Rachel Laudan

This is an updated version of a small handout that I wrote for a meeting of the International Association of Culinary Professionals in Columbus, Mississippi. So many people want to write food history, and so many tell me they are intimidated because they do not have Masters or Doctorates in history. This is the Dummies guide to getting started. And anyone who has an interest should. Now.

Getting Started in Food History

The most visible result of my preparations for the IACP Food History Symposium was a pile of books, articles and notes on my desk. As I gazed at the chaos, it struck me that it was a pity to just file everything away again. Here was the start of a set of notes on food history that people at the meeting might find useful. So here’s what emerged from my chaotic pile. As you’ll see it’s incomplete, idiosyncratic and probably has many errors. I’d like to invite all of you to comment and criticize.

Getting Started

You’ve got your grandmother’s recipe file. Or you are proud of your culinary heritage. Or you have a hunch that cooking has had a greater effect on history than people realize. Or you adore chocolate and want to know more about it. Or, like me in Hawaii, you are fascinating by an utterly foreign cuisine. You want to find out more. You want to write a history.

The best start is a passionate interest.

It’s not necessary to be trained as a historian. Those skills can be picked up. It’s worth remembering that even now most history is not written by people in history departments. Lawyers write the history of law, musicians write the history of music, scientists or former scientists write the history of science, anthropologists write the history of early man and geologists the history of the earth.

There’s a good reason why so much history is written outside history departments. It helps to know what you’re writing about. So if you’re a cook or if you have a passionate interest in food, you already have the basic qualifications you need to write a history of food.

Historians do three things at the same time: researching the sources, thinking and writing. If you just do research without thinking, you’re wasting your time. If you sit and think without checking your ideas by doing some research, you’re wasting your time. And there’s no better way to bring your research and your thinking together than getting out a pencil and tablet and jotting down ideas for your story, questions you need to answer, sources to go to, and, of course, bits and pieces of the finished product.

So, some things to think about as you head off to the sources. before you go to the sources

What is Your Question?

 

The most difficult part of history in my experience. I find I start off with the vaguest of questions such as “What in the world is this stuff they are eating in Hawaii?” Only when my research is nearly finished do I end up with something reasonably clear. “What happened when three utterly distinct culinary traditions were transplanted to tiny Pacific Islands and what does this tell us about culinary change?”

And it’s not a linear process from ill-defined to well-defined. I end up going down all kinds of blind allies.

I go to different sources, or look for different things in the same sources as my question gets redefined. But unless I keep returning to “What is my question?” “Why is it important?” I just get quite lost happily trawling through dusty bookshelves or poking in mom ´n pop stores.

What Kind of Food History are You Writing?

Not all food history is the same. Different people want to find out different things about food in the past. Here are some major approaches.

· Culinary history. The word “culinary” comes from culina, the Latin word for kitchen. Culinary history focuses on what goes on in the kitchen and what comes out of the kitchen. It’s what people could have eaten at a particular time.

· History of dining and manners. Just what it says. How people consumed their food.

· History of diet. This deals with what people actually ate in the past usually concentrating on intake of calories and nutrients rather than on finished dishes.

· History of theories of diet. The evolution of what physicians have said about what we should eat.

· History of nutrition. Accounts of how what we have eaten has affected our health and well being.

· History of foodstuffs. This concentrates on a particular ingredient such as sugar, salt, ketchup or cake.

There are lots of others: histories of food businesses, important individuals or groups, culinary literature. What you are trying to do will influence the sources you go to.

 

Ways of Approaching the Past: Memory, Legend, Antiquarianism, and History

History isn’t the only way of approaching the past.

Legend. A story that supports the beliefs of lots of people. Every Thanksgiving countless publications and radio and television programs repeat a legendary version of the first Thanksgiving. And the women who voted Betty Crocker the second most popular woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt expressed how reassuring they found that smiling woman in the red suit.

Memory. A tribute to something that we believe we have lost. Like legend this is a way of creating group identity. So sitting down to a Thanksgiving dinner helps unite Americans whatever their ethnic origins.

Both memory and legend can be very important. In the realm of food, they are the stuff of many cookbooks. An old but entertaining look at these issues can be found in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Antiquarianism. A disinterested investigation of the past for its own sake.

Historians are busy debating how these different approaches to the past are related. I think most would agree that compared to legend and memory, history takes a more critical and comparative attitude to sources. Compared to antiquarianism, it is more concerned to link past to present.

Primary and Secondary Sources

Historians usually distinguish primary and secondary sources. Primary sources are documents (such as diaries, letters, cookbooks, speeches, interviews) or objects (kitchens, gadgets, buildings, markets) that give direct evidence of the past. Secondary sources talk about primary sources. Although the distinction is not absolute, it is useful.

Criticism and Comparison

The historian approaches both primary and secondary sources with a critical eye. Just like witnesses in the courtroom, people forget, slant, interpret or sometimes downright lie about the past. Nor can objects be trusted. Those bones may have been moved by a flood, those paintings are designed to help the dead in the next world, not to show us how people cooked, and so on.

One of the best ways to criticize sources is to compare, compare and compare again. An example. It is widely stated that the British working class diet was worse at the beginning of twentieth century than at any time in history. The source for this was a famous government report on the physical deterioration of the British people presented to Parliament in 1904. Many of the witnesses talked about a poor diet as the cause.

But since we don’t have any comparative evidence about the physical state of the British in earlier times, we don’t actually know whether or not there was deterioration.

Which leads to. . .

Inference and Argument

If invention is one percent genius and ninety nine percent sweat, history is one percent sources and ninety nine percent the inferences you draw from them. Well, that’s not quite true of course. But for a still relevant, cautionary tale of the traps that await even the most experienced and distinguished historian, see

David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies (New York: Harper, 1970).

Footnotes and References

Footnotes and references are one of the things that sets history off from legend and memory. People can check where you got your information. They’re so important that Martha Carlin’s website has some useful, simple advice before you plunge into the arcana of different styles.

There are various styles of endnotes and footnotes, two of the better known being the MLA style and the Chicago Style. It you get to the stage of writing a book, it may be worth buying the Chicago Manual of Style. It’s incredibly useful on such arcana as proof readers signs, how to refer to every imaginable source, and how to do footnotes.

Taking Notes

Our memories are sieves. It’s essential to take notes. Often introductory books on how to do history recommend that you use cards. Arrange them by categories, they suggest.

I have never, ever been able to make this work. This could be just my sloppiness. But I think there are more important reasons.

It’s terribly time consuming. And as you work the categories that you use get refined and changed.

Nor have I been able to use a computer for taking notes. I like to be able to use the flexibility of a pencil to comment, underline, put in exclamation points, etc.

So I simply use notepads with the title of the manuscript, article or book I am using at the top. Or if it’s an interview, details about the interview. Then I put page numbers in the left hand margin, quotes, summaries and comments opposite.

A digital camera is great for quick shots of manuscripts. Also for when you have limited time with a set of resources or for recording fragile documents.

Cameras are also great for recording kitchen experiments, contemporary history outings, etc.

Even so before you write you will need to process what you have recorded. Note-taking forces you to reflect.

Physical Remains of Food

Archaeologists have always had interesting insights on food from funerary remains, paintings and so on. These can often correct or supplement information from literary sources.

A slew of new techniques including optical and scanning microscopy have opened new possibilities.

. . . . . .

Ethnographic Studies or Kitchen Experience

Nothing beats an experimental batch of fish sauce under the kitchen sink, a meal prepared over an open fire, or an hour or so spent working with a woman hulling rice to throw a new perspective on past foods.

Oral History

For many of us, oral history is an important part of our work. It is also very tricky.

All our instincts to the contrary, eyewitness accounts, stories straight from the horse’s mouth are no more reliable than any other source. It’s not that people deliberately lie, even though few of us want to stress our less glorious moments. It’s just that everyone forgets bits of the past, reinterprets others, thinks that yet others are too unimportant to mention even though they might be crucial bits of evidence.

On the practical front, using a tape recorder can be useful for archives. Transcribing tapes, though, is one of the slowest and most tedious exercises. Taking quick notes like a journalist is very helpful.

A useful source is the web site “Oral history techniques: How to organize and conduct oral interviews” by the Indiana University Center for the Study of History and Memory.

It has a useful bibliography and also a permission form for interviews that you might want to deposit in an archive or use for various purposes.

Some Favorite Resources

· Sandy Oliver’s site

Go here for sources for historic cooking, food museums, culinary history groups, booksellers specializing in food history, and much more including Sandy’s log which keeps you up to date on what’s happening in US food history while gently inculcating the principles of good historical scholarship.

· Madge Griswold’s “Selective Guide to Culinary Collections in the US.” An IACP publication. Www.iacpfoundation.org/docs/culdir.pdf

· Any Land Grant University library. These universities with their agricultural schools and home economics departments have been collecting works on agriculture, nutrition, and related subjects for a hundred and fifty years. They are wonderful resources.

· The eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Published in 1911, it is one of the best reference works every produced as it is written by real experts. Not much use, I admit, for the last hundred years but a gem for everything up to then. Facts and figures on population, trade and agriculture, detailed accounts of everything from dairying to Vedic sacrifice.

· Any books or articles in a foreign language. One of my favorite histories of Indian food is written by a Brazilian scholar. Although I can barely make out the text, just the references are invaluable.

 

· Older culinary histories. Food history goes back to Athanaeus, was very active in the Renaissance, and there are lots of nineteeth and early twentieth century works. To my sorrow my Latin is not up to the Renaissance texts. But there’s still nothing to beat Maurizio’s Histoire de l’Alimentation Végétale (1932) for example.

· On line library catalogues. Use the Library of Congress, the British Library, the Bibliotheque National, the Hollis catalogue for Harvard Library to check references, to find out what has been published, etc. Use your local public or university library catalogue to prepare and organize a list of references and with your prepaid copy card, whizz through a pile of references.

For US libraries. For the world.

·   The home page of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor, Martha Carlin who teaches history of medieval food. A wonderful source for links to food history bibliographies, universities, history journals, world wide, reference tools and maps, archives, downloadable cookbooks and guides to how to footnote.

Information Sources for Students of Gastronomy at the University of Adelaide is indispensable.

· Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Extraordinarily useful site with guides to the profession, tools for the historian, bibliographies, links, and good guides to “unpacking evidence” such as travel narratives, objects, music, maps, etc.

· The Yellow Pages. These are a wonderful source for food businesses, restaurants (obviously), markets etc. And not just in the United States. Type paginas amarillas into Google and you can get the yellow pages for every Latin American country. Of course, in poorer countries lots of businesses won’t show up in the yellow pages but it’s a great start.

Dealing with Academic Historians

It helps to be understand a little bit about academic history departments just so that if you want you can locate your work in that context. People in history departments think of themselves in three ways (and divide their journals up in the same ways).

1. Their geographical area. So they might say “I’m an Asianist” or “I’m an Africanist” or (overwhelmingly likely if we’re talking about the US), “I’m an Americanist.” In most countries of the world, the national history swamps all others, reflecting the origins of modern academic history in nineteenth-century nationalism. Today in Mexico, for example, history means almost exclusively Mexican history.

2. Their time period. The historian might say “Oh I do Ren and Ref (Renaissance and Reformation), or “I do the colonial period.”

3. Their thematic interest. This might be diplomatic history, economic history, social history, or cultural history for example.

Academic history has its fashions like every other walk of life. In the last seventy five years, these have been some of the major trends: first from the thirties on, social and economic history, then in the 1960s, economic and business history often of a quantitative sort, then from the late 1960s a new wave of social history particularly of the poor and of women (“history from the bottom up”), then most recently cultural history heavily influenced by cultural anthropology.

So if you are busy studying Chinese restaurants in California in the early twentieth century, you might say “I’m doing the economic and business history of migrant groups in twentieth century America.” You get the picture.

Finding Other Food Historians

This is a great time to get to know people. With the internet, the fact that you are not in New York or Berkeley doesn’t matter one whit. In fact it can be a huge advantage. You have a perspective that is out of the ordinary. You have access to materials that are unusual.

You already know the advantages of belonging to IACP. But some other ways of getting in touch are worth thinking about.

· Join your local food history group (or start one). It’s a good way to meet a mix of food enthusiasts.

· Sign up for the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) listserve. A lively and well-informed group.

Journals and Societies

Food History News (see favorite resources. Strong American and historic cooking emphasis).

Petits Propos Culinaires. (Founded by the British food historian Alan Davidson on a lark, this long-running quirky journal takes a strongly international perspective and just about all the senior food historians have published in it.

Food and Foodways (some excellent articles in its infrequent early issues, this journal is now on track again).

Gastronomica Darra Goldstein’s pioneering editorial stance welcomes all kinds of food scholarship and more besides).

Food, Culture and Society (the journal of the ASFS under the editorship of Warren Belasco. He is actively encouraging all kinds of food scholarship).

Apart from Writing: What Food Historians Can Do

· Encourage your family, your library or your business to keep records. Many librarians still think of cookbooks as ephemera to be thrown away as new ones appear. Many businesses do not know the value of their archives.

· Help out at your local museum, school etc. Visitors, children, students respond really well to food history. It’s so immediate.

· Start a culinary historian’s group. Just a group of friends who like to get together and chat and eat.

· Write accessible food history for the community paper, the newsletter your business or school puts out. Or try to get a column going in the local paper. Lots of people interested in food would like to see food pages and food periodicals move beyond the predictable mix of legends, memory and recipes. It’s especially important with the whole issue of food world wide so politically charged. You can add perspective.