Because the topic bears on the question of how to think about the history of cuisine that lurks behind the submissions to the Intangible Heritage Program of UNESCO I have been writing about, because the Proceedings have very limited distribution, I’ve decided to post the paper here.

Today I offer the preamble.  I will follow up in the coming days with the ten suggestions and some commentary where my ideas have moved along. As always, I welcome comments.

What Can the Culinary Historian Learn from the Linguist? Ten Suggestions

Some years ago, I lived in Hawaii.  If you can penetrate the cloud of marketing put out by the tourist industry, you realize that this is one of the most multi-cultural lands on earth.

A population of only a million people is made up of roughly equal numbers of three great diasporas: one from the South Pacific, one from Europe and America, and a third from Asia.  Each of those diasporas is in itself complex: native Hawaiians, Samoans and Tongans; British, Germans, Mexicans, and Americans; and Hakka and Han Chinese, Japanese and Okinawans, Tagalog and Ilocano Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese and Thais, who arrived at different times and for different reasons.

With no group in the majority, with no group having cultural or economic dominance, living in a few hundred square miles of the most isolated inhabited land on earth, it was a case of learn to live together or perish.

As a result, the inhabitants of Hawaii created a creole language, known to Islanders as Pidgin and linguists as Hawaii Creole, so that they could communicate. It is now the main language in the islands, the first language of half a million people, and has its own printed literature.

They also created in lunch wagons and restaurants a fusion cuisine known to residents as Local Food. Everyone in the Islands drew parallels between cuisine and language.  A book in pidgin describing Local Food, Pupus to Da Max (roughly translatable as “everything you need to know about the foods you take to a pot luck) is a long-time best seller in Hawaii. Greeting cards chirping phrases such as “It musubi your birthday” fly off the shelves, everyone enjoying the play on the word musubi, the nori-wrapped, Spam-topped rice log ultimately of Japanese origin that is the  favorite quick lunch sold in every convenience store.[i]

The parallel creation of a creole language and a creole food made me think about the possibility that the culinary historian could learn from the linguist.

Since the study of language history goes back further–through the great scholars of the nineteenth century, the work of William Jones in the late eighteenth century, and the studies of antiquarians in the Renaissance—and has engaged more scholars than the history of cuisine, the  question is what can the culinary historian learn from the way that linguists have framed questions about the history of languages that will offer new perspectives or open up new lines of research?

The possibility that we can learn something from linguists is made yet more plausible when we consider the parallels between language and cuisine. While many different species communicate and while all species feed themselves, no other species carries these activities to the same level as humans. Human language, both spoken and written, is vastly more elaborate and complex than that of other species. Human alimentation is similarly elaborate and complex, being based on cooked, not raw foods.

Before I proceed, let me clarify a couple of issues.

First, comparing language and cuisine as means of human expression, or as ways of expressing identity, although a perfectly legitimate enquiry (indeed one to which the Hawaii case lends itself) is not my major interest. Exploring the parallels between the changing global distribution of languages and of food is.[ii]

Second, I am no expert in historical linguistics.  What I have learned I have learned from books for a general audience. I have no considered opinion on theoretical debates such as the origin of words or the emergence of syntax.

To start, we need to decide what in the culinary sphere corresponds to language.   Language is clearly a system, comprising at the least sounds, words, ways of combining words (grammar), the context in which words are used, and the meanings words are given. Because the concept “food” is so vague and general, so lacking in any sense of system, it does not seem an adequate equivalent. I propose instead to use the concept “cuisine” for the system of ingredients, rules and techniques for combining them into dishes and meals, and understandings about context and meaning.[iii]

So, OK, to many cuisine reeks of elitism and in English is used as a synonym for high cuisine. Yet since there is no good English equivalent for, say, the Spanish cocina meaning both the kitchen and the way of cooking, and since even among English speakers cuisine is increasingly used to suggest a way of cooking (as the titles of many cookbooks indicate), I think it is quite reasonable to use this as our unit of analysis.

Cuisine captures the system of the way we eat just as language captures the system of the way we communicate. Linguists defend the idea that all languages, understood as ways of expressing the needs of their users, are equal in the sense that “there is nothing intrinsically limiting, demeaning, or handicapping about any of them.”[iv] For the purposes of this paper, all cuisines too are equal in the sense that they make up the panorama of the way humans feed themselves.

Those preliminaries over, I now offer ten suggestions for research, based on lines of investigation already established in historical or comparative linguistics, that as a culinary historian I think might open up new frontiers of research or new analytical tools.

___________________

Commentary.  Here I urge that for historical purposes scholars should treat all cuisines as equal just as linguists treat all languages as equal, since both serve the purposes of their users.  This is one reason why I feel uneasy about UNESCO essentially handing out gold stars to some cuisines and not others.  We would be very uneasy about selecting certain languages for special status.

This is not to say I am a relativist about languages or cuisines.  I think some are better than others, depending on the needs and wants of their users.  French High Cuisine served the purposes of international diplomacy extremely well.  Arctic Cuisine allowed people to survive in one of the most hostile environments possible. Both excellent for the job at hand, but apples and oranges if your aim is to rank them.

[ii] See the special section edited by Annie Hauck-Lawson in Food, Culture and Society, Spring 2004, 24-146.

[iii] Many distinguished students of food, including Jack Goody, Sidney Mintz, and Stephen Mennell, have found the term cuisine indispensable.  Since, however, there is no agreement on exactly how to define it, I feel free to use it in my own way.

[iv] David Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 6.

In the market in Silao, Mexico, the very geographic center of Mexico, ten miles south of the the city of Guanajuato in the State of Guanajuato, the semilleros (seed shops) sell black eyed peas (Vigna unguicalata) along with all the usual Mexican beans. They call them veronicas.

You can see them in the sack at the back.  When you ask the vendors how they cook them, they indicate that they “guisar” them, that is they put them in stews as they would habas or garbanzos.  They do not eat them alone and simply boiled as they would the huge variety of Mexican beans.  This makes sense because all three are Old World not New World legumes.  It’s a boon to me because my husband loves black-eyed peas and I can nip down and get a supply from time to time.

But this leaves the bigger puzzle. To see black eyed peas in Mexico is, to put it mildly, odd.  You simply don’t run across blackeyed peas in markets in Central Mexico.

But the hypothesis that I have to consider is that these are a legacy of the African heritage in Guanajuato.  As I’m sure all readers know, blackeyed peas have been closely associated with African cooking.

And in the sixteenth century–yes, that early–Guanajuato had a substantial African population that was described as hailing being Angolan, Congan, Biafran, Biafaran, Baran and Araran, that is from the River Niger basin and Angola.  They were mainly slaves though cross-marriage, particularly with indigenous, began almost immediately.

Guanajuato in the sixteenth century was an immigrant community with no large settled indigenous community.  Apart from Africans, it consisted of Spaniards, particularly Basques and Castellanos, migrant indigenous particularly nahuas, michoacanos, otomis, and chichimecas, Portuguese (possibly crypto jews), and French.

According to a document that appears to date from the 1580s, in the mining area of Guanajuato there were 400 Spanish, 500 horses, 800 slaves (presumably African) and 800 mules.

Silao was where the runaway slaves took refuge, seeking out broken country to the south of the town.

If there’s anything to this, it suggests that looking for traces of African foods in Mexico is going to be a case of looking for tiny little clues.

I probably missed earlier postings, but it seems likely that ensaimadas evolved on Mallorca during its Moorish occupation. The argument against this is that the Moors didn’t use lard (saim in Catalan), but the word probably has an Arabic root, and in any case, the pastry skills of the moors were far more advanced than those of Medieval European cooks. Think baclavas and kadaifs. Think also croissants whose texture correlates with that of an ensaimada. The Moors turned a blind eye to wine making in the Balearics, so I think this pastry is another link in your Hispano-Arabic chain.

I am always happy to have more links in the Hispano-Arabic chain so I am happy with this theory.  Any more objective folk out there who want to raise doubts?

]]> http://www.rachellaudan.com/2009/05/ensaimadas-again-more-moorish.html/feed 0 http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/06/art-and-manuscript-cookbooks-in-peril.html http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/06/art-and-manuscript-cookbooks-in-peril.html#comments Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:32:14 +0000 Rachel Laudan http://www.rachellaudan.com/?p=370 Here’s a link that lists some of the pieces of art that have disappeared from Mexico recently, particularly from churches.  It makes very sad reading.

What are not included in this list are manuscript cookbooks. Many of the great convents in Mexico still have magnificent manuscript cookbooks from the eighteenth century.  These are not only writen in a beautiful hand but really are part of the treasure of Mexico because it was in the convents that much of the country’s cuisine was created.

I happen to know for a fact that one of the most important “vanished” within the last couple of years. For a variety of reasons, the fact of its loss was suppressed. It may be well taken care of in the collection of whoever it was that purchased it.  He or she obviously can not make it available to others though.  So it’s effectively gone.  Unless perhaps some day some one returns it to the convent or to the national archive.

If you travel to Mexico, and if you are interested in its stupendous heritage of colonial architecture, you might look at the books available on the Espadana web site.

I haven’t figured out where I stand on this yet, though I know which way I lean. Self sufficiency in food is a hopeless goal for most countries. The Romans couldn’t do it. The Dutch became the most prosperous country in seventeenth century Europe partly by abandoning that goal. The British haven’t been able to do it in a couple of centuries and haven’t a prayer of doing it now.

Given that, this is a trend that is not going to disappear. It’s also not so different from factories on foreign soil. It’s just that the area is much larger. And given what we’ve learned about how to farm more efficiently, this could boost world food production enormously.

In any case, it’s not hard to predict that who has access to agricultural land and how that maps on to political boundaries is going to be a hot topic in the next few years.

A hundred and fifty years ago, it would have been the very rare person in Japan who would have had even the faintest clue what butter was. The only people in Japan who ate butter (except perhaps as a medicine) were the Dutch in their trading post at Nagasaki.

Then came the black ships and the forcible opening of Japan to the west. For a wonderful account of how this produced modern Japanese cuisine, look for Katarzyna Cwiertka’s wonderful book of the same name published by the University of Chicago Press last year. In a nutshell, though, the Japanese government, after a few fits and starts, embarked on a campaign to make the Japanese diet more like the Western diet. Just what this meant depended on where you stood in the social scale. Butter was for those at the top end. The government underwrote the early dairy industry.

About a hundred years ago, a few wealthy Japanese might have eaten butter and possibly even buying it. An enterprising Japanese lawyer opened Meidi-ya, an upmarket store, inspired by what he had seen at Harrods and other London department stores that sold all kinds of western food products. Well-to-do Japanese had the choice of butter from France, Holland, and Denmark. Later, butter for the store came from dairies established on the northern island of Hokkaido.

Was butter greeted with cries of joy?  Hardly. Fats in quantity were a new experience. According to the distinguished Japanese food historian, Watanabe, they gave diners diarrhea and so Chinese immigrants who opened restaurants cut back on the fat in their dishes. That certainly fits with my experience in Hawaii where I heard elderly Japanese claim that the saimin (noodle soup) sold in McDonald’s was too greasy for their taste because it was made of chicken stock instead of a stock of seaweed and perhaps fish.

About fifty years ago, the Japanese would have begun to have ready access to butter following the lean (literally) war years and their aftermath. So in a couple of generations, butter has become so essential to the Japanese that the government is thinking of intervening to ensure the supply.

I realize that I don’t know how butter is used in Japan.  I doubt it’s for spreading on bread (whose rise in Japan parallels that of butter) because in most parts of the world bottled mayo seems to have that function. I doubt it’s for home cooking.  So is it in restaurants?  If I had to guess, I’d guess upmarket cakes and confections.

I’m probably dead wrong.  But someone out there must have an answer. Anyone know?

An interesting tale of changing tastes, globalization and its effects.

Sheila Levine masterminds the superb food and wine list put out by the University of California Press. The books are of high scholarly quality, beautifully produced, and, cheers, almost never written in a dry academic style. They range from Ted Bestor’s study of Tsukiji, the Japanese fish market, to Marion Nestle’s series of books on food politics (pet food politics being the next offering), to a reprint of Martino’s Art of Cooking, central to understanding the cooking of Renaissance Italy. If you don’t know this series, check it out.

Also look at Gastronomica, that the journals wing of the Press publishes, edited by Darra Goldstein.

Rob Arndt is in charge of Yes Press which has just one book to its credit, Culinary Biographies, edited by his late wife Alice. I was a tad skeptical when Alice told me her plans for this and twisted my arm into doing entries on Accum (see below) and Appert (the Frenchman who demonstrated the possibility of canning in the early nineteenth century). The result, however, makes compulsive reading and it was enthusiastically reviewed by the New York Times and other prestigious organs.

Opening it at random, I can go from Marion Harland, celebrity cookbook author in nineteenth-century America, to Dorothy Hartley, collector of English culinary folklore, to Nika Hazelton, German-Italian cookbook author who did much to introduce Americans to European cookery following World War II.

So if you don’t have it, it’s a book worth thinking about. And since in a few years there will be a second edition, think of suggestions for new entries. Rob particularly wants to strengthen non-American, non-European entries.

Ann Dolamore and her husband run Grub Street. It has reprinted some of the very best cookbooks of the last century, with a British emphasis, including ones by Elizabeth David, who had fame in England as great as the fame of Julia Child in the United States, Jane Grigson, who combined style, scholarship, research and great recipes whether for charcuterie, fruit, or vegetables, and Claudia Roden, of middle eastern food fame.

Less well known but just as interesting are Margaret Patten and my favorite Mary Norwak. She wrote the first cookery column I ever read on the back page of the Farmer’s Weekly no less. Her book on English Puddings Sweet and Savoury that Grub Street has reprinted ranges much more widely than the title suggests and opens the eyes to a world that has nearly gone.

Finally, there Phil Zuckerman, president of Applewood Books. He sells all kinds of interesting food books at great discounts. He reprints historic food books, mainly American and ranging much more widely than just cookbooks, and sells them at quite ridiculously low prices.

And if you visit his web site Foodsville, you can join discussion groups, do social networking (as I’ve learned to call it), and–get this–read those hundred plus reprints free. What a service.

I quickly checked out Accum’s Treatise on the Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons (1822), Bertha Haffner Ginger, California Mexican-Spanish Cookbook (194), Lafcadio Hearn’s Creole Cookery (1885), and Cheese and Cheemaking with special reference to Fancy Continental Cheeses (1896)–basically how Americans could get in on the growing cheese business.

So first off to Exhacienda San Jose about twelve miles from my house as the crow flies. No pics of this. The few ruins that are now a primary school were closed. The lady outside who sells shoes to the mothers from her pick up truck said the teachers had a meeting.

But on to Exhacienda Guadalupe.

There it is.

And here’s another straight on view. It’s in ruins of course. The Mexican Revolution and the redistribution of land that followed meant that these big haciendas were broken up and (often) nationalized. The government owns this one but has so much property of this kind that they can do nothing. There’s a village store in the central building now but the rest is abandoned.

But imagine once. Those mines in Guanajuato needed mules, they needed thousands of mules: mules to haul ore in the mines, mules to run the crushing equipment that was preliminary to extracting the ore, mules to carry it to the coasts, mules to carry food for the mules in the mines, mules to carry food for the people who worked in the mines and who ran the mines.

These big haciendas grew the corn that fueled that huge industrial enterprise. And they were run as huge what we would now call agribusinesses. That is, if you realize that the labor was all human labor, no machines. My grandfathers were peons on this hacienda, said the lady who ran the shop in the exhacienda. She also mentioned that those who still live there would like to put a new roof on the hacienda church but they did not have the money. They still lived off the small parcels of land they received when the hacienda was broken up. No way that produced enough money for roofing this substantial church.

And here are the buttresses of the church.

So on to Exhacienda La Paz just five miles away. This has been bought by new investors and is producing on the large scale again. I reckoned that the three pieces of John Deere machinery that I saw in another dusty space in front of another exhacienda must have cost between $300,000 and half a million US dollars.

A drive just ten miles down the road. And here you have material for a dozen posts: on the ancient history of agribusiness; on the dual problems of feeding animals and humans; on the cost to humans of producing food; on the history of Mexico in the last five hundred years; on why there is migration to the United States; on how to organize the labor of producing food; and on things that make your heart ache.

For the last few months I have been dipping into Richard Fletcher’s The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity. Historians have been producing some fascinating books on the spread of the world’s religions. I’ve already referred to one on the rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier. Since converting to a new religion normally means changing what you eat, I find this literature particularly suggestive.

The Barbarian Conversion is a measured book, scholarly in tone, careful in its way of teasing out conclusions from fragmentary evidence. It’s not a book to read all at once. Its five hundred pages work carefully through the conversion of Europe over a thousand years. But it has lots of interesting ideas.

For example, in the first chapter he lists nine questions to be posed when thinking about conversion. I think most of them are just as important for understanding changes in cuisine (or changes in taste to put it another way). Here are the first three.

1. The apostolic impulse. Why were churchmen’s enthusiasm for changing the beliefs of others go up and down? Translate to food. Why have certain people (rulers, religious leaders, nutritionists) sometimes decided that it was important to change people’s eating habits.

This may seem like a strange question. But just consider the efforts in the US in the last century to Americanize immigrants’ diets. Or now to make people eat fewer processed foods. Apostolic impulses all and just the tip of the iceberg. Efforts to change diet have been going on for millennia.

2. The nature of the evangelists. Who were they, why did they take on these tasks, what were their models, how did they develop strategy and tactics?

3. The missionary target. Who are you going to focus on? The wealthy, the poor, the migrant, the old, the young? HOw are you going to reach them?

More of these questions in a day or so.