress, and the cookie, that resulted in
the emergence of a colonial cuisine with distinctive dishes, avours and blends.
In this cuisine, British diet and taste were not only moulded by Asian expertise,
ideas, ingredients and avours, but also guided by reference to India (South
Asia) as the original source for recipes of decidedly colonial dishes such as the
mulligatawny soup or kedgeree or pishpash, a fact that added interesting twists
and turns to this tale of mishmash.
Class, race, gender and power were worked out on distinct registers in this
multi- and inter-cultural conversation and transposition. If the white memsahib
was entrusted with the dicult and delicate task of running the British household
as an institution of the Empire with a sta of primarily male colonised servants
who needed to be ‘civilised’, the servants deployed their own notions of food
t for British tastes to create and prepare hybrid dishes that found their way to
colonial dinner tables. For memsahibs, whose husbands were in the lower rungs
of employ and could not depend on cooks and servants, the task of ecient and
competent management of a British home was even more hazardous. Leong-
Salobir’s absorbing analysis, premised on a close reading of domestic manuals,
recipe books and memoirs and travelogues, oers vistas of a fascinating world of
cross-cultural fertilisation that was oen poised on distrust. e white mistress
was ever vigilant of the servants and cooks misuse or abuse of money and
material in the purchase and preparation of ingredients and dishes; the cooks in
turn were suspicious of the memsahibs’ knowledge of proper cooking. is tense
collaboration, where the ‘mem’ spelt out the menu and measured and supplied
the materials for the preparation of food, and the ‘cookie’ cooked, spiced,
avoured and decided on what was t to be eaten at dierent times of the day
and on dierent occasions, resulted in the emergence and evolution of a distinct
colonial cuisine spread across South and Southeast Asia, which got transported
back to England and to other parts of the globe.
In the following essay, Ishita Banerjee-Dube dely complements the world
Introduction 11
of the mem and cookie with that of the grihalakshmi (goddess of the home)
and her collaborators, competitors and contenders. She points to the near
simultaneous emergence of three distinct yet overlapping and crisscrossing
discourses in India in the second half of the nineteenth century – that of a
nuclear family with the accomplished wife as the ideal partner (and mother);
that of a procient mistress of the home who ran the household with skill and
enterprise, serving delectable, nutritious food to ensure the health of family
members; and the cultural discourse of nationalism that marked out of the space
of the home, the domain of the new woman, as the inner frontier of the nation,
the core of Indianness and cultural dierence from the West. e essay focuses
on the centrality accorded by the nationalist discourse to health and nutrition
in conceptions of a healthy family as the basis of a healthy nation in order to
underline its discrete implications and deployments.
While young male members of the family tried to teach their wives the art
of ecient housekeeping as a mode to establish their power and legitimacy in
an extended family vis à vis their elders of both sexes, their young wives oen
collaborated with them in their eort to overwrite the extended family with
a nuclear one. At the same time, accomplished elite and middle-class women
imaginatively appropriated the nationalist conguration of the new, modern
Indian ‘woman’ and housewife as the goddess of the home who took proper care
of the health and sustenance of the family, in order to establish their primacy
and control over this domain of the interior. is eort led them to engage in
competition, not only with male educators and authors of recipe books, but
also with their female counterparts, over authenticity and novelty, authority
and frugality, and correct and competent execution of recipes. e processes
coincided to result in the development of a ‘modern’ cuisine for the modern
nation being construed. British style menus and Anglo-Indian dishes were given
a place in this ‘modern’ cuisine as a marker of competence, advancement, and
the ‘cosmopolitan’. is zesty tale of love and collaboration, turf bales and
competition, and innovation and emotion leads the author to ponder on the
possibilities of opening up ‘gender’ as a concept-category that goes much beyond
the demarcation of contending social relations between men and women.
Jon Holtzman widens the explorations of food and cuisine in South and
Southeast Asia by examining the signicance of sweets in Japan. Arguing that
sweets constitute a pervasive but relatively unexplored element of Japanese
cuisine and culture, he warns us against the excessive focus on rice or sh as
typical and ideal representatives of Japanese food and identity. Sweets in Japan
tell an interesting tale. ey originally entered courtly cuisine via contact with
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
12
Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century; this also marked the beginning
of extensive use of sugar in the preparation of sweets. Contemporary Japan
contains a wide range of sweets – both ‘traditional Japanese’ as well as the
ones adopted relatively recently from Western nations. Sweets are associated
with distinct social/cultural meanings and a broad array of social uses. On the
basis of eldwork conducted since 2009, Holtzman examines several varieties
of sweets together with their diverse uses and meanings to show how they
mark local identities, enunciate gender roles, and are central in processes of
gi exchange, a crucial aspect of Japanese life. is leads him to contend that
sweets do not only form a key aspect of Japanese culinary culture; they also
oer insights into broader aspects of Japanese life.
e third section on ‘Food, Identity, Personhood’, opens with a detailed
analysis of the many meanings, perceptions, functions and appropriations of
ethnic ‘local food’ in contemporary China. Focussing on the Enshi prefecture
of southwest Hubei in central China, a marginal and ‘ethnic minority’
prefecture, Xu Wu’s ethnography playfully blends dierent meanings of local
food with their perceptions, uses and appropriations over time and space to
narrate a tale where marginal, local, mountain and minority food gets branded
and standardised as ‘ethnic’, and marketed and integrated by urban restaurant
chains. Initially frequented by poor workers who migrated to towns and cities
in search of work, restaurants serving hezha food, the generic term for food
of Hubei, have grown in number and prestige. Consequently, hezha food has
taken on newer meanings and connotations. e politics of branding and
marketing has made hezha food symbolic of minority, famine and farmers’ or
poor peoples’ food, as well as healthy and tasty, and ecological and delicate
food. A boom in eco and ethnic tourism together with an araction for the
‘ethnic’, the marginal, and the backward ‘other’ on the part of city dwellers
have converged to congure hezha food in particular ways and endowed it
with contradictory meanings and signicance. It has also inuenced a change
in textures of taste and notions of being urban and cosmopolitan. Xu Wu
tracks the symbolic and culinary adaptations of hezha food to underline the
constant construction and transformation in meanings of food in national
andinternationalarena, which in turn allows the simultaneous existence of
contradictory connotations of food and identity.
In the following essay, Guadalupe Aguilar walks us through the din and
bustle of markets in the Senegalese capital of Dakar via anities and conicts
in family kitchens to end at the ‘dinner table’ as a site of family meals and grand
Introduction 13
feasts. She focuses on Muslim women sellers, vendors and peddlers in dierent
markets of Dakar to lead us into the everyday worlds of the ordinary members
of Senegalese society. Emphasising that eating and consumption in Dakar,
renowned for its hospitality, entail a long and arduous process of procuring
ingredients and materials, and their preparation and serving in accordance with
norms and rituals, Aguilar opens a world of struggle and strife, solidarity and
sociability. Women sellers and vendors use the public space of the market to sell
sh, vegetables and other produce in an eort to supplement the scarce family
income; they also barter each others’ wares to put some food on the family
table in a society that lays great stress on sharing of food and drink as a mark of
geniality and hospitality, and status and prestige. e market is further used as a
site for the operation of social support and nancial schemes that help women
deal with economic crunch and the daily hazards of life and love. Eectively
inhabiting the public space of the market, these women return to the domain of
the private to follow their assigned roles as nurturers and providers of food. Here
too, they use the allocated space of the kitchen in innovative ways to establish
a degree of autonomy and demarcate frontiers between allies and enemies
within an extended family. Finally, they assume the responsibility of properly
apportioning the common food at a collective meal or feast, highlighting
thereby their importance as nurturers. Such actions and manoeuvres, without
directly challenging the gender division in a patriarchal society, subtly shake up
and negotiate unequal gendered relations in the family and in society.
On a dierent plane, such accommodations feature in the food that is eaten.
Le thieboudienne, a ‘typical’ and favourite dish of Dakar, is in reality the result of a
blend of colonial legacy and local culture. A mix of rice introduced by the French
colonisers in the nineteenth century with sh, abundantly available in Dakar,
le thieboudienne highlights the constant mixtures and mix-ups that constitute a
‘national’ or a typical dish. Without entering into detail, Aguilar also hints at the
role played by women in adopting and adapting rice as a staple in place of the
locally available coarse grains that take longer to cook.
In the nal essay of the section, Arianna Huhn demonstrates how what
is consumed goes into the very conguration of ‘what is human’. rough
a meticulous analysis of food taboos in a town of Mozambique, Huhn shows
how such taboos are persistently used to separate human persons from their
anti-social, uncompassionate, and hence inhuman alters – the sorcerers. In a
context where ‘pro-sociality’ is of vital importance for community membership
and metaphysical existence, arming humanness through food and foodways
carries immense import. Food taboos, argues Huhn, are crucial in the separation
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
14
of social persons from their anti-social, uncompassionate, and ‘inhuman’
others – the sorcerers. Sorcerers try to destroy life instead of maintaining and
improving it: this involves apredilection not only for creating human misery,
but also for consuming human esh. In such a context, the conguration and
armation of human personhood requires a very careful avoidance of meats
that resemble human beings in physical, emotional, or spiritual form. Food
taboos, by performing this very valuable task, become an integral part of social
reproduction: they enable humans to take great care to evade ever being charged
with anthropophagy. Drawing upon the dierent responses to queries about
food taboos of the people she interviewed, Huhn suggests that the discourse
about avoiding various kinds of meat perceived to be close to human esh,
and the actual practice of not consuming animals that look like humans have
an underlying subtext. ey underline a disinterest on the part of humans in
feeding o others. Moving away from what is eaten to what is not, Huhn puts
a dierent spin on food and consumption by pointing to the centrality of what
is not consumed as a key element in constructions of personhood and identity.
e last section ‘Food, Myth, Nostalgia’, crosses the boundaries of Asia
and Africa to educe sensations of nostalgia and longing, and contestations over
belonging in the construal of ‘national’ myths of national cuisine. Outlining
hybridity and nostalgia as vital spices of food and cuisine, Jean Duruz oers a
tale of fragments loosely connected in time and space, in order to unsele linear
constructions of ‘heritage’ and ‘locality’ under regimes of western modernity.
She deploys the rich chaos of food markets reected in complex mix of smells
and spices, colours and tastes, and peoples and places, as a richly nuanced starting
point, as well as a ‘grounded’ ending point to proer a tale of ras el hanout, a vital
and variable spice mix of Morocco, blended with nostalgia and remembering in
hybrid spaces and contexts.
Duruz dwells on Roden’s nostalgic practices of culture preservation from
a location that is, temporarily and spatially, ‘home’ yet ‘not-home’; wanders
in the streets, food stalls and restaurants of ‘ethnic’ Paris where ‘dierent’
communities challenge dominant meanings and memories of French ‘cuisine’;
and dips into the jars of ras el hanout lined up on shelves in a Moroccan stall in
Adelaide’s Central Market, and the smell of preserved lemons to pose a number
of questions. Do taste and smells, transplanted and hybridised, contribute
to understandings of ‘heritage’ and ‘locality’? Do food markets perpetuate
romances of migrancy and cosmopolitanism, and constitute a ‘place’ for
cartographies of remembering? Do ‘ethnic’ cookbooks, neighbourhoods and
food smells help in the mapping of geographies of belonging? If they do, then
Introduction 15
food traditions will tell a tale of the uidity of borders of the modern state, rather
than the ‘interruption’ of modernity’s national prescriptions, and chart distinct
cartographies of hybrid belonging strewn together by memory and longing, loss
and nostalgia, borrowing and sharing, cooking and living.
e nal essay of the volume brilliantly counter-poses ‘borrowing’ as
‘heritage’ by dwelling on the signicance of myths, legends and stories in the
construction of the genealogy of a mixed Mexican cuisine. Sarah Bak-Geller
takes us back to modernity’s ‘prescription’ of the national state by unravelling
the myth-making that undergirds the construction of a cuisine that is at once
‘mestizo’ and national; an ideal combination of pre-Hispanic and Iberian
cultures that embodies the true spirit of the Mexican nation. Granted the
status of ‘national heritage’ by UNESCO in 2010, Mexican cuisine, arms
Bak-Geller, has further bolstered food as a crucial element of nationhood. She
interrogates and interrupts the symmetry, continuity and homogeneity that is
meant to underlie Mexican cuisine, by oering an incisive against-the-grain
reading of two culinary myths of the Mexican republic of early-nineteenth
century, that of the foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlán, and of the rst meeting
between Moctezuma and Cortés. Bak-Geller contends that both were based
on historical events of the sixteenth century, the conquest to be precise, and
were picked up and reinterpreted by the Republic to portray the harmonious
mix of pre-Hispanic and Iberian food cultures. Such reinterpretations allowed
leading political actors to evoke ideas of unity, authenticity and mestizaje
(mixedness) as important elements of mexicanidad (mexicanity). Bak-Geller
oers a counter-reading of the myths by means of a critical examination of the
writings of leading nineteenth century historians and iconographic sources
of that period (prints, oils, enconchados). Such writings and sources portray
tension and exclusion, and misunderstandings and suppression, rather than
harmonious blend and reciprocal sharing and ‘fertilisation’. A careful and
simultaneous analysis of historical events and their particular projections
enables Bak-Geller to underscore the manoeuvres and manipulations that lay
at the heart of the foundation of Mexican ‘national cuisine’ as a key element
of a mestizo nation; manoeuvres that excluded many groups of people from
the gastronomic (and general) history of Mexico. rough her re-reading, she
aempts to restore the narratives of conquest and suppression, displacement
and marginalisation, and shake up thereby the myth of an amiable and unied
mestizo nation. By bringing in power as a central element of hybridity, this
essay invites us to reect on the many dimensions of sharing and mixture,
transplantation and cross-fertilisation that give shape to cultures of cooking
and the cooking of cultures.
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
16
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