Dining on Turtles: Food Feasts and Drinking in History

Dining on Turtles Food Feasts and Drinking in History

Edited by

Diane Kirkby and Tanja Luckins

Dining on Turtles

Also by Diane Kirkby BARMAIDS: A History of Women’s Work in Pubs ALICE HENRY, THE POWER OF PEN AND VOICE: The Life of an AustralianAmerican Labor Reformer SEX, POWER AND JUSTICE: Historical Perspectives on Law in Australia (editor) LAW HISTORY COLONIALISM: The Reach of Empire (with Catharine Coleborne) DEALING WITH DIFFERENCE: Essays in Gender, History and Culture (with Patricia Grimshaw)

Also by Tanja Luckins THE GATES OF MEMORY: Australian People’s Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War GO!: Melbourne in the Sixties (edited with Seamus O’Hanlon)

Dining on Turtles Food Feasts and Drinking in History Edited by

Diane Kirkby and Tanja Luckins

Selection and editorial matter © Diane Kirkby and Tanja Luckins 2007 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230517158 hardback ISBN-10: 0230517153 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Figures and Map

vii

Notes on Contributors

viii

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction: Of Turtles, Dining and the Importance of History in Food, Food in History Diane Kirkby, Tanja Luckins and Barbara Santich

1

Part I Feasting Past and Present 1 Banquets in Ancient Rome: Participation, Presentation and Perception Beryl Rawson 2 Food and Feast as Propaganda in Late Renaissance Italy Ken Albala 3 Feasting on National Identity: Whisky, Haggis and the Celebration of Scottishness in the Nineteenth Century Alex Tyrrell, Patricia Hill and Diane Kirkby 4 Moose-Nose and Buffalo Hump: The Amerindian-European Food Exchange in the British North American Fur Trade to 1840 George Colpitts 5 Competing for Cultural Honours: Cosmopolitanism, Food, Drink and the Olympic Games, Melbourne, 1956 Tanja Luckins

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33

46

64

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Part II Food, Drink and Community 6 Cider, Oysters and Tavern Sociability: Ritual, Violence and Young Men in Early Modern Rural France John Cashmere v

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7 The Reform of Popular Drinking in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe A. Lynn Martin

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8 ‘Beer, Women and Grub’: Pubs, Food and the Industrial Working Class Diane Kirkby

136

9 Community Cookbooks, Women and the ‘Building of the Civil Society’ in Australia, 1900–38 Sarah Black

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10 Remembering Cyprus: ‘Traditional’ Cypriot Cooking and Food Preparation Practices in the Memories of Greek Cypriot Emigrants Tina Kalivas

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11 ‘Just Sugar’? Food and Landscape along Queensland’s Sunshine Coast Chris McConville

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Index

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List of Figures and Map Figures 1.1 Thomas Couture, Les romains et leur décadence, 1847, Musée d’Orsay, Paris 1.2 Sarcophagus of P. Caecilius Vallianus, third century CE Rome, Musei Vaticani, Museo Gregoriano Profano. DAI Rome Neg.90.413 5.1 Newspaper advertisement, from Herald, Melbourne, 21 March 1956, National Library of Australia, Canberra 6.1 The Pretty Bar Maid by John Collett, ca.1775, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Virginia 6.2 Peasants fighting (a.k.a Peasants Brawling Over Cards), Alte Pinakothek, Munich 8.1 Photo of hotel dining room ca.1941, Butlin Archives, Australian National University, Canberra 8.2 Newspaper illustration from Figaro, 11 August 1888, Oxley Library, Brisbane

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29 95 102 109 143 145

Map 4.1 Major fur trade posts in Western Canada

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Notes on Contributors

Ken Albala, Professor of History at the University of the Pacific in Stockton California, is the author of Eating Right in the Renaissance (University of California Press, 2002); Food in Early Modern Europe (Greenwood Press 2003); Cooking in Europe, 1250–1650 (Greenwood Press, 2005); The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe (University of Illinois Press, 2007) and Beans: A History (Berg Press, 2007). He is also series editor for Food Culture Around the World (12 volumes in print) and two other forthcoming series on food with Greenwood Press. Sarah Black is a postgraduate student in the Discipline of History at the University of Adelaide, writing her thesis on Australian community cookbooks. John Cashmere taught for many years in the School of Historical and European Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia from which he recently retired. His teaching and research were focussed on the social history of early modern France, in particular on village communities and popular culture. He has published on youth groups and charivari, the symbolism of food in witchcraft, gender relations and sociability in French villages, and paternal authority in a Norman Calvinist family. He is currently preparing a book on male witchcraft and village communities in seventeenth century Normandy. George Colpitts is an assistant professor in the History Department of the University of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada. He specialises in environmental history, with research interests in Western Canada, the North, the fur trade, and changing human relationships with the environment. His book, Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940 was published in 2002 by UBC Press, Vancouver. Patricia Hill majored in History at La Trobe University. Born in Scotland, her research is focussed on ‘Scottishness’, especially the cultural identity of Scottish emigrants around the world expressed through celebrations involving food and drink. viii

Notes on Contributors ix

Tina Kalivas currently teaches food and drink history at La Trobe University where she completed her PhD exploring the food cultures of Greek-Cypriot migrants in Melbourne. She has published ‘Olive Oil, Eggplants and Haloumi Cheese: Greek-Cypriot Migrant Food Cultures in Melbourne in the 1960s’, in T. Luckins and S. O’Hanlon (eds), GO!: Melbourne in the Sixties (Circa, 2005), and ‘Food as Political Metaphor: Seventeenth Century English Travellers’, in A. L. Martin and B. Santich (eds), Culinary History (East Street, 2004). Diane Kirkby is Reader in History at La Trobe University in Melbourne, where she teaches food and drink history along with Australian and US social, cultural and gender history. She has written several books and numerous articles including Barmaids: A History of Women’s Work in Pubs (Cambridge University Press, 1997). She has held Research Fellowships at the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Wisconsin and New York and has won awards for her research from the State Library of New South Wales, the Australian Historical Association, and the Centre for Australian Cultural Studies, Canberra. Tanja Luckins is a research fellow at Monash University. Her research interests are in Australian cultural history and memory. She is the author of the award-winning The Gates of Memory: Australian People’s Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War (Curtin University Books, 2004) and co-editor of GO!: Melbourne in the Sixties (Circa, 2005). She is currently writing a history of the pub in Australia with Diane Kirkby. A. Lynn Martin was founder-director of the University of Adelaide’s Research Centre for the History of Food and Drink until his retirement in 2004. He still continues to edit the Research Centre’s newsletter as a Research Fellow of the University. His research focuses on the history of drinking in traditional Europe, focussing on England, France and Italy. He is the author of Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Palgrave, 2001) and is finishing another book on Alcohol, Violence, and Disorder. Chris McConville has taught at several Australian universities and currently teaches in history and urban planning at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. He previously ran a business as a heritage, landscape and conservation researcher, and has worked in local and

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federal politics, in the media (especially radio) and as a nurseryman. He is currently editing a collection of papers on the history of horse racing and gambling, and is involved in a number of environmental projects, notably in relation to future uses of canelands on the Sunshine Coast. Beryl Rawson is Professor Emerita and Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. Her research interests are in the social, cultural and political history of ancient Rome and in iconography. Her first book was The Politics of Friendship: Pompey and Cicero (1978). She has since edited three books on the Roman family (1986, 1991, 1997) and then wrote Children and Childhood in Roman Italy (2003, 2005). She was President of the Australian Historical Association 1991–92. Barbara Santich is a culinary historian and food writer, currently Program Manager of the Le Cordon Bleu Graduate Program in Gastronomy at the University of Adelaide. This is one of the few postgraduate programs to offer students the opportunity to graduate with the degree of Master of Arts in Gastronomy. She is the author of six books, including The Original Mediterranean Cuisine: Medieval Recipes for Today (Wakefield Press, 1995), What the Doctors Ordered: 150 Years of Dietary Advice in Australia (Hyland House, 1995) and In the Land of the Magic Pudding: A Gastronomic Miscellany (Wakefield Press, 2000). Alex Tyrrell is an Associate of the History Program at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He was born in Scotland and educated at Edinburgh and McMaster Universities. His most recent books are The People’s Bread. A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (Leicester University Press, 2000), co-authored with Paul Pickering; and Contested Sites: Commemoration, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (Ashgate, 2004), edited and co-authored with Paul Pickering and other scholars. He has published several articles on national identity in Scotland and is a speaker at Scottish festivities in Victoria.

Acknowledgements We are only too aware of the joint endeavours that bring a work like this to fruition. Our thanks to each of the contributors for their part in bringing the work out, and to the staff of the Borchardt Library, La Trobe University and the State Library of Victoria for their cheerful assistance. We are particularly grateful to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Musei Vaticani, Rome; the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Virginia; the Alte Pinakothek, Munich; the National Library of Australia and the Australian National University for permission to publish the images we have used. Special thanks are due to the Art Gallery of Western Australia for permission to use Kathleen O’Connor’s painting, The Tea Table, for our cover. Lastly we thank our families who willingly allowed us time for research and writing.

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Introduction: Of Turtles, Dining and the Importance of History in Food, Food in History Diane Kirkby, Tanja Luckins and Barbara Santich

When a group of gentlemen of the Royal Society in London sat down to their turtle dinner in 1783, they were simultaneously enjoying fine dining and participating in an act of colonialism. Turtle soup was all the rage in England in the eighteenth century. By the second half of the eighteenth century turtle was recognised as ‘a key dish of grand English cuisine’, with the first recipes for turtle having appeared by 1750.1 Hannah Glasse explained ‘How to dress a Turtle the West India Way’ in her Art of Cookery (1743): this involved bleeding, dissecting, soaking and cleaning the guts, then boiling, stewing and baking various parts. From this came various courses. The turtle could be baked or roasted but this was an acquired skill.2 Its status was such that ‘imitation’ turtle dishes were soon included in later eighteenth century cookbooks and, by the nineteenth century, mock turtle soup, as mentioned in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and made with calf’s head (less expensive than green turtle) plus seasonings and wine, featured regularly in formal menus for civic banquets. Instructions from The Bath Cookery Book (1790) indicate it was custom at the time to serve turtle as five separate dishes: the calipee (white belly meat), calipash (dark back meat), fricassee, soup and fins, which were served in a clear, madeira-flavoured broth, which could make a ‘turtle dinner’ on their own.3 Thus for the gentlemen of the Royal Society the menu for the occasion read: A Turtle Scate Harricot of Mutton a Hare another dish of Turtle 1

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Potatoes cold Ribs of Lamb Breast of Veal Haddock more of the Turtle4 How they came to be eating turtle is perhaps an even more significant historical story. The European expansion into the ‘New World’ of the Americas in 1492 was, in part and indirectly, inspired by food – the appetite for spices in medieval Europe particularly among the wealthy classes. Spices came from East India and present-day Indonesia, via India in a trade that was largely controlled by Arabs. If spices could be sourced directly and imported without recourse to Arab middlemen, the prospects were there for potentially enormous profits: a cargo of silk, spices and pepper delivered to Venice returned a dividend of about 1000 per cent, and Venetian merchants could expect a further profit of 100 per cent in the next stage of commerce when the spices were sold in the consuming countries of Europe.5 Food from the ‘New World’ such as sugar, tea, coffee and chocolate became both popular foods and prized commodities in Europe. In the eighteenth century average per capita consumption of sugar in England rose seven and half times, while English imports of tea increased more than one hundredfold between 1711 and 1791. Other foods were prized not as commodities but as symbols of prestige. The turtle was one such food. London, the commercial and cultural capital of empire, was where men of wealth and taste could find the turtle, most of which were brought back from the Caribbean. According to Archie Carr, the green turtle was ‘herbivorous, abundant and edible    as big as a heifer, easy to catch and easy to keep alive on its back in a space no greater than itself. It was an ideal food resource    fed a host of people and to some of them it became a dish of almost ceremonial stature’.6 Botanist and patron of science Joseph Banks feasted on turtles on his voyages to the Pacific with Captain James Cook in 1768–71. He appreciated the turtle in its natural state: the ‘turtles are certainly far preferable to any I have eat in England, which must proceed from their being eat fresh from the sea before they have either wasted away their fat, or by unnatural food which is given them in tubs where they are kept given themselves a fat of not so delicious a flavour as it is in their wild state’.7 A member of the Royal Society, Banks also belonged to the Royal Society Club, a dining club composed of Fellows of the Society. The dining club held regular dinners which were financed through their

Diane Kirkby et al. 3

annual subscription of one guinea.8 The prospect of a turtle dinner invariably attracted a large group of diners, and the donor of a turtle was always made an honorary member of the dining club.9 In 1783 Joseph Banks had been keeping a turtle in his London house. In October he wrote to a dining club colleague, ‘Out of his element is my poor Turtle I suppose. If he is at any time in danger if his Life, I beg it may be saved by an incision in his Throat, & his body presented to the Club.’10 Banks’ fears were realised. The turtle was ‘far from well’, and Mr Simpkin of the Crown & Anchor had reported that the weather was too cold for it to be kept in water and that it should be allowed to crawl about the kitchen and be wrapped in a blanket at night. Simpkin determined that the turtle ‘having shown strong symptons of mortality, had its throat cut upon a general consultation’. The British could colonise the Caribbean but could not civilise the turtle it would seem. The turtle was eventually prepared for a dinner on 23 October 1783, ‘Simpkin having cut away all the suspicious parts, also made three tureens of soup.’ The Royal Club diners declared Banks’ turtle ‘very good and well cooked; but not to be compared with a plain turtle steak or cutlet’.11 Dining on turtle, brought from the Caribbean to cold wet England, in an elaborate ritual of prestige and taste, required systems of trade and communication, transport, monetary exchange and knowledge of cooking techniques that came together at that historical moment to create that particular experience. The how, when and why of these connections between political and economic changes, the experiences of feasting and drinking, and the communities in which they occurred, are profoundly historical questions. Historians are newcomers to the study of food. While economic historians have long made food and agriculture a central subject of their discipline, it is nevertheless, as Warren Belasco claims, ‘safe to say that food has until quite recently been largely invisible in academic history’.12 Other disciplines – sociology, anthropology, archaeology, museum, language and literature studies – long ago recognised the significance of food in culture and society. They have made valuable contributions to understandings of ritual, symbolism, diet, etiquette and manners, among other topics.13 Food history has rapidly gained strength and credibility in the past 40 or so years, and there are now significant numbers of historians working in the field. Only recently have more than a few historians moved beyond the study of diet and nutrition to explore the wider experiences and meanings of cultures of eating and drinking in specific times and places, the rise of gastronomy, the histories of specific foods and cooking practices. A search in the catalogue of any large

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university library using the keywords ‘food’ and ‘history’ would reveal that more than 80 per cent of food history titles have been published since 1980. The call to arms came from French historian Fernand Braudel in 1961, in an issue of Annales: Economies, Societies, Civilisations. Braudel called for an ‘enquête ouverte’ or open enquiry into what he called ‘vie matérielle’ or material life – a vague title, he acknowledged, but extraordinarily diverse, taking not only an historical perspective but also including insights from geography, anthropology, sociology, economy, demography, folklore, linguistics, medicine, statistics and many other disciplines.14 Material life, he elaborated, encompassed five closely related areas: food; housing and clothing; standards of living; techniques; and biological characteristics. The problem, however, was not so much to define material life as to relate it to economic and/or social conditions. Of these five areas, Braudel proposed that the enquiry should start with the ‘histoire de l’alimentation’, or history of food and diet (the English language does not have an exact counterpart to the French ‘alimentation’, which refers not only to diet in both a quantitative and qualitative sense but also to provisioning). What he envisaged and outlined was more akin to dietary or nutritional history, an evaluation of what past societies or communities ate in nutritional terms (protein, fat, carbohydrate, minerals, vitamins), and the implications of their nutritional status. Braudel broadened the scope of l’histoire de l’alimentation in a subsequent issue of the same journal in 1961, with his proposal to look also at the history of the movements of food plants such as sugar cane and coffee. Nevertheless, he recommended that food history research should focus on majorities, the ordinary masses, looking at both shortterm and long-term changes, rather than on the better-documented meals of the privileged few.15 A more important broadening of the boundaries occurred with the publication, also in Annales in 1961, of Roland Barthes’ famous article ‘Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption’. It includes the now much-quoted passage: ‘For what is food? It is not only a collection of products that can be used for statistical or nutritional studies. It is also, and at the same time, a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behaviour.’16 European historians responded to the Annales challenge, and in the 20 years to 1980 the journal published some 66 articles on food history. The early ones followed closely the directions indicated by Braudel – ‘Régimes alimentaires dans la France du XVIIe siècle’ (Seventeenth century diets

Diane Kirkby et al. 5

in France), ‘Les rations alimentaires de l’armée et de la marine anglaise au XVIe siècle’ (Food rations in the English army and navy in the sixteenth century). At the same time, scholars began to realise some of the methodological problems associated with such research – the gaps in the records, the limitations of the data – and the multiplicity of possible directions. In the following decade, the narrow focus on diet, rations and consequent nutritional status had all but disappeared, as had the section of the journal devoted to them (Dossier: Histoire de la Consommation – History of Consumption, which was itself a more general category than ‘Vie matérielle et comportement biologique’). In 1975 Annales published an article by Jean-Paul Aron on the trade in food leftovers in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, while in 1977 it published an analysis by Jean-Claude Bonnet of the food- and cuisinerelated entries of Diderot’s encyclopedia. By 1975 Maurice Aymard could delineate what he considered the three principal strands of food history research: psycho-sociological (taking into account the symbolic values of foods); macroeconomic (statistical estimates of food supplies); nutritional (estimating nutritional status and its implications).17 The real expansion of food history studies began in the 1980s. At the start of the decade a small number of French researchers, from a variety of disciplines but all undertaking food history research, formed a group under Jean-Louis Flandrin at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (located in the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Institut Fernand Braudel). In 1981, Oxford historian Theodore Zeldin and ex-diplomat Alan Davidson initiated the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, now an annual event. Davidson had previously, in November 1979, launched a small, scholarly food journal, Petits Propos Culinaires (initially intended as a single issue), described as ‘Essays and notes to do with food, cookery and cookery books’. A number of significant and influential books were published – such as Michael Symons’ history of eating in Australia, One Continuous Picnic (1983); Steven Kaplan’s Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade During the Eighteenth Century (1984) and Stephen Mennell’s All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (1985). Finally, associations such as Culinary Historians of Boston and Culinary Historians of New York were formed in the early 1980s (there are now many more associations of culinary historians in the USA). In 1984 the American Institute of Wine and Food began publishing its journal, the Journal of Gastronomy, and the following year the academic journal Food & Foodways was launched.

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What was once either taken for granted or deemed not worthy enough as a topic of historical inquiry is now the focus of scholarship. As historians have brought their analytical skills into engagement with the fruits of other disciplinary labours the result has been a widening and deepening of our knowledge of historical change and past societies. Historians pose questions about social and power relations, temporal and spatial context and the changing dynamics of these to go beyond the details of artefacts, the preservation of heritage or the collection of information. The field of food studies has much to gain from the involvement of historians. Historians too have much to gain from focussing on food, on remembering, as one historian reminds us, ‘that history is also about “the animal reality of our living existence” ’.18 As James McWilliams has argued, food is important politically and not always in the obvious ways. In the American colonies food contributed significantly to the political philosophy that drove the colonists to revolution. Not having to import food made them independent and able to pursue radical ideas. Self-sufficiency shaped those ideas. Food, McWilliams says, was ‘the obvious manifestation’ of the eighteenth century concept of virtue that underlay the revolutionary impulse.19 William McNeill argues that the potato changed the course of world history once it was adopted into the European diet. As in Ireland, where there was a population increase of 300 per cent between 1780 and 1840, the German population also increased after the acceptance of potatoes because they not only yielded two to four times more calories per acre than did grain, but could be grown in previously unproductive fallow fields. Even when the population grew as a result of increased food supplies, more people had enough to eat. As a consequence, writes McNeill, ‘the industrial transformation of northern Europe could and did proceed at a very rapid rate’.20 Ancient historians have written about the importance of food and banquetting in the ancient world.21 Other historians, too, have found that a focus on food illuminates historical events in surprising ways. Hasia Diner has presented new perspectives on immigration history through her comparative analysis of Italian, Jewish and Irish immigrant foodways in the United States.22 Ken Albala has challenged views of health in the Italian Renaissance.23 Donna Gabaccia and Jeffrey Pilcher have examined food’s importance in its more usual role as marker of ethnic identity in specific communities.24 English scholars such as John Burnett and James Walton have explored food’s importance in understanding the history of the working class.25 Gilly Lehmann’s history of cooking and cookbooks in eighteenth century Britain shows how

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cookbook readership gradually extended further down the social scale to include an increasing proportion of servants.26 This shift in the intended audience for cookbooks had relevance for the colonies where the knowledge of culinary skills, availability of domestic help, experiences in running a household have all been subjects of historical enquiry. In Australia the establishment of cookery classes for girls in public schools and to the development of courses at technical colleges to train cookery teachers have been explored by historians of education. The emphasis on sweet dishes in the eighteenth century, when baking pies and tarts developed as an English speciality, continued in early Australian cookbooks. There are questions here about women’s colonial history that are exposed through the lens of food.27 A focus on food and drink can lead to new explanations of the past, as the research by A. Lynn Martin on the drinking habits of Europeans in late medieval and early modern Europe has suggested. Martin connected the high levels of alcohol consumption, particularly among women, in the period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century with modern research on foetal alcohol syndrome, thereby suggesting that the drinking patterns of that time could account for the high rates of infant and child mortality.28 Similarly, the history of camembert in France gives insights into the increasing polarisation of the modern food supply where tradition and individuality are juxtaposed with mass-production and standardisation. Camembert is (or was in the 1980s, when Pierre Boisard was researching the history) the most popular cheese in France; on average, every household was eating nearly two camembert per week.29 Boisard attributes this to its relative cheapness, which in turn is a consequence of industrialisation of production, which itself was a response to the popularity and reputation of the cheese. While most camembert in France is factory-produced, according to standardised and mechanised processes, a small proportion is still produced following traditional methods (even though the camembert ‘tradition’ dates from only about the time of the French Revolution). Traditional camembert, says Boisard, ‘depends on the valorisation of local specificities supported by a network of personalised relations’.30 It costs about two or three times as much as its industrial counterpart, and has a distinctive, relatively strong flavour. Most consumers, however, prefer a relatively bland cheese, consistent in appearance, taste and texture. The two types of camembert are not only produced in different ways in different locations, they have different clienteles, who make their purchases in different outlets, who have different spending powers, different taste preferences, and different

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degrees of respect for ‘tradition’. In other words, there are two totally different circuits of production and distribution. This history of camembert offers insights into the evolution of the food industry, industrialisation and patterns of consumer preference. It also highlights themes of traditionalism and innovation in communities. Food is significant not only in its material aspects but in its symbolic aspects – the meanings attached to eating, to particular foods, to particular methods of food preparation and distribution. Food history adds to and enriches our understanding. What values influenced food preferences, and why certain foods were not eaten tells us about the beliefs, attitudes and values of past societies. In the words of John Super, ‘food is the ideal cultural symbol that allows the historian to uncover hidden levels of meaning in social relationships and arrive at new understandings of the human experience’.31 It offers new paradigms, new perspectives, new avenues of understanding. For some scholars food opens up profound and disturbing questions. Diana Wylie has importantly shown how food can reveal a darker side of history in her analysis of the growth of white supremacy in South Africa. An ideology of racism was based on knowledge of the foods Africans ate and the view that if they were hungry it was because they didn’t know how to feed themselves.32 In a similar vein Tim Rowse has examined the power dynamics of colonialism through the food rationing system whereby Aboriginal Australians were provided with foodstuffs (flour, sugar, tea) in an unequal exchange of colonial power relations.33 Judith Carney’s powerful study of the transfer of rice cultivation from Africa to the slave plantations of the southern United States not only opens an important new window onto making the Atlantic world and the history of slavery, but also shows another way in which Africans contributed culturally and technologically to United States’ history.34 There are also numerous economic and business histories of diet, commodities, staples, agriculture, the international meat trade, brewing and canning, industrial food production, as well as social histories of drinking and consumption, famines and soup kitchens that contribute importantly to our knowledge of food but do not generally fall into the scope of the new field of food history. The field is either impossibly broad or as yet insufficiently defined. This collection of essays is a contribution to this emerging field. Explored here in case studies offering new insights into social and cultural history are themes of national identity, industrialisation, cosmopolitanism, political power and prestige, gender relations, popular culture, trade, memory, working-class sociability, migration, community

Diane Kirkby et al. 9

and landscape. These themes are a part of case studies which range temporally from banquets in ancient Rome to the memories of twentieth century Greek Cypriot emigrants; and geographically from the north American fur trade to whisky, haggis and celebrations of Scottishness in England, Scotland and Port Phillip District (Victoria). The topics are no less ambitious: feasts in Renaissance Italy; cosmopolitanism, food, drink and the 1956 Olympic Games; the reform of popular drinking in late medieval and early modern Europe; taverns and male sociability in early modern rural France; and the intimate relationship between food, pubs and the industrial working-class. The case studies use a wide range of sources, sometimes in order to look at well-known themes and topics afresh and at other times to reveal the links between food and broader historical issues. Thus, the community cookbook, one of the most popular genres of cookbooks, may be seen not only as an artefact of cultural production but an important constituent in the making of ‘civil society’ in colonial societies, notably the development of gendered community institutions. A sixteenth century banquet management guide thus becomes more than a prescriptive guide to the elaborate preparation and display of food, music, entertainment, perfumes and flowers: it was a form of propaganda – a superb form of advertisement – for the small Italian courts as they hoped to become the model of sophistication and refined taste for their larger neighbours such as France and Spain. Oral history becomes a unique tool to look afresh at the role food plays in the memories of emigrants, not only to describe the important link between emotions, memory and food but to analyse the broader context of economic, social and political changes in which they arise. In a similar way, to look at sugar from the perspective of cane farmers allows the history of sugar to be considered in new ways. The distinctive cultural landscape created by cane farming thus becomes a part of the process of vernacular cane farming sustained over generations, in addition to the popular historical understanding of sugar as a commodity. This volume originated in a conference of historians at the Australian Historical Association meeting in the rural town of Mildura located on the River Murray in the north-western corner of the state of Victoria, Australia in September 2003. Mildura is a grape-growing region, famous for its dried fruits industry, its wineries and its historical origins as an experiment in irrigation by the Canadian-born Chaffey brothers. Today it is renowned for its award-winning restaurant owned by chef Stefano de Pieri who brought national attention to the region with a popular television series on food and produce and the publication of cook books

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such as A Gondola on the Murray: A Feast by the River.35 Not surprisingly a major theme of the conference – called Feast by the Murray – was food and drink history. Its success led to the idea of publishing this collection and the solicitation of further papers from other scholars to produce a volume that is coherent, wide-ranging and innovative. It is rare to have a collection that draws only on the work of historians. It is also rare to have a work with so much Australian content. Food history has a strong if still quite small following in Australia that was significantly boosted by the establishment of the Research Centre for the History of Food and Drink at the University of Adelaide which holds a regular international conference. There have been several publications flowing from presentations at that conference which are not concentrated on Australian topics but which, like this volume, incorporate Australian material in a global context.36 Most of the contributors to this volume work in Australia although the temporal and geographic scope of the contents, as well as the issues, reach well beyond the boundaries of Australia’s history. We are confident that the studies contained in this work will illuminate the existing history of food and drink and stimulate further research not only empirically but also, we hope, in conceptualising the field.

Notes 1. G. Lehmann, The British Housewife: Cookery-books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2003), p. 258. 2. K. Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe (Westport: Greenwood, 2003), p. 76. 3. Lehmann, British Housewife, p. 259. 4. T. E. Allibone, The Royal Society and its Dining Clubs (Exeter: Pergamon, 1976), pp. 120–1. 5. A. S. Atiya, Crusades, Commerce and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), p. 199; F. Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce. vol. 2 of Civilisation and Capitalism Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century, trans. S. Reynolds (London: Collins, 1982). 6. A. Carr, So Excellent a Fishe: A Natural History of Sea Turtles (New York: Natural History Press, 1967), p. 13. 7. J. C. Beaglehole (ed), The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768–71, vol. II (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963), p. 94. 8. Email correspondence from Clara Anderson, Assistant Archivist, The Royal Society, 13 May 2004. 9. Allibone, Royal Society, pp. 42–3. 10. N. Chambers (ed), The Letters of Joseph Banks: A Selection, 1768–1820 (London: Imperial College Press, 2002), p. 65. 11. E. Smith, The Life of Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society with some notices of his friends and contemporaries (London/New York: John Lane/Bodley

Diane Kirkby et al. 11

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

Head, 1911), p. 70. On this occasion the turtle was eaten at the Royal Society ‘rebellious’ dining club, founded and led by Banks, 1775–84. W. Belasco, ‘Food Matters: Perspectives on an Emerging Field’, in W. Belasco and P. Scranton (eds), Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 2. For example, S. Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (London and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985); S. Mennell, A. Murcott and A. H. van Otterloo, The Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet and Culture (London: Sage, 1992). F. Braudel, ‘Vie matérielle et comportements biologiques: bulletin no. 1’, Annales: Economies Sociétés Civilisations, XVI (1961) 545–9. Braudel, ‘Histoire de la vie matérielle: bulletin no. 2’, Annales: Economies Sociétés Civilisations, XVI (1961) 723–8. R. Barthes, ‘Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption’, Annales: Economies Sociétés Civilisations, XVI (1961) 977–86. M. Aymard, ‘Pour l’histoire de l’alimentation: Quelques remarques de méthode’, Annales: Economies Sociétés Civilisations, XXX (1975) 431–44. J. E. McWilliams, A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). McWilliams, Revolution in Eating, p. 16 W. H. McNeill, ‘How the Potato Changed the World’s History’, Social Research, LXVI, 1 (1999) 67–83. J. Wilkins, Food in Antiquity (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1995); P. Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). H. R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). K. Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). D. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Foods and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); J. Pilcher, Que Vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998). J. Burnett, England Eats Out: A Social History of Eating Out in England From 1830 to the Present (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004); J. Burnett, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Food in England from 1815 to the Present Day, 3rd edn (London, 1966; London: Routledge, 1989); and J. K. Walton, Fish and Chips and the British Working Class 1870–1920 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992). Lehmann, British Housewife, pp. 161–6. B. Kingston, ‘When Did We Teach Our Girls to Cook?’, Australian Cultural History, 15 (1996) 89–101. A. L. Martin, ‘Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in Europe, 1300–1700: A Review of Data on Alcohol Consumption and a Hypothesis’, Food & Foodways, XI (2003) 1–26. P. Boisard, ‘The Future of a Tradition: Two Ways of Making Camembert, the Foremost Cheese of France’, Food & Foodways, III (1991) 173–207. Boisard, ‘The Future of a Tradition’, p. 181. J. C. Super, ‘Food and History’, Journal of Social History, XXXVI (2002) 165–78.

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32. D. Wylie, Starving on a Full Stomach: Hunger and the Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001) 33. T. Rowse, White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 34. J. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 35. S. de Pieri, A Gondola on the Murray: A Feast by the River (Sydney: ABC Books, 1999). The series was first broadcast on ABC television in 1999. A CD featuring Gluck, Scarlatti and Vivialdi was also released, designed no doubt to inspire cooks as they prepared recipes from A Gondola on the Murray. 36. R. Dare (ed), Food Power and Community (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1999); A. L. Martin and B. Santich (eds), Gastronomic Encounters (Adelaide: East St. Publications, 2004); A. L. Martin and B. Santich (eds), Culinary History (Adelaide: East St. Publications, 2004). There are many other books exploring the history of eating drinking and feeding the population.

Part I Feasting Past and Present

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1 Banquets in Ancient Rome: Participation, Presentation and Perception Beryl Rawson

Ancient Roman feasting dates back more than 2000 years, but perceptions of that society continue to fascinate. The association of banquets with ancient Rome immediately summons up perceptions, in many modern minds, of excess and decadence. The source of these perceptions is something of a puzzle – a historiographical puzzle.1 ‘How do we know?’ or ‘How do we think we know?’ are questions which will resonate throughout this book, but let us confront them here. A full analysis of why artists and writers in modern periods have chosen one aspect or another of Roman society as the basis for their work, and the sources which they used, would require a large separate study. It suffices here to remind ourselves that all creative work is an artefact of its own times. Some work follows ancient sources more closely than does other work, but even the ancient sources are a reflection of particular preoccupations of the artist/writer or of his own times. This chapter analyses the sources of some modern perceptions of ancient Roman culture and argues for the importance of history in understanding and representing banquets. Food and drink are here a window on to larger problems of historiography. The native Italian tradition which we can reconstruct is one of family occasions, or gatherings of friends, as much cerebral as visceral. What then are the sources for the images of wild excess perpetuated by Hollywood and TV? These images do not derive, on the whole, from the ancient sources – archaeological, legal, or most of the literary sources, although the genre of satire during the first century CE or so does use food and wine as one of the vehicles for moral criticism of contemporary Roman society. The visual impact of art and artefacts may have been more powerful than has previously been recognised: from antiquity, 15

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wall paintings and associated elaborate tableware from Pompeii and, from the nineteenth century, paintings from the ‘Classical Revival’. An anecdote from the second century BCE illustrates Romans’ early familiarity with feast-giving and its role in public life. In 167 BCE, when Rome was well on the way to establishing her rule over most of the Mediterranean world and beyond, a Roman general (L. Aemilius Paullus) celebrated his military and diplomatic victory over the Macedonians with a great display of entertainment and banquets. He did this in one of the most respected cities of the East, Amphipolis, once the heartland of Alexander the Great. The choice of Amphipolis was significant for its strategic location, at the head of the Aegean Sea and virtually between West and East, and its association with Alexander’s Macedonian empire. Paullus represented his hospitality and display as beating the Greeks at their own game. Rome could not only conquer in war but could take one of the central features of Greek public life, the public banquet, and do it better and bigger in the heart of their own territory. Rome was more than a military machine now: she could compete and conquer on the cultural level as well. This was certainly ‘making a statement’. He articulated it in these words: ‘the man who knows how to conquer in war can also arrange a banquet and organise games’, attributed to him by the first-century BCE historian Livy. Livy’s extended account brings out the full kudos which Paullus was able to extract from this occasion. After the serious business [diplomatic arrangements; law-making (‘not to conquered enemies but to well-deserving allies’)], a show was provided. This had been long under preparation; Paullus sent messengers to announce it to the cities of (the province of) Asia and to the kings, and on his own tours of the cities of Greece Paullus had announced it to the leading citizens. It was celebrated with great pomp at Amphipolis. A crowd of all sorts of professional entertainers gathered from all over the world, as well as athletes and famous horses; delegations too, with sacrificial animals, and whatever more is usually done at the great games of Greece for the sake of gods and men, so as to arouse admiration not only for lavishness but also for skill in giving shows, something in which Romans were at that time inexperienced. Banquets too were prepared for the delegations, with equal sumptuousness and attention to detail. Paullus’ own statement was widely circulated, that the man who knew how to conquer in war could also arrange a banquet (conuiuium) and organise games.   

Beryl Rawson 17

In that great gathering of Europe and Asia, with such a crowd assembled partly to offer congratulations and partly for the show, in the midst of such forces naval and military, a remarkable fact was that supplies were so abundant and grain so cheap that many gifts of such supplies were given by the general to individuals and cities and peoples, not only for immediate use but also to be taken home with them.2 This show, then, achieved the diplomatic aims of advertising Rome’s power, organisational skills and cultural understanding, before an assembly of all the pre-existing powers of the Eastern Mediterranean. A potent symbol of all this, and of Rome’s magnanimity and ability to bring peace and prosperity, was a bumper harvest and provision of food supplies to all. Roman generals before Paullus had captured rich loot, famous works of art, libraries and intellectuals; but this was a new level of sophistication. To know how to ‘do’ a banquet, and on that scale, and to out-do the Greeks at their own game, established Roman superiority in a new sphere. It was shrewdly perceptive to see the banquet as a significant, core feature in Greek culture and accomplishment. In today’s concept of ‘cultural imperialism’, the penetration of a modern Western nation into a different culture might mean establishing McDonald’s or CocaCola in a new area. The Romans chose to capture an integral feature of the conquered nation, and to incorporate the local elites into its performance, all under the Roman aegis. Our account of this incident (Livy) tells us that Romans were still inexperienced, at this time, in giving such big shows. But it does not say the same about their experience and skill in providing such banquets. In fact, banquet-giving had long traditions in all of the ancient Mediterranean societies of which we know. It was particularly associated with military activity (especially victory) and with religious occasions. Very early, Romans had expertise in these uses of banquets. Banquets for the people at large were associated with one of Rome’s most ancient festivals, the Roman Games, where the entertainment was in honour of the god Jupiter. It is notable that in Livy’s accounts of this festival, over the years, he regularly uses exactly the same phrase, ‘A banquet to Jupiter was held on account of the Games’ (Iouis epulum fuit ludorum causa).3 The phrase must have been part of the ritual provisions for holding the Games. Similar, if lesser, banquets were held in other towns throughout Italy. The great triumphal parade for Paullus after he returned to Rome from Macedonia was accompanied by many sacrificial animals. When these

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had been despatched in the religious ritual, they provided the basis for a special banquet for the Senate and a celebratory meal for the general population, one of the few occasions when ordinary Romans would enjoy the luxury of meat. Plutarch’s account4 of the triumph gives more details of the role of the sacrificial animals in the triumphal procession: on the third and final day, trumpeters preceded 120 fat oxen, ‘their horns gilded and set off with ribbons and garlands’, and young boys followed them with gold and silver bowls for the sacrifice. Children were socialised early to the awe and gore of animal sacrifice. The participation of children (boys and girls) in public ritual – prayers, choral performance, sacrifice – added sanctity and purity to such performances, and children learned early of the central roles of food, wine and religion (often intertwined) in Roman society. Such banquets were held in public places, and, as the city of Rome grew larger, they were organised on a localised basis in different neighbourhoods. This gave a role to the neighbourhood boss, the local ‘big man’, to exercise patronage locally. For the lower classes, almost all eating was in public. The skimpiness and fire hazards of their tenements made this necessary, and the enforced conviviality of taverns and cookshops was an integral part of their lives. But semi-public banquets were also held in private houses at a certain level of society. Public and private merged in the great houses. There was not such a firm dichotomy between private and public space as in our contemporary homes. The architecture of large houses reflected this, in the reception rooms, the gardens, the location of different dining rooms. Country villas often served a similar purpose, in a more relaxed environment. Vitruvius, writing extensively on public and private architecture at the end of the first century BCE, specified the needs of men of high public position.5 They should give thought to circulation space and decoration in the areas of their houses with public access, such as vestibules, atria, courtyards and peristyles. Aspect was important to the function of different rooms. Winter dining rooms should face the western setting sun, so as to make use of the evening light and to take advantage of both the view of the setting sun and its warmth for evening functions. For similar reasons of outlook and temperature, spring and autumn dining rooms should look east, and those for use in summer should face north. Although rooms had flexible usage, and need not have been dedicated solely to dining, the elaborate provision for the needs of dining reflects the importance of this activity and of domestic hospitality in the lives of Romans who had some position in society to maintain. In this way the status-conscious Roman presented himself to his guests and, by

Beryl Rawson 19

reputation, to the wider public. The concern for aesthetics, comfort and luxury provides the necessary infrastructure for the performance of the banquet. Integral too is the careful planning of the food and its presentation, as we shall see below. These great houses became a focus of social and intellectual life, which was increasingly enriched by waves of educated immigrants – some slave, some ex-slave, some freeborn and already of a certain standing in their own communities. They joined Roman society, sometimes in public positions such as teachers, clerks, doctors, but often in private households as advisers, tutors, librarians, or just honoured guests at one’s dinner table. The Roman concept of the dinner-table – its ideology – differed from that of the Greeks. The cultural construction of food and its ritual was different. Unlike the Greek practice of the symposium, a drinking party that was exclusively male except for hired women, the Roman conuiuium could include women and sometimes children, and the emphasis was at least as much on food as on wine. Romans were sometimes keen to point out the difference etymologically. Whereas the Greek word symposion meant ‘a drinking together’, and referred to a separate drinking session which followed a meal, the Latin conuiuium, suggesting ‘a living together’, referred to a gathering of friends at a meal table for food, wine and conversation. The Roman concept is closer to our ‘conviviality’ and ‘commensality’. Cicero, writing in the first century BCE, elaborated on this contrast when he attributed comments on old age to Cato the Elder, a distinguished Roman of the previous century.6 Cato regretted the loss of some physical pleasures in old age, including generous amounts of food and drink. But he could still take pleasure in modest dinners and in the sociability associated with them. He said that he had always enjoyed the company and conversation of friends at dinners as much as the physical pleasures there, and believed that the Latin term conuiuium was more appropriate for this ‘communion of life’ than Greek terms which focussed on the drink and sometimes food, giving priority to the less important aspects of a banquet over the more important aspects of congenial company. Romans’ inclusion of women in such company also contrasted with Greek practice. This was one of the examples chosen by the biographer Cornelius Nepos in the later first century BCE, when pointing out that different societies had different social customs and that the criteria of one society should not be used to assess another. This is a lesson appropriate to our present discussion. It was perfectly proper, said Nepos,7 for a Roman wife to be prominent in her own household and meet all comers, whereas Greeks relegated their

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women to contact with only close relatives and to private parts of the house. And no Roman had any inhibition against taking his wife out to a banquet (a conuiuium). Visual images from Etruscan tombs of an early period (such as the fifth century BCE) portray women of respectable garb and pose reclining on dining couches alongside their husbands. This seems to have been a native Italic tradition which endured, irrespective of any Hellenistic practices adopted by the Romans. The inclusiveness of Roman dinners is reflected too in family meals, where children traditionally had a role from early times. Some historians have argued that ‘family meals’ as we understand them were not part of Roman domestic life. But this involves a single, romanticised, model of family meals in contemporary society, which envisages parents and children gathering round the dinner table to exchange news of their day. This may be the ideal, but the reality often is that of family members eating at separate times, or on the run, or watching TV. For Roman children there were some conventions which distinguished them from adults: they sat on straight chairs while the adults reclined on couches; sometimes they sat apart, at different tables. There was a tradition that at an early period children of the family helped serve at meal times and sang songs with historical or mythological themes during dinner.8 But by the first century BCE, with growing prosperity and sophistication, others were providing the entertainment. There were quite specialised professionals, either on the family staff or hired in, who sang, danced, played instruments, acted scenes from drama, or read poetry, and children joined their parents as audience for such performances. Meals were a site for socialisation of children – from training in table manners to social interaction and intellectual appreciation. Girls as well as boys benefitted from these occasions. We know of well-educated young women who must have acquired much of their culture in their parents’ homes in childhood. Calpurnia, the last wife of Julius Caesar, grew up in a house with a splendid library of philosophical books, where the Greek intellectual Philodemus was a frequent visitor. The dinner table was one of the favourite places for intellectual discussion and for what we would call networking. Calpurnia’s father, Calpurnius Piso, is a good case study for several of our concerns. He was active in Roman political life and held the highest offices available. He had a reputation for keeping a good table as well as entertaining philosophers and other intellectuals. Cicero attacked Piso, in a politically charged prosecution speech,9 for indulging in the gastronomic pleasures of banquets without providing the elegant accoutrements which should accompany banquets, such as fine silver vessels, expensive shellfish,

Beryl Rawson 21

elegant young slaves to wait on table, and all the food and wine from the house’s own kitchen and cellar. The rhetoric of the courtroom represents as vulgar what in many circles might be thought of as elegant but frugal simplicity. The Epicurean philosophy, to which Piso and Philodemus and other respected Romans of the time subscribed, required a standard of simplicity. It set value on a satisfying diet as a necessary condition for productive intellectual effort and the desired level of philosophical calm and absence from pain. The desire for food was one of the natural and necessary desires which must be satisfied, to establish equilibrium of body and mind. This aspect of Epicureanism has often led to a distortion of this philosophical system as a licence for physical pleasures. But the satisfaction of such desire has a limit, which is easily reached. There is no reason for trying to add to such satisfaction; the pure pleasure of equilibrium cannot be exceeded. Thus Epicureanism provided no licence for gourmandising. It was frugality (albeit often elegant) which characterised the philosophy, but not starvation or ascetic deprivation. By contrast, a feast celebrated by a religious college in the previous decade (in 69 BCE) was characterised by the level of extravagance and luxury which must have provoked some of the sumptuary legislation which was attempted in the first century BCE and first century CE. It exemplifies the mixture of religious and secular life experienced by official priests at Rome, who were not ordained or consecrated figures but public magistrates. The report of it comes from the fifth century CE writer Macrobius,10 but he cites the pontifical records as his authority. The lavish banquet, to honour the inauguration of L. Cornelius Lentulus Niger as a priest of Mars ( flamen Martialis), one of the senior religious officials at Rome, was held in rooms elaborately decorated and fitted with fine furnishings. Macrobius tells the story as an example of the great value once attached to the pleasures of the table, much greater than in his own day. He details the content of successive courses as if delighting in the very descriptions, a linguistic pleasure in the variety of terms for food which was a feature in earlier literature. (It has been recognised that in the realm of pleasures there are linguistic pleasures, lists of food and such delights which slip off the tongue so easily – pleasures which need to be taken into account when evaluating satire.) For hors d’oeuvres, there were many kinds of seafood; then thrushes, fowls, more seafood, various meats and pies and special bread rolls. Some foods were repeated cooked in different ways. For about two dozen guests, this was an extravagant spread, even when one takes into account that dinner was not only the main meal of the day but the only meal of any substance, other meals being very light and frugal. This was a

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standard of living to which those present in 69 BCE were accustomed. They were a select and high-ranking company: male priests and four Vestal Virgins (high-ranking women who did take a vow of celibacy but were very much part of the public life of their day). The year 69 was a time of high political tension, and the conversation at this dinner must have been lively: military problems in the East, trials in Rome for corruption, and current elections. The company will have made the most of their opportunity to keep abreast of social and political issues of the highest importance in Rome, while celebrating their new colleague’s inauguration in style. In spite of the elaborateness of the banquet, there is not the slightest suggestion of impropriety of conduct: the one did not entail the other. Nor is there a suggestion even of gourmandising. We do not know what quantities were actually consumed. There was an expectation by hangers-on and attendants that after such feasts there would be something left over for them. For these banquets of the Republican period (the last centuries BCE) we have to depend on literary sources, as there is little Republican art extant (although Etruscan art, as we noted above, does provide some evidence for early Italic tradition). For the imperial period, satire and some Pompeian paintings diversify the picture, as will be discussed below. The continuing picture of domestic banquets is that of a form of hospitality which combined food, wine, conversation and entertainment. Sometimes the banquet at home might be quite a grand affair; at other times quite frugal (even for wealthy families). Against this, however, the modern stereotype of Roman meals tends to be one of dissipation, vulgar ostentation, and excess of every kind. A striking illustration of this is the large, colourful painting exhibited in 1847 by Thomas Couture (Figure 1.1), explicitly associating a Roman banquet with decadence (entitled ‘Les romains et leur décadence’). Couture was a member of the prestigious Académie, and his influence seems to have been long-lasting. Topics from Greco-Roman antiquity had been prominent in European art from the time of the Renaissance. This was a time of rediscovery of many of the works of Greek and Latin literature, and these literary works dominated European perceptions of Greece and Rome for a long time. Their influence continues, and a selective use of them helps to explain some of the modern presentations of Greek and Roman society. These presentations have often been of the ‘daily life’ variety, whose narrative is based on a fairly literal reading of genres such as satire and imperial biography. More recently, new methodologies and disciplines have begun to refine our perceptions. Anthropologists have shown that

Beryl Rawson 23

Figure 1.1 Thomas Couture, Les romains et leur décadence, 1847, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

images of food and associated ritual may be multivalent and anything but straightforward. Literary theory has sensitised us to the variety of ‘readings’ which a text might bear. Archaeologists have revealed a world of material culture which might complement the texts but which sometimes seems to contradict, or at least differ from them. This is partly because archaeology, like social and cultural history, in the latter half of the twentieth century widened its focus to include the lower classes, the masses, women, children, slaves, domestic space, everyday artefacts, even traces of vegetation and bones, in place of the previous narrower focus on elites, emperors, monuments and palaces. Classical archaeology was particularly affected by the unearthing of Pompeii. From the middle of the eighteenth century, excavations at Pompeii got into full swing. There was an emphasis on ‘treasure’, including costly tableware and domestic ornament; and there was a voyeuristic interest in the erotic aspects of the art and artefacts discovered, including the ubiquity of the apotropaic phallus. The paintings of couples on dining couches sometimes led to misunderstandings that these were bedroom scenes, scenes of sexual activity. The flimsy dress of some (but not all) of the women accentuated this, and the fragmentary nature of some paintings made interpretation difficult. These were the aspects of Pompeii which interested the French Bourbon court, which had a base in Naples, and it was this court which heavily financed

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the excavations. Pompeii was a Hellenised town from early times and had become a resort area for wealthy Romans, and villas were built here to reflect that. Their owners had leisure at Pompeii to enjoy hospitality and intellectual and physical pleasures. They deployed their new wealth to display their accomplishments, and major vehicles of display were architecture, food and the ritual of dining. That is what elites (or would-be elites) do with their surplus and their leisure; and in this way they reinforce the hierarchical order in society. Paintings on the walls of Pompeian houses frequently depict banquet scenes. Archaeologists are sceptical about the extent to which such scenes depict everyday practice in Pompeii. Some of the rooms are much too small to accommodate grand banquets. But the paintings present to guests ideals of pleasure and luxury, to inspire in them the right mood for relaxation and enjoyment of the dinner being offered. Some can be shown to be based on earlier, Hellenistic models and conventions. Some of the women depicted are on the model of Greek hetairae, but others have the dress and pose of respectable matrons. The food is not heaped up to excess, but there is considerable attention to the elegance of its presentation. The scenes could not, on the whole, be called orgiastic. They certainly contrast with the wild drinking scenes on fifth century BCE Athenian pottery, scenes which often include naked flute girls. Couture was familiar with the classical art being unearthed by archaeologists and being built into great national collections in France. He was also familiar with the work of his predecessors in French and Italian painting, many of whom featured banquet scenes. One of the more famous scenes was Veronese’s ‘Wedding Feast at Cana’. This had no association with ancient Rome. Nor did the numerous generic banquet scenes involving drunkenness and sexual licence. To the extent that any period and setting can be identified for the wilder scenes, it is the royal courts of the eighteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century there was widespread pessimism amongst Couture’s contemporaries about the French nation and its society. When Couture’s ‘Romans’ painting appeared, there was an explicit identification made with French decadence of the time.11 The Salon catalogue for the 1847 exhibition did specify a Roman source for Couture’s inspiration. This was two lines from Juvenal,12 which state that luxury was ruining Roman society. There is no particular association with banquets. It was part of a long rhetorical tradition opposing the wealth and soft living of peace-time to the virtue of an idealised past of poverty, hardiness and warfare. But those lines gave Couture his theme. His realisation of it on canvas owed little to Juvenal. It may have owed something to the poetry of

Beryl Rawson 25

Anacreon, a Greek of the sixth century BCE whose poetry of wine and love was widely read at this time. Couture’s taste was eclectic, and in spite of the title attached to the ‘Romans’ painting it seems to have no firm historical point of reference. The general theme of decadence was popular in eighteenth century art, literature and theatre and continued into the nineteenth for the reasons of society malaise referred to above. The theme was often associated with licentious women, which may have attracted Couture to Juvenal’s sixth Satire. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century images, however, the women were usually courtesans. In ancient Athenian society, such women (hetairae) also figured in the feasts and other pleasures of male citizens, but they were less prominent in Roman society because of the more visible and active role of respectable married women. In his later years Couture turned away from Roman scenes to landscapes, and the Impressionists turned further in this direction. In Victorian England, however, a classical tradition continued but art now turned back to Greece of the fifth century BCE, especially to sculpture. Archaeology was again influential, but the excavations were in the eastern Mediterranean, first at Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns and then at other sites in Greece. In the spare lines of Greek statuary, there was little role for banquets or grand social scenes. The more restrained style will have appealed to the growing taste for domesticity. Late Victorians could aim at the purity and simplicity of classical Greek art, with its fine decorative detail, for the domestic interiors to which they were giving increasing attention. Nevertheless, the lush Roman themes of AlmaTadema, on large canvasses, were popular. His ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ hinted at oriental luxury, sex and other pleasures of a kind likely to excite but not be attained by ordinary people. This painter was also fascinated by the Pompeian excavations and studied their photographs in fine detail. It is no accident that Alma-Tadema was admired by Cecil B. De Mille, who in the twentieth century used grand-scale historical epics in the cinema for similar purposes of excitement and escapism. Nevertheless, banquets are almost entirely lacking in Alma-Tadema’s repertoire. The only Roman banquet is in ‘The Roses of Heliogabalus’ (1888), but that painting contains few banqueting details. Its theme is the sadism of the third century emperor (Elagabalus) smothering his dinner guests to death under huge swathes of flowers. When the film ‘Cleopatra’ was remade in 1963, exploiting the big screen and associated sound effects to the full, it was Couture’s banquet which was realised in magnified detail.

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Historiographically, the classicising art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been very influential in modern perceptions of ancient Rome (just as visual images are increasingly influential in our present society). An example of this continuing influence is the choice of the cover illustration for a reprint13 of a biography of Cleopatra by Ernle Bradford, first published in 1971. The reprint contains a wealth of illustrations, virtually all from antiquity and mostly primary source material. But the colour cover is Reginald Arthur’s 1892 painting, ‘The Death of Cleopatra’, depicting a voluptuous female body blood-stained from the bite of the asp – a sensuous and slightly erotic figure calculated to strike a response of recognition in the modern reader. The power of such a representation is more enduring than that of the more ‘authentic’ images liberally provided within the book. In the twentieth century, ancient Rome was appropriated for modern popular culture in a variety of media, especially in the cinema, in TV and in historical novels. The focus was often on morality, directly or indirectly. The phrase ‘decline and fall of Rome’ is seductive, and hypotheses for the causes have been propounded for centuries. That the causes are often seen as moral owes something to Rome’s own historiography. Roman writers usually saw their own history in moral terms, as a departure from an earlier golden age of virtue and simplicity. The aim of education was largely moral, to inculcate models to admire and follow and models to avoid. The supposed moral decline was often seen in terms of physical indulgence – too much money, too many grand houses, too many extravagant feasts, too many fine clothes, and, often associated with all of these, too much irresponsible sexual pleasure. These vices were seen to originate in the period of rapid growth in Rome’s prosperity and access to the exotic produce of almost the whole known world, which was being incorporated into Rome’s empire, in the second century BCE. It has been all too easy and attractive for modern perceptions to draw on the philosophising of historians and satirists and to ignore other evidence of everyday behaviour, of what was intrinsically ‘Roman’. Modern projections have not been very punctilious about the chronological parameters of their evidence or settings, mixing architecture, characters, and other details from different periods or simply drawing on creative imagination. From the ancient historians themselves, Sallust and Livy wrote about trends in the Republic, and the focus of Tacitus and Suetonius is mostly on a very restricted period, that of the Julio-Claudians in the first half of the first century CE. Specific examples are drawn from the imperial family (Gaius Caligula, Messalina, Nero) or their close associates, exemplifying the corruption of wealth and power.

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There are few chronological niceties in the modern images. Whatever date we attribute to the ‘fall’ of Rome, however defined, it was centuries after the periods usually chosen for scenes of banqueting and other excesses (usually the first centuries BCE and CE). The second century CE was perhaps Rome’s most powerful, and in some respects (such as legislation, concern for rights of women, children, slaves) its most humane. The image projected by the imperial house was one of comparative sobriety and modesty, and there was an active intellectual life. In Roman satire, Petronius’ Satyricon does provide hilarious scenes of all kinds of excesses, including dining and drinking, in its send-up of vulgar upstarts of slave origin in the mid first century CE. Couture may have read Petronius, according to some of his contemporaries. A generalisation from the Satyricon to wider Roman society, especially the aristocracy, misses the whole point of the satire. The source of amusement for the contemporary aristocratic reader, or listener, is the way in which these newly rich ex-slaves ignorantly try to emulate real high society. The author may have been the Petronius who held high office under Nero and who advised the emperor on standards of taste and pleasures. That his tastes were very different from those of the Satyricon is reflected in Petronius’ reputed title of arbiter elegantiae, ‘arbiter of elegance’. Nero’s new palace, the Domus Aurea, the ‘Golden House’, took Vitruvius’ precepts for architecture to unheard-of heights, with elaborate landscaping, a variety of dining rooms with retractable roofs, and the main dining room fitted with a revolving roof to represent the sky of day and night. This palace was no doubt a scandalous squandering of funds, but neither Tacitus nor Suetonius associates it with excesses of banqueting. Juvenal’s bitter satire in the early second century attacks emperors and Roman aristocrats for hypocrisy, snobbery and obscene wealth, and excesses of the dinner table are part of this. From the fourth century onwards, there are Christian denunciations of ‘pagan’ society. Earlier Christians in the western Roman world seem to have adapted for most purposes to the society of which they were part. It was only when their numbers grew, and especially when emperors adopted Christianity, that the vehement criticisms of earlier Roman society were articulated. Even then, it was not primarily food which was the main target of their attacks. Macrobius’ account of the pontifical banquet, which we saw above, was expressed in fairly neutral language, and when he makes the contrast with his own time in the fifth century he explicitly says that this is not necessarily to show that his own time was superior to the earlier one, but merely to show that earlier generations took

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greater thought for such pleasures than did his own. Banquet scenes are common in Christian catacomb paintings. The communal meal was important to Christian fellowship, and early Christians may have held funerary meals at the tomb as did their non-Christian contemporaries. These scenes, however, became infrequent from the early fifth century, which coincides roughly with the time when Christian writings are increasing their criticisms of pagan practices. After the period of Pompeian art (after 79 CE), we have few representations of banquets in the domestic context. This could be simply the result of the chances of survival, or it could reflect changing fashions in art. The visual representations which we do have of Roman feasts are those associated with funerary commemoration. Food had been associated with funerals in the public sphere for centuries. In 183 BCE, when the head of the pontifical college (the pontifex maximus) died, there was a public distribution of meat, a gladiatorial display (120 gladiators), three days of funeral games, and after the games a feast (epulum). Banqueting tables were set out through the whole Forum. A banquet was central also to many family ritual occasions, especially those of birth, marriage and death. The funerary representations usually have some claim to reflect the everyday life of the deceased or of his or her times. They may be a reminder of happy times of a past life, or they could present a picture of pleasures in the life to come. Images are multivalent, and they probably embody elements of both interpretations. But the picture presented is of such detail and immediacy that we can assume that it is drawn from the banqueting practices of the day. The sarcophagus of P. Caecilius Vallianus (Figure 1.2), a military officer of the third century CE who died at the age of 64, depicts a scene of a funerary meal on its front. Caecilius is presented on his sarcophagus in a familial context. He is clearly a man of means, surrounded by members of his familia in the expansive space of his own home. He reclines on a couch (kline) while slaves serve food, entertainers play musical instruments, and two children and a dog play in front of the couch. The food and equipment for dining are presented in some detail. This is a scene of considerable wealth and some display. But it has little in common with the scene in Couture’s painting. Obviously, this level of dining, entertainment and space was not available to the great masses in the cities, or to peasant families in the country, in their small and crowded private living spaces. Our evidence of family meals is largely upper-class; but this level of society did provide role models for the behaviour and aspirations of some others, in what was a hierarchical but socially mobile society. For the masses, there was a street culture in which food played an important part. Roman

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Figure 1.2 Sarcophagus of P. Caecilius Vallianus, third century CE Rome, Musei Vaticani, Museo Gregoriano Profano. DAI Rome Neg.90.413

governments (Republican and imperial) recognised the importance of providing food on various public occasions. These were not just the ritualised handouts – the public distributions of grain or bread – but feasts and entertainment for the people on celebratory and religious occasions. These continued to be features of the military triumphs which were held frequently for successful and ambitious individuals until the end of the Republic and for emperors and members of their families in the imperial period. Expectations of these had risen to such an extent by the end of the Republic that sometimes meat was specially bought in, when sacrificial meat could not provide for the numbers and appetites of the crowds who attended. A special category of ‘the lower classes’ was the large number of slaves, many of whom (in the city) were almost an integral part of family life and who often had good expectations of freedom and even Roman citizenship. One aspect of slave treatment which remained constant, in spite of different styles and presentations of household staff, was probably a reasonably adequate standard of nutrition. Slaves were a valuable part of an owner’s estate, and of his or her own image; so it was self-interest, if nothing more, to keep them in reasonable condition. By contrast, the standard of diet for Caribbean slaves in the eighteenth century was often low, but sources were available for constant imports of new slaves. Such imports were not so available to Romans in imperial times, once widespread peace (the pax Romana) had been imposed. Many Roman slaves served at dinner – sometimes in very menial jobs, but also

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with very specialised training. At dinners, they watched, they learnt, they were socialised to the life they aspired to after slavery. The standard and appearance of an owner’s household slaves became symbols of the image which he or she wanted to project. Did they want to be served by sleek, beautiful, Eastern boys with sophisticated skills, or by more modest, less groomed, sound Italian boys? Juvenal proclaims his own simpler taste: a boy from a country town, one who spoke Latin but not Greek, one whose hair was short and straight rather than long and curled in the more luxurious fashion, one who is homesick for his mother and his local area.14 Again to put satire in context by comparison with other media, we note that in visual images slaves are comparatively simply presented, although they are elegant figures. They are never represented naked: their clothing is part of the image of elegance and luxury. Dinners and their associated ritual became the site of moral contestation for many Romans. We today target a much greater range of social flaws for criticism of our own societies. The centrality of food and of the ritual of dining in Roman society helps explain the focus on that aspect. Criticism contrasted the Roman tradition of simplicity and self-restraint with new fashions of elaborate dining and entertainment. Many Roman writers proclaimed their frugal tastes and the moral and intellectual superiority of their dinners. Pliny the Younger15 castigated an acquaintance for attending a more exotic dinner in preference to Pliny’s offering of fresher, simpler food and the entertainment of ‘a comic play, a reader or singer, or all three if I felt generous’. Yet the architecture of Pliny’s villas took great forethought for the ambience of dining, as Vitruvius had recommended over a century earlier, and the outdoor facilities at one villa reflect dining scenes from Pompeian paintings.16 Frugal but elegant fare was often associated with Italian identity – produce must be fresh and, even better, home-grown rather than imported. Over the centuries, when moderns have engaged with the past, their focus has reflected modern preoccupations. For some time the United States took Republican Rome as its model for political forms and ideals. But in the twentieth century it has been imperial Rome which has been the natural subject for recreation of the past. It was the most powerful, extensive and complex empire ever known before the twentieth century, and it offered readers and viewers pictures of power, wealth, luxury and geographical variety on a grand scale. Modern media focussed at different times on different aspects, such as political absolutism and the corruption of power; militarism; class struggles; suppression of women. There has been a long Christian tradition of attacking Roman pagan immorality or corruption, and there has been a genre

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of historical fiction focussing on religious persecution (the ‘sandal and toga’ epics). Hollywood has used all of these, sometimes in combination. Food, sex and conspicuous consumption seemed particularly relevant in the 1950s and 1960s, for example in the Joseph L. Mankiewicz Cleopatra film of 1963. More recently, the topics of two films on Mediterranean antiquity have been Alexander the Great and the Trojan War. These have as their principal focus warfare and its attendant excitements and brutalities. This is perhaps a more relevant focus for the early twenty-first century. Our perceptions too will reflect our own preoccupations and the cultural discourse of our own time. Maria Wyke, one of the best recent writers on Hollywood’s use of the past, suggests that we need to ‘examine the intersection (of these films) with the national, political, economic and cultural identities of the communities in which they are produced’.17 It is a tribute to the magnetism of ancient Rome that it has been looked to for so many purposes. If we want to get deeper in our understanding of that society we must use the whole range of evidence available (and be aware of its many gaps), evaluate it with the help of appropriate methodologies, and be aware of the cultural baggage which affects our own perceptions. An element of caution and scepticism should still leave us free to appreciate the vital role of banquets in Roman public and private life and what they provided for the participants and for the presenters, and to enjoy them as consummate performances.

Notes 1. After this chapter was written, a major work appeared: Dunbabin, 2003. It does not address the historiographical issues of this chapter, but the text and illustrations are a rich source of information and analysis of Roman banquets. 2. Livy, 45. 32–3. 3. E.g. 31. 4. 7. 4. Aemilius Paullus 28–34. 5. On Architecture 6. 4–5. 6. On Old Age 44–5. 7. Preface 6 to Biographies of Distinguished Greeks and Romans. 8. Reported by Varro, De uita populi Romani (On the Life of the Roman People), fragments 83 and 84. 9. Against Piso 66–8. 10. Saturnalia 3. 13. 10–11. 11. A major modern source for Couture is A. Boime, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), to which I owe examples of contemporary reactions. 12. Satires 6. 292–3.

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Penguin 2000. Satires 2. 146–61. Letters 1. 15. Pliny, Letters 5. 6; 2. 17. Projecting the Past (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 32.

Further reading K. Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). P. Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). I. Nielsen and H. Sigismund Nielsen (eds), Meals in a Social Context: Aspects of the Communal Meal in the Hellenistic and Roman World (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1998).

2 Food and Feast as Propaganda in Late Renaissance Italy Ken Albala

It was an unusually balmy evening in August as the guests approached the Castello Estense decked out in multi-colored silks. The still air seemed to soften the forbidding brick battlements and one could catch the faint aroma of rosemary wafting through the open parapets. Flames flickered from within and the thin plaintive notes of viols cut through the crimson-streaked sky. The line of guests slowly ambled their way over the moat and through the portcullis, up the central staircase, past Flemish tapestries depicting the labors of Hercules. Upon reaching the grand hall each pair was formally announced by the scalco (Steward) and shown to their places beneath the richly painted ceiling, surrounded by frescos. The Duke and his family had not yet arrived, but the credenza was already adorned with majolica platters, heaped with elegant little pastries filled with boar meat, peacocks studded with cinnamon, carp from the Po Delta on thin slices of citron, capon and clear gelatins, massive cheeses from Piacenza, endive salads and dishes of cream. Elegantly folded napkins stood crisply at each setting beside golden forks and spoons and carvers waited attentively with knives ready to commence the service. That is how it might have happened one summer night in Ferrara. The brief account in Giovanni Battista Rossetti’s sixteenth century banquet management guide, Dello Scalco, does not offer the details.1 But it does reveal that banquets in Italian courts of the latter sixteenth century were extravagant multi-media events meant to astound and overwhelm the senses of participants. They included music, entertainment, perfumes and flowers as well as the elaborate displays of food to feast the eyes as well as the palate. These banquets were meticulously recorded in published works which described how to throw similar events. Smaller courts could learn how to imitate their superiors’ dining practices just as 33

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they imitated their manners, dress and speech through the pages of other ‘how to’ manuals. Thus, these books served as a form of propaganda extolling the taste and refinement of court for those unable to attend.2 This literature was also a superb form of advertisement for the small Italian courts as they hoped to become the model of sophistication and refined taste for their larger neighbors such as France and Spain. The Italians’ relation to these states was precarious. Much of the peninsula had either been conquered in the course of the Habsburg-Valois Wars or was now tacitly controlled by the larger powers. Marriage alliances were crucial to the survival of many Italian states. Furthermore, stuck between the ever expanding Italian city-states were smaller independent courts waiting to be gobbled up. These small courts needed the protection of the nation-states, but had little to offer in terms of resources or arms. Instead they offered culture: art and architecture, literature, gardening and cuisine. Knowing full well their resources could never match those of royal kitchens, they still spent exorbitant sums on banquets, often draining their treasuries in an effort to impress. What they could not achieve in terms of sheer volume of food was made up for with dexterous technique and sophisticated presentation. The published accounts also made sure these prodigal feasts survived beyond a single evening. The small courts spent their fortunes on what might be considered frivolous entertainment precisely because they depended on their powerful protectors and needed to market themselves as paragons of refined culture. Perhaps they needed to convince themselves of this as well. In any case, a fabulous banquet with novel inventions could smooth relations, cement alliances and marriage deals or flatter a potential protector. They were thus seen as an essential part of the propaganda necessary to statecraft. Exactly what message these banquets and their published accounts intended to project is another matter though. The painting and architecture of the mannerist period have been studied at length, as has the literature. These too served as forms of propaganda with explicit encoded statements intended to dazzle readers and viewers. What though could a banquet say apart from impressing guests with sheer profusion of food and its elaboration? These were, of course, goals in themselves, but it should be possible to look deeper, to decode as it were, the complex symbolism, associations and intentions that underlie the order of service, the ingredients and especially the methods of cookery. By exploring the details of the typical banquet a reconstruction of its message will be presented, much as one might explore the symbolism and artist’s intention in a still life painting or the imagery in a poem.

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In fact, food references in these sources can serve sometimes to explain the message in an actual meal that is no longer so easily ‘read’ today. To start, Italian food was a particularly good vehicle to convey a message of sophistication. The Italians were in a unique position to impress Europe with their cookery from the earliest days of printing. It is not a coincidence that the Maestro Martino’s Libro de arte coquinaria was both the first printed cookbook, albeit imbedded in Platina’s De honesta voluptate (printed ca.1470), as well as the first translated one into most vernacular languages. It was the first cookbook with a very broad readership, circulation throughout Europe and one which purported to present a very Italian way of cooking, though it does include some Catalan recipes. It was nonetheless Italian cuisine that was first disseminated on a wide scale in print, although Martino and Platina do not contain descriptions of banquets per se.3 The first work to present an entire detailed description of the Italian banquet, replete with menu lists and recipes is the Banchetti of Cristoforo di Messisbugo, the first edition of which appeared in Ferrara in 1549. Ferrara was precisely the sort of small brilliant late Renaissance court that was at once consciously trying to serve as a model for its smaller neighbors, but also trying to prevent being swallowed up by larger Italian city states, the Papal States in particular, and also trying to take part in the broader politics of Europe. Marketing Ferrara’s cultural capital was certainly successful if we consider the arts – both Ariosto and Tasso were among the most popular and widely imitated poets of the sixteenth century. Cardinal Ippolito d’Este’s gardens and fountains at Tivoli are often claimed to have been the model for subsequent royal landscape architecture. This marketing skill was also applied to the culinary arts, as evidenced by Giovanni Battista Rossetti’s Dello Scalco, published in 1584, only a decade or so before the city was in fact swallowed by the Papal States.4 On one level, the book might be viewed as a last heroic effort to advertise Ferrarese greatness and the house of Este. Rossetti was the scalco, or banquet manager, for the ruling Este family, a position which he took over from Messisbugo. Uniquely in Ferrara the scalco was a kind of majordomo who oversaw not only kitchens and service staff but also maintained the entire household budget in both peace and wartime, even provisioning campaigns abroad.5 Normally the scalco would manage only the food related staff and design the menus and would rank beneath the master of the household and would himself supervise the chef, buyers, wine steward and various other officers. Based on his experience as banquet manager, Rossetti’s work is thus not a cookbook but a list of dishes served in banquets, their order and

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directions on how to present them along with management advice. The reader is expected to marvel at and imitate the structure and contents of the banquet lists, and adopt particularly Ferrarese organisation for the banquet, which was broken into several distinct courses alternating hot and cold dishes and ending with a fruit course. The aspiring scalco in another court would learn basic organisation of the kitchen and food staff as well as the particulars of service from books like this, of which there were many. They exhibit not only the rare knowledge and expertise of the author but the good sense of the patron at whose court such marvels were executed. But it is not only Ferrarese dining styles that are described. Rossetti also states in the preface that he will explain the fashions of the Germans and French so that Italian cooks might try alternative banquet styles if they so desired, because of course they have the skills to do so.6 These statements at once betray both Rossetti’s sense of the cultural superiority of the Ferrarese but also his apprehension that more powerful countries have greater resources and should not be looked down upon, but rather carefully courted. His comments throughout the book reveal his respect for the customs of these countries in a way that may have surprised Italian readers who took their superiority for granted. For example, in the preface he explicitly praises the Germans and French as ‘truly inventors of many dishes both of meat and fish, most rare and without equal, as well as an infinite number of pastries and sauces, the use of which they have imparted to our cooks of Italy.’ That is, in his attempt to be comprehensive, Rossetti reveals his anxiety, if not perhaps his jealousy of the greater nations. These same emotions would lead many Italians to seek their fortunes abroad in these very courts. For some of the banquets he describes, Rossetti often chose German or French service in deference to the guests, perhaps visiting ambassadors. Rossetti had in fact served meals abroad as well while serving Alfonso II, so he understood foreign habits first hand. On other occasions the guests were visiting dignitaries from other Italian states, so that the type of service would have varied depending on those in attendance. For lesser states showing off the friendship of the Este with foreign monarchs may have itself been the message, demonstrating that the staff was so familiar with the customs that they could serve foreign guests in their own style. This seems to be the case when someone from the Empire was present and the German service, arranging many separate dishes in one large platter on a round table in each course, is used rather than the typical Italian profusion of small plates in each course.

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A purely political factor may have also prompted Rossetti’s deference to the Germans: the Empire was most likely perceived as the only hope for maintaining Ferrara as an independent dukedom in the face of papal encroachment. Despite a previous alliance with the French through the marriage of the French king’s sister Renée to Duke Ercole earlier in the century, and even though Alfonso had even fought with Henri II years before, by the latter sixteenth century the Ferrarese began to back the winning horse, the Germans and their Habsburg cousins the Spanish. This was in fact why Rossetti’s first patron Duke Alfonso II had married Barbara of Austria in 1565.7 She was the sister of the Habsburg Emperor and it is most likely that the German service was introduced as an attempt to cement the German alliance and flatter Barbara. By the time Rossetti’s book was published he had entered into the service of Alfonso’s daughter Lucrezia d’Este, the estranged wife of Francesco Maria della Rovere, the duke of Urbino. Although there are no dates given in the banquet lists, we can safely assume that they describe actual meals served throughout Rossetti’s 27 years of service for both Alfonso and his daughter, not only because they list the most important guests present, but because there are a full 450 pages of menus for every season, enough to fill many years with feasting. The banquet was highly politicised by nature. Its messages were carefully encoded through the choice of ingredients, how they were prepared and how the meal was served. These messages were delivered not only to the guests, but also to those who read Rossetti’s account. Thus each meal broadcasts a unique political message. What follows is a detailed deciphering of a single meal that occupies a mere four pages of a book 547 pages long. To begin, nearly every banquet opens with a mythological scene, or in fact one for every table, that specifically refers to the guests present, to a running theme or to the season. These scenes were normally constructed of sugar and might feature figures, architecture, coats of arms with animals. Many refer to mythological topoi that would have been understood by the guests, or at least those sophisticated enough to understand. As with most mannerist arts, obscurity was itself a virtue. Sometimes the message was quite simple though. Cupid and Venus would immediately signal an amorous message. Neptune would announce a fish meal for Lent. Hercules performing labors or soldiers would immediately signal a heroic masculine theme. Often these were constructed merely to show off the ingenuity of the scalco, but sometimes they said more. There is one particular banquet described by Rossetti that features a fascinating cold tableau. It was an evening banquet thrown by Count Pala Strozzi

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on the Feast of San Rocco in August. The feast normally falls on the sixteenth of the month. On each of the tables was set an edible tree constructed with a trunk of salami covered in leaves fashioned from slices of prosciutto. Surprising to say the least. Tied to the tree was a figure carved out of salted tongue, beside which stood a hippogryph fashioned from a hare with the wings of a partridge sewn on and then gilded. Above this hovered an armed figure of pastry acting as liberator while a giant cold bass (varolo in the dialect of the Marche, or branzino) arrives with gaping mouth to swallow him. The entire scene, of cold meat and fish since it was summer, was also strewn with flowers and the table set with pleated napkins.8 Part of the appeal of this was the mere spectacle and mannerist delight in perversity and titillation, but the imagery was not at all arbitrary. The date, specified as the Feast of San Rocco, was probably just coincidental, and one can hardly expect the scalco to have organised a meal dedicated to the patron saint of pestilence. On the other hand, Saint Rocco was buried in nearby Venice and after the last great wave of plague in 1576 it became customary for state dignitaries to celebrate his feast day in thanks for the deliverance from plague. The tricks with salami hardly seem to herald a solemn occasion though, and it may be that this perplexing scene carries some other meaning. In fact, the scene would have been immediately familiar to the Ferrarese. The hippogryph of course is known today by Harry Potter fans and had been a familiar mythological creature since ancient Greek times. But in the sixteenth century, diners would have recognised it from one of the early scenes in Ludovico Ariosto’s extraordinarily popular poem Orlando Furioso, composed earlier in the century in this very court. In canto IV we find Brunello escorting the warrior maiden Bradamante to the Pyrenees between France and Spain to confront the sorcerer Atlante who keeps cavaliers and ladies captive in a huge steel mountain-top fortress. Bradamante ends up deceiving her guide to obtain a magic ring of invulnerability, but rather than kill him, she ties him to a fir tree. Thereafter the sorcerer appears, armored and riding his flying horse – the hippogryph. Commonly a union of horse and gryphon was thought impossible, the two mythical creatures being mortal enemies, but the poet assures us the creature is not a fiction, and, though rare, is found in the Riphaean mountains, not a magical creature, but a prodigy of nature. Bradamante ends up fighting the sorcerer and beats him, but in the end spares his life when she realises he is an old man and only built his steel castle to keep Ruggiero safe. Ruggiero, a noble pagan, just happens

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to be the true love of the warrior maiden Bradamante. The sorcerer, we learn only brought the cavaliers and ladies there to entertain him with ‘Games, music, clothing, food, at every turn. All pleasures, all amusements you will find / For which the lips can ask, the heart can yearn.’9 In the end, the castle is dissolved, the cavaliers and ladies freed, but Ruggiero mounts the hippogryph and is promptly swept away on it. Only in canto VI do we learn that the hippogryph has borne the knight across Europe, beyond the pillars of Hercules and across the forbidden seas to an enchanted isle where his story continues. These adventures eventually became the popular culture favorites of the day; they were painted on majolica plates, and were repeated in puppet shows for centuries. Without lingering on Ariosto’s narrative, it is clear that the scene Rossetti has devised refers to this scene in Ariosto, the figure tied to the tree being Brunello, the armored liberator Bradamante, and the hippogryph starring as itself, although in somewhat ludicrous guise as a hare-partridge hybrid. The only unclear element is the giant fish, maybe meant to represent the sorcerer though nowhere in Ariosto does it claim that he is disguised. In any case, the guests at this banquet would certainly have recognised the scene and would have begun considering why it was chosen for this particular meal with this host on this day. Of course it may be that there is no reason whatsoever and this was merely meant for decorative effect. But why go to such great lengths to make a specific scene and then record it for posterity in a description? At a certain level, the lords and ladies present at this banquet, themselves in a sense captive, could have identified with those in the story, and because they are not depicted in salami, they might assume they are cast in that role, enjoying all pleasures as the poet described it. Who then would figure as the other characters, strangely about to be consumed by the guests? Perhaps this particular scene was chosen with some deeper allegorical intent, referring to the host or current events. Unfortunately, the date of this banquet is not recorded by Rossetti so it would be impossible to pinpoint a precise context for the allusions in the scene, but in a general sense it is a scene of a captive guarded by a monster, impending rescue and another second threatening beast. There are two possible ways to interpret this scene, one referring to the host, the other to the duke and duchess. Because the banquet took place before 1584 when the book was written and no earlier than 1557 when Rossetti entered service, it occurred in the course of the Revolt of the Netherlands in which the host Strozzi fought. It was also during these years that the Este, in an effort to thwart encroachment by the Papal

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States, began to court Habsburg protection. Both these options will be considered in turn. First, the identity of the host may offer some clues. This Signor Conte Pala Strozzi, as Rossetti calls him, is not a member of the illustrious Florentine branch of the family, but Count Nicolo Palla Strozzi, chamberlain to the Duke of Ferrara after 1559, who fought in Flanders as counsellor of war in the service of the Spanish. The connection of service to the Habsburgs was probably made through the Duke’s wife.10 Thus it is a banquet thrown within the ducal court by one of the leading courtiers, a figure in international politics, though not it seems a major player. He was a leading player in Ferrara though, and the duke was present, so this can be construed as a message both from a courier to his superior as well as to the outside world in the form of the printed account. The theme of captivity and liberation may refer in some way to the wars in the Netherlands. In the minds of the Spanish and the Ferrarese helping them, Flanders was indeed being liberated, preserved for true religion, exactly as it turns out was Ruggiero in Ariosto’s story, whose fate was to be converted (at this point he was still pagan) and whose fate was to be set free, something the sorcerer could not understand.11 Thus there is an implicit message that the Habsburgs are playing the role of liberator, in the allegorical form of Bradamante, in freeing the Netherlands from bondage, perhaps to magic, perhaps even to Protestantism. This is conjecture, but if Strozzi and Ferrara are indeed implied in the choice of the story then it also serves to explain Ferrarese greatness as valuable to the obviously wealthier and stronger Spanish in their effort to hold onto their rebellious possessions, politically and in terms of religion. That is, this scene is inspired not necessarily by fear of foreign involvement in Italy, something already a fait accompli, but of the greater power’s need for Italian expertise, in this case in war. After all, Italians like Alessandro Farnese were brought in to lead the war. The second possible interpretation is equally plausible and depends on the opening pages of Ariosto’s poem where he explains that the illustrious house of Este is actually descended from the union of Ruggiero and Bradamante. They marry at the end of the epic. Thus there would have been an immediate association of these figures with Alfonso and Barbara, cast as hero and liberator. If this is the case, then Barbara, as sister of the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian, would be liberator of Ferrara either saving the city from the impending threat of the papacy, cast perhaps in the form of the gaping bass, or more prosaically by providing an heir to carry on the Este dynasty. In fact, neither of these happened. Barbara died in 1572 and by 1579 Alfonso had married his third wife

Ken Albala 41

Eleonora Gonzaga. They also produced no heir. In the end, upon the duke’s death in 1597, the male line ended and though Alfonso willed his titles to his cousin Cesare, Pope Clement VIII successfully claimed the city for the Papal States in 1598. Cesare and the Este dynasty survived only in Modena. All this was unknown at the time of the banquet and the publication of the book though. The only problem with this interpretation is that the scene depicted in cold cuts does not actually show Ruggiero, but the scene before where Bradamante confronts the sorcerer. Still, the confrontation of Empire and Papacy with Ferrara as the implied captive is possible. Interestingly, the meal also ends where the epic ends. Sugar sculptures appear after hand washing and before the final course of sweets which depict Orlando gone mad, as if to remind the diners in case they missed the allegory. Orlando was the other hero of the poem. The choice of madness as a topic might seem a little tactless, given that the poet at court who replaced Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, was visibly losing sanity in the course of the 1570s, but then this banquet may have preceded this. What of the food served in this meal though? How specifically could it be construed as further glorifying Ferrara and the house of Este? Without doubt, those present and readers of Rossetti would have been astounded by the amount of food alone, as well as its variety and the complexity of preparation. This meal consisted of five separate courses each containing between 15 and 19 different dishes in multiples of seven. In total, including the six scenes and six plates of mad Orlando, there were 621 dishes of food served. We are not told how many guests were present on this day nor how many tables were used, though we can judge from the number of servings per guests Rossettti specifies elsewhere, 12 servings for 70 people, for example, or four servings for 24.12 This banquet probably served about 40. That means for each guest there were about 15 dishes. The service was also in the Italian fashion with many small plates covering the table in each course. The courses are also alternated: a cold course to start, followed by a hot course, followed by a third of roast meats, then fruits, then finally hand-washing and sweets and conserves. That is, rather than a progression of different types of food: soup, fish, roast, dessert, Rossetti’s meals alternate by temperature and method of cooking with different types of food both sweet and savory in every single course. The first cold course, what we might consider appetisers, consisted of boar pastries, trout pastries, a peacock covered in sugar stuck with cinnamon sticks, carp in a sweet and sour sauce, sumata (preserved sow’s belly) with lemon slices, salmon with white sauce, salted capons,

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blancmanger (a finely pounded mixture of capon, almond milk, rice starch, rosewater and sugar) in a pastry case, gelatin with peacock flesh, endive salad with prosciutto, cabbage salad with sumata, scotie (a fish?), angler fish (rospe), watermelon from Chioggia, cheese from Piacenza (often preferred to Parmiggiano), cream in plates and pieces of sturgeon roasted and stuck with lardo in a prune soup. Apart from the combination of flavors and ingredients that would seem startling to our palates, each separate item is prepared in a different manner, with a different texture, color and is clearly meant to display the versatility of the cook. It is also designed consciously so that anyone’s particular taste can be accommodated. Functionally it works precisely as a menu does; no one would be expected to eat some of every dish, merely whatever they desired. The second hot course includes kid’s feet and veal with sugar, pies of boned pigeons, pork belly wrapped in caul fat and roasted on a spit, capons in broth with fried bread, quails in little pastry cases, pigeons and slices of tongue in sauce, zambudelli (a kind of sausage), ducklings, roasted quails with tongue, tiny pickled birds from Cyprus roasted in caul fat, fig-peckers, thrushes, turtledoves, and young chicks, plus garlic sauce, green sauce, tiny pigeons stuffed with truffles and chicken livers on a spit. The third course consisted of roasted dishes such as peacocks, capons, veal, a leg of roe deer, whole kid, mountain goat, veal liver and beef loin, along with sauces like mustard (made of fruits) royal sauce, lemons and oranges, and even a tart of pears, presumably also roasted. Before proceeding with the other courses, it should be clear that not only is there a staggering profusion of species in each course, but most of them are wild as well, and there is a heavy dependence on fowl. The majority of foods are also those that had specific noble associations. Large game animals were almost entirely the preserve of nobility who had the equipment, leisure and land to pursue them. Hunting was also an analogue of warfare, and served to literally hone the skills of combat. In fact dexterity with a sword and carving skills were usually considered essential to any well-rounded gentleman, and all the foods mentioned above would have been dismembered by noble trinciante, an official position at court. Even small fowl, normally captured with a falcon were also exclusive to noble tables. Some domestic meats appear, particularly capons and veal, which were considered delicate and easily digested. But wild meats still dominate the Ferrarese table, it seems in a conscious effort to emphasise the noble status and chivalric importance of the household. The image they wish to project to the rest of Europe, however, is that Ferrara, like France and Spain, has its own

Ken Albala 43

worthy chivalric culture. This is what Ariosto’s epic proclaimed, and so does this meal. Yet more is revealed in the so-called fruit course. Here we find displayed all the treasures of Italian horticulture, the inheritance of their classical past. Fruits are defined loosely and include what we would call vegetables as well, including artichokes several ways, fennel, cardoons, as well as dairy products like junkets, cheese from Lodi, and Florentine marzolino, plus peaches, pears, almonds in various forms – all of which would have been in season in August. Those fruits not in season appeared in the final sweets course in preserved form: fruits, apricots, quince preserves, even strangely enough candied lettuce in citron flower water. There were also confections of aniseed, marmalade, candied nuts and a plate of toothpicks. Here the Ferrarese boast the cultivated side of Italian culinary culture, the taming and conquering of nature, and raising products from every season to perfection with the art of confectionery. Additionally, although this particular menu offers only a few hints, the profusion of sugar used in these meals would itself have proclaimed the wealth of the court, let alone the edible gilding, and various spices adorning each dish. Although Rossetti does not offer recipes, his predecessor Messisbugo did, and many of these dishes were perennial favorites found in both books. Like his predecessor, the preferred flavors here are overwhelmingly sweet – sugar and cinnamon garnish nearly every dish and lemons appear on many as well. There is also a surprisingly liberal use of butter, not only in pastries but as a cooking medium and as a flavoring added to dishes toward the end. These too are much more than a simple matter of taste. They speak of culinary art and sophistication. They are intentionally complex and time consuming and composed of many contrasting, vibrant flavors. These were dishes that could only be found at the wealthiest courts with the greatest chefs – such as Ferrara itself. There can be no doubt that through this meal the Ferrarese court boasted the two sides of late Renaissance culture, both the warrior, elite, powerful and skilled enough to be of service to the mammoth nation states, and learned, witty and elegant enough to teach them the finer arts of living. Whether this superiority had any basis in fact or whether the French, Spanish and other European nations actually learned something from them is a matter for debate. More importantly, this is the message they wished to project to themselves and to the rest of Europe. In this respect the meal and the printed account function as propaganda in precisely the way other Italian arts do. Some of the message is blunt and

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direct as in the scene from Ariosto, the rest is subtle, but speaks directly in that the foods presented were all specifically associated with nobility and privilege and are prepared with panache. The image of Italian superiority, again, stems not from real strength but from a need to convince others that it exists. There is no way to be certain that others believed this message, though they did indeed imitate many features of Italian cuisine – confectionery and pastry especially, manners and the use of forks. These were the elements that were foreign to them. Hunted game, wildfowl, and even the use of spices and sugar were not new to them. In a certain respect, Europeans did believe the propaganda, but not the part about the strength of Italian arms and military expertise. The strength of Italian city states had already been eclipsed by nations and so had its wealth. Cultural leadership, in cuisine as well, would also pass to the Spanish and then to the French.

Notes 1. G. B. Rossetti, Dello Scalco (Ferrara: Domenico Mammarello, 1584; facsimile reprint Bologna: Arnaldo Forni Editore, 1991). 2. While the scholarship on court studies in the Renaissance and the importance of art and literature is immense, a number of works directly address the role of feasting in the courtly context; In addition to Further Reading see C. Young, Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002); Regarding the history of Italian cuisine see relevant chapters in F. Sabban and S. Serventi, A Tavola nel Rinascimento (Rome: Laterza, 1996), and E. Faccioli (ed), Arte della cucina: Libri di ricette testi sopra lo scalco, il trinciante, e i vini (Milan: Edizioni il Polifolo, 1966). A classic study of the Ferrarese court, though not extending into the latter sixteenth century is W. Gundersheimer, The Style of a Renaissance Despotism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). 3. Martino of Como, The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book, trans. J. Parzen (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005); Platina (Bartolomeo Sacchi), On Right Pleasure and Health, trans. M-E. Milham (Tempe, Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998). 4. Rossetti, Dello Scalco. The banquet discussed here is found on pp. 338–45; See also Christofaro (sic) di Messisbugo, Libro Novo (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 2001), which is a facsimile reprint of the second Venetian edn of 1557. There were a number of other works in the scalco literature which include Domenico Romoli, La Singolare Dottrina (Venice: Gio. Battista Bonfadino, 1593) (1st edn 1560) and Cesare Evitascandalo, Libro dello Scalco (Rome: Carlo Vulietti, 1609). The genre enjoyed continued popularity through the end of the seventeenth century as well. 5. L. Chiappini, La Corte Estense all metà del Cinquencento (Ferrara: Belriguardo, 1984).

Ken Albala 45 6. Rossetti, fol. b iv. 7. This marriage, or rather the strange disappearance of Alfonso’s first teenage wife (Lucrezia de Medici) was the subject of Robert Browning’s poem ‘My Last Duchess.’ It was suspected that Alfonso had the young girl murdered. They were in fact separated only a few days after their marriage and she disappeared a few years later just as Alphonso began negotiations to marry Barbara of Austria. 8. Rossetti, p. 338. 9. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. B. Reynolds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 187. 10. For a genealogy of the Strozzi family in Ferrara see http://www.sardimpex. com/strozzi/Strozzi-Ferrara.htm. Palla should not be confused with Francesco Strozzi (1541–82) who played a major role serving France against Spain in these years. 11. Ariosto, p. 225. 12. Rossetti, p. 180.

Further reading K. Albala, The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007). A. Cappatti and M. Montanari, Italian Cuisine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). R. Strong, Feast (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002).

3 Feasting on National Identity: Whisky, Haggis and the Celebration of Scottishness in the Nineteenth Century Alex Tyrrell, Patricia Hill and Diane Kirkby

Food rituals and customs have their own history and are themselves often creators of history. There can be few groups that exceed presentday Scots in their assertion of national identity through the celebration of distinctive food and drink. The most evident indications of this alimentary nationalism are the suppers which are held in honour of Scotland’s poet, Robert Burns, and occur today wherever Scots and the descendants of Scots live and work. The choice of foodstuffs such as ‘cock-a-leekie’, ‘champit tatties’, ‘bashed neeps’ and ‘Scotch Trifle’ sustains a sense of Scottishness during these celebrations. Of most importance is the haggis, which is ceremonially paraded from the kitchen to the table and extolled in Burns’s own words while it is ritually sliced open, saluted with whisky and consumed by the guests. It is Scotland’s national dish, writes Hugh Douglas, and it ‘links our generation and that of our forefathers who made Scotland what she is today’. The ritual ‘follows the same pattern in Adelaide as in Alloway, where Burns was born’; there can be no forgiveness for anyone who is ignorant enough to ‘stray from the set pattern’ of activities.1 Douglas’s reference to a ‘set pattern’ of activities serves as a reminder that the modern Burns Supper is much more than a meal; it is a highly ritualised feast in which the presentation and consumption of food and drink are accompanied and even overshadowed by a panoply of emblems of national and group bonding: rhetoric, music, recitations, special clothing, insignia, symbolic decorations, toasts and ceremonies of various kinds. A Burns Supper that was devoid of these accompaniments would be unrecognisable to modern eyes. To assert, however, as Douglas does, that the rituals of Burns Suppers have been ‘stable’ 46

Alex Tyrrell et al. 47

ever since 1802, when a few of the poet’s friends consumed ‘a comfortable dinner’ of sheep’s head and haggis in his memory is a contentious proposition.2 It overlooks some of the most important characteristics of memorialisation to which historians have directed attention during the last two decades. As E. J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have pointed out, many group celebrations, including those that denote nationality, originate as ‘invented traditions’. Less firmly derived from the past than most of their participants acknowledge, they invoke a sense of continuity that is ‘largely factitious’, and much of their effectiveness relies on ‘a process of formalisation and ritualisation’.3 Following a similar line of analysis, Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out that Scots have relied heavily on ‘invented traditions’, and, with evident relish, he dissected the realities behind the emergence of the Highland rituals that have come to symbolise Scottishness. His hypothesis can be extended to the Burns Supper and other Scottish forms of mutuality where haggis, whisky and cock-a-leekie hold pride of place. Admittedly, it cannot be said, as Trevor-Roper memorably remarked of the modern kilt, that the haggis is a recent invention, given to the Scots by an Englishman;4 Alexander Fenton has found it mentioned in Scottish records going back to the sixteenth century including a 1636 reference to a female ‘puddinwricht’ (haggis-maker) in Aberdeen.5 Nonetheless the Penguin Companion to Food offers several examples of haggis-like dishes in various countries, and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (endorsed by such impeccably Scottish sources as Annette Hope’s A Caledonian Feast) refers to it as ‘a popular English dish till 18th c[entury]’, at which time it seems to have been attributed to the Scots as peculiarly their own.6 The attribution can be seen in the literature of the mid-to-late eighteenth century. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), a novel by Tobias Smollett, a Scot, contains an early version of what would become the stock encounter in life as well as literature between haggis-eating Scots and their histrionically disgusted English visitors. Squire Bramble, one of Smollett’s characters, comments on the strength of Scottish national characteristics during his tour of Scotland: ‘I am not yet Scotchman enough to relish their singed sheep’s-head and haggice.’7 The first put me in mind of the history of Congo, in which I have read of negros’ heads sold publickly in the markets; the last, being a mess of minced lights, livers, suet, oat-meal, onions, and pepper, inclosed in a sheep’s stomach had a very sudden effect upon mine, and the delicate Mrs Tabby changed colour; when the cause of our

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disgust was instantaneously removed at the nod of our entertainer. The Scots, in general, are attached to this composition, with a sort of national fondness, as well as to their oat-meal bread    . A few years earlier Smollett had sent the haggis on an even more startling flight of fancy as a national symbol when he defended George III’s Scottish Prime Minister, Lord Bute, against the anti-Scottish diatribes of his harshest critic, John Wilkes. Concocting a speech between two imaginary Englishmen – Captain Iago Aniseed (a thinly disguised Wilkes) and Lord Gothamstowe – Smollett cleverly used the haggis as a satirical device for deriding the Scottophobia that was widespread in England. Bute, so Aniseed wailed, had not only flooded the public institutions of Great Britain with an army of Scottish place-hunters, he had also planted a Scottish scullion in the Royal kitchen. The dastardly implications of this long-term strategy were immediately discerned by Gothamstowe: ‘Oh horrible! – in time that scullion will rise into a cook, and then the Caledonian haggish will smoak beneath the nostrils of a British King – Foh! The very prospect turns my stomach.’8 This was all part of the cut and thrust of a debate that was conducted with an eye to its jocular qualities, but there was no doubt as to the reality of the hostility that was directed against Scots at a time when they were becoming more visible in the institutions of the British state and when memories of the 1745 Jacobite rising were still fresh in the public mind. Smollett’s squibs were examples of what was becoming a commonplace of contemporary satire; references to diet could be used as pejorative statements of nationality. In his poem, ‘The Prophecy of Famine: A Scots Pastoral’ which he dedicated to Wilkes in 1763, Charles Churchill derided Scotland as a place where ‘half-starv’d spiders prey’d on half-starv’d flies’. No living thing, whate’er its food, feasts there, But the Cameleon, who can feast on air.9 Samuel Johnson was another who made much of the Scottophobia of that era; his contempt for all things Scottish was typified by his dictionary definition of oats as ‘A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’10 Given as an insult, jibes such as this were countered with pride by two of Scotland’s most famous poets, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. In 1773 when the faculty of St Andrew’s University entertained Johnson at a sumptuous feast during his tour of Scotland, Fergusson was appalled

Alex Tyrrell et al. 49

by what he saw as his alma mater’s cringing sycophancy towards one of Scotland’s most notorious detractors. In response to the news that the university had brought in foreign delicacies to satisfy Johnson’s tastes, he addressed a repartee ‘To the Principal and Professors of the University of St Andrew’s On Their Superb Treat to Dr Samuel Johnson’. Waggishly imagining the menu he would have devised if he had been entrusted with the arrangements for ‘Samy’s’ banquet, Fergusson constructed a sequence of dishes that would have given the ‘surly wight’ the reward he deserved: Imprimis, then, a haggis fat, Weel tottled [slowly boiled] in a seything pat[foaming pot], Wi’ spice and ingans [onions] weel ca’d thro’ Secundo, then a gude sheep’s head Whase hide was singit, never flead, [flayed] And four black trotters cled wi’ girsle, [gristle] And so the poem goes on with Fergusson delightedly imagining Johnson’s ‘glowrin een’ surveying the ‘list o’ gudely hameil gear’ [homeproduced items].11 All too obviously, Smollett and Fergusson were not describing a cuisine that could be seen as appetising; Scottish foodstuffs served as national symbols that provided them with useful literary devices for punishing English critics and sycophantic Scots who aped foreign ways. In his ‘To a Haggis’ Robert Burns followed their example by lampooning the ‘French ragout’, ‘olio’, ‘fricassee’ and ‘trash’ preferred by those of effeminate tastes, but there was a different element that made his poem a milestone in Scotland’s culinary history. The haggis was the ‘Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race’; it was ‘a glorious sight, Warm-reekin, rich’; and ‘nae skinking [watery] ware’ would serve as a substitute.12 In other words a haggis could actually be enjoyed. By the time of Burns’s death in 1796 it was also becoming evident that the haggis could be celebrated with relish by the very social elites that he and Fergusson had derided. Scottish foodstuffs were becoming socially mobile. In earlier times, writes Alexander Fenton, haggis was not seen as ‘the food of the elite’.13 Fergusson and Burns were aware of this, and their patriotic critique relied on it; in Burns’s words it was the ‘Rustic, haggis-fed’ who upheld the values of ‘Auld Scotland’. By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, haggis was becoming a highly acceptable dish in polite circles where it was now fashionable to question the association of culture with aristocratic modes of foreign display and to celebrate the primitive virtues of

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Ossianic warriors, tartan-clad clansmen and ‘heaven-taught ploughmen’. Peasant foodstuffs could find a place of honour in this tableau of sturdy patriotism. Mary Cosh refers to ritualistic ‘Scottish’ luncheons offered by the highly aristocratic Nairne family circle in Edinburgh at which the menu consisted of ‘hodge-podge, cocky-leeky and haggis’.14 The emergence of whisky as the Scottish national drink was a similar story in some respects; foreign beverages, especially claret, were preferred by the Scottish social elites for most of the eighteenth century.15 This was a theme that stirred the patriotism of Fergusson and Burns. In his ‘A Drink Eclogue’ Fergusson saw their taste in drink as yet another demonstration of the foppishness of the people he sometimes called the ‘butterflies’. The poem takes the form of a dialogue in which two bottles, ‘Whisky’ and ‘Brandy’, debate their respective merits while they sit on the shelf of a cellar in a Scottish tavern. Sure of his place ‘wi’ a’ the daintiths o’ the land’, ‘Brandy’ boasts of his foreign origins and sneers that ‘Whisky’ is the drink of those who go ‘Bare-ars’d and barefoot o’er the Highland braes’. The debate rages to and fro until ‘Brandy’ calls on the landlady to adjudicate. Her verdict is scathing. In her tavern ‘Whisky’ is the genuine article; ‘Brandy’ is whisky adulterated with dye to look like the foreign product preferred by the toadies.16 Burns took up where Fergusson left off. In his ‘Scotch Drink’ brandy is the ‘burning trash’ that sends ‘auld Scotland’s cash to her warst faes’, whereas whisky is the drink of ‘honest men’.17 The apogee of this story of how haggis and whisky found acceptance as the national food and drink was reached in 1822; in that year the worst fears of Lord Gothamstowe were fulfilled, and the haggis did indeed ‘smoak beneath the nostrils of a British King’. Paying the first visit by a reigning monarch to Scotland since the seventeenth century, George IV arrived in Edinburgh. Some of the highlights of the novelist Sir Walter Scott’s management of this occasion as an invented tradition of Scottish nationality are well known; the King dressed in a kilt and hailed the Scottish people as ‘The Chieftains and Clans of Scotland’.18 Less frequently mentioned by historians is the careful choice of foodstuffs and drinks as icons of nationality during this royal visit. At a dinner that was held in his honour in Edinburgh the King was regaled with a feast that included haggis, sheep’s head and hotch-potch. As for whisky, George began his visit to Edinburgh by drinking a glass with Sir Walter Scott, and it was said that during his time in the city he ‘drank nothing else’ but Glenlivet whisky. When supplies ran out, Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus was ordered by her father to empty the family’s ‘pet bin, where was whiskey [sic] long in wood, long in

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uncorked bottles, mild as milk’.19 The King was well informed and well served. Whisky was being produced in increasing amounts at this time, but most of it was manufactured illegally, and it has been described as ‘a fiery spirit of inconsistent quality’. It was a drink to be selected with care. Much later in the nineteenth century the pendulum would swing to the other extreme which is now taken for granted; identified by brand name and heavy advertising, a homogenised product was devised for a mass consumer market that overspread national frontiers. The importance of the first 60 years of the nineteenth century for the definition of Scottish national identity is well known. At a time when older forms of Scottishness were dying out, and, as Lord Cockburn put it, Scotland was drifting towards the appearance of something like an English county, new expressions of nationality emerged.20 ‘Highlandism’ and ‘Balmorality’ took hold, endorsed by the tours of tartanclad monarchs in 1822 and 1842.21 The cult of Robert Burns was consolidated at the ‘national’ festival at Ayr in 1844,22 and throughout Scotland his birth centenary was enthusiastically celebrated in 1859. Great monuments, very notably the Wallace Monument in Stirling, were erected to commemorate the nation’s past glories. Distinctive forms of Scottish feasting found a place in this context. These expressions of Scottish cultural nationalism carried no separatist threat to the British polity; there was no hostile ‘othering’ of the English. Scots expressed their sense of nationality through distinctive rituals and cults that reflected their perception of themselves as valued members of the United Kingdom. This ‘Unionist Nationalism’, as it has been called, was a crucially important part of the culture that helped to make the nineteenth century Scots an imperial people.23 Carried throughout the British Empire, it fitted them to make a contribution that was at one and the same time distinctive and reassuringly collaborative. The rest of this chapter is principally concerned with feasts where Robert Burns’s memory was honoured. Focussing on the period between the 1830s and the 1850s when the rituals of Scottish mutuality had not ‘set’ in their modern form, it assesses the characteristics in Scotland of the feasts that formed part of the Burns centenary celebrations in 1859. It then examines the Scottish feasts that were held in Australia and compares them with their counterparts in Scotland and India. It gives special attention to the emergence of a distinctively colonial pattern of Scottish feasting in the part of south-eastern Australia that was known as the Port Philip District or Australia Felix before it was separated from New South Wales to form the colony of Victoria in 1851. This new colony was being settled at the very time when the culture of

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Unionist Nationalism was taking root in Scotland. Consequently, far from being mere demonstrations of ‘old-world loyalties’ and ‘traditional ceremonies’, as one historian has claimed,24 the feasts were dramaturgical representations of an emergent ‘Unionist Nationalism’ but in a form that was quickly adapted to the circumstances of a newly-founded colony. Elizabeth Buettner’s research into the feasts that celebrated Scottishness in India later in the nineteenth century offers a useful point of comparison with the Scottish celebrations in the Port Phillip District as well as those that were organised in English and Scottish cities.25 Uniting all these experiences was the notion that these feasts were assertions, not only of nationality but also of contemporary attitudes to gender. It is argued here that these Scottish feasts were highly gendered affairs, and that in the Australian colonies they threw into prominence some of the tensions that presaged the emergence of what subsequently became the late nineteenth century ‘Woman Movement’. In nineteenth century Scotland, celebrations of Scottishness often coalesced around the memorialising of Robert Burns as the national bard. Burns Clubs were founded, biographies written and monuments built in honour of ‘the People’s Poet’ from early in the nineteenth century, but the celebrations intensified after 1840. As newspaper reports in several Scottish and English cities make clear, by the 1840s Burns’s birthday (25 January) held a special significance as a time of festivity that brought Scots together, usually for a dinner. At one of these dinners that was organised in 1843 by the Scottish community in Manchester, the chairman took it for granted that thousands all over the world were likewise engaged that night.26 Typically the focus at these dinners was on a succession of toasts interspersed with speeches and songs. For example, in 1833 and 1837 the annual dinners of the Ayrshire and Edinburgh Burns Club were of this sort. The Club dated back to 1820, but there was considerable flexibility in the rituals that it observed, and there seems to have been less emphasis on the theme of Scottish identity than at the celebrations that were organised in Australia and in India later in the century. Reinforcing Annette Hope’s claim that distinctively national forms of feasting have more significance for exiles than for those who remain in the mother country,27 the newspaper reports of the Club’s dinners were remarkably lacklustre; they made no reference to national foods, special clothing, room decorations or other items of nationality. The themes of the toasts were reported, but no information was supplied about the sort of drinks that accompanied them. At this stage the Burns cult in Scotland focused heavily on living memory, and the highlights of many of these occasions were visits by members of the Burns family

Alex Tyrrell et al. 53

and others who had known the bard. Considerable interest was shown in personal artefacts that were associated with him. For example, at the Ayrshire and Edinburgh Burns Club’s 1837 dinner, Burns’s family bible and a specially commissioned portrait were exhibited.28 This was a time when it was still hoped that Burns’s memory would animate a school of Scottish poets, and guests often recited specimens of their own work. During the 1850s the Burns Cult consolidated its hold on Scots as a focal point of national identity. When the centenary of Burns’s birth was celebrated in 1859 there were celebrations all over Scotland and in many places overseas – 872 meetings of various sorts took place according to one estimate. The Scotsman provided pages of reports in which it ecstatically described a ‘truly national’ event in which a ‘torrent of love and honour    flowed from the universal Scottish heart’: the events of that day were a ‘heaven reaching cairn of Memory’, one that would need a worthy historian to give it exposition.29 The reports make it evident that a distinctive pattern had still to be ‘set’ in a way that would be recognisable to modern eyes; it was almost as if there was no need for prescribed rituals at this stage in the evolution of the Burns cult in Scotland. To honour the memory of the national bard the organisers of events seized on any and every social and cultural activity known to their era. Officially or unofficially many communities observed the day as a public holiday: in some places bells rang; there were processions of freemasons, the trades, schoolchildren and others; foundation stones were laid for community buildings; items that Burns had owned were exhibited as ‘relics’; there were concerts and recitations; prizes were awarded for poems in the Burns style; Kirkcudbright had a shooting competition and regatta; the Liverpool Scots had a soirée musicale in which there were orations as well as a Scottish concert. In Edinburgh, as ‘a pendant to the centenary celebrations’, there was even a phrenological exposition of Burns’s mental characteristics that revealed him as the quintessential Scottish hero: if he had lived in an earlier age he would have been a Wallace or Bruce. Members of Burns’s family were honoured guests at several of these festivities, and a special fund was raised to assist some of them who were in need. Evidently this was still a living tradition. The most typical event in 1859 was a feast. The reports focused on the speeches and toasts that celebrated Burns as a symbol of national identity. He was invoked along with other Scottish writers of note: Sir Walter Scott, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson. Scottishness at some of the festivities was also shown in music, much of it consisting of Burns’s folksongs. Evidently there was a considerable amount of drinking, especially

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of whisky, and in the aftermath of the celebrations there were reports of court proceedings against publicans who had interpreted the event as one that allowed them to extend the official opening hours. This was an era when there was considerable anxiety about the unruly behaviour with which drunkenness was associated, and the newspaper reports suggest that the organisers of events were lukewarm or even uneasy about offering distinctive drinks to symbolise Scottish nationality. Significantly it was the Scottish exiles in London who seem to have been the most determined to make the ‘chieftain o’ the Puddin-race’ the focal point of Scottish culinary nationality. When the London Caledonian Society celebrated Burns’s memory at the London Tavern, its members consumed ‘a huge haggis’ and listened to the music of five pipers. Scots in London could also attend a great festival in the Crystal Palace and enjoy a ‘first-class SCOTCH DINNER’ that included a good supply of haggis from Scotland.30 The reports made it clear that feasting in 1859 proclaimed values that went beyond a respect for Robert Burns as a symbol of nationality; it endorsed contemporary forms of social status. To deconstruct the term ‘feast’ is to reveal distinctions that were of great importance in the early and mid-Victorian era. One of the most obvious examples was the devising of dinners that did not disturb the existing social divisions; there was a tendency for gentlemen to dine with other gentlemen, leaving, as was reported at Galashiels, the working classes to celebrate ‘in their own hearty manner’. This was an era when feasting raised anxieties concerning the moral as well as the social order, and there was some uncertainty as to its place in a society that attached great value to feminine respectability. Earlier in the century public dinners had acquired such a bad reputation as scenes of drunkenness and coarse behaviour that they were usually confined to men, but, as a consequence of the successful social gatherings organised by the Anti-Corn Law League and other public associations, this reputation had faded during the 1840s.31 Speaking at one of the Robert Burns celebrations that were organised in Edinburgh in 1859, Duncan McLaren, who had played a major part in the League’s Scottish activities, commented on the good order that now prevailed in comparison with Burns’s day. One indication of this was the large number of women who attended the public festivities that were held in Burns’s honour during that year. Scottish feasts exemplified the range of gendered possibilities that was now available to organisers of public events.32 The total exclusion of women continued to be an option, but by 1859 this strategy looked out-of-date in Scotland, although, as Buettner has shown, it continued

Alex Tyrrell et al. 55

to hold sway much later in India.33 If, as was generally accepted, women were inherently more moral and religious than men, it was evident that the public sphere had much to gain from the influence they could exert. This line of reasoning, which had admitted women to the public gatherings of the anti-slavery and corn law repeal movements during the second quarter of the century, could be seen in the arrangements that were made for many of the celebrations in 1859. Welcoming the announcement that ladies were to be admitted to a banquet that was being arranged in Stranraer, one writer commented on ‘a new and beautiful feature in our public festive meetings, and one calculated not only greatly to increase the pleasure but to exercise in every way a beneficial influence’. Few writers at this time were bold enough to suggest that respectable women should mingle freely with men: great care was taken in making the arrangements for any public gathering to which women were admitted. As a consequence time, space and diet were strictly gendered at many of the public dinners that were held in Scotland on 25 January 1859. At some of the festivities women were allowed to enter after the meal to hear the speeches. Another option was to bring the values of the temperance movement to bear on public dinners by organising spiritfree festivities. Sometimes women were allocated separate seating and provided with different food and drink. At Largo, for example, the ladies were admitted after the dinner and ‘treated to wine and cake and other delicacies’. At the large Glasgow celebration the ‘gallery was laid out with a service of cake and wine for the ladies who were to enter after dinner’. Other new features of early Victorian public life, the tea party and soirée, also contributed to the gendering of the celebrations in 1859. Tea-drinking as a pastime associated with women had an established history; early in the eighteenth century Daniel Defoe had referred to the ‘tea-table’ as a place of ‘new invention’ for ladies. In the early nineteenth century Sir Walter Scott could still describe his hero, Waverley, entering the ‘female empire of the tea-table’ where a woman presided over mixed company.34 This was a private gathering, but in the early Victorian era the public tea party and soirée rapidly established themselves as forms of entertainment in middle-class culture, providing opportunities for men and women to socialise more reassuringly with each other than at functions where alcoholic beverages were freely consumed.35 Sometimes they were organised by women. Thus Dundee and Penicuik celebrated Burns with cake and fruit; Peebles opted for tea and cake; a soirée was organised by a ladies’ committee at Coldstream; Crieff admirers of Burns

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held a teetotal soirée; and at Dalkeith there was a soirée attended by 500 guests of whom one third were women. Significantly, the reports of many of these feasts in the Scotsman said nothing about the consumption of distinctively Scottish foods. Evidently they were not seen as noteworthy items on these occasions.36 In the colonies there were many resemblances to the celebrations in the homeland, but there were also many differences. Elizabeth Buettner has shown that by the end of the nineteenth century the Scottish community in India was locked into a social and mental world of ‘invented traditions’ in which distinctive Scottish foods and drinks occupied an important place. The Scotland that was extolled on these occasions was ‘the Highlands writ large’ despite the fact that most of the audiences were Lowlanders. These were ‘repetitive, ritual occasions’, Buettner writes. Scots in India entered the venues of their festivities to be ‘greeted with the sight of tables, walls and pillars decorated with bunting, streamers, Scottish flags and thistles. Heather imported “direct from home” adorned the tables and was worn by many in combination with “the national costume”.’ Scottish regimental bandsmen provided music for reels on these occasions. Eating haggis and drinking whisky were central features of the entertainment, and pipers often escorted the haggis into the hall. In the course of the evening ‘copious amounts of whisky’ would be consumed. Scots played a disproportionately large part in the government and commerce of British India, and the values they invoked at their feasts were those of Unionist nationalism in an imperial setting. Buettner quotes a typical speech that saluted an age-old land of rugged beauty where a succession of ‘heroes’ including William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, John Knox and Robert Burns had set an example of national, civil and religious liberty that fitted their descendants to take a proud place as empire-builders.37 Buettner’s descriptions of Scottish celebrations in India refer to the late nineteenth century. Developments in Port Phillip in the 1830s to 50s followed a similar course in important respects. As in the case of India, Scots were prominent among the early colonists, and a recognisable Scottish community soon emerged in Port Phillip. A contemporary described the Melbourne of the 1840s as ‘almost altogether a Scotch settlement’ inhabited by ‘a people altogether Scottish in their habits and manners, a people who prized not only material wealth but also respectability and were free from habits of social cringing’.38 These Scottish settlers quickly came together to celebrate their national distinctiveness. Their first feast, a St Andrew’s Dinner, took place as early as 1840, eliciting ‘feelings of unity and patriotism’. A year later a St Andrew’s

Alex Tyrrell et al. 57

Society of Australia Felix was founded, and in 1842 there was a dinner to commemorate the Battle of Bannockburn. Celebrations of Robert Burns soon followed, the first being in 1845. Over the next 20 years several Scottish societies were formed that devised their own versions of the feast, very notably the Caledonian Society (founded in 1858).39 The public dinners in the Port Phillip District amply endorse Annette Hope’s reference to the part played by food in ‘proclaiming or reinforcing national identity’ for exiles.40 Unlike the reports in the Scottish press at that time, the local newspapers made much of the cuisine at the feasts. At the St Andrew’s dinner in 1844 the menu included ‘haggis, singed sheep’s head and Scotch Kail’.41 Reports of a Robert Burns Dinner in 1845 described tables groaning under the weight of an ‘orthodox Scotch feed’ including haggis, hotch-potch, cock-a-leekie, sheep’s head broth, oat cakes and shortbread. Whisky also seems to have been in plentiful supply.42 Doubtless it accounted for much of the ‘high glee’ that was reported at one of these gatherings.43 These events were very similar to Buettner’s description of the Scottish festivities in Edwardian India – an invented tradition of national celebrations consisting of a cultural pastiche where distinctive foodstuffs were consumed in a Highland setting. ‘Chieftain McDonnell’ was the guest of honour at the St Andrew’s dinner in Melbourne in 1840; ‘My Heather Hills’ was the great hit at the 1844 St Andrew’s dinner; and at a Robert Burns dinner in 1845, a piper arrayed in ‘complete Highland costume’ played ‘solemn strath speys and lively reels of Scottish fame’.44 The performances were interlaced with speeches extolling the virtues of the heroes who had fought for Scotland in the era of Bannockburn. James Hedderwick, the editor of the Glasgow Citizen, seems to have come close to the truth when he wrote in 1859 that ‘the effect [of Scottish celebrations] has been to    make the Scotch abroad more intensely Scotch than even their countrymen at home’.45 As in the case of India, the Scots in the Port Phillip District were cherishing a distinctive nationality – one that was suffused with an ideology of Unionist Nationalism adapted to colonial conditions. Admittedly, some of the early festivities were exclusive – a Robert Burns Festival in the Queen’s Theatre in 1846 was restricted to Scots and their descendants, but this attitude soon changed. Responding to the criticism that distinctive national traditions had no place in the new colony, a speaker at one of the feasts denied that Scottish celebrations were exclusive; the Scots wished to extend the hand of friendship to settlers from other parts of the United Kingdom. At the Bannockburn Dinner in 1842 the chairman rejoiced that ‘We are now all Britons’ and praised ‘the

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laurels so nobly won’ by English valour at Crécy, Poitiers and Blenheim. In 1844 the St Andrew’s Society opened its dinner to guests who were ‘not Scotsmen’. The Robert Burns dinners followed a similarly swift trajectory from exclusiveness to a policy of welcoming non-Scots.46 Themes of empire were prominent in many of the speeches given by these Port Phillip Scots. Toasts acknowledged ‘The Ships, Colonies and Commerce of Great Britain’, together with the British armed forces and imperial events such as the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. A special place of honour was accorded to the Queen as a unifying symbol: at the Robert Burns celebration in Melbourne in 1859 a speaker hailed her as the British monarch who had adopted the Highland symbols of Scottish identity. Descended from the Stuarts, she had dressed her son in the ‘national Scottish costume’ and had established a residence in Scotland where she was always welcomed by the playing of the bagpipes. This was not a telescopic vision of national identity; from the outset the Scottish colonists identified themselves with their new home. Toasts celebrated ‘Our adopted country, Australia Felix’; extolled ‘The Agricultural and Pastoral interests of Australia Felix’; and endorsed the work of the literary, scientific and charitable institutions in which the Scots of the colony were playing a prominent part. The decorations at the St Andrew’s Dinner in 1845 neatly summarised the loyalties that these Scots proclaimed. There was ‘an unfurled flag of England [probably the reporter meant “the United Kingdom” ’] supported by two gigantic thistles, beneath which was ‘a large garland of Australia’s fairest flowers; and crowning the whole was an arched garland of thistles, roses and shamrocks’.47 Evidently the national identity of these emigrant Scots was multi-layered; they saw no difficulties in reconciling their Scottishness with their status as members of the United Kingdom, the British Empire and the colony in which they lived. One significant difference between the Scottish celebrations in the Port Phillip District and those in Edwardian India arose from the extent to which they were gendered. Drawn together in a warm spirit of ‘clannishness’, speakers in India hailed those present as men (women were excluded) of meritocratic endeavour who submerged their social class differences in a spirit of shared nationality; they were a community of brothers who were dedicated to the service of British India.48 In the Port Phillip District women were also excluded from Scottish public festivities at first, but this quickly changed, and by 1859 it was taken for granted that their presence would have a beneficial effect on the behaviour of the men.49 The seating arrangements on these occasions allowed for the

Alex Tyrrell et al. 59

presence of women in a gallery where they were served with different foods and drinks from those that were offered to the men. By admitting women in this way the organisers were following Scottish precedents, but one of their guests was distinctly unimpressed. Having attended the Robert Burns celebration in the Exhibition Building in 1859, she wrote a letter under the name of ‘Agnes’ to the Melbourne Age where she described her experiences in a tone of incandescent asperity. As she pointed out, the male guests on this occasion seem to have prided themselves too easily on their liberality in admitting women to the celebration: the arrangements had been organised as if it was ‘a great privilege for us female creatures to be allowed to look on you eating and drinking and making yourselves happy’. The women had been left ‘alone with nobody to help them’. For two hours she had not even been able to obtain ‘a drink of iced water’, and only belatedly had she received some sherry and coffee. Henceforth, she announced, she would remain at home rather than be treated ‘so shabbily’. This was bold language, but the first step was obviously the crucial one, and, warming to the theme of double standards, ‘Agnes’ broadened her critique of male behaviour to make an unmistakably ad hominem thrust against the Governor of Victoria, Sir Henry Barkly. The Governor as guest of honour had spoken of Burns’s moral failings, but, as ‘Agnes’ bluntly pointed out, the poet had owned up to his weaknesses, unlike some men who were not so honest: ‘Had he kept quiet about himself, he might have gone down in posterity with a character as steady and immaculate as Sir Henry himself.’50 This letter was remarkable in an age when women were expected to exhibit qualities of respectful submissiveness. It is surprising that such an outspoken breach of standard notions of gender and rank was written and published. Admittedly, the ‘Woman Question’ as it was often called offered material for lively debates in the mid-Victorian era, but they were usually contained within an almost unchallengeable respect for the doctrine of ‘separate spheres’ which confined the public world to men and restricted the opportunities for women to voice their distinctive grievances.51 By speaking up in the way she did, ‘Agnes’ was foreshadowing a political movement that would emerge a little over a decade later in the Australasian colonies and lead to dramatic changes in the status of women. She had thrown down a challenge to the gendered behaviour of public life that in subsequent decades would become a fully fledged campaign for women’s rights in the colonies. It may be that further research will show that ‘Agnes’s’ declaration was an example of what is sometimes called the adaptation of immigrants’

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‘cultural baggage’ to colonial conditions; the daughters of Scottish settlers played a conspicuous part in the women’s movement that emerged in Australia. One of them, Catherine Helen Spence, complained that ‘Law and custom had placed a bridle on the tongues of women.’ She attributed her interest in women’s rights and electoral reform to her childhood in Scotland where her mother had been a public and outspoken supporter of the 1832 Reform Act. Spence claimed to have learned from her mother and aunts that ‘women were fit to share in the work of this world, and that to make the world pleasant for men was not their only mission’.52 Spence’s close friend, Alice Henry, who worked as a journalist and campaigned for woman suffrage in Victoria, similarly attributed her political commitment to her Scottish upbringing. It may have been indicative of changing attitudes that her mother was alerting her to the different treatment boys and girls received at almost the same time as ‘Agnes’ was complaining in the press about the shabby treatment meted out to women at public gatherings.53 Perhaps there was a creative tension in these women’s heritage of Scottishness. Acquiring political knowledge and passions in their intimate circles, they grew up in a world where women were banished to the periphery of the public sphere because of their sex. This may have been fertile ground where a feminist consciousness could grow. Finally, what is the story nowadays? Haggis and to a much lesser extent whisky hold pride of place at Robert Burns festivities where Scots celebrate their sense of identity, but the rituals have become stylised in ways that would have been unrecognisable in the nineteenth century. This is in part because women now join these celebrations on the same basis as men. They give toasts and make speeches. It is a sign of the times that speakers on these occasions in Melbourne have been known to quote from a jocular sequel to ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, the poem where Burns takes it for granted that Tam’s wife, Kate, has no choice other than to suffer his drunken escapades. In the modern version Tam recovers from his stupor the next day only to discover that Kate has emigrated with Jim, their farmhand, and that the children whom Tam had assumed were his own had been fathered by Jim.54 ‘Agnes’s protest has travelled a long way.

Notes 1. H. Douglas, Johnnie Walker’s Burns Supper Companion (Ayr: Alloway, 1988), Foreword. 2. Douglas, Burns Supper Companion, pp. 17–18.

Alex Tyrrell et al. 61 3. E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in E. J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 2. 4. H. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’, in E. J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), Invention of Tradition, pp. 21–2. 5. A. Fenton, ‘Diet’, in M. Lynch (ed), The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 169. 6. A. Davidson (ed), The Penguin Companion to Food (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), pp. 436–7; The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), vol. 1, p. 913; A. Hope, A Caledonian Feast (London: Grafton, 1989), p. 123. 7. T. Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Athens: Georgia, 1990), pp. 214–15. 8. T. Smollett, ‘The Briton’, in O. M. Brack (ed) assisted by L. A. Chilton, Poems, Plays, and ‘The Briton’: Tobias Smollett (Athens: Georgia, 1993), p. 312. 9. Quoted in D. Grant (ed), The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 203–4. 10. S. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1978), reprint of 1773 edn, vol. 2, p. 1326. 11. Quoted in A. B. Grosart (ed), The Works of Robert Fergusson (London & Edinburgh, 1851; New York: AMS Press, 1973), pp. 104–5. 12. Quoted in J. Currie, The Life of Robert Burns (London: Cadell & Davies, 1813), vol. III, pp. 217–19. 13. Fenton, ‘Diet’, p. 169. 14. M. Cosh, Edinburgh The Golden Age (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2003), p. 440. Hodge-podge (hotch-potch) is a mutton soup. 15. H. Cockburn, Memorials of his Time (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1872), p. 30. 16. Quoted in Grosart, Robert Fergusson, pp. 112–16. 17. Quoted in Currie, Robert Burns, III, pp. 16–17. 18. J. G. Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1888), vol. II, p. 521. 19. Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus, Memoirs of a Highland Lady (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1988), vol. 2, p. 166. 20. H. Cockburn, Journal of Henry Cockburn, Being a Continuation of the Memorials of His Time, 1831–54 (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1874), vol. 2, p. 394. 21. J. Prebble, The King’s Jaunt (London: Fontana, 1988), part IV; A. Tyrrell, ‘The Queen’s Little Trip: The Royal Visit to Scotland in 1842’, Scottish Historical Review, LXXXII, 1 (2003) 63–73. 22. A. Tyrrell, ‘Paternalism, Public Memory and National Identity in Early Victorian Scotland: The Robert Burns Festival at Ayr in 1844’, History, XC, 1 (2005) 42–61. 23. G. Morton, Unionist-Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland, 1830–60 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999). 24. F. K. Crowley (ed), A Documentary History of Australia, vol. 2, 1841–74 (Melbourne: Nelson, 1980), p. 328.

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25. E. Buettner, ‘Haggis in the Raj: Private and Public Celebrations of Scottishness in Late Imperial India’, Scottish Historical Review, LXXXI, 2 (2002) 212–39. 26. Manchester Guardian, 28 January 1843. 27. Hope, Caledonian Feast, p. 311. 28. Scotsman, 28 January 1837. 29. Except where indicated, the references to the festivities in Scotland in 1859 are based on reports in the Scotsman, 26 and 29 January, 2 and 5 February 1859. 30. The Times, 25 January 1859. According to Isabella Beeton, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (London, 1861; London: Chancellor Press, 1982), p. 71, ‘Cock-a-leekie was largely consumed at the Burns Centenary Festival at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, in 1859’. 31. P. Pickering and A. Tyrrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2000), Chapter 9. 32. On the gendering of British public gatherings during this era see A. Tyrrell, ‘Woman’s Mission and Pressure Group Politics in Britain (1825–60)’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, LXXXIII, 1 (1980) 198–203. 33. Buettner, ‘Haggis in the Raj’, p. 228. 34. D. Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (1724), quoted in N. Ferguson, Empire. How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2003), p. 15; Sir W. Scott, Waverley: Or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 102. 35. For the rise of the tea party and soirée in religious (especially dissenting) and teetotal societies during the first half of the nineteenth century see B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians. The Temperance Question in England, 1815–72 (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 302. 36. There seems to have been no attempt to provide distinctively Scottish food and drink at the national festival that honoured Robert Burns in 1844. A writer in Punch, July–December 1844, p. 82, referred to a menu consisting of ‘a piece of cold tongue, a plate of gooseberries almost ripe, and a pint of some mystery, calling itself Sherry’. 37. Buettner, ‘Haggis in the Raj’, p. 225. 38. Niel Black, quoted in P. de Serville, Port Phillip Gentlemen and Good Society in Melbourne before the Gold Rushes (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 41. 39. Port Phillip Gazette, 2 December 1840; Port Phillip Patriot, 2 December 1841; Port Phillip Patriot, 27 June 1842; M. Prentis, The Scottish in Australia (Melbourne: AE Press, 1987), p. 110. 40. Hope, A Caledonian Feast, p. 311. 41. E. Finn (Garryowen), Chronicles of Early Melbourne 1835–52: Historical, Anecdotal and Personal (Melbourne: Fergusson & Mitchell, 1888), vol. 2, pp. 645–6. 42. Finn, Chronicles, p. 658. 43. Port Phillip Patriot, 27 June 1842. 44. Port Phillip Gazette, 2 December 1840; Finn, Chronicles, p. 645; Port Phillip Herald, 28 January, 4 December 1845. 45. Quoted in the Scotsman, 26 January 1859.

Alex Tyrrell et al. 63 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

Port Phillip Herald, 28 June 1842. Port Phillip Herald, 4 December 1845. Buettner, ‘Haggis in the Raj’, p. 227. The men who attended the Burns Centenary Festival in Melbourne, 1859 were warned that ‘they must be upon their good behaviour, since they were in the presence of ladies’; See Age, 26 January 1859. Age, 27 January 1859. L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), Chapters 3 and 10; For the lively debates see A. Tyrrell, ‘Samuel Smiles and the Woman Question in Early Victorian Britain’, Journal of British Studies, XXXIX, 2 (2000) 185–216. S. Magarey, Unbridling the Tongues of Women: A Biography of Catherine Helen Spence (Sydney: Hale and Ironmonger, 1985). D. Kirkby, Alice Henry: The Power of Pen and Voice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 5–6, 11–13. The authorship and provenance of this version seem to be unknown. See www.auldlangsyne.org/readings.html#kate where reference is made to it being read at a Burns Supper at Burray in the Orkneys and circulated via the internet. It is not to be confused with the version in Matthew Fitt, Kate O’Shanter’s Tale and other poems, Luath Press Limited, Edinburgh, 2003. We are indebted to Mrs Kate Clayton of Melbourne for this information.

Further reading E. Buettner, ‘Haggis in the Raj: Private and Public Celebrations of Scottishness in Late Imperial India’, Scottish Historical Review, LXXXI, 2 (2002) 212–39. E. J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). A. Hope, A Caledonian Feast (London: Grafton, 1989). A. Tyrrell, ‘Paternalism, Public Memory and National Identity in Early Victorian Scotland: The Robert Burns Festival at Ayr in 1844’, History, XC, 1 (2005) 42–61.

4 Moose-Nose and Buffalo Hump: The Amerindian-European Food Exchange in the British North American Fur Trade to 1840 George Colpitts

‘The list of meats’, fur trader H. M. Robertson wrote in 1879 of his experience of North America, ‘is so extensive, and each requiring a particular mode of cooking, that a long time may elapse without a repetition of dishes’. In this, one of many descriptions of food in the fur trade, Robertson drew from his years of service to note the surprising range and variety of meat food sources deep in the North American interior. His post was ‘well stocked with all the delicacies and substantials afforded by the surrounding country’. His plate was filled with buffalo hump and moose-nose, ‘the finest and most savoury waterfowl, and the freshest of fish’. Robertson claimed to know 94 different types of animal meat available and suggested he knew how to cook them all.1 The importance and vast quantities of wild meat supporting the commercial fur trade in North America is often overlooked in popular and many academic histories. While anthropologists and ethnohistorians have identified the more complex social and political relations implied in food transactions, and the human ties which joined in its supply and reciprocation,2 historians have at times drawn the ‘trade’ completely in terms of the animal skins and European goods that were exchanged. Yet the wild meat exchange was a crucial element of intercultural relations and, indeed, commercial profits, in the fur trade. That historians have ignored the significance of food in this business enterprise is, moreover, curious given its centrality to a trader’s success. Robertson was fortunate to have been posted to the plains but most Europeans commonly found themselves in the forests to the north. These boreal and aspen parkland environments, where small animals with valuable fur abounded, were notoriously uncertain in terms of larger game. For 64

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that reason, food and the food trade mattered a lot to newcomers. In her study of fur trade journals, Elizabeth Vibert remarked on how much traders fretted about food.3 Many Europeans found their meager and meaty diets, not to mention the frequent fear of starvation, intolerable in the long term. This ‘most wretched state Man can be inflicted with’ was how one trader described his North American service. A trader at Lesser Slave Lake lamented of being ‘confined to the courser foods, and deprived of almost every comfort’. Managers admitted that the diet of the fur trade tested even the most stout recruit, that ‘those whose stomachs require fresh Beef and Poultry will not suit that country’.4 No wonder that Carolyn Podruchny, studying rituals among fur trade voyageurs hired to paddle canoes, suggested that eighteenth century Europeans drew aspects of their identity around food. Those working closer to major ports and communities, still able to eat home fare, were derisively termed the ‘pork eaters’ from Montreal or the ‘oatmeal-eaters’ from Hudson Bay. By contrast, the boastful Hommes du nord, who liked to make these distinctions, were posted far into the North American interior and ate little other than wild animal meat.5 The case of the fur trade is, in this respect, quite significant in world food history which often devotes itself to cookery, eating practices, and meanings of food in societies changed by agricultural and husbandry revolutions. Food history often examines the dietary lifeways, consumption and food redistribution traditions in communities long after the hunting and gathering period – the ‘Paleolithic paradise’ – had ended.6 About 300 years of the fur trade’s history, however, occurred in a region where local diet continued to contain comparatively small amounts of vegetable carbohydrates and preponderantly high proportions of wild animal protein and fat. There, hunting and gathering societies had developed sophisticated meanings and customs around hunting and the exchange of wild animal food. In turn, animal meat and products constituted one of the most important commodities passing hands between European newcomers and indigenous people. Hardly inconsequential in terms of social relations, this food shaped power dynamics between hunters and newcomers and, indeed, allowed material goods to be traded in the first place. Despite what Europeans said about life in the plains, the dire circumstances that could face fur traders in Canada’s boreal forest were demonstrated during a particularly grim winter in 1800, recorded by Willard Ferdinand Wentzel. That year, Wentzel’s post at Grand River, representing Northwest Company (NWC) merchants, began a vicious food fight with one of Alexander Mackenzie’s XY Company posts nearby. By this period, competing Montreal traders were everywhere inland from

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present-day Quebec to Lake Athabaska. They were also faced by Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) men, who, in the 1780s, had moved inland from their northern coast on the Bay to meet their rivals and compete for furs hunted and processed by aboriginal people. In October 1800, Wentzel’s house set aside a half keg of gunpowder and its employees began systematically frightening any game from the region ‘by firing at every thing we could’, he said. The better supplied Northwesters then bought up all the provisions from Amerindians arriving to the area. Not uncommon in periods of intense competition, this laying siege could have terrific effect. In this case, an ugly starving of the XY post began. By 18 November, the subarctic winter setting in around him, the French master of the house sent a message asking for mercy. Wentzel, however, wanted the best possible terms, recording that ‘it is now no time for him to repent’. By 5 December, aboriginal traders followed Wentzel’s directions and burned goods procured from the competitor, undoubtedly receiving the same in kind from NWC stores. By 10 December an ominous silence fell over the competitor’s house. The men starving inside, the post personnel, hadn’t enough energy to dispatch anyone to the nearby lake to check nets for fish. The post’s factor, pleading for compassion, asked Wentzel for provisions to conduct him and his men to Slave lake. ‘He told us that he was near loosing [sic] one of his men through weakness to day visiting the nets, and that he had to eat the cuttings of green skins he had to make windows of in the fall.’ Wentzel agreed to buy up all the XY goods on hand in exchange ‘for 24 skins of goods, 72lb of pounded meat, and grease and barley corn’.7 The incident demonstrates the precariousness of postings in the fur trade. In periods of competition, furbearers and big game rapidly became depleted. In some cases competitors launched concerted species extirpation programs to squeeze out their neighbours. They recruited and situated expert Amerindian hunters to trap out regions near their rivals or to create environmental buffer zones (fur deserts) bereft of game or furbearers to reinforce separate trading spheres of influence.8 But the Wentzel account also suggests some of the combined politics and economics of the food exchange and, interestingly, the reaction of Amerindians who watched on as European rivals used food to assert dominance over each other. What were likely Chipewyan onlookers, however, were probably not very surprised. To those who inhabited the boreal forest, sometimes termed ‘northern forest’ because of its special characteristics in northern latitudes, food established relations. Its distribution determined the power of the hunter over his benefactors. In this case, in a region so variably supplied with game, the Chipewyan were watching

George Colpitts 67

the very typical use of food to establish social, economic and power relations. Food formed an important social link in the fur trade because of the environment in which most of it took place: regions touching upon or following northward into the subarctic – one of Canada’s largest ecological regions, rich in the most valuable fur animals and dominated by boreal forest (see Map 4.1). In contrast to the northern great plains, where vast buffalo herds and other big game existed, the subarctic was comparatively less supplied with Nature’s bounty. These regions have shorter summer seasons, declining quantities of direct solar radiation in northerly latitudes and low rates of evaporation. Subarctic conditions conspire to ensure that boreal soils are waterlogged or bound in permafrost. Forests in this region are often dense, seemingly barren of life, and made dreary by outcrops of ancient Canadian shield granite.9 In this environment, game animals of critical food value to Amerindians, and soon European traders, were the beaver, hare and moose. The two former species, however, were subject to significant population

Cumberland House

BRITISH Pacific COLUMBIA Ocean

Major Fur trade Posts

Hudson Bay

Atlantic Ocean

Boreal Forest Regions

Figure 4.1 Major fur trade posts in Western Canada, 1780–1821; the dark band shows boreal regions; the grasslands, in the interior to the south, provided the greatest abundance of food. (map created by author)

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cycles, the latter easily over-hunted.10 These boreal realities meant that food was always in variable supply. Amerindians consequentially hunted and gathered in small, commensal units, relocating to berry, fishing and hunting regions according to the season. This constant mobility often took them into the boreal shield region, or the intermediary parkland belt, in order to exploit different resources and game opportunities throughout the year. This mobility also severely limited their capacity to carry and store goods. Even if they dried and pounded wild meat, reducing it to a fifth of its weight, these people could not carry or cache a great deal of food. Hoarding food, too, was out of the question for other reasons. Helm’s study of fur trader Peter Fidler’s diary, describing a journey he took with a Chipewyan band through the Great Slave Lake region in 1791–92, reveals the constant challenge boreal people faced hunting sufficient food: it was, as Fidler suggested, ‘always with them either a feast or a famine’.11 His companions’ fare consisted primarily of wood buffalo, moose and beaver, the band on average consuming about six pounds of meat per person per day when it was available. As per the understood rule of boreal environments, the band received strangers and fellow travellers when they appeared. Sometimes overnight or for longer periods, these strangers were given shares of the food on hand, and without question upon their departure given a portion of remaining supplies. At other times, individuals arriving with news of starvation arising in other camps were sent back with meat.12 Reciprocity in food supply, even between strangers, was an important survival mechanism in a region of variable game populations. It did not, however, assure plenty – generosity to others constantly depleted what stores were available. European traders first arriving to this region had to contend with these realities and three dynamics of such a precarious existence. The first was the primacy of the food hunt itself. With food supply always in question, native hunters probably diverted only incidental energy to trapping pelts for trade. Previous scholarship held that native people began specialising in furbearer trapping in more local environments in order to obtain necessary European goods, upon which they grew dependent.13 This understood model of fur trade dependency requires refinement. Scholars are increasingly interested in the degree to which native people remained independent of the fur trade and are suggesting that it might well have been peripheral to a much more important food hunt.14 Because fur companies could not transport sufficient quantities of food into the interior until much later, it seems questionable whether native hunters could have become dependent on Europeans in any dietary sense. They undoubtedly continued to

George Colpitts 69

look after their caloric needs first. Anthropologist Bruce Winterhalder’s study of Cree and Ojibwa hunting indicates that furbearer hunting was likely contingent upon sufficient availability of moose, hare and other food staples. During periods of plenty, male band members could divert energy to trap weasel, mink, fox and other species for trade. Conversely, when big game and hare populations fell (hare fell drastically every 7–10 years), bands likely saved their energy to hunt food. Fur traders frequently lamented that native hunters, likely facing provisioning difficulties, brought few furs to trade. They were instead hunting ‘for their bellies’.15 A second dynamic affecting the fur trade related to traditions of food consumption and preparation. Though they relied on what Europeans considered ‘coarse’ wild meat, Amerindians had developed complex traditions and meanings in its hunting and exchange. Their cooking and processing traditions transformed the flesh, fat, organs, intestines, sexual parts and bones of an animal into a myriad of food forms, many of which were considered staples or delicacies. Amerindians ate them raw, roasted over a fire or boiled in soups. Little was left uneaten, sometimes even an animal’s skin. Flesh itself was eaten in a variety of forms. It could be consumed immediately ‘green’ (fresh), or preserved for later, dried, smoked, or taken to its most compact form through half-pounding and pounding (the latter quite literally pounded by stones into powder). In their high-mobility lifestyle, native people often relied upon high energy pemmican – pounded meat joined with an animal’s fat or jellied bone marrow and berries. They joined this heavy flesh and fat consumption to a sophisticated knowledge of herbals, plants and berries,16 and further diversified their fare through inter-tribal (sometimes continentsized) trade rendezvous networks. A great delicacy inland on the plains, for instance, far from its source, was salmon pemmican originating low on the Columbia River. Amerindians, and soon Europeans, in turn ranked meat according to a quite formal list of preferences. They became picky gourmands of fat. Moose was the tastiest because of the soft quality of its fat, particularly the dépouille, the portion of fat three to six inches thick that lay underneath the skin along the moose’s back. The buffalo, both the plains and the wood buffalo subspecies, also carried the succulent and prized back fat, or bosse. Stripped from a carcass and dipped in hot grease, both moose and bison fats were considered delicacy and hung up to dry and smoked before eaten. The value of fat translated into a preference for females over males in a species, cow over bull moose, moose over elk and caribou, elk over cow, buffalo and deer, and so on.17 While protein

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dominated their diets, then, boreal forest and plains people in presentday Canada directed their hunting energy to procure fat in an environment comparatively poor in carbohydrates, especially during late winter. Fats found in female animals, their young or even their fetuses, were targeted for butchering late in the fall, when they were their plumpest. The fats and proteins dried for preservation thus provided a survival staple easily convertible to carbohydrates later in the winter. Similarly, Amerindians and traders avoided hunting late in the winter when meat became too lean. They knew the dangers of completely relying on hare, offering virtually non-fat meat. Although not understanding the metabolic implications, Amerindians were avoiding dangerously lean diets that might lead to the accumulation of nitrogenous end-products associated with protein poisoning.18 A final dynamic was still more critical to fur traders, that of food reciprocation and meat distribution. Food and its preparation entwined eaters in North American society. Wild meat was usually cut, cooked, pounded or dried by women, a social reality that significantly complicated the fur trade. Women who produced or transformed food in turn made decisions about its distribution and trading. In the case of the Ojibwa and many Plains people, women who controlled meat and wild rice production and who usually figured prominently in native rendezvous markets before and during the period of the fur trade, were likely the first contact for Europeans who arrived to trade.19 These exchanges of meat from the hands of band women to the needy were, meanwhile, undoubtedly invested with social and political significance not recorded in fur trader transactions. In native tradition, hunting success was associated with supernatural power. Particularly in environments of uncertain game, numerous protocol developed around the treatment and butchery of species; taboos limited women or menstruating women from touching animals such as bear and wolverine after they had been killed. Amerindians maintained separate treatment and processing customs for virtually each animal species because of complex magical and religious beliefs associated with their game spirits. The very spiritual aspect of hunting meant that success earned a hunter a reputation of possessing ‘good medicine’. He had since youth not only learned the complexity of boreal forest hunting – no small art – but also developed wisdom through dreaming and medicine bundling. Now as an adult, a hunter’s successful provision to his band proved that the animal spirits, or more often, a single animal spirit who ultimately made prey available to the hunter, favoured him. The individual’s success in hunting and the woman’s preparation of wild meat (and

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usually her redistribution to needy members of the band) was a sign of medicine power. A status signifier, the distribution of one family’s surplus to another, then, not only underlined the cardinal principle of generosity in native society; the movement of food signified power and had, according to Robin Ridington who studied Beaver Indian ‘medicine wars’ around meat distribution, a range of social indicators and likely political implications.20 These aspects of diet quickly impacted on fur traders establishing themselves in post systems deep in boreal forests. Finding themselves dangerously exposed to starvation and completely dependent upon Amerindian hunters for food, newcomers very quickly appropriated food values, culinary tastes and, most importantly, the ‘custom of the country’, as it was called, which held food sharing as a sacrosanct value. Some traders, of course, offended Amerindians for having too much interest in the outer layer of an animal, its pelt and fur. Aboriginal people occasionally criticised traders, like one north of Fort Chipewyan, which they found ‘speaks too strongly for Hair, that Meat has not hair    ’.21 Most traders, however, understood their position. They quickly emulated the consumption practices of their hosts. The records of Anthony Henday, probably the first HBC man to visit the prairies in present-day Alberta in 1754, suggest how such Europeans were quick to learn eating protocol. Animal flesh worked to join peoples – as Henday soon discovered when his party finally reached a promising game location and killed two moose. The fast-moving party stopped suddenly, and ate. He recorded that the hunters had ‘a noble feast, attended with drumming, conjuring, smoaking [sic], talking, dancing and singing’. Within a few weeks, his party killed more than 18 moose and innumerable elk. With such plenty, Henday witnessed the concord established with food reciprocation. He was invited to numerous feasts held in nearby hunting camps (no less than seven on one day!) where he remarked ‘provisions good and plenty’ and ‘fine sweet eating’ offered in buffalo hump and moose nose: ‘travelled none’, he stated on two consecutive days, ‘all hands employed eating and smoaking, and I am not behind hand, thank God a good stomach’.22 When they established their first posts, the same traders welcomed whatever Amerindians offered in food. They rarely rejected anything for sale or as gifts, although concord could be undermined when Amerindians arrived with rotting, damaged or suspicious-looking animal flesh. When fresh meat did arrive to post, employees hurried to dry and smoke surpluses and lay them up in storage. In winter, fresh meat was packed

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in the icehouse and those supplies not consumed by Spring were transformed into pemmican.23 Since they enjoyed little of the European food variety available even at frigid York factory,24 interior traders quickly ate the most variegated and exotic of fare. They looked to fresh venison as a remedy for scurvy. In times of particular want, and perhaps as a means of coping, they imaginatively transformed what little meat was available into favourite home food items. A starving trader could eat porcupine which, roasted, was said could taste something like suckling pig. The truly hungry subsisted on ‘Albany beef’, the euphemism for sturgeon fish that was often boiled in a soup.25 When all else failed, traders defied their commercial directives altogether and ate their furs. Bearskins, shaven and boiled in water, could taste a little like pork, said one trader who had nearly starved to death; if made into a soup with the lichen, tripe de la roche, bearskin broth could save one’s life – although its ingestion often led to intense intestinal cramping.26 They also mastered the basic rules of the custom of the country. Traders found little difficulty integrating themselves into the Amerindian nutrient economy. But their entry into these food exchanges implied obligations which they had to honour. From the beginning, food formed an initial meeting ground between strangers. Indeed, with boreal forest rules around reciprocity, it was unthinkable that native people not offer their supply to these newcomers. But just as apparently, these food offerings became an entry point for Europeans into band life and social relations. Despite its importance in the trade, the food exchange itself is difficult to quantify fully in surviving records. Since the fur trade was by definition a commercialised venture extending manufactured goods to America, its participants vigilantly accounted for the natural products returned in kind or, more often the case, at great profit to investors at home. Food was not one of them. Clerks poorly accounted for the provisions they traded or received as gifts. They often left few records of the actual quantity of provisions arriving to post or the prices to pay for them – provisions accounts were often inconsistently maintained or vaguely detailed. The best evidence of the importance of provisioning activities appeared in journals – kept separate from accounts – which noted the almost daily arrival of Amerindians offering sometimes hundreds of pounds of dried, beat (pounded) or pemmican meat for trade. Provisions also came into a post’s inventory not just through direct trade but through the gift exchange. Native traders opened trade with gifts of food or included food with furs. The fur traders’ journals

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make clear that one of the most important daily tasks of a trader was to encourage and maintain a successful victual trade or welcome the gifts of visitors. The food exchange in this respect redirected a trader’s energy from the outer, commercially valuable, portion of a wild animal to the nutritive muscular and fatty layers between fur and bone. In moving from one trade commodity to another, the fur trader now participated in a wider ritual in which the animal’s flesh figured in reciprocity, gift exchanges and social customs. Its exchange suggested the beginnings of a social, rather than merely, commercial relation. Even more consequentially, food was often left as an unpaid gift – transformed into an obligation on the trader’s part.27 In their aggregate quantity, these gifts and food trades constituted a significant supply of food for traders.28 Not surprisingly, traders made food provision their first priority; they also actively pursued food at its source during periods of the year when snow and ice conditions reduced post visits. Fur traders intermarried with Amerindians not only to trade furs. Native women gave links to a coordinated hunting effort among a band’s members and offered absolutely essential skills to traders in order to survive post life and transport goods.29 In winter, Europeans looked to seasonal native settlements that formed around their posts, the ‘plantations’, as they called them, which began forming in late summer. Amerindian families who traded fur sometimes tented nearby for the winter and shared their hunting successes with traders in exchange for European goods. Traders actively recruited other hunters by offering goods at lower rates or on generous terms of credit early in the fall. They had to give good terms. Once winter winds began to howl over the frozen lakes and ice grew inches thick on the interior walls of posts, these plantations often became the traders’ only means of survival. ‘Plantations’ themselves were not static but kin-linked bands pooling specialised hunting skills. By November they broke up further and members dispersed into distant ‘wooder camps’ where they hunted in smaller numbers with more mobility. After this point, traders sent large numbers of a post’s personnel to winter in such distant camps. Those staying behind dispatched barrels of rum, tobacco and other goods to encourage Native hunters; or they served as couriers to carry to the post whatever meat the ‘hunter Indians’ had killed. As they interacted, lived in commune and passed wild meat between them, social obligations inevitably accrued; so also the trading links that connected family-based bands with particular traders were strengthened. And since its membership relied upon this ‘hospitality’ in the worst months of winter – even if food had been expensive in terms of trade goods – the fur trade post

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could not turn away Amerindians in fall, summer or spring when or if the Amerindians’ own hunt had failed. Out of the Europeans’ condition of perpetual dependency, then, an interdependent social organisation set in between Natives and newcomers. Such social linkages are glimpsed in the communities forming around trading posts. Anxious to establish social linkages with bands, traders reciprocated with consumable trading commodities. They returned gifts with liquor, tobacco and food from their own supply. The posts on the banks of the North Saskatchewan and Athabasca Rivers leave clear evidence of the shanty villages where camps of ‘home guard’ natives lived alongside Europeans and supplied food. Amerindians in want were provided food out of a community of goods. Those frequently arriving and sharing their food surpluses were given gifts or traded goods. The Northwester’s Fort George became such a village. Although only a handful of Montrealers were actually posted there, the fort’s population was estimated to be as high as 80 men ‘and near as many women and children’. Fort George and its equivalents were intercultural communities, where only blurry social lines had been drawn between people and country marriages were common. All the while, the energy of all was directed to survival.30 John Franklin, who used the Hudson Bay Company’s post system to reach the arctic on his first overland exploration, witnessed firsthand the way food requirements dominated the life of such posts. At one, he counted 70 Canadian and Metis traders and 60 women and children (and undoubtedly dogs), collectively eating 700lb of buffalo meat daily. The collective food requirements of such posts, where so many people could unexpectedly gather in times of want, pressed traders to welcome and carefully weigh any meat arriving in the trading season. George Hudson on the Saskatchewan River rated diminutively the ‘trifle of provisions’ which arrived in five canoes in 1784 comprising no less than 97lb beat meat, 28lb fat, 100lb of pemmican and 100lb of dried meat. Traders like Hudson, however, were always anticipating a lean winter ahead when little food would reach a post and a daily meat ration among many people could range between 6–12 pounds per day per person.31 Some of the precariousness of life – and the trader’s dependency on native hunters in the forest – was alleviated by the late 1700s as fur companies began developing a provisioning system that tapped sources on the buffalo plains to the south. Cree and Assiniboine hunters, and later Metis buffalo hunters, began specialising in buffalo hunting to support food depots in the Lake Winnipeg area, for reshipment northward by brigades servicing the post system. This provisioning system

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imported vast quantities of pemmican, fat, pounded and dried meat and exported it to the hungry posts scattered in the forests to the north. This supply became critically important to fur traders working in the northerly stretches of Athabasca country. But traders continued to rely on Amerindian hunters, if only to receive cherished fresh meat supplies and to make ends meet when plains provisions did not reach them. Before and after the establishment of the plains provisioning system, native subsistence traditions, themselves seasonal, developed a rhythm of life for the fur trader. Amerindian visitors brought food according to seasons of hunting, fishing and gathering.32 Neighbouring bands developed food ties with a post that implicated its European staff in a broad range of reciprocal obligations. A most revealing case example emerges with that of Cumberland House, the Hudson Bay Company’s first major inland post established in 1774 on the Saskatchewan River system. From its first days of operation, Cumberland House was visited by small bands of men and women. Whether they carried furs or not, they almost invariably offered food in variable quantities, based on supply on hand. On February 28, 1780, for instance, these newcomers inland recorded the arrival of three ‘Indian women’ with ‘a little provision’. Europeans benefiting from these transactions had to reciprocate in kind. When Beaver Lake, southern Cree and Basquia Indians had earlier arrived at the same post in mid-December, ‘all without food’, the post had little recourse but to give them provisions. Considering that just days previously, no less than two parties had arrived ‘tolerable wellgooded’ and with ‘moose flesh’, the post had little means to reject native demands on their own stock. Indeed, from the beginning, Cumberland House traders found themselves ensconced in a commensal food sharing tradition which in many respects determined their first trading and social relations with native people. Following boreal forest rules, these outsiders had to share food from the same commissary whether they liked to or not.33 And likely just as fundamentally, the food arriving from travelling bands, offered as gifts or traded directly, brought not only significant costs to a post but undoubtedly established, from the indigenous perspective, a power relation between provident indigenes and needy newcomers. Beyond the trader’s dependency on indigenous food for nutrition and calories, the social relations struck with food transactions formed the means for a fur trade to be based. A quantitative analysis of Cumberland House’s provisions suggests that native visitors to posts maintained a constant and considerable supply of food. These gifts and traded

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commodities fixed ‘social’ obligations and thereby established the basis of subsequent fur trading. This possibility is quite clear by the early nineteenth century, when Cumberland House had become a chief food depot in the HBC trade, receiving tons of dried meat, pemmican and barrels of fat produced on the plains. Cumberland House staff received, processed and rebundled into ‘pieces’ 90lb bags of pemmican, 100lb bales of dried meat, barrels of buffalo and deer tongues, hundreds of barrels of hard and soft fat, and sent it onward, either farther up the Saskatchewan River or northwestward towards the English River district system for distribution into the Athabasca country. Cumberland House food reached as far as the Peace River post system and even the New Caladonia region on the west side of the Rocky Mountains. Throughout the season, the post’s clerk diligently recorded the import and export of these plains surpluses, in pounds. But a systematic reconstruction of the post’s inventories to compare total exports with imports reveals significant imbalances where the amount of food leaving the post exceeded the amount entering it from the plains.34 In some years, 1823–32, this imbalance is most apparent. During this period, the post’s employees were using fat imported from the plains to make pemmican themselves, a not uncommon task for employees who created this important food stuff by joining necessary ingredients. (The common ratio of pounded meat to fat was 35:55, joined with plenty of crushed berries, all traded locally.)35 In many years, however, the post exported far more pemmican food than it was importing in component parts. The consistent shortfall of necessary pounded meat more than suggests that a good quantity of pemmican was being produced locally, from meats arriving to the post in the form of gifts or indirect trade. The exact quantity of these transactions was not recorded but by referring to written journals, it becomes clear that local gifts and exchanges, sometimes small and usually not entered into annual accounts, sometimes large and recorded as food trades, were cumulatively significant. Such small transactions in food product had always underlain the post’s social relations with nearby native groups. During the month of August 1776, for instance, the post journal mentioned the following arrival of visitors bearing food gifts or provisions for trade: August August August August

1 2 3 10

5 1 1 7

canoes, moose and deer, 2 or 3 skins canoe, moose flesh canoe, moose flesh canoes, with very little with them

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August August August August August August

12 14 18 23 25 30

4 4 1 1 8 3

canoes, dried meat and beat meat canoes, dried, beat and green meat canoe, with a little deer flesh canoe, ‘a little’ moose flesh and a few skins canoes, moose flesh ‘only traded a little’ canoes, a little moose flesh.

Much of the food coming into the Europeans’ hands by indirect trade, informal exchanges and gift giving continued to underlay and strengthen Cumberland House’s relations with nearby hunting and gathering groups, who in turn provided the furs that came into the post’s stock. A valuable note was left in 1828 accounts suggesting the dimensions of this local food supply. The clerk noted 1032lb of dried meat, 2670lb pounded meat and 1340lb fresh moose meat arriving that year from local sources. Although the post imported 3147lb of pemmican from the plains, it actually exported 4114lb,36 the clerk evidently proud that a third of the pemmican exports originated locally and were thus likely made from moose meat. These edible products, drawn from neighbours and procured in gifts and small transactions, signified and enlarged the post’s relations with local fur trapping bands. Relations with Amerindians arising from the provisions trade should not, however, be confused as idyllic, peaceful or harmonious. Food ultimately established power in social relations. Fur traders and native provisioners regarded each other with suspicion. Their relations frequently broke down into dissension and misunderstanding. Europeans, so dependent upon Amerindians and competing with other companies, tried to strike a compromise with the land they entered by encouraging a provisioning post system on the much wealthier plains. Much of this system was created not only to provide a more stable food source, but also to release the northern posts from the obligations and costs arising from a food exchange with boreal forest hunters. But this system did not remove traders from the ‘Debt of Nature’ that the Boreal Forest exacted. They, like the hunting and gathering bands around them, were involved in a constant search for food, and integrated into a commensal tradition of receiving and providing food out of what was considered a common supply. Visitors, then, occasionally viewed the quantities of meat periodically on hand or being prepared for re-transport at posts and frequently mistook what they saw as evidence of wildlife superabundance in North America. A Montrealer, who visited Hudson Bay Company posts in 1838 and wrote about his experience in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, described

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a plenitude inland. There he saw the carcasses of a buffalo and three deer suspended on chains being barbecued.37 Longtime employees in the fur trade, however, rarely described a biblical or Edenic plenitude. Such fundamental misconceptions of the quantity and availability of wildlife in the subarctic, if they were entertained at all, were erased from traders’ minds in the first few years of their service. Their experience with the vicissitudes of wild meat supply left fur traders locked in an interdependency with Amerindians that was challenged later when Europeans gained greater confidence in agricultural improvement and ideas of progress. By the mid-nineteenth century, the native traditions imposed on the fur trade – commensal social units, food sharing and interdependent supplying – offended outsiders guided by the century’s belief in progress and the human individual’s ability to improve nature. Not surprisingly, fur trade traditions clashed with the era’s ethic of individualism. Significant changes had occurred in the ways that newcomers and Amerindians met. New ethics were challenging a societal organisation based upon the exchange of wild animal food. Traders had lived in a unique period of interdependency in North American history. They had survived their forest postings largely because of the societal organisation imposed upon them by Amerindians, who successfully redistributed wild animal protein and fat to form social relations. Traditions around wild meat hunting and rules over its distribution had determined the success of the fur trade and formed some of the basis for social and cultural encounter in the boreal forest of North America.

Notes 1. H. M. Robertson, The Great Fur Land: Or Sketches of Life in Hudson’s Bay Territory (Toronto: Coles, 1972), pp. 94–5, 348; John Long similarly remarked on ‘the joy arising from an unexpected supply, and sitting down to a table in the wilderness’, See Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader (London: Robson, 1791), p. 119. 2. This chapter expands on issues raised in my Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002); For an ethnohistorical approach drawing attention to the food trade, see B. M. White, ‘The Woman who Married a Beaver: Trade Patterns and Gender Roles in the Ojibwa Fur Trade’, Ethnohistory, XXXXVI, 1 (1999) 121, 124. 3. E. Vibert, Traders’ Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia Plateau, 1807–46 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), pp. 94, 173–4.

George Colpitts 79 4. McCord Museum Archives (hereafter McCord), A. R. McLeod letter, 31 May 1825, M2783, Robert McVicar Fonds; William MacIntosh Letter to John McDonell, 8 May 1833, M2799; HBC Fonds; Archives nationales du Québec (hereafter ANQ) Donald Southerland Letter, 21 July 1803, Southerland Letterbook, 0-526. 5. C. Podruchny, ‘Baptising Novices: Ritual Moments among French Canadian Voyageurs in the Montreal Fur Trade, 1780–1821’, Canadian Historical Review, LXXXIII, 2 (2002) 179. 6. See J-L. Flandrin, ‘The Humanization of Eating Behaviors’, in J-L. Flandrin and M. Montanari (eds), Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. C. Botsford, A. Goldhammer, C. Lambert, F. M. Lopez-Morillas and S. Stevens (New York: Columbia University, 1999), p. 15. Also, F. FernándezArmesto, Food: A History (London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 1–24. 7. National Archives of Canada (Hereafter NAC), Masson Collection, Wentzel Diary Entries for 15, 18 November; and 5, 10, 11, 18 December 1804, MG 19, C1 vol. 44, NAC microfilm, C-15639. 8. A. Ray, ‘Competition and Conservation in the Early Subarctic Fur Trade’, Ethnohistory, XXIV, 4 (1978) 347–57; also, J. Ott, ‘ “Ruining” the Rivers in the Snake Country: The Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fur Desert Policy’, Oregon Historical Quarterly, CIV, 2 (2003) 166–95. 9. See Map 17 and descriptions 17A, ‘Descriptions of Ecological Regions’, in R. Cole Harris (ed), Historical Atlas of Canada vol. I (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); For a description of the Subarctic, see R. M. Bone, The Geography of the Canadian North: Issues and Challenges, 2nd edn (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 16–43. 10. T. Wilkinson, ‘The Benefits of Beavers’, National Parks, January/February (2003), pp. 31–5; D. Gallant, C. H. Bérubé, E. Tremblay and L. Vasseur, ‘An Extensive study of the foraging ecology of beavers (Castor canadensis) in relation to habitat quality’, Canadian Journal of Ecology, LXXXII (2004) 922–33. 11. J. Helm, ‘ “Always with them either a feast or a famine”: Living off the land with Chipewyan Indians, 1791–92’, Arctic Anthropology, XXX, 2 (1993) 46–60. 12. Helm, ‘Always with them’, pp. 50–5. 13. Arthur Ray suggested this still useful model in ‘Periodic Shortages, Native Welfare, and the Hudson’s Bay Company 1670–1930’, in S. Krech III (ed), The Subarctic Fur Trade (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984), pp. 1–20. 14. See Laura Peers’ insights into the Ojibawa fur trade, The Ojibwa of Western Canada, 1780–1870 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1994), pp. 8–14, 72–7. 15. B. P. Winterhalder, ‘Canadian Fur Bearer Cycles and Cree-Ojibwa Hunting and Trapping Practices’, American Naturalist, CXV (1980) 870–9. 16. M. Lux, Medicine that Walks: Disease, Medicine, and Canadian Plains Nativepeople, 1880–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 17. J. Parker, Emporium of the North: Fort Chipewyan and the Fur Trade to 1835 (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1987), p. 53; on red-deer and bear flesh, see A. Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 222–3.

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18. T. Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), pp. 46–8, 50–1. 19. White, ‘The Woman who married a beaver’, pp. 109, 111, 120–2. 20. R. Ridington, ‘The Medicine Fight: An Instrument of Political Process among the Beaver Indians’, American Anthropologist, LXX, 6 (1968) 1152–60; for boreal hunting see A. Steegmann (ed), Boreal Forest Adaptations: The Northern Algonkians (New York: Plenum Press, 1983). 21. Wentzel’s journal was used by S. Krech III, ‘The Trade of the Slavey and Dogrib at Fort Simpson in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in S. Krech III (ed), The Subarctic Fur Trade: Native Social and Economic Adaptations (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984), p. 107. 22. Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Winnipeg (hereafter HBCA); I am using Henday’s narrative as it was transcribed in Andrew Graham’s Journal of 1767, E.2/6. 23. Prices on meat rose dramatically if Amerindians discerned a trader in want, one of the reasons why old hands instructed incoming European traders to keep the door to the victual shed closed and locked at all times. Humphrey Marten to Matthew Cocking, September Letter, 1776, in E. E. Rich (ed), Cumberland House Journals and Inland Journal, 1775–82 (London: Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1951), p. 88. 24. HBC, See State of Provisions at York Fort 1761 compared with 1766, HBC, pp. 96–8ff. E.2/6, microfilm reel 4M1. 25. A complete reliance upon fish, particularly sturgeon, seriously undermined morale and Vibert has pointed out that traders saw red meat strengthening the body and ‘weak’ fish not; See Vibert, p. 46. 26. NAC, William Auld to Colin McDonnel, 1 October 1811, Selkirk Papers, vol. I, p. 99; Long, pp. 117–18. 27. B. M. White, ‘ “Give Us a Little Milk”: The Social and Cultural Meanings of Gift Giving in the Lake Superior Fur Trade’, Minnesota History, XXXXVIII, 2 (1982) 60–71. 28. HBCA, 31 August 1832, Cumberland House Journals B.49/a/49 and ibid., 13 September 1832. 29. HBCA, William Tomison revealed in a candid journal entry in 1779, following Longmoore to Hudson House: ‘embarked on my Journey with a female Indian for my canoemate’, and when he reached Longmoore he found the men all well, and wrote down the welcome news that one of the Indians living in the settlement had killed a moose which would serve three days of provisions. September 22 and 27, 1779. B.87/a 2. The classic study of the role of women in the fur trade is S. Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1870 (Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer, 1980). 30. D. McGillivray, The Journal of Duncan McGillivray of the North West Company at Fort George on the Saskatchewan, 1794–95, in A. S. Morton (ed) (Toronto: Macmillan Co, 1924), p. lx. 31. See McGillivray Journal, pp. lvii, 41; HBC, Cumberland House Journal, 2 September 1784, B.49/a15. Shepard Krech III offers daily rationing figures in The Ecological Indian, p. 132. 32. E. J. McCullough, Prehistoric Cultural Dynamics of the Lac La Biche Regions (Archeology MA thesis, University of Calgary, 1977), pp. 149–50.

George Colpitts 81 33. I am using E. E. Rich’s edition of Cumberland House and Hudson House Journals 1775–82 (London: The Hudson’s Bay Company Record Society, 1951); some trends in the post’s provisioning hinterlands appear in my article, ‘ “Victuals to put into our mouths”: Environmental Perspectives on Fur Trade Provisioning activities at Cumberland House, 1775–82’, Prairie Forum, XXII, 1 (1997) 1–20. Statistical analysis for this chapter has been drawn from HBCA, Cumberland House Accounts from 1804–46, B.49/D series (B.49/d 1–61). 34. The reconstruction is based on Cumberland House annual accounts, in HBC B.49/d/3-B.49/d62; See my article, ‘Victuals to put into our mouths’, pp. 8–9; a complete breakdown of fat, pounded meat and pemmican imports and exports appears in my forthcoming article, ‘Reports of Environmental Degradation in Hudson’s Bay Company Fur Trade Journals’, British Journal of Canadian Studies. 35. H. A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, new edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 300. 36. HBC. In this case, the post’s accounts showed 86lb of dried meat being imported, 1032lb being exported, 3147lb of pemmican imported and 4114lb exported. The accountant then turned to the provisions ‘received and in depot’ and revealed the discrepancies between what was taken on, and exported, with what was received locally. Statement of Provisions Received and in Depot, 1829 CHA B.49/d/24. 37. Glenbow Archives, Calgary, copy of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine for 1838, vol. V, pp. 648, 654.

Further reading R. Brightman, Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1993). G. Colpitts, Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife to 1940 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002). S. Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: WW Norton, 1999). A. Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Trappers, Hunters and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660–1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974).

5 Competing for Cultural Honours: Cosmopolitanism, Food, Drink and the Olympic Games, Melbourne, 1956 Tanja Luckins

Food history does not usually address questions within a broader conceptual framework. Histories of food in postwar Melbourne, Australia, have tended to follow this trend, evaluating the ‘quality’ of cuisine and fine dining alone. Examining a moment of internationalism in the 1956 Olympic Games allows the food cultures of postwar Melbourne to be considered within a broader conceptual framework – cosmopolitanism. Why did Melburnians link ‘continental’ migrant food cultures and sociability, hospitality and cultural diversity as the marker of their city’s cosmopolitanism? When in April 1949 the International Olympic Federation met in Rome to announce the host-city for the 1956 Olympic Games, the city of Melbourne was euphoric. After the initial euphoria had died down, the enormity of the task sunk in and Melburnians began to ask questions about their city. Were Melbourne’s hotels and restaurants world-class? Could the city provide hospitality of an international standard? Such anxious questions might seem like those asked by every Olympic host city, but they were important questions for Melburnians back in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Not only were the athletes competing, so was Melbourne. According to the Wine and Spirit News and Australian Vigneron, the Games would provide ‘the first real test Melbourne will have had as a city judged on cosmopolitan standards’ since the international exhibitions held in Melbourne in the 1880s.1 In the years and months preceding the Games, much was made of Melbourne being a cosmopolitan city. ‘Today our city is much more cosmopolitan than at any time since gold-seekers and immigrants poured through it in the 1850s’, wrote one Melbourne magazine.2 The emphasis 82

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was two-fold: Melburnians reminded themselves that they had a cultural history that once had been cosmopolitan but had become submerged by restrictive practices, especially those favoured by temperance advocates who preferred leisure activities that did not involve alcohol. Melbourne needed more continental ways (continental and cosmopolitan became synonyms in the postwar period) such as a more relaxed lifestyle, one example of which was pavement cafes where people could eat and drink and socialise at the same time.3 Emphasis was also placed on the people of Melbourne, especially postwar migrants from Mediterranean Europe who had brought with them a cosmopolitan mentality and were believed to be responsible for a boom in restaurants, cafes, espresso bars and lounges. On the eve of the Games, the Age newspaper explained, Melbourne’s eating habits have been greatly influenced by the postwar influx of Continental migrants. More than a million newcomers have arrived in Australia to settle permanently since the second world war and the ancient cultures they have brought with them are perhaps more apparent in the gastronomic world than anywhere else.4 Olympic boosterism aside, why the links between ‘continental migrants’ and food and drink as the marker of a city’s cosmopolitanism? Greece, on the European continent, was the birthplace of the ancient Olympics and from where many of the admired and desired aspects of western civilisation were and are believed to come. Food historian Massimo Montanari comments that in the Greco-Roman cultural system, the partaking of food and drink was the cornerstone of civilisation. For instance, the convivium, or banquet, was the very image of cum vivere, or life together, itself a concept deeply rooted in the idea of the city.5 The etymology of cosmopolitan has similar origins: kosmos/world, polites/citizen and (its best known site of experience) the polis/city. These historical connections, drawing broadly on the Mediterranean (as cosmopolitan and continental became synonyms, so Greek and Roman cultures were often blurred), could be drawn on to legitimise Olympic Melbourne, indeed I think that this sense of ancient history – and the internationalism of the modern Olympics – prompted Melburnians to reflect on their own city’s history. In particular there was a feeling that Melbourne, a city of migrants, could claim a cultural identity associated with cosmopolitanism. In contrast, Melbourne’s social identity was centred on the suburbs – ‘an ideally English roses-and-lavender setting of home and garden’, according to the Olympic Games Melbourne 1956 Opening Ceremony Official Souvenir Programme. The distinction is

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straightforward but important. The city was believed to have more prominent and diverse cultural assets than the suburbs, where Melbourne’s social fabric was located. For within the municipal boundaries of the Melbourne City Council (the official host of the Games) were top hotels with fine dining rooms, and pubs, restaurants and cafes run by ‘new Australians’, and inner city suburbs where postwar migrants lived. This is not to cast a slur on the suburbs, where in fact the Olympic Village was situated and also where postwar migrants lived, and suggest that the city has greater cultural value, but in the context of the Olympic Games, the ‘city’, as host of the Games, assumes importance. It should be noted that the words cosmopolitan and continental were given to postwar migrants, not by them, and they focussed on consumption and leisure, not production and work. Yet to be cosmopolitan was not so amorphous or abstract to be metaphorical. One aspect of being cosmopolitan was to taste, smell, hear and savour an essentially urban experience. It was also a change in mentality, in outlook, in mood. A Melburnian could be cosmopolitan if s/he wanted to. It was a desire. The emphasis on being cosmopolitan might seem to go against the grain of Melbourne’s dominant British-Protestant social identity and political structure. It certainly went against the grain of the ‘Australian Way of Life’ concept used to assimilate migrants in the 1950s. Interestingly, the many books about the ‘Australian Way of Life’ published in the 1950s, such as George Caiger’s The Australian Way of Life (1953) did not depict the city of Melbourne (by the late 1950s, Sydney became the most ‘Australian’ city).6 But a city – and an international event such as the Olympic Games – did not have to engage with national discourse, instead it could actively seek a global outlook. To follow ethnographer James Clifford, who argues that cosmopolitanism helps to undermine the ‘naturalness’ of ethnic absolutes, Olympic Melbourne was perhaps inevitably drawn towards cosmopolitanism.7 This contemporary awareness of Melbourne’s cosmopolitan past and desire for cultural diversity has, however, been ignored by historians who have tended to argue that Olympic Melbourne, isolated by geography and social conservatism, was insular and parochial, leavened by a younger generation of businessmen who looked to America.8 Such a framework can only be created of course with the benefit of hindsight and if the present is considered a cultural highpoint. Food writers have offered a similar assessment of food in the 1950s. Stephen Downes comments that ‘Australian eating in the 1950s is easy to ridicule. From our perspective it lacked quality and diversity’ (although he calls Melbourne’s food ‘decidedly weird’, and the food of the top

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dining rooms ‘limited’ and ‘repetitive’).9 According to food historian Michael Symons, the postwar years were ‘gastronomically bleak’.10 The staple diet in 1950s Australia was steak and chips, beer or a cup of tea, and ice cream and passionfruit; ‘ordinary’ Australians rarely ate out. But he does find solace in the ‘civilised’ fine dining the Massoni, Molina, Triaca and Virgona families helped to establish in Melbourne in the 1920s. The connection between fine dining and ‘migrant’ food has led another historian to suggest that Melbourne was the city most receptive to postwar migrants with food skills; nonetheless, restaurant food in the 1950s was essentially a choice between haute cuisine and a bohemian style establishment where one drank red wine and ate osso bucco.11 Doyenne of Australian cookery writers Margaret Fulton adds a cautionary note and points out that there was (and still is) a big difference between haute cuisine and home cookery. She argues that, although the smell of roast lamb permeated homes in the 1950s, Australians were becoming more food conscious: ‘we were becoming educated about food and wine’, she writes.12 This she attributes to postwar immigration as well as better domestic refrigeration, the proliferation of cookery books and postwar travel opportunities which made it possible for Australians to experience food overseas, especially in Europe. In general, food historians have considered food in the 1950s to be a precursor to the gourmet boom of the late 1960s and the Asian influenced cuisine of the 1970s. That Melbourne has had Jewish and Chinese food since the 1850s – and a host of other food cultures – has somehow been submerged beneath the need to show a smooth historical path towards a modern, sophisticated and diverse (for diverse read multicultural) Australian palate exemplified in restaurant cuisine. My concern is to avoid making value judgements about the ‘quality’ of cuisine and fine dining in 1950s Melbourne. Rather, my interest lies in exploring the food and drink cultures of Olympic Melbourne within the contexts that the people of Melbourne perceived them. This might seem fundamental, even impertinent, but to do so will both historicise and reconceptualise food and drink cultures within a broader cultural framework, notably cosmopolitanism. The aspects of cosmopolitanism that came to the fore were transnational hospitality, sociability and cultural diversity. This was a popular understanding of cosmopolitanism which more often than not conflated Mediterranean food cultures and implicity drew on concepts of cosmopolitanism elucidated by the Stoics and Kant. Moreover, a particular aspect of this popular understanding was the descriptive manner in which Melburnians conveyed their food cultures. If the idea was to convey both an embodied and desired sense

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of cosmopolitanism to as wide a range of audience as possible, then newspapers, magazines and guidebooks necessarily provided descriptive, even ethnographic, commentary on food and drink. Food was complicit in Melbourne’s bid for the 1956 Olympics. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was expected to make its decision about the 1956 host-city during the 1948 London Olympic Games. During these Games six official dinners were scheduled. Although Britain was still on wartime food rationing, athletes had been awarded an exemption, although no provision had been made for the official dinners. Knowing this, Sir Frank Beaurepaire, a member of Melbourne’s bidding team, arranged for a consignment of Australian food and wine to be sent to London for the Lord Mayor’s banquet. During the dinner, the Lord Mayor of London reminded the 300 diners that they were actually the guests of the city of Melbourne – news which was received enthusiastically, according to Beaurepaire.13 Although the IOC’s decision was ultimately deferred until the following year, Melbourne’s generosity was not forgotten, nor was Australia’s contributions to the ‘Food for Britain’ campaign during World War Two. In comparison, Melbourne’s rival for the 1956 Olympics, Detroit, could not have had its bid enhanced by the actions of the United States during the 1948 Games. A large number of unofficial American offers to feed all Olympic competitors did not materialise, and American complaints about accommodation and food appeared hypocritical given that 15,000 chocolate bars were provided for their own athletes, who also enjoyed freshly baked bread flown from the United States to London daily. As soon as Melbourne was awarded the Games, concerns began to be aired about Melbourne’s standards of hospitality. One newspaper journalist, after a survey of what he described as ‘middle-class city cafes’, said they were mostly stuffy, drab and the food unappetising. In the majority, the standards of cleanliness and service were very poor. He made a list of problems: napkins were not provided; nearly all the menus were old, dirty and crudely corrected in ink; crockery was chipped; there were too few ashtrays; condiments were uncovered; tablecloths, when provided, were usually spotted.14 A catering specialist, recently returned from a trip to the United States, agreed with the journalist. Lorraine McCarthy, of the Victorian Chamber of Catering Industries Bureau, said that Melbourne had many mediocre restaurants and not enough good ones. She believed that there was sufficient business in Melbourne to warrant the ‘standard civilised people expected’, by which she meant service and cleanliness, two things she equated with hospitality in American restaurants. McCarthy warned that cafes (she used

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cafes and restaurants interchangeably) would have to improve 300 per cent to meet the expectations of Olympic visitors.15 In reply, the journal Catering argued that there was no need for Melbourne to yearn for American standards of hospitality. While it agreed that local service was not always good, this was because there was a lack of trained personnel caused by postwar shortages. But food in Melbourne was good. Almost all of our best people, Catering pointed out, were trained by specialists with ‘old-world training’ or had themselves come from Britain or the Continent.16 One aspect that worried Games organisers was the clause in Victoria’s Licensing Laws which did not allow a restaurant or cafe to automatically obtain a liquor license. It was a frequently voiced concern that it was undignified and uncivilised to furtively slip bottles in bags and under the table at a restaurant in order to have a drink with a meal. As one well-travelled Melburnian lamented, why should restaurant patrons break humiliating laws in order to enjoy what is taken for granted in more ‘adult cities’. Changes to licensing laws would be, in this writer’s opinion, ‘a civilising influence’.17 Norman Carlyon, well-known hotelier and (later) chair of the Olympic Housing and Catering Committee, who attended the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, noted that spectators tended to eat later, after the events were finished. Carlyon thus believed that the Victorian government would have to relax the licensing laws to allow hotels to cater for the late-diners.18 He was speaking as a hotelier and assuming that visitors would want to consume alcohol with their meals taken in a hotel dining room. Such observations were duly noted. Yet when in 1953 American journalist Ester van Wagoner Tufty commented on Melbourne’s reluctance to improve hotel service, especially to serve meals at any hour, the responses were indignant.19 Tufty noted that Melbourne’s way of life seemed too sacred for people to change in order to make the Games a success. But her point was simple: a social characteristic of Melbourne could be taken as a cultural peculiarity. Despite such concerns about hospitality, Melburnians were interested in ‘foreign’ food. When in 1955 the Emily McPherson College of Domestic Economy held a display of international cooking by its students, all the food on the tables was sold quickly to the public. Such a display may have been a publicity exercise, but it gave the Games organisers, who attended the cooking display, a confidence boost. They fielded questions about food, noting that, ‘thanks to New Australians’, all ingredients are available in Melbourne.20 Henry Zimmerman, head chef at the William Angliss Food Trade School, was confident that the big hotels would be ‘gastronomically’ prepared for the Olympics, and the ordinary pub would be ready

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to serve cheap counter lunches consisting of sausage and mash and roast duckling.21 But he worried that Melbourne would not have enough small, good restaurants, as there was in Paris. Alternatives were emerging however. Hotels, especially those run by postwar migrants, were offering a wider range of meals; and espresso bars, cafes and lounges were proving popular. In the early 1950s, coffee had been ten times the price of tea, and commercial espresso machines were not found in Melbourne. However, by 1955, espresso machines were now widespread in the city, ‘making a small cosmopolitan dent in the formerly solid tea and pie front’, wrote one reporter.22 The following year, Rosalie Stephenson in Woman’s Day claimed that Melbourne was becoming an ‘esspressociety’.23 Another woman’s magazine went so far to suggest that Melbourne was the most coffee conscious city in Australia; Melbourne had become ‘cosmopolitan and exciting’.24 That espresso bars and coffee became popularly associated with Italy, not Greece, seemed to matter little; after all, it was all ‘continental’. It is evident that the use of the words cosmopolitan and continental helped in no small way to change the meaning of Italian food as cuisine and fine dining (with white tablecloths and silverware) to a more informal public experience (with red gingham tablecloths) to be enjoyed by a wider range of people. It is also probably worth adding that the association of continental food cultures with cosmopolitanism helped to redirect attention away from prewar social meanings of cosmopolitanism as rootlessness, decadence and degeneracy. A few months before the Games, the Olympic Civic Committee undertook a survey of 240 ‘eating houses’ in the city and suburbs of Melbourne, which ranged from champagne and caviar hotel dining rooms to smaller cafes and restaurants. These were to be included in a guide to eating out in Melbourne, the Official Guide to the Olympics. This publication, and the numerous guides issued by organisations, emphasised that Melbourne had a wide range of hotels, restaurants and cafes. ‘High cuisine’ was mentioned but not highlighted. The hotel counter lunch was said to be a cheap option, while the typical Australian dish of steak and eggs was said to be available almost everywhere, including the large cafeterias at Myer Emporium and G. J. Coles variety store in the city, whose normal meal hours were extended to 11.30 pm each day for the duration of the Games; they also offered a take-way food service. Food to be found in the city of Melbourne was represented as culturally diverse. Continental, Chinese and Orthodox food was available, according to the ANZ Bank’s Australia and the Olympic Games: A Guide for Visitors. City hotels, such as Molina’s Imperial Hotel was said to

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offer the ‘delights of spaghetti marinara – that delectable combination of tasty spaghetti and the succulent oyster’, while the Hotel Oxford had on its menu kangaroo tail soup and T-bone steak weighing two pounds. The Hotel Australia accommodated for all tastes, its a la carte menu included oysters czarina, whiting caprice, lobster Indienne, veal Milanese, omelette Espagnole and sole Cleopatra. One guide book for American Olympic visitors said that Australia’s postwar immigration scheme had diversified the types of cooking available in Melbourne, and there were now many Greek and Italian restaurants and cafes. If an American did not want to dine out, they could ‘make the rounds’ and visit bakeries, butchers and greengrocers, as well as continental delicatessens and the Queen Victoria Market where fresh produce could be bought. American guidebooks noted that were no American style supermarkets or one stop shopping centres around Melbourne.25 Other guidebooks, and newspapers and magazines, drew attention to Chinese, Russian, Dutch, Jewish and Ceylonese restaurants which also offered music and dancing. These were of course not opened simply for the Games; many had been around for decades but they featured in Games commentary in order to highlight Melbourne’s ‘continental’ cuisine. Indeed, ‘continental’ could mean anything vaguely exotic, even, on occasion, Asian food. While the intended audience was the Olympic visitor, there was also a sense that Melburnians had somehow forgotten about cultural diversity and were reminding themselves that such restaurants were in their city. Guide books assumed that visitors would enjoy alcohol while dining. The Official Guide to the Olympics informed visitors that Australian wines compared favourably with Continental ones, although the red wines were distinctly heavier. The best growing areas were said to be the Hunter and Barossa valleys. Australian spirits were not yet up to European standards. Beer drinkers were warned that Melbourne beer was ‘stronger than it seems’, a sentiment echoed in the Welcome to Melbourne guide issued by the Australian-American Association of Victoria. Americans were also told about the ‘complicated’ drinking hours, a polite way of introducing the six o’clock closing of hotels. During the Games, a wine drinker could read newspaper articles about the history of wine in Australia and attend wine-tasting luncheons: this was no coincidence. It was part of a wider campaign to publicise Australian wine in order to make inroads into the lucrative American market and also to puncture European snobbery about Australian wines. In the postwar years, Australian vineyards had started to produce fine vintages, although exports had dropped. The industry felt that a publicity campaign would help to kick-start exports

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and change perceptions that Australian wine was merely ‘plonk’ and ‘bombo’. The Wine Overseas Marketing Bill was thus passed in federal parliament in 1954, which gave the Australian Wine Board funds to advertise Australian wine overseas and in Australia.26 In contrast with the culturally diverse foods offered in city restaurants, cafes and pubs, it was in the suburban home that ‘Australian cooking’ (‘cuisine’ was never used) came into its own, as Rachel Buchanan shows.27 Because there was a shortage of hotel rooms, almost 9000 visitors were billeted at homes around Melbourne. Much advice was offered to the suburban Olympic hostess. Architect and social commentator Robin Boyd suggested that a visitor should be served ‘an Australian breakfast’, which he declared was ‘something cooked in a pan’ not a ‘Continental one’.28 This again highlights the perceived difference between social practices in the suburban home and cultural practices in the city. In contrast with food offered in the city, cookery experts nominated roast lamb, crayfish casserole and passionfruit with meringue and ice-cream as typical Australian dishes to be served in the suburban home.29 As well, the suburban hostess could organise a bush picnic to allow a visitor to savour local meat, traditional damper and billy tea, although the inclusion of a damper recipe suggests that a Melbourne housewife did not regularly cook damper. A few Asian (in the 1950s this usually meant Indian, Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian, as well as Chinese) recipes featured in cookery pages in newspapers and women’s magazines. One hostess was pleased to report that sharing food and hospitality with her Malaysian guest had made her more aware of international life – she had thought that Asians might be wary of coming to Melbourne because of the ‘White Australia’ immigration policy.30 During the Games there were numerous official and private banquets, luncheons, cocktail parties, barbecues and picnics. Never before had Melbourne hosted so many functions in a short period of time. The official Olympic Federation banquet, held at Melbourne’s finest hotel, the Menzies, involved months of detailed preparation on music, flowers, food, wine, even the number of steps the Duke of Edinburgh had to climb from the red carpet to the first floor where he was met by the official welcoming party. Such etiquette was not new; the 1954 Royal Tour would have been fresh in the organisers’ minds while the 1880s international exhibitions formed a deeper cultural backdrop. A trial banquet was held in July 1956, when five guests sampled the menu drawn up by Menzies Hotel chef ‘Blue’ O’Malley and sweets chef Henry Timmerman. The wording of the menu proved problematic however. ‘We do feel that as this is an International Banquet it is practical to use French, as it

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is the common culinary language’, K. Donaldson, executive assistant to the managing director, Menzies Hotel, rather sniffily explained to the Olympic organisers. ‘At official banquets in England the menu is usually printed in French and we, therefore, recommend that you use the French version’.31 The 500 guests dined on La Chouxfleur du Barry and La Supreme de Vollaile, and drank Three Palm Amontillado Sherry, Gramps Barossa Valley Riesling 1955 vintage, Mount Pleasant Burgundy 1953, Great Western Champagne and imported liqueurs. It was clear to Games organisers that there would not be enough cooks in Melbourne to cater for the expected number of competitors, officials and visitors; so the Housing and Catering Committee asked the Immigration Department to ‘import’ cooks for the Olympics. Yet this was less an indication of the standard of Melbourne cooking at the time, and more of the fact that the Olympics were, as the journal Catering declared, the ‘biggest catering venture in Melbourne’s history’ and thus required a large number of chefs.32 The initial group of cooks, however, ‘proved unsatisfactory’, although the Housing and Catering Committee did not explain why. The Immigration Department agreed that it needed ‘technical assistance’ and thus allowed hotelier Tom Carlyon to travel to Europe in early 1956 and select a number of cooks who would migrate to Australia on assisted passages and cook at the Olympic Village.33 The first, four British cooks and their families, arrived in April 1956. Ultimately around 100 cooks from Britain, Germany, Italy and Denmark came to Australia. Although cooks were not initially recruited from Asia, a record number of competitors from Asian countries meant the Housing and Catering Committee had to recruit ten chefs from India, Pakistan, Hong Kong and Singapore for temporary employment; these had worked on cruise ships and for the RAF and were thus experienced in preparing food for large numbers.34 These and other local Asian cooks worked under the command of Melbourne chef Chiney Poon, who was in charge of the ‘Oriental section’ at the Village. Poon, who came to Australia from China in the 1930s, ran a café in Little Bourke Street, in Melbourne’s Chinatown. He was confident that a Chinese cook was capable of handling any eastern dish – Japanese, Siamese, Malaysian, Philippine, Korean – and would be helped in his task by Australia’s ‘world-class’ rice.35 Ultimately this did not include Chinese dishes, as China pulled out of the Games at the last moment. It emerged much later that Australian diplomats, worried that athletes and officials from Communist China would have contact with the rest of east Asia, wanted the Chinese team to eat in a separate dining room.36

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The 6000 athletes and officials ate at the Village’s ten main dining rooms, a kosher dining room and an International Dining Room. According to their food tastes, countries were organised into a particular dining room. The Housing and Catering Committee boasted that 92 per cent of the food would come from Australia, quantifying their claim that Australia had abundant supplies of ‘good basic foods’: cereals, meat, fish, milk, butter, cheese, fruit and vegetables.37 But not, it seems, spices. Each country was asked to bring along a ‘spicer’ who would provide spices, flavourings and oil. And if a cook needed assistance they could consult a ‘fairly comprehensive’ library of cookery books held at the Village’s Catering Office. To make sure that the Village was ready to function, the Housing and Catering Directorate, over three weekends in September 1956, hosted ‘Operation Get Set’ which was designed to simulate life in the Village. Olympic officials and prominent Melburnians sat down and sampled ‘Continental and Oriental menus’. The operation was judged a success. The International Dining Room at the Olympic Village became symbolic of the Olympic fellowship which the IOC, despite – or because of – the political crises over the Suez Canal and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, was keen to promote. Thus the IOC boasted of the espresso coffee lounge and a la carte menu offering a wide choice of Australian and international dishes and wine. In fact, when it became public knowledge that not all athletes were teetotallers, Lindemans Limited and the Wine and Brandy Makers Manufacturers Association offered to supply wine free to the Village. This offer had to be refused however. As the Housing and Catering Committee explained, under the existing Licensing Laws they (the Committee) were unable to serve wine even without charge, so the organisations had to make their gifts direct to the national teams.38 Much was made of the variety of food at the Village. Melburnians were told about Crème Florentine d’epinards for Bulgarians, Runderlappen for the Dutch and chicken and egg curries for Indians. Athletes from countries all around the world were photographed chatting while eating, and the mutual curiosity of the athletes was highlighted in the press. Focussing on the toleration of diversity and transnational sociability afforded by the internationality of food helped to deflect attention away from the Cold War political problems which the IOC feared would mar the Melbourne Games.39 As Kant advocated universal hospitality which travellers and visitors, as cosmopolitan citizens of the world, have a moral right to, so the IOC promoted the transnational sociability afforded by food and drink which athletes had a right to.40

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Since the Games had been announced there were nervous mutterings about Victoria’s drinking hours and habits. Newspapers often reported comments, invariably negative, made in the overseas press about what was colloquially termed the ‘six o’clock swill’.41 Did local licensing laws reflect a cosmopolitan city? What would a cultured European think of a hotel that did not allow him/her to obtain a drink at all hours? Would a sophisticated American be the unfortunate recipient of a ‘technicolour yawn’ in a pub during the six o’clock swill? The six o’clock swill was the male ritual of consuming as many beers as possible in the hour before hotels and pubs closed at six o’clock. Early closing was introduced during World War One, when wartime patriotism and austerity and a general temperance mood impelled its introduction. In 1915 closing time was fixed at 9.30 pm and then altered to six o’clock the following year. In 1919 this was enshrined in legislation.42 Restrictions on hotel trading hours and general availability of alcohol were also introduced in other Australian states as well as other countries after World War One, most conspicuously the United States. Australians who attended the 1952 Helsinki Games reported that Melbourne would need to cater for the particular demands of the world’s press, who of course would be reporting Melbourne to the world. One noted the press’ tendency to work late hours, while another suggested that Melbourne hotels would need to provide bottled beer, Scotch and Australian whiskies, vermouth, brandy on demand for visiting journalists.43 Australian team manager for the Helsinki Games, C. W. Henderson, warned that if drinking laws were not liberalised, Melbourne risked becoming the ‘laughing stock of the world’.44 IOC delegate and former lord mayor Sir Harold Luxton, also recently returned from the Helsinki Games, insisted that if the six o’clock closing of pubs was not changed, then Melbourne would be brought into ridicule. ‘When you see civilised drinking in other countries’, he explained, ‘you feel ashamed of the mad six o’clock scramble’.45 The ‘Europeans are civilised’ theme was often used by well-travelled Melburnians to argue the point that hotel hours had to accommodate the needs of Olympic visitors. In practice, such suggestions meant that Victorian Licensing Laws would have to be changed. The Victorian Government did not dismiss suggestions that licensing laws needed to be changed, especially before the Games. However, mindful of the strength of the temperance vote, the state government, led by newly elected premier Henry Bolte, did not wish to legislate change. Thus, it called a referendum on late closing to be held in March 1956. The public would decide whether or not pubs would continue

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to close at six o’clock or be allowed to stay open until ten o’clock. Melburnians who spoke in favour of late closing argued that the ‘race against the clock’ in cramped sterile conditions in a bar did little to make the broader community accept that social drinking and eating was not ‘sordid escapism’ but ‘an integral part of life when men and women relax’, as one journalist argued.46 Furthermore, the six o’clock swill underlined the fact that drinking alcohol (especially beer) was, in the popular imagination, linked with men. This much was recognised by the United Licensed Victuallers Association in their campaign advertisements in favour of late closing which compared Victoria with civilised western countries where men and women were depicted drinking and eating in a leisurely and civilised manner (Figure 5.1). This was similar to the way in which women’s magazines represented Melbourne as an ‘esspressociety’, which in itself was an implicit rejection of the gendered nature of alcohol drinking. Indeed it could be said that a public-oriented ‘esspressociety’ was emerging as an attractive alternative to a segregated ‘beersociety’ or ‘alcosociety’.47 In 1954 a late dining licence had been introduced so that alcohol could be taken with a meal in a hotel dining room until 10 pm – although once the meal was finished no more alcohol could be consumed. Now the debate centred on the right to eat and drink, or either eat or drink – in sum, the right to socialise – in any space in a pub. This debate was a manifestation of the moral edge given to cosmopolitan hospitality by Kant. In ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784), Kant suggested that if social courtesies and proprieties mark a civilised society, then the moral right to them marks a cosmopolitan order.48 In the context of Olympic Melbourne, the implication was that not only did eating and drinking go naturally together, but people from these countries could well be Olympic visitors who believed they had a moral right to eat and drink in a civilised manner. While I doubt that advocates of late closing consciously drew on Kant, we can see that linking hospitality with sociability falls within a longer historical understanding of cosmopolitanism – and one which contrasted with an American hospitality associated with service and cleanliness as advocated by catering specialists. Those who favoured retention of early closing argued that late closing would lead to heavier drinking, more temptation to youth, greater danger to night motorists, and would break-up families. Such claims were made especially by non-conformist Protestant church leaders and temperance advocates. Their claims were successful. Over 60 per cent of Victorians voted ‘no’. Only six of the 66 electoral divisions – the

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Figure 5.1 Advertisement for referendum on later closing held in Victoria, 1956, from Herald, Melbourne, 21 March 1956, p. 8, National Library of Australia, Canberra

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city of Melbourne, the inner city suburbs of Albert Park, Carlton, Port Melbourne, the seaside entertainment area of St Kilda and the well-heeled Toorak – voted ‘yes’. Yet as late as September 1956 there were still hopes that drinking laws would be relaxed for the Games, hopes based on the fact that the Official Olympic Guide Book omitted any mention of Victorian Licensing Laws. Yet there was no cultural dispensation, the state government heeded Victoria’s social morés. The Games opened on 22 November and closed on 8 December. It was a fortnight not only of sporting competition but of theatre, opera, art, food and drink, dancing and music. It was a festival. Not bacchanalian, but a joyous coming together, a kind of revelry. Finally, after the nervousness which preceded the Games, there was reason to celebrate. City streets were decorated with flags, floral displays, hanging decorations and decorative lights at night. Warm evenings enabled people to roam the ‘streets in a gay, carnival atmosphere’ and promenade the wide pavements European style. Bands played and people danced – they jived, fox-trotted and waltzed on the streets. The clothes of visitors added colour: turbans offered Oriental grace and the latest New York look suggested ‘jazzy sureness’. One observer called it the ‘people’s pageant’; another declared that Melbourne was in ‘party dress’.49 But was this a pantomime? Was Melbourne just dressed up for the occasion? As the etymology of ‘festival’ suggests, it is a public occasion, a celebration at which feasting and sharing good times is prominent. Modern analyses propose four cardinal aspects of festival behaviour: reversal, intensification, trespassing and abstinence.50 These aspects were evident in Melbourne during the 1956 Olympics. The fact that Melbourne would not host the Olympics again gave people reason to trespass or reverse ‘normal’ bounds of behaviour. There was a sense of intensified fun and merriment. An ‘imagined community’ may also be discerned, as can an integrative functionalist force at work: the festival submerged social and economic problems migrants experienced in Melbourne and the fact that postwar migrants were not a homogenous and close-knit community. What judgements were passed about food and drink at the Games? Not surprisingly, local newspapers focussed on favourable comments. ‘Melbourne social life exemplifies the art of gracious living’, Elizabeth Brundage, wife of the IOC president, was quoted as saying.51 AAP’s sports correspondent, Murray Rose, wrote that Melbourne was a ‘hustling, booming city’, and steaks were plentiful and cheap by American standards.52 The food at the Games Village was also pronounced a success. This was particularly pleasing because athletes had criticised the

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quality and quantity of food at the 1948 London Olympics.53 Reports in overseas newspapers were duly summarised, although, as Graeme Davison comments, the coverage of the Games in the overseas press was slender. The Sun’s London correspondent noted that the food in the Village had been widely praised, and the idea that Australians lived entirely on steak and tea was not accurate. Another London newspaper reported that ‘Melbourne cooking has improved a good deal since [Polish pianist] Paderewski stayed at the biggest hotel [Menzies] in the town [in 1904]’.54 Perhaps the most famous statement was that made by sports journalist Red Smith of the New York Herald Tribune: ‘the Olympic marathon will produce no gamer competitors or pluckier stayers than the legions who rush the growler six evenings a week in Melbourne pubs’. Another visitor, Hong Kong’s assistant Chef de Mission O. R. Sadko commented, it ‘must be embarrassing for Victorians not to be able to buy guests a drink after six pm’.55 But not all visitors found early closing an inconvenience. Many who stayed in suburban homes said they were glad to be billeted with non-drinkers.56 Whereas local drinking laws were criticised, food, especially Melbourne’s ‘continental menu’, received no criticism. The emphasis on food and coffee, which could be enjoyed by both sexes, helped to deflect attention from the licensing laws, symbolised as they were by the masculine six o’clock swill. It was the diversity of food and drink and the transnational hospitality and sociability they afforded which mattered. When the grandstands were silent and the visitors had gone home, the Olympic Civic Committee could permit itself a note of self-congratulation. It noted that ‘having been spotlighted before the entire civilised world’ Melbourne had come up trumps.57 Six o’clock closing had been embarrassing, but a moment of internationalism in the Olympic Games made Melburnians realise that, by focussing not on their social identity but their city’s cultural assets – ‘continental’ food and drink, brought to the fore by postwar immigration – they could revive their city’s cosmopolitanism.

Notes 1. Wine and Spirit News and Australian Vigneron, 20 May 1949, p. 1. 2. G. Tebbutt, ‘Olympic City’, Port of Melbourne Quarterly, April–June 1956, pp. 19–21, 29. This chapter is part of a book-length project on the history of cosmopolitanism in Australia. 3. For example, Sun, 20 and 30 August 1952. 4. Age, 21 November 1956.

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5. M. Montanari, ‘Food Systems and Models of Civilisation’, in J-L. Flandrin and M. Montanari (eds), Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. C. Botsford, A. Goldhammer, C. Lambert, F. M. Lopez-Morillas and S. Stevens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 69ff. 6. On the concept see R. White, ‘The Australian Way of Life’, Historical Studies, XVIII (1979) 528–45. 7. S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), especially Introduction. 8. S. Plant and K. Dunstan, Australian Magazine, 7–8 December 1996; 1956: Melbourne, Modernity and the XVI Olympiad, Museum of Modern Art at Heide (Melbourne: Museum of Modern Art, 1996); G. Davison, ‘Welcoming the World: The 1956 Olympic Games and the Re-presentation of Melbourne’, Australian Historical Studies, XXVIII (1997) 65. 9. S. Downes, Advanced Australian Fare: How Australian Cooking Became the World’s Best (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002), p. 13. 10. M. Symons, One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia (Adelaide: Duck Press, 1982), p. 226. 11. R. Beckett, Convicted Tastes: Food in Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984), p. 148. 12. M. Fulton, I Sang for my Supper: Memories of a Food Writer (Sydney: Lansdowne, 1999), pp. 84ff; and C. Ripe, Goodbye Culinary Cringe (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993), pp. 227ff. 13. Davison, ‘Welcoming the World’, p. 68. 14. Herald, 12 May 1949. 15. Herald, 14 May 1949. 16. Catering, May 1949, pp. 20–2. 17. Herald, 3 December 1953. 18. Sun, 28 October 1952. 19. Sun, 29 September 1953. 20. Catering, September 1955, p. 18. 21. Herald, 19 July 1955. 22. Cited in A. Brown-May, Espresso! Melbourne Coffee Stories (Melbourne: Arcadia, 2001), p. 48. 23. Woman’s Day, 19 November 1956. 24. Australian Women’s Weekly, 26 September 1956. 25. Welcome to Melbourne (Melbourne: Australia-American Association, 1956), unpaginated. 26. See debates in federal parliament, for example, Hansard, 13 October 1954, pp. 1968ff. 27. R. Buchanan, ‘The Home Front: Hostess, Housewife and Home in Olympic Melbourne, 1956’, Journal of Australian Studies, 72 (2002) 201–9. 28. Herald, 21 June 1955. 29. Herald, 22 November 1956. 30. Age, 8 December 1956. Visitors billeted in Melbourne homes were, however, overwhelmingly from the United States and New Zealand: of the 8,806 visitors, only 731 were from ‘other overseas countries’; See E. A. Doyle (ed), Official Report of the Organising Committee of the XVI Olympiad (Melbourne: n.p., 1958), p.199.

Tanja Luckins 99 31. Donaldson to Colonel Stoyles (reception officer, IOC), 9 October 1956, Victorian Public Record Office (hereafter VPRS) 10743/21 folder 6/11. 32. Catering, December 1956, p. 16. 33. Housing and Catering Committee minutes, 17 February 1956. VPRS 10743, box 13, folder 6/11; And see ‘Mission to Select Olympic Cooks’, press statement, February 1956. E. A. Doyle papers, State Library of Victoria (hereafter SLV) MS 2833/4. It is often, wrongly, assumed that his brother Norman travelled to Europe. Perhaps the best known chef is Hermann Schneider, who was hired as a 19-year-old in Zurich. He cooked for France, Belgium and Luxembourg at the Olympic Village. Schneider went on to open several award-winning restaurants in Melbourne. 34. Housing and Catering Committee minutes, 1 August 1956. VPRS 10743, box 13, folder 6/11. 35. Woman’s Day, 29 October 1956. 36. H. Gordon, Australia at the Olympic Games (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994), pp. 200–1. 37. Olympic Newsletter, 8 May 1956, p. 4. 38. Housing and Catering Committee minutes, 21 August 1956. VPRS 10743, box 13, folder 6/11. 39. H. Kent and J. Merritt, ‘The Cold War and the Melbourne Olympic Games’, in A. Curthoys and J. Merritt (eds), Better Dead than Red: Australia’s First Cold War, 1945–59 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986), p. 178. Ultimately this did not include Soviet athletes, who stayed on Soviet ships anchored off Melbourne in Port Phillip Bay. 40. S. Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), especially Chapter 5. Kant, however, was thought ‘not at all refined in his tastes’. According to Gabriel Peignot, he took great pleasure in a puree of lentils, in a puree of parsnips cooked with pork fat; a pudding of pork fat; a pudding of dried peas with pigs trotters; and dried fruit baked in an oven. Peignot, Le Livre des Singularites (1841), cited in B. Allen, Food: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 24. 41. For example, Sun, 5 October 1953, reporting comments in New York Times, 4 October 1953; and Herald, 14 October 1954, reporting Punch, 13 October 1954. 42. W. Phillips, ‘ “Six o’clock swill”: The Introduction of Early Closing of Hotel Bars in Australia’, Historical Studies, XVIX (1980) 250–66. On the end of the six o’clock swill in Victoria in 1966; see T. Luckins, ‘ “Time, Gentlemen, Please”: The End of Six o’clock Closing and the Post-Swill Pub’, in T. Luckins and S. O’Hanlon (eds), GO!: Melbourne in the Sixties (Melbourne: Circa, 2005), pp. 174–87. 43. Reports of B. Kerville and B. Welch, undated, E. A. Doyle Papers, SLV, MS 7981, box 2833/3. 44. Sun, 9 August 1952. 45. Sun, 15 October 1952; See also comments of C. Mackay, Australian Wine Board, Sun, 17 October, 1952; trade unionist A. Monk, Herald, 25 August 1953; president of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, W. J. Allison, Herald, 26 August 1953. 46. Clive Turnbull in the Sun, quoted in Vigilante, 22 March 1956.

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47. On segregated drinking see D. Kirkby and T. Luckins, ‘ “The Winnies and Pats    Brighten our Pubs”: Women’s Place, Men’s Space and the Changing Australian Pub, 1920–70’, Journal of Australian Studies, 87 (2006) 75–86. 48. J. Swenson, ‘A Small Change in Terminology or a Great Leap Forward? Culture and Civilisation in Revolution’, MLN, CXII (1997) 332–4. 49. These observations come from reports in the Age, Argus, Herald and Sun newspapers. 50. A. Falassi, ‘Festival: Definition and Morphology’, in A. Falassi (ed), Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), p. 3. 51. Herald, 22 November 1956. 52. Argus Weekender, 17 November 1956. 53. Catering, January 1957, pp. 3ff. 54. Sun, 24 November 1956. 55. Sun, 21 November 1956. 56. Argus, 10 December 1956. 57. Olympic Civic Committee, ‘A Review of the Activities of the Olympic Civic Committee’, April 1957, unpaginated.

Further reading Culinary Distinctions, special issue of Journal of Australian Studies, 87 (2006). S. Downes, Advanced Australian Fare: How Australian Cooking Became the World’s Best (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002). C. Ripe, Goodbye Culinary Cringe (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993).

Part II Food, Drink and Community

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Figure 6.1 An artists’ representation of the interior of an eighteenth-century tavern, The Pretty Bar Maid by John Collett, London, England, ca.1775, from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia, accession No. 1962–284, image TC 1990–51

6 Cider, Oysters and Tavern Sociability: Ritual, Violence and Young Men in Early Modern Rural France John Cashmere

Drinking and eating have always been central elements of sociability, and their excesses, drunkenness and gluttony, are often viewed as being at the heart of many social problems, from domestic violence to poor health. The purpose of this chapter is to examine eating and drinking in early modern rural France in a tavern setting, and to explore some of the behaviours which this setting facilitated. Young village males, as they reached their late teens, graduated from the village spinning bee, a space organised primarily by women, to the tavern. There, by sharing food and drink with kin, neighbours, friends or total strangers, they could begin to learn the complex rules and expectations which attached to being a man. But for heads both used and unused to the effects of the excessive consumption of alcohol, learning to be sociable could get young village males into serious trouble, which might bring with it crippling injury or even death. Conviviality and good fellowship may have been aspirations of tavern sociability, but they were not always its only intended outcome. The publication in 1979 of William Taylor’s now classic study of drinking patterns and social behaviour among eighteenth century peasant communities in colonial Mexico changed forever our ways of looking at the relationship between the consumption of alcohol and violent social behaviour.1 In Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages, Taylor examined drunkenness in new contexts, not as a physiological/chemical cause of disorderly and irresponsible behaviour, but as purposeful and meaningful behaviour in ritual terms. Taking his cue from Taylor’s pioneering work, Thomas Brennan published his study of taverns and drinking in eighteenth century Paris in 1988, 103

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which shifted the focus of the study of drinking in France from official pronouncements on drunkenness, to sociability and the actual rituals of public drinking in taverns. Although Brennan’s study did not extend to an exploration of the world of the early modern French village taverns, much of what he says has relevance to them. Of particular relevance is his remark that ‘the tavern may perhaps have been a transitional institution for men in their twenties and thirties, weaning them from bachelorhood and the youth groups and introducing them to role models of marriage, to the neighbourhood or guild’.2 One advantage of extending Brennan’s work to the rural taverns is that this can provide opportunities to follow through the social processes of the repeated visits of young men to taverns, as well as the integration of tavern rituals into the broader fabric of local society. The majority of the episodes used for this chapter are taken from the records of the presidial court of Caen in Lower Normandy. The bulk of rural establishments in the villages of this region were cabarets, establishments serving a light meal and offering accommodation,3 or inns (hostelleries) and taverns (tavernes) serving alcohol only. In the seventeenth century many drinking establishments in Normandy were simply private houses whose owners, wishing to avoid state taxes, yet having surplus cider to sell, placed a hasty symbol above their door, or a barrel outside, moved the family into a single room, and started selling cider. In Periers in 1682, for example, those passing through the village knew where to stop for refreshment because, as several witnesses pointed out, the sieur Osmond had ‘exposed a barrel of cider for sale’.4 If the tax collectors did turn up, and they did with ruthless regularity, the symbol could be quickly removed, or the cider whisked away and domestic normality restored in the wink of an eye.5 Occasionally owners of these ‘sly-grog shops’ were caught, and not always by the tax collectors. In 1654 Mathieu Lamy was summoned before the Protestant consistory in Basly ‘for having placed a branch above his door’ in Thaon, not as part of some arcane pagan rite, but as a symbol announcing the sale of home-made cider.6 A branch or jug placed above the door was a common symbol during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in rural France to announce alcohol for sale.7 If Calvinist consistories had little tolerance for those who consumed alcohol, they certainly had none at all for those who traded in it. The beverage of choice in Normandy’s cabarets, taverns and inns was not wine or beer, but cider. The apple orchards of the region had been planted in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the predecessors

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of men like the sire de Gouberville, and by the seventeenth century cider had become the regional beverage.8 For many Normans, cider was not simply an alcoholic beverage, but also had distinct health benefits. At the beginning of the seventeenth century a local doctor and professor at the University of Caen declared cider excellent for inducing sleep, being ‘restorative of the roots of humour and humidity’. Cider was prescribed variously for gout, nephritis, childbirth, pleurosy and fevers: even for a wound in the groin.9 The sire de Gouberville himself subscribed to the pharmacological wonders of cider, distributing it generously to family, farm workers and friends to benefit the health of the community.10 Though cider was the beverage of preference, it was not the only beverage produced in Normandy. It is a popular misconception that wine was never made in Normandy, but in fact a white wine known colloquially as vin Huet was produced for several centuries south-east of Caen. There is reason to believe that vin Huet d’Argences was actually quite good at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The grapes were grown from stock brought allegedly by the English from Guyenne and other regions.11 For whatever reason, by the early seventeenth century vin huet had deteriorated in quality, and by the nineteenth century it was universally detested. In spite of the presence of local and imported wine, cider remained the preferred beverage of the Norman countryside in the seventeenth century, and was available by the jug in most drinking establishments. The rural and urban cabarets which sold cider, food and accommodation were often the seeding grounds for public rituals like charivaris, which in the faint traces we have of them suggest that they involved significant degrees of violent behaviour. In an earlier essay, I demonstrated that the violence which was so frequently described in these rituals was not necessarily a sign that the ritual processes had been suspended. It was often integral to such rituals in that the hypothetical resolution to conflict offered by the rituals was never intended to be taken up.12 Charivaris did not necessarily ‘go wrong’ when violence erupted. Sometimes they were intended to be violent. Equally, violence in taverns is often seen as an aberration, a manifestation of the unsociable, rather than a ritual element of sociability. Brennan has corrected that view to a considerable degree, but I want to take his conclusions a little further. Violence in taverns was no simple matter, and a resort to inebriation, aggression and other such ‘excuses’ for violent behaviour when drinking can

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occasionally obscure deeper ritual functions of violence within social behaviour. Let me illustrate this point first by turning briefly to public rituals of humiliation, which included charivari, and the role played by the cabaret in their performance. At the end of the sixteenth century, a Lyon magistrate writing of the danger of abolishing carnival, asserted that ‘the people [will] go instead to taverns, drink up and begin to cackle, their feet dancing under the table, to decipher Kings, princes    the State and Justice and draft scandalous and defamatory libels’.13 It was certainly a common fear expressed by the voices of authority in seventeenth century France that taverns were hot-beds of sedition and rebellion, but it was not necessarily a reasonable one. Make no mistake, French villagers could certainly decipher kings, princes, state and justice with effortless skill and boundless enthusiasm, but their interest was often more locally focussed on deciphering members of their own community. To decipher a village vicar, however, was not necessarily a long way from deciphering the Church itself. The local taverns were often the setting in which young men conceived of and launched rituals of humiliation. In 1682 a magistrate from Roanne set himself up in the ‘Fountain’ tavern in the village of Saint-Just-en-Chevalet in central France, to investigate a complaint lodged by the local curate about a verbal and physical attack on his lanky vicar.14 The locals, men, women and children, volunteered patchy information, but there was a general consensus, generated in part by gossip, that on the night the offence was committed, a group of men had been drinking and singing together in a local tavern. Red wine would have been the beverage of fellowship on this occasion. There was also a suggestion that the men may have been drinking earlier at the ‘Fountain’ tavern run by a man called Dammergue, whose son was allegedly one of the culprits. The rest of the group included the lord of the manor (châtelain) and members of the legal fraternity, all worthy locals. Witness testified that the men had a musket, a drum and fife: the châtelain had fired shots from the tavern door at the local vicar’s house opposite, but only after he and the others, as one witness described it, had ‘been dissolute, singing indecent and shocking songs against the presbyterial dignity’ to the beat of their ‘wicked drum’ (méchant tambour). Throughout this performance the curate had apparently been sitting in the tavern drinking, though he prudently seems to have made no move to defend his vicar’s honour at that particular moment. There was even some suggestion that the vicar himself may have been in the tavern when his house was being attacked. His

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offence remains obscure and the only snatch we have of the songs is the phrase ‘everyone is laughing at the tall black curate’.15 With the exception of two female witnesses and the tavern keeper, all in their forties, the male witnesses in the case were in their late teens or early twenties. Drunkenness, aggression and violence on the part of young male patrons were frequently emphasised in civil complaints lodged with the courts. Plaintiffs seeking financial compensation in civil courts for injury to their person or property invariably represented attacks upon themselves as unprovoked. They rarely mentioned a charivari, because before the eighteenth century local magistrates showed a reluctance to take decisive action against the perpetrators of such performances.16 They knew, like everyone else in the local community, that most of these rituals passed without incident. Some of the magistrates may have disapproved of the performances, but they knew that a barking dog did not bite without provocation, even if it was not always clear what had provoked it. Flamboyantly public acts of humiliation were not the only rituals generated within the confines of the cabaret. Just as violence outside the cabaret did not necessarily signal the suspension of the ritual process, equally drunkenness and violence inside the cabaret did not necessarily suggest the suspension of purposeful behaviour either. Learning to be a man was no simple matter, and one crucial setting for that learning was the local drinking venue. The rules of tavern deportment for village males were the rules of village sociability in general. What a young man learned about respect, honour, responsibility, sharing, bonding, family and friendship were life lessons best taught by one’s peers. I can illustrate this most effectively through two sets of episodes from the records of the presidial court in Caen which will serve to highlight the fluidity and complexity of being male and sociable in a village context. The setting for the first set of episodes is the village of Courseulles north-west of Caen. The village hosted at least two cabarets, and in one of them on the evening of Sunday 2 September 1691, a dozen or more fishmongers were sharing jugs of cider in several drinking circles.17 Conditions were cramped that evening with close to 20 people in the house. The two drinking circles were family based: in one were the Cardines, fishmongers to a man. The father Nicolas, aged 50, ran the business with his two sons Jean, 23 and Guillaume twenty.18 Sitting with them were the boys’ maternal uncle, his son, aged 19, and another young man named Jacques Fortin. In the other circles sitting across from

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them were the Berthellemy and Aubrée brothers, also fishmongers. No females were recorded as being present. At about 9 pm the senior of the Berthellemy brothers asked Nicolas Cardine, the father, whether he wanted to buy 200 weight of oysters. Calvados oysters were well known since Roman times and the designation of the Norman coast at this point as la Côte du nâcre [Mother-of-Pearl coast] underlined this. In the seventeenth century the abundance of Norman oysters contributed significantly to supplying the 2000 oyster sellers who operated in Paris alone during the reign of Louis XIV.19 Nicolas Cardine asked the other man how much he wanted for them: 80 pounds was the reply. Sixty, Cardine haggled, and the figure of 70 pounds was also mentioned. It was a tense moment in the bargaining process of a commercial transaction, since oysters were highly perishable goods in an age without refrigeration. At this delicate point in the negotiations the youngest Cardine boy, Guillaume, interrupted: ‘Mon père, don’t accept oysters, take it easy, don’t discuss it. Although we have money, we still have merchandise.’ Furious at this interruption to negotiations, Berthellemy called the Cardine boy deranged [un hagard],20 and with lacklustre repartée the young man replied ‘The haggards are in your breeches’. Someone knocked a candelabra to the floor, and immediately a full scale brawl broke out. Cardine senior and his eldest son leapt to Guillaume’s defence, and the fighting spilled out into the courtyard. By the time it was over both father and eldest son had been severely beaten in defence of the younger man, and the father’s hat had disappeared. A witnesses testified to overhearing one assailant say ‘Give me the pocket knife while I cut this hat’, and another reply ‘No, there’s no need to cut it, it’s la loquette’s’, a nickname given to the father, Nicolas Cardine. The following morning Julien Berthellemy returned to the cabaret and asked the owner’s daughter, the fiancée of the older Cardine boy, to fetch Nicolas Cardine the father, to lunch with them. The intention was probably to negotiate a local settlement, and perhaps some compensation for the previous evening’s affray.21 Nicolas declined the invitation, claiming the beating of the evening before as his excuse. Julien was then reported as saying: ‘It is true. I am very sorry, but it was his son who caused it all.’ Later the boy himself came into the cabaret, and Julien apologised for assaulting his father the previous evening, adding that he would have preferred the boy to have been beaten in his stead. He called the boy a rogue [coquin] and a clod [hallier], saying that he always had been and always would be worthless, and that he (Berthelemy) and

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Figure 6.2 Flemish artist Adriaen Brouwer (1605–38) spent much time in taverns and alehouses. Peasants Brawling Over Cards, Ronfende Kartenspieler, Inv.Vr.562. Beyerische Staatsgeriol desammlunger, Alte Pinakothek, Munich

his party were the people to test his strength. After some additional posturing and exchanges of abuse, the pair sat down again (Figure 6.2). In this brief drama much more was at stake than simply a sizeable quantity of perishable shellfish. The story told by the witnesses suggests that a complex set of relationships was violated by Guillaume Cardine’s youthful enthusiasm. When Guillaume’s party entered the cabaret, they did so as kin. Their drinking circle was formed from familial links, but when Julien Berthelemy spoke with Nicolas Cardine about the oysters, new links were forged. A commercial relationship was invoked, and within that relationship the authority to bid and trade was recognised as being invested in these two men, one representing fraternal, the other paternal authority. Actions would be judged on familial and commercial etiquette, and in those terms, Guillaume’s intervention with his father was a gross blunder. In those two brief sentences urging his father to be prudent in his commercial transactions, Guillaume Cardine transgressed both etiquettes: he compromised his father’s paternal authority, as well as his commercial integrity. He had also compromised the family’s honour. As we shall see in a moment, the treatment of Nicolas’s hat testifies to this.

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We catch up again with Guillaume Cardine two weeks later, on Sunday 16 September 1691 in another cabaret in Courseulles. On this occasion he was the plaintiff, and stated that he had gone to the cabaret for a meal after vespers with his older brother Jean, and three other young male companions in their early twenties. While they were eating, according to witnesses, another group of young men from a rival kin group entered the cabaret, ‘like fishmongers’ one witness described them. Guillaume’s older brother Jean raised his glass of cider to one of the newcomers and cried out ‘To your health, Matrune!’22 He then threw his glass against the wall, in imitation of the characteristic seventeenth century gesture when toasting the King.23 Whether intended as insult or jest, it was taken as an insult and a quarrel ensued. Later in the evening this erupted into an all out brawl on the village street between two groups of young men in their late teens and early twenties. In the melée which followed, the Cardines stole a hat from one of their older opponents, echoing the fate of Guillaume’s father’s hat a few weeks earlier. The owner later complained that someone in Guillaume’s party had ‘had the effrontery to wear his insolence as well as his cruelty’, a reference no doubt to the stolen hat. Guillaume had probably only graduated to tavern society quite recently. Up to 17 or 18 he would have attended spinning bees under the supervision of women, but at 20 he had graduated to the world of male sociability and ritual in the tavern. He was probably fortunate that his father and older brother were so badly injured in the first fight or he might have expected a beating himself on the way home. Though a father’s arm could protect, as we shall see shortly, it could also deal out a sound thrashing for ill-judged behaviour. Of the witnesses who made depositions in the second episode in Courseulles, one man had been drinking with the group who had lodged a complaint against the Cardines. This man was Guillaume Cardine’s godfather, who along with his wife, had presided at Guillaume’s baptism into the Calvinist faith in February 1671.24 On the night of the brawl, however, his chosen drinking companions were his godson’s rivals, and he did not join the fray on his godson’s behalf. A second witness, a woman aged about 50, admitted that she was the aunt of one of Guillaume’s companions, but that she was also mother to one of the boys in the other group. She claimed that she and her son had been dining with a relative, and on their way home her nephew, who had fought alongside the Cardines, had attacked and struck his first cousin, her son. Other witnesses had already placed her son in the cabaret at the time of the brawl, exposing her vain attempt to give him an alibi.

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The contestants in these disputes moved in and out of roles in various ways. Certainly the Cardine party in the initial episode was linked by kinship: father, elder and younger brothers, uncle and first cousin formed a seemingly tight kin group. In action, both father and brother leapt to Guillaume’s defence at some physical peril to themselves. In the other group Berthelemy had initially addressed himself to Guillaume’s father, who was known to him and his friends by his trade, his formal name and his nickname [la loquette]. In commercial negotiations, central to the lives of such men and their families, paternal authority normally invoked respect. On this occasion it was respected by all but the youngest Cardine boy. When he compromised his father’s authority, which he manifestly did in his unwarranted intervention over the oysters, he antagonised his assailants yet did not compromise the loyalty of his father and brother. Guillaume’s seemingly inadvertent challenge to his father’s authority, like his brother’s later apparent challenge to a rival’s manhood, speaks of rivalries which point to bondings other than those of ‘family’. Age and status within the family may be imbued with tradition and respect, but testing the boundaries of those traditions and that respect was the sport of youth. In both episodes the reference to a hat points to antagonisms, and to trophy hunting, a not uncommon pursuit in tavern violence. Thomas Brennan has drawn attention to the hat both as trophy and symbol of personal honour in brawls in Parisian taverns in the eighteenth century, and and this is underlined by the Norman rural experience.25 Nicholas Cardine’s hat was not ‘trophy’, however, because he had not provoked the challenge, and its mutilation might have carried the wrong message. Amongst age sets of unmarried males in village communities, the initiation into tavern sociability invited ritual contests amongst young bloods, where affiliations were not necessarily dictated by the formal or emotional bonds of kinship, past or prospective. For example, in the second tavern brawl in Courseulles, Guillaume Cardine’s co-plaintiff was a young man called Biron. He was legally a first cousin of the young lads who brawled with the Cardines, and he may well have seen himself as affiliated with them at other times; Biron’s godfather was the very relative at whose house his aunt claimed to have been dining with her son; and within a couple of years Biron was to marry into the Michelle clan, but on the night of the hunt for the hat trophy, he was the Cardine’s man.26 Contesting manhood in the village taverns in Normandy could involve long term enmities. In a counter complaint lodged against Guillaume Cardine and Biron by the Du Puis brothers, it was alleged that

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all the Cardine men had harboured ‘a hatred and aversion’ against the Du Puys family for a long time. In the previous year they had threatened to incinerate the Du Puys brothers in their homes. Such threats often appeared in legal complaints to give dramatic emphasis to the plaintiffs’ allegations. On this occasion the complaint also alleged that back in mid-July Biron had menaced Michel Du Puys in a cabaret, with the threat that the next time he saw him, ‘he would make him pass the time badly’. Two months later, Biron had picked yet another fight with Michel Du Puys. The longevity of these animosities between age-set groups based on kinship is emphasised by another brawl which took place five years earlier in 1686 in Courseulles.27 The venue this time was not a tavern, but a private barn, where villagers assembled for a spinning bee. On these occasions women and girls spun, while pubescent boys still too young to go to the tavern with fathers, older brothers or male friends, would amuse themselves in pre-courtship rituals, chaperoned by the village matrons.28 On this occasion there was an extra dimension to the spinning bee: Jacques Fortin’s cousin was getting married and a charivari had been mounted against the newlyweds. One witness, woken by the noise, asked his neighbour what the fuss was about. She replied that it was ‘the boys from les accordailles [the marriage] and Jacques Fortin and Pierre Berthelemy were fighting’. In 1686 Fortin and Berthelemy were in their early teens, but the family enmities which were acted out in the charivari and in their personal brawl were alive and well five years later when, as young men now, they defended their personal and family honour again in the tavern brawl in Courseulles in 1695. If fathers, humiliated by youngest sons, beaten up by young bloods involved in age set feuds, and nevertheless standing resolute by those sons in a fight; and godfathers who showed scant affection for or allegiance to their spiritual charges; or aunts who found, in the thick of violence, that they were mothers first, and set themselves at odds with their nephews as a result, are not sufficient to excite our interest and curiosity about the complexities of tavern sociability, then there may well be fascination in another perspective on this episode. A witness to the second tavern brawl in Courseulles referred to one of the participants as Michel Homo. Michel was not a first name, but a family name, and Homo was not a family name, nor was the witness designating the lad’s sexuality. It was a familiar corruption of the biblical name Amos, used by French Protestants. The witness recognised Mathieu Michelle’s voice, and classified him by his family name [Michelle], but

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could only distinguish him from the other males of the same surname by adding his father’s first name [Homo] to the family name. In other words she knew him intimately enough to recognise his voice, but was not able to distinguish him by his baptismal name. She knew his father, though. Amos (alias Homo) Michelle was Mathieu’s father, and had been elder for Courseulles in the Reformed Church at Basly, from 1672 to 1684. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685, there were 123 Protestants in the village of Courseulles. According to official records, only five of these appeared to have been converted to Catholicism, and seven had promised to do so, but 111 had remained obdurate, ‘amongst whom Amos Michelle’, formerly overseer ‘of the party who prevented all the others from doing their duty [for example, converting to Catholicism], and who scoffed at the fair warnings given to him’.29 In 1686 the curate of Courseulles recommended that Amos be imprisoned if the other Protestants in Courseulles were ever to be converted.30 These contests between the Cardines and families like the Berthelemys, Du Puys and Michelles, acted out in the language of violence in the cabarets of Courseulles, might not have been such simple family feuds. The Michelle men were not the only Protestants in the affair. Both of the Du Puis brothers had been Protestants, but had made abjurations in November 1685. Even Guillaume Cardine, his father and brother were Protestants. Biron, Guillaume’s companion, features on the Catholic parish register for Courseulles for 24 June 1696 as being married to Marie Michelle, ‘both of the Pretended Reformed Religion’,31 almost 11 years after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Their marriage, which took place clandestinely in 1694 or 1695, was not recorded in any register. Jacques Biron, constrained by his religious affiliation, took his bride from the bosom of the Michelle clan, no doubt much to the delight of old Amos. Between 1676 and 1682, Amos buried many of his charges bearing the patronymics Michelle and Cardine in the service of an ideal of religious community which was singularly fragile in experience. Hints of that ideal may well have lingered beneath the surface of these tavern brawls in Courseulles in 1691. A second set of episodes, which brings into sharp relief the complexities of tavern sociability in rural France, took place four years later over the summer of 1695. The location was the village of Beuville, about 15 kilometres south-east of Courseulles, and the setting was the cabaret run by Marc Auber, his wife and daughter.32 Living within earshot of the cabaret was Germain de la Londe. We know little of La Londe other than that he was 28 years of age in 1695, married with two children, and

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described himself variously as a day-labourer ( journalier) to the court and a trooper (cavalier) to the patrons of the tavern. It seems possible that the villagers of Beuville may have elected him to serve on their behalf in the coast guard militia, whose function was to hold off invasion forces till regular troops could arrive. Over the summer of 1695 Germain de la Londe revealed himself to be a complex character in his dealings with his fellow villagers, and a man who adopted and shed roles with considerable ease. His wife remains without name, though her presence, and that of other women in the tavern reflects the caution we should exercise in assuming drinking establishments to be exclusively male spaces. We can trace Germain de la Londe in or near the Beuville tavern on three occasions in 1695, first in May as a plaintiff, then in August as a witness, and finally in September as one of the accused. In May Germain de la Londe and a companion had gone to Auber’s tavern between six and seven in the evening ostensibly to drink some cider and eat a meal.33 The companion had said to the cabaret owner, ‘Look. Here is a four shilling piece. Give us food and drink to the value of this coin.’ He was brought a pot of cider and a small loaf of bread. Others were already in the tavern drinking, and one of them, Jacob Lucas, started fighting with Germain. Several women had turned up at the tavern in search of their husbands, among them Germain’s wife. Some of the women, when they discovered the presence of a lute player inside, stayed on to dance. Most of those present agreed that Germain had been struck successively by three men: by Jacob Lucas inside the cabaret, by a trooper called Vannery and the cabaret owner outside. Vannery returns to our story later as one of Germain’s drinking companions a month later. Three months after this episode, Germain de la Londe was back in court over another incident in Auber’s cabaret, though on this occasion he was a witness.34 Two brothers in their late teens or early twenties had beaten up another man who challenged their behaviour. The victim had intervened when the younger of the brothers, probably unused to the effects of cider, had accosted and insulted a 75 year old miller who had been drinking alone. The victim had said to the younger man ‘that he was wrong to insult a man of the witness’ age who had done him no wrong’.35 Immediately the boy’s father and brother joined in the fight which spilled out into the courtyard. Germain and another trooper heard the brawl from their houses and went to investigate, helping to calm the disputants. Germain claimed to have said, laughing, to one of the younger men who had stones in his hand, ‘What do you trying to

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do? Don’t you have any shame?’ A corn-chandler, who had responded to the brawl fearing that some of his relatives might be involved, reported that after the affray was broken up and the brothers and their father had left the cabaret, the father had taken the youngest of his sons, who had started the brawl, by the hair and the arm, beating him about the head with a stick. The boy had twisted out of his grip and started kicking his older brother, knocking him to the ground, suggesting that this lad, like the Cardine boy in 1691, still had his learner’s permit in the environment of male sociability. One month later in mid-September, Germain de la Londe was in court again, though now as an offender.36 Germain and some other troopers, among them his companion in May and another who had struck him on that occasion, were drinking in Marc Auber’s cabaret. They were there to meet some villagers from Biéville, an adjacent village, who owed them some fodder they were obliged to provide for the King’s militia. As the villagers from Biéville were leaving, Germain, in a flourish of masculine bravado, called them ‘buggers of dogs’, to which the leaders of the villagers replied, ‘What have the dogs from Biéville done that you have so little respect for them?’ Instantly an inter-village battle ensued between the troopers from Beuville and the villagers from Biéville, which only ended when the leader of the villagers from Biéville fled into the sanctuary of the Beuville presbytery hotly pursued by Germain, his wife and another trooper who were hurling stones. Sharing food, a central ritual of hospitality in many cultures, could be a fraught experience in the early modern French rural cabaret. On Sunday afternoon 26 November 1695 a group of half a dozen males was drinking in Guillaume Tombette’s establishment in the coastal village of Hermanville about an hour before dusk. They had been served cider, and had asked for meat. Tombette’s wife brought them a piece of bacon or cured pork, and they haggled with her over the price, finally arriving at an amount which they agreed to share. About an hour later two other men entered the tavern for a meal. One of the larger group of drinkers tried to press the two newcomers to share their meat. The two men politely refused, as they had already been served their own meat. One witness claimed that one of the two men had speared a small piece of the other group’s meat, but that his knife had fallen to the floor and he had not eaten the morsel. The newcomers paid their bill, but did not pay for any meat. This outraged the members of the larger group who demanded that they pay their share, and pursued them down the village street intent on a fight. Perhaps if one of the newcomers had not played

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with the morsel of meat, offence might not have been taken, but the flimsiness of the insult suggests that for some in the cabaret that night, this was an anticipated contest. Tombette’s wife insisted that whoever ordered the meat should pay for it, and did not include a share in the newcomers’ bill. The two were assaulted in the village street some four hours after the larger group had entered the cabaret, during which time numerous jugs of cider would have been consumed. Once again the signs are that this was not random, out-of-control violence. During the affray, someone snatched the hat of one of the newcomers, and a search by bystanders failed to find it. A trophy had been seized, and a triumph registered. Honour was vindicated. While cabarets and taverns in rural Normandy were predominantly the playground of village males, women also used these spaces, though perhaps in smaller numbers, and for different purposes and with different attitudes to violence. It was a situation similar to eighteenth-century Paris, where according to Brennan, women occupied an ambiguous place in taverns, not because they used the taverns differently, but because ‘women did not use taverns as freely as men’.37 His conclusion was ‘that the tavern was not equally open to men and women and was predominantly male space’. Part of the problem is what witnesses to these episodes noticed, or rather what they failed to notice. Males tended to see other males, catching glimpses of women in taverns only in their peripheral vision. Brennan points out that in Paris female witnesses often observed the goings-on of their neighbourhood ‘from the windows and doors of their lodgings’.38 This is what leads him to conclude that men and women did not have the same freedom to enter a public drinking space. The same can be said of young male witnesses, however, who reported ritual performances or tavern violence as though they had not been involved, or were merely observers of the action. Women were much more likely to report the behaviour of other women, and to represent them as mediators in male ‘cock-of-the-walk’ contests, both inside and outside the tavern. Some women did not leave the task of separating brawling youths and their kin to male by-standers. In Plumetot in 1682 a dispute broke out in the local cabaret between Martin Paisant, the villager responsible for assessing and collecting the taille tax, and another group of male villagers.39 Violence occurred only on the village street when the patrons had left the cabaret, and hearing the disturbance, the 18 year old daughter of a member of the local gentry, and her sister, emerged from their house to see what was going on.40 Both sisters claimed to

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have helped to separate the brawling males, and were subsequently seen by another witness supporting the injured tax collector Paisant along the village street. For the romantics, the parish registers for Plumetot for 24 May 1709 record amongst those required to pay a levée for the subsistence of the poor, ‘Catherine de Fierville, widow Paisant’.41 In this episode we catch a glimpse of why so many other disputes may never have reached the courts. Martin Paisant’s uncle, who also happened to be the parish priest for Hermanville, approached the defendants with a proposition. On behalf of his nephew, he initially demanded 200 pounds compensation not to pursue the matter further. He reduced the sum gradually to 26 pounds, but the accused refused to pay more than medical expenses. It was this failure of local negotiations which precipitated the matter into the royal courts. Women also appeared in rural taverns both as patrons and as management. It may have been less the cider which attracted them than the dancing. In July 1677 a large group of villagers from Basly, most in their late teens or early twenties, attended a cabaret in Anguernay.42 It was probably the celebration of a mixed Catholic-Protestant marriage such as the Reformed Consistory of Basly repeatedly complained of in its registers.43 Two young men from rival families began fighting over ‘the honours of the dance’. The tavern keeper claimed that both young men were drunk at the time, and fearing some disorder moved the dancers from the courtyard into the house. In no time the dancers were back in the courtyard, where further punches were thrown. Once again it was the young women, according to witnesses, who struggled to separate the brawling youths, though the plaintiffs insisted that several young women had also been involved in the fight. Women were sometimes noted on the managerial side of tavern life. In Rots, a few kilometres from Caen, a widow continued to run what must have been a busy cabaret after her husband’s death in 1680. The wife of Marc Auber who ran the tavern in Beuville in 1695, was not named, but her presence, and the presence of female servants in taverns, points to a silent power exercised by women in these establishments. In August 1695 Auber’s wife had pitched in with her husband on at least one occasion to separate brawling males, and was knocked to the ground for her efforts. Earlier in May, Auber had brandished a staff at a quarrelsome patron, insisting that he and his wife should leave his cabaret immediately. But Auber and his wife were not typical in taking a firm hand with unruly patrons, at least in the villages around Caen. Thomas Brennan observes that in eighteenth

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century Paris, tavern owners were effectively powerless in dealing with raucous customers, and that it was usually their patrons who ejected the troublemakers.44 While the raucous behaviour of clients can sometimes be read as a ritual part of sociability, it is important to remember that occasionally the chemistry of drinking was enough in itself to produce violent behaviour. In 1657 in the town of La Fouliade in the Auvergne, Bernard de Conquans’ behaviour lurched out of control.45 Conquans, an outof-towner, had been in and out of Anthoine Garde’s tavern all day drinking with a friend. The two men went upstairs to the bedroom of the house where Conquans became very drunk. When the landlord’s pregnant wife Anne Girou went upstairs to present their bill, Conquans lost it. Becoming very angry, he called her a whore and a stinking carcass, denied drinking anything and threatened to kill her. Other patrons forced him outside but he returned with further threats and abuse, drawing a pistol, and when that was taken from him, a sword. Thrown out again by a couple of local farmers, Conquans began throwning stones at the pregnant woman. He had been drinking wine, which in the south of France was often diluted with water, but in sufficient quantities, it could still diminish control in a belligerent customer. Sharing cider, and sometimes bread or bacon, along with music and the pleasures of dancing in a village cabaret in seventeenth century France provided much more than simply a setting for collective conviviality. These drinking establishments were settings for rituals crucial to the sociability of village life, rituals which involved family affiliations, friendship networks, the ethics of drinking circles, religious allegiances, personal honour, the etiquette of commerce, respect for age and deference to authority. All of this had to be negotiated and learned as part of the experience of male sociability, and to a lesser extent female sociability as well. If women used tavern space more diffidently than men, it was almost certainly because they used other spaces, like the spinning bee, more confidently for their own rituals of social grooming. Whatever the collective life of these village communities was all about, it could form, dissolve and re-form with giddy speed. Taverns and cabarets offered male villagers spaces for constantly testing and reworking the rules which governed male sociability, and the boundaries of social interaction. Young men had to learn those rules and test and prove those boundaries as an extension of what they had already experienced in the spinning bees, only now they were becoming men.

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Notes 1. W. B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979). 2. T. Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 153. 3. Brennan notes that by the 1690s the word taverne had vanished from popular vocabularies, ibid., p. 81. 4. Archives départementales du Calvados (hereafter ADC) 1B 1290 Paisant. 5. For an example of what could happen when the tax collector turned up in a drinking establishment in 1662; see ADC 1B 1284A. 6. ADC C 1561 Déliberations du consistoire de Basly. 7. Brennan remarks: ‘The police also complained of wine cellars selling à bouchon, that is by putting a branch over their door. The sign denoting a drinking shop had been universal in the Middle Ages but by the eighteenth century “ordinary cabarets” had signs like any other shop’, Public Drinking and Popular Culture, p. 88. 8. E. Le Roy Ladurie, ‘In Normandy’s Woods and Fields’, in The Territory of the Historian, trans. B. Reynolds and S. Reynolds (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), pp. 139–42. 9. Ibid., pp. 139–40. 10. Ibid., p. 139. 11. See G. Vanel, Caen: Une grande ville aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 2 vols (Caen: Jouan, 1910), vol. 1, pp. 328–9. In 1662 there was an accident in Caen involving a cart and a barrel of vin huet d’Argences as it was being transported by a local wine merchant: ADC 1B 1284a Le Butor. 12. J. Cashmere, ‘The Social Uses of Violence in Ritual: Charivari or Religious Persecution?’, European History Quarterly, XXI, 3 (1991) 291–319. 13. N. Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 97. 14. Archives départementales de la Loire (hereafter ADL) B781 assemblée illicite. 15. ‘le curé grand et noir rire le monde’, ADL B 781. 16. See for example the André Peyretier episode in Cashmere, ‘The Social Uses of Violence in Ritual’, p. 296. 17 écots, ADC 1B 2100 (Cardine v Berthelemy) (Cardine v Michel) (Du Puys v Cardine & Biron). 18. Knowing the ages of the participants is crucial to distinguishing generations. 19. M. Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food (Mass./Oxford: Maldon, 1992 (1987)), p. 389. 20. Cotgrave records the meaning of this abusive epithet in 1695 as ‘Froward, contrarie, crosse, unsociable’, placing the stress on behaviour rather than appearance; R. Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the English and French Tongues (London: Adam Islip, 1614). 21. The negotiation of these local settlements kept many cases like this out of the courts. Sometimes those perceived to be independent like the parish curate were charged with the negotiations; see ADC 1B 1290 Paisant. 22. ‘A ta santé, Matrune’. I take matrune to be a rendering of matrone or in English in its perjorative sense something like ‘fat old bag’ or ‘hag’. 23. See Vanel, Caen: une grande ville, vol. 1, p. 258, n. 1.

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24. ADC C1553, 1 February 1671. 25. Brennan, Public Drinking, p. 55; See also ADC 1B 1319b (Quesnel), 1B 1330a (de Bled), 1B 2926 (d’Esterville). 26. ‘Le 20 juin 1696, b. de Charlotte, fille sortie des oeuvres de Jacques Biron et de Marie Michelle, tous deux de la R.P.R’, ADC E. supp. 523 [Courseulles (Creully)]. 27. ADC 1B 1331b. 28. I have not come across teenagers younger than 18 in taverns as patrons. 29. A. Galland, Essai sur l’histoire du protestantisme à Caen et en Basse-Normandie de l’édit de Nantes à la Révolution (1598–1791) (Paris: Grassart, 1898), pp. 265–6. 30. Ibid., p. 273. 31. Archives départementales du Calvados, E supp. 523. 32. ADC E. supp. 1223 Rots (Tilly-sur-Seules). 33. ADC 1B 1330 La Londe. 34. ADC 1B 1330 Auber. 35. ‘qu’il avoit tort d’insulter un homme de l’age dud. proposant qui ne luy faisoit aucun tort’. 36. ADC 1B 1330 La Porte. 37. Brennan, pp. 146–8. 38. Ibid. 39. This was a burden Paisant was to bear until 1690 (ADC E. supp. 731). 40. ADC 1B 1290 Paisant. 41. Ibid. 42. ADC 1B 1289(a) Moisson. 43. ADC C1561 Déliberations du consistoire de Basly. 44. Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture, pp. 306–7. 45. ADL 16B 212 (Gardes, 1657).

Further reading T. Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). D. Gefou-Madianou (ed), Alcohol, Gender and Culture (London: Routledge, 1992). M. P. Holt (ed), Alcohol: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2006). B. Kümin and B. A. Tlusty (eds), The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe (London: Ashgate, 2002).

7 The Reform of Popular Drinking in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe A. Lynn Martin

In late medieval and early modern Europe alcoholic beverages had a variety of functions that reveal their role was more important than it is today. Alcohol in the form of wine, ale, and beer was a necessary component of most people’s diet – not as important as bread, but in the words of an Italian historian of ‘prima ma non primissima necessità’ – ‘prime but not primest necessity’.1 Alcohol was also a fundamental part of the medical pharmacopeaia. Not only did doctors recommend it for all manner of ailments, but it was also the most common solvent or menstruant for ingredients in medicines. Finally, because of its role in recreational drinking alcohol was the ubiquitous social lubricant. This last function as a social lubricant attracted the attention of reformers. Political and religious authorities and the so-called middling and better sorts of people wanted alcoholic beverages to be not quite so ubiquitous. Because of alcohol’s important functions during this period complete abstinence was unthinkable. As forcefully stated by John Calvin, ‘We are nowhere    forbidden to drink wine.’2 Temperance movements that advocated complete abstinence would have to wait until the nineteenth century, when safe alternatives to alcohol such as tea and coffee became widely available. Instead of advocating abstinence the reformers attacked excessive drinking leading to drunkenness; they would have agreed with John Selden’s aphorism: ’Tis not the drinking is to be blamed, but the excess.’3 Excess and moderation were, like Shakespeare’s beauty, in the eye of the beholder; the regulations of the Order of Temperance established in Hesse in 1600 required its members to drink no more than seven glasses of wine with each meal.4 The reformers focused their attention on popular drinking or plebeian drinking, that is, drinking by the lower classes. Although 121

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recreational drinking remained a popular pastime among all classes, the primary concern of the reformers was drinking by peasants and agricultural workers, apprentices and artisans, beggars and vagabonds. The best illustration of the class bias of this concern comes from the debates in the English Parliament over the introduction of laws against drunkenness in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Many speakers expressed their concern that ‘the son of a good man’ or ‘men of best quality’ might face detention and whipping as a result of the proposed legislation and therefore sought amendments in the legislation to avoid the possibility of this happening.5 Inseparable from the campaign against drunkenness was the campaign against taverns and alehouses. Although the historical records do not mention ‘dens of iniquity’, the terminology employed indicates comparable connotations. Taverns and alehouses were nests of Satan; the devil’s chapels, churches, and schoolhouses; schools of drunkenness and violence; nurseries of all riot, excess and idleness; ‘secrett dennes for Theeves, Cheaters and such like’; ‘receptacles of all manner of baseness and ludenesse’; and ‘rowsey rakehells’. A good example of the campaign against alehouses and popular drinking comes from Keith Wrightson’s article ‘Alehouses, Order and Reformation in Rural England, 1590–1660’. Wrightson begins by discussing the important role of ale in the diets of the poor and the important role of the alehouse in popular or lower-class culture and then proceeds to analyse the campaign against the alehouse. According to Wrightson, the causes of the attack were ‘a growing concern with public order   ; the development of novel attitudes towards the poor; and a religious hostility focused    upon certain features of contemporary manners’.6 Elsewhere Wrightson claims, ‘it can be asserted without exaggeration that at the level of the local community, the struggle over the alehouses was one of the most significant social dramas of the age’.7 ‘The Reform of Popular Drinking’ of my title is an adaptation of a concept developed by the historian Peter Burke. In his book Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe Burke launches the phrase ‘the reform of popular culture’. Burke uses Peter Bruegel’s painting ‘The Combat between Carnival and Lent’ (1559) to illustrate what he means by the phrase. Carnival represented popular or plebeian culture with its ‘stress on the values of generosity and spontaneity and a greater tolerance of disorder’. Lent on the other hand represented the culture of the middling and better sort, both Catholic and Protestant, with its stress on the values of ‘decency, diligence, gravity, modesty, orderliness, prudence, reason, self-control, sobriety,    thrift’, and hard work. In other words, Bruegel’s

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painting was a metaphor for the concerted attempts to reform popular culture that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Burke gives short shrift to earlier attempts at reform; he states, ‘The medieval reforms were essentially sporadic efforts by individuals. They were unlikely either to spread far or to last long.’8 While Burke’s analysis attempts to clarify the chronology of the reform of popular culture, the work of Gregory Austin attempts to clarify the geography of the reform of popular drinking. In his encyclopaedic survey of Alcohol in Western Society from Antiquity to 1800 Austin devotes considerable attention to the reform of popular drinking in England, the Netherlands, and Germany. Italy forms a special case, according to Austin, as a result of the sobriety of Italians. Austin cites the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini and the testimony of travellers such as Michel de Montaigne to demonstrate this point, and instead of documenting efforts to reform popular drinking he notes the prescriptions of temperance contained in Baldessare Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528) and Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1558).9 As for the French, they form an intermediate category between the sober Italians and the drunken English, Dutch, and Germans. Austin mentions the concerns of a few French moralists, but he asserts that, ‘Drunkenness is not seen as a major problem among the peasantry   , and inebriety itself is not a major social concern in France.’10 In addition to the chronology and geography of the reform of popular drinking, another consideration is the changing nature of the attitude toward drunkenness. As early as the seventh century ecclesiastical authorities considered drunkenness a sin, a sin attracting a penance of 15 days.11 The medieval canonists included it with gluttony in the list of the seven deadly sins,12 and drunkenness attracted the attention of ecclesiastical courts.13 Medieval preachers moreover condemned drunkenness as ‘the mother of vices’, for it led to other sins – adultery, fornication, incest (as illustrated by the biblical account of Lot and his daughters), blasphemy, gambling, robbery, theft, and murder.14 Apparently, attitudes toward drunkenness underwent a transformation in the early modern period, a transformation best illustrated by English Puritans. The new attitude still contained the element of sin, a sin leading to other sins, but as indicated by Keith Wrightson’s analysis of the reform of alehouses the new attitude reflected the ideology of nascent capitalism by demonstrating a concern for the social, economic, and political ramifications of excessive drinking. Drunkenness resulted in idleness, in the economic ruin of drunkards, and in the misery of their families. Alcohol likewise was a threat to that great obsession of the early modern state – public order. The old and new elements are

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evident in the preamble to the English law against drunkenness enacted in 1606: ‘The loathsom and odious Sin of Drunkenness is of late grown into common Use within this Realm, being the Root and Foundation of many other enormous Sins, as Bloodshed, Stabbing, Murder, Swearing, Fornification, Adultery, and such like, to the great Dishonour of God, and of our Nation, the Overthrow of many good Arts and manual Trades, the Disabling of Divers Workmen, and the general Impoverishing of many good Subjects, abusively wasting the good Creatures of God.’15 In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England the sin of drunkenness continued to concern ecclesiastical courts,16 but the crime of drunkenness attracted the attention of secular courts. People from all classes could commit the sin of drunkenness, but authorities regarded the crime of drunkenness in a manner that was class specific. All of this work by other historians thus results in certain expectations concerning the chronology, geography, and reasons for the attempts to reform popular drinking. The evidence, however, does not support the expectations. The medieval reforms were not ‘sporadic efforts by individuals’; they were widespread and persistent. The special case of Italy was not all that special, French authorities did regard drunkenness as a major problem, and inebriety was a major social concern in France. Medieval and Catholic authorities and moralists were just as concerned as English Puritans about the social, economic, and political effects of popular drinking. Medieval legislation against drinking was likewise class specific. In late medieval England excessive drinking attracted the attention of preachers, ecclesiastical authorities, local magistrates, and the central government. The burlesque treatment of drunkards in English literature that climaxed in Shakespeare’s Falstaff was the product of a tradition going back to medieval preachers. Drunkards were the subject of satire and ridicule in the medieval sermon; they saw two candles when there was only one, they mistook trees for robbers, they counted four children instead of two and consequently accused their wives of adultery, and when a priest came to administer the last rites, they asked, ‘Has the priest brought me some good ale?’17 Not just sermons ridiculed the drunkard; in the fourteenth century William Langland described what happened to Gluttony after he drank a gallon of ale in The Vision of Piers Plowman: He pissed four pints in the space of a Paternoster, And blew the round bugle at his backbone’s end So that all who heard that horn held their noses, And wished that he had bunged it with a bunch of whins.18

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In his ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ Geoffrey Chaucer produced a similarly unflattering portrait: O drunkard, how disfigured is thy face, How foul thy breath, how filthy thy embrace!19 Medieval sermons also criticised drunkenness for its social, political, and economic effects, not only on the individual but also on the nation as a consequence of the dissipation of wealth and the accompanying idleness and disorder. The fourteenth-century Dominican friar John Bromyard warned drunkards of excessive drinking: ‘Let them beware of the impoverishment of worldly goods that so often follows from it in this life.’ According to another preacher, ‘of drunkenesse cometh warre, pestilence and hunger’,20 and the theologian John Wyclif argued that poor workers should not spend all their money on drinks on holy days.21 In addition to the criticisms and the warnings of the religious authorities, the theme appeared in popular literature; The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools, a fifteenth-century poem, described the economic ruin of a carpenter at an alehouse despite the efforts of his tools to help him earn money. The carpenter would always spend more on his drinks than his whetstone, axe, adze, plane, and hammer could help him earn.22 Rather than relying on sermons and other prescriptive literature to reform popular drinking, religious and political authorities adopted a proactive approach. For example, in 1366 the Archbishop of Canterbury instructed the rectors, vicars, and parish chaplains to make frequent exhortations to persuade their parishioners to abide by his prohibition of drinking bouts.23 In the next century local authorities forbade the practice of holding ‘bid-ales’ that assisted people down on their luck by brewing and selling ale for their benefit.24 According to Marjorie Keniston McIntosh in her work on Havering, such attempts at social control were features of late medieval English communities long before the arrival of Puritan ideology.25 As early as 1379 authorities at Thornbury, Gloucestershire, were prosecuting ale sellers for their encouragement of disorderly behaviour.26 At the level of central government England had a long tradition of legislation designed to control various aspects of alcohol production, distribution, and consumption, including statutes against disorder and excessive drinking.27 During the reign of Henry VII in 1495, 100 years before the English Puritan assault on excessive drinking and alehouses, Parliament passed the Beggars Act permitting justices of the peace to suppress ‘common ale selling’ and to require alehouse keepers to provide bonds for good behaviour.28

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Across the channel in France political and religious authorities at both the local and national level similarly demonstrated concern and backed their concerns with action. Royal regulation of taverns and drinking went back as far as the reign of St Louis. In an attempt to control the disorder, violence, and crime associated with taverns, in 1256 he banned the sale of wine for consumption at taverns to all except travellers.29 Despite the ephemeral nature of many royal edicts, this ban did not come to a definitive end until 1670 when the royal council decreed the prohibition of selling wine to local residents applied only during hours of divine service on Sundays and other holy days.30 In 1354, not quite 100 years after St Louis issued the ban, the royal council reinforced it with another edict that prohibited workers from visiting and drinking in taverns on working days as a result of the belief that lower-class patronage of taverns promoted idleness.31 At the end of the century in 1398 Parisian officials further reinforced the prohibition with another ordinance specifically directed at workers and the poor who haunted taverns.32 Early in the sixteenth century King Francis I responded to drunken disorders in Britanny by punishing drunkenness with imprisonment on bread and, appropriately, water and threatening repeat offenders with whippings, banishment, and the amputation of ears.33 Royal officials expressed their concerns about drunkenness and taverns, often in terms that would have struck a familiar chord with English Puritans. Laffemas, economic adviser to Henry IV, condemned his fellow countrymen for their drunkenness in treatises published in 1596 and 1600. According to Laffemas, drunkenness very often resulted in the ruin of households and families. Similarly, Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, considered wine a ‘great obstacle to work’ and condemned the idleness of the tavern.34 Wherever scholars have examined local archives in France, they often find documentation of similar concerns by local authorities. For example, Guy Cabourdin notes that in Lorraine all levels of government enacted a ‘multiplicity of measures’ to control drinking.35 Many of the complaints of local authorities included elements that echoed the social and economic concerns of English Puritans. Magistrates from Ervy claimed in 1576 that men were wasting their money in taverns, ‘abandoning their wives, children, and family to die from hunger, and in that place they undertake conspiracies, murders, and other crimes with infinite blasphemies against the honour of God’.36 In 1581 the police bureau of Nantes complained the ‘artisans and craftspeople of the town and faubourgs    pass the greater part of working days in taverns, gambling and getting drunk, rather than everyone sticking to

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his work to gain his living and serve the public and individuals’.37 Another complaint from another town stated, ‘Most of the craftsmen in the town    are so dissipated that they never leave the inns and taverns either by night or by day. They sit there squandering their assets and all the income they are able to win by their labours and industry. The result is that most of their families are on the verge of starvation.’38 Not to be outdone by the royal government and local magistrates, religious authorities pleaded, prohibited, and penalised. The Synod of Rouen in 1235 imposed three days of penance for excessive drinking that resulted in vomit.39 A common theme in sermons was the condemnation of those who profaned holy days by drinking; many theologians were so exasperated by the practice that they argued the church should reduce the number of feast days to give people fewer occasions for drunkenness, and one bishop refused absolution to those who drank on the feast day of their patron saint.40 In addition to the condemnation of festive drinking and drunkenness, some religious authorities condemned drinking and drunkenness in general. In the fifteenth century preachers in the province of Artois attacked the population of towns for their drunkenness,41 and in the seventeenth century officials of the Company of the Holy Sacrament complained of the scandalous behaviour of drunkards in the taverns of Grenoble.42 A priest in Limousin blamed a poor vintage and subsequent rise in the price of wine on the drunken antics of the locals; ‘Their constant drinking and blasphemy vexed our good Lord so greatly that the wine which was once so abundant has become extremely dear.’43 Not to be outdone by the Catholics, Calvinist consistories in Languedoc attacked drinking on Sundays and the frequenting of taverns.44 When religious authorities attacked excessive drinking, they often followed the medieval tradition of condemning drunkenness for being the gateway to other sins. A good example is the anonymous author of the religious drama Le mystère de la résurrection, written in 1456, who catalogued the sins resulting from too much wine: ‘murders, thefts and crimes, beatings and other misdeeds, suspicion and envy, dishonourable and dissolute games, gluttony and lusts, secrets revealed, promises broken, trouble and slander’. However, the author also noted the social and economic effects of wine: ‘it makes lazy workers waste their time when there are still jobs to be done, and for many it consumes their wealth, which results in the crying of wives and children’.45 One of the more explicit medieval manifestations of the ideology of nascent capitalism was De Novis Celebritatibus, written in 1413 by Nicolas de Clamanges. He hoped to convince people that wasting time and money

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in taverns was folly; they should apply themselves instead to the values of industry, frugality, and temperance. Significantly, when Clamanges attacked the ‘detestable excesses’ committed on holy days in taverns, he argued that the church should reduce the number of holy days so that people would work; instead of haunting taverns they would prune their vines and plant their crops.46 A fourteenth-century Parisian warned his young wife about the dangers of taverns: ‘The tavern is the devil’s church, where his disciples go to serve him and where he does his miracles.’47 Political and religious authorities would concur with the warning. Taverns served customers on Sundays and holy days; instead of acting with the piety and devotion appropriate to such days sinners became drunk, blasphemed the Holy Name of God, and participated in obscene activities. Men dissipated their earnings and their time there while their wives and children went hungry at home. Taverns were haunts of criminals, who took refuge there after committing their crimes; they congregated in gangs, recruited new members, exchanged information, plotted new crimes, and sold stolen property. Prostitutes circulated among the clientele seeking customers, counterfeiters passed fake money, traitors schemed, and professional gamblers engaged the gullible in games with loaded dice. Brawls and fights broke out with the tavern keepers come time to pay and with strangers or with friends as a result of insults and slanders or for no reason at all. After a night at a tavern men went home with bloodied faces as a result of the fights, or without cloaks and caps as a result of fraud or dissipation. Such were the characteristics of the devil’s church.48 A similar pattern emerges south of the Alps; as already noted, Italy was not a special case. The condemnations of drunkenness and drinking establishments in Italy and the subsequent efforts to reform popular drinking did not match those in France or England, but they were nonetheless significant, as illustrated by the well-documented case of Florence. Beginning in the thirteenth century Florentine officials attempted to restrict drinking by the poor; their simple but effective method of accomplishing this was to require taverns to sell wine in such large quantities that the poor could not afford to purchase it.49 In 1339 the government turned its attention to the disorder associated with taverns when it banned them from operating within a mile of the city’s wall, claiming ‘many people of different manners come there day and night and gamble, and beyond this they do many disgusting and illegal things, and these taverns    are dens of thieves, gamblers, and dishonest and evil men’.50 Like other Italian governments,

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Florence also forbade taverns to operate near churches or other sacred sites; in the fourteenth century authorities stipulated a distance of 300 braccia or ‘arms’.51 Officials went further in 1528 and closed all taverns, believing the sins committed in them angered God.52 The taverns eventually reopened only to be the subject of moral indignation again in 1588, when the preachers of Florence with the support of Grand Duke Ferdinand mounted a concerted campaign against the taverns of the city. According to a contemporary account, ‘Almost every day the preachers, especially at the Duomo, railed against the taverns of our city, Florence. They said that the taverns are, if not absolutely, then generally the ruin of our young men and boys, and that it would be excellent to get rid of them.’53 The combined effect of these measures would have been to put pressure on tavern keepers to control disorderly drinking establishments and their customers. Reinforcing the measures were prosecutions and fines for violating curfews, gambling, receiving stolen property, and procuring.54 Other Italian governments enacted similar policies in an effort to control the potential for disorder in drinking establishments. The policy in Chioggia, a small town in Venice’s lagoon, was effective in its simplicity; authorities permitted only three taverns to operate.55 Venice waged a long battle against illegal taverns that operated without licenses from boats, the furatole, with punishments including fines and the confiscation and destruction of property.56 In 1316 Venetian authorities banned prostitutes from working in taverns, and when this proved impossible to enforce they issued another one preventing prostitutes from congregating at taverns in Piazza San Marco. In their attempts to control sodomy they instructed the night watch to search taverns for evidence of homosexual activity.57 When gambling dens proliferated throughout Venice in the early fourteenth century with proprietors luring young men with wine, officials banned games of dice in the city, in the duchy, and in the entire Venetian empire.58 As in France, ecclesiastical authorities attacked the drinking that accompanied holy days, as did the synods at Bologna in 1566 and at Ferrara in 1612.59 At Milan Carlo Borromeo complained of the drunkenness that accompanied the traditional May Day celebrations in an attack comparable to the English Puritan Philip Stubbes’ oft-cited attack on the same celebrations.60 While Baldessare Castiglione and Giovanni della Casa counselled temperance, other Italians issued warnings and condemnations that developed the same themes as those developed by French and English writers. Foremost among such themes were warnings about and condemnations of taverns. Just as the French considered the tavern to be the

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devil’s church, so also did San Bernardino of Siena. One of his sermons delivered in 1425 contrasted the tavern’s swindlers with vicars, its drunkards with parishioners, its gamblers with priests, its prostitutes with nuns, and its pimps with cathedral officials. As befitting the devil’s church, the tavern celebrated an anti-mass; the sighs of losing gamblers corresponded to prayer, glasses of wine to the chalice, and coins to the host.61 Medieval poets warned those who haunted taverns: Leave the tavern, attend church, If you want eternal life, and, If you frequent the tavern, You will lose your money there.62 Similarly, Paolo da Certaldo, a fourteenth-century Florentine, warned people to stay away from taverns in his Libro di Buoni Costumi. According to Certaldo, the tavern was a very evil place where gluttons engaged in brawls and plots and lost their money.63 Francesco Guicciardini praised Savonarola for closing the taverns because of their bad influence on young men.64 The haunting of taverns, especially by young men, was a practice condemned by parents of students attending the university at Bologna in the thirteenth century, by San Bernardino of Siena in the fifteenth century, and by members of Jesuit sodalities at Barletta in the sixteenth.65 Another theme, although less developed than the warnings about and condemnations of taverns was excessive drinking. The fifteenth-century Florentine poet Filippo Scarlatti attacked drunkards for their stupid behaviour: I do not say this for one or two, But in the evening I find a good fifty of them.66 In the seventeenth century Scipione Mercuri denounced the excessive consumption of spirits that he detected among lower-class Italians: ‘Such madcaps and so foolhardy are the lower orders, being without forethought or consideration, that men feel the urge to drink acquavite in the morning with such avidity and desire that they might be drinking celestial nectar.’67 The attempts to reform popular drinking demonstrate a remarkable similarity throughout the centuries and the countries. The

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methods, concerns, warnings, and condemnations were similar in medieval England, France, and Italy, Protestant England, and CounterReformation France and Italy. At all times and in all places the goals were to prevent drunkenness and to regulate drinking establishments. No one attempted to ban alcohol all together, but the aim was to produce a sober population and to prevent the disorders associated with recreational drinking. Instead of being a product of English Puritanism, the values of nascent capitalism were evident in the concerns of medieval authorities and in Counter-Reformation France and Italy, as officials and writers condemned the dissipation of wealth and the idleness of drunkards and the consequent misery of their families. For the reformers the culprit was the drinking establishment, and they raised a chorus of denunciation against alehouses and taverns. If alcohol was the ubiquitous social lubricant, alehouses and taverns were the ubiquitous venues of lubrication, as they replaced the church as the ‘third place’ after the home (first place) and work (second place). As elaborated by anthropologists, the third place is public space that is relatively secure, a place where people can gather, talk, relax, and socialise.68 As the third place and venue of recreational drinking, taverns and alehouses became centres of popular recreation and popular culture, much to the chagrin of the reformers. To return to Peter Burke’s words, the reformers promoted the values of ‘decency, diligence, gravity, modesty, orderliness, prudence, reason, selfcontrol, sobriety,    thrift’, and hard work, not the values inculcated in the devil’s church. Since the reform of popular drinking was one aspect of Burke’s reform of popular culture, the evidence does not support his denigration of medieval efforts, but he was right in claiming medieval reform movements were failures. The reform of popular drinking in the Middle Ages was a failure. However, it was also a failure in the sixteenth century, and it was a failure in the seventeenth century. The ubiquitous social lubricant remained ubiquitous.

Notes 1. Antonio Ivan Pini quoted in M. Montanari, L’alimentazione contadina nell’alto Medioevo (Naples: Liguori, 1979), p. 377. 2. Quoted in G. Harkness, John Calvin: The Man and his Ethics (New York: Abingdon, 1958), p. 160. 3. L. R. N. Ashley (ed), Elizabethan Popular Culture (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1988), p. 285. 4. G. A. Austin, Alcohol in Western Society from Antiquity to 1800: A Chronological History (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1985), p. 203.

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5. J. Kent, ‘Attitudes of Members of the House of Commons to the Regulation of “Personal Conduct” in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, XLVI (1973) 49–50. 6. K. Wrightson, ‘Alehouses, Order and Reformation in Rural England, 1590–1660’, in E. Yeo and S. Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), pp. 1–27, quotation on p. 11. 7. K. Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), p. 167. 8. P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper, 1978), pp. 213, 218; Chapter 8, ‘The Triumph of Lent: The Reform of Popular Culture’, pp. 208–43 for the complete argument. 9. Austin, Alcohol in Western Society, pp. 142, 149–50, 167, 178. 10. Ibid., pp. 152, 186–7, 198. 11. E. G. Baird, ‘The Alcohol Problem and the Law: I. The Ancient Laws and Customs’, Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, IV (1944) 545; Austin, Alcohol in Western Society, p. 87. 12. M. W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (East Lansing: State College Press, 1952), p. 147. 13. P. Hair (ed), Before the Bawdy Court: Selections from Church Court and other Records Relating to the Correction of Moral Offences in England, Scotland and New England, 1300–1800 (London: Elek, 1970), pp. 33, 251–2. 14. See the discussion in G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters and of the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), pp. 430–1. 15. Quoted in E. G. Baird, ‘The Alcohol Problem and the Law: II. The CommonLaw Bases of Modern Liquor Controls’, Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, V (1944) 144. 16. M. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 100. 17. Owst, Literature and Pulpit, pp. 425–31. 18. W. Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, trans. and ed. T. Tiller (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1981), p. 62. 19. G. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, trans. N. Coghill (Baltimore: Penguin, 1958), p. 263. 20. Owst, Literature and Pulpit, pp. 431–5; the quotations are from pages 432 and 434. 21. J. Wyclif, Select English Works, T. Arnold (ed) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1869–71), III, pp. 158–60. 22. The Debate of the Carpenters Tools, in W. Carew Hazlitt (ed), Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England (London: John Russell Smith, 1864), I, pp. 79–90. 23. H. A. Monckton, A History of English Ale and Beer (London: The Bodley Head, 1966), p. 64. 24. Ibid., pp. 81–2. 25. M. K. McIntosh, A Community Transformed: The Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 250.

A. Lynn Martin 133 26. M. K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 76. 27. Baird, ‘The Alcohol Problem and the Law: I’, p. 556. 28. R. F. Bretherton, ‘Country Inns and Alehouses’, in R. Lennard (ed), Englishmen at Rest and Play: Some Phases of English Leisure, 1558–1714 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), pp. 148–9. 29. Austin, Alcohol in Western Society, p. 94. 30. R. Dion, Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France des origines aux XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), pp. 488–9; J-C. Sournia, A History of Alcoholism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 18. 31. B. Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 32. 32. Dion, Histoire de la vigne et du vin, p. 493. 33. A. Franklin, ‘Moeurs et coutumes des parisiens’, in Journal du siége de Paris en 1590 (Paris: Léon Willem, Editeur, 1876), pp. 58–9. 34. Barthélémy de Laffemas according to Dion, Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France, p. 488; Bernard de Laffemas according to T. Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University, 1988), pp. 194–6. 35. G. Cabourdin, Terre et Hommes en Lorraine (1550–1635): Toulois et Comté de Vaudémont (Nancy: L’université de Nancy II, 1977), p. 708; For other examples see P. Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 16, 38–9; T. Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture, p. 282; J. B. Collins, Classes, Estates and Order in Early Modern Brittany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 20, 72, 101, 258, 280–1; R. Gascon, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe siècle: Lyon et ses marchands (environs de 1520-environs de 1580) (Paris: Mouton, 1971), pp. 385, 737; P. T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 141–2; E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 226; R. Sauzet, Contre-réforme et réforme catholique en Bas-Languedoc: Le diocèsede Nîmes au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1979), p. 274. 36. A. Babeau, Le village sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Didier, 1882), p. 228n. 37. Quoted from Collins, Classes, Estates and Order, p. 280. 38. Quoted from Y-M. Bercé, History of Peasant Revolts: The Social Origins of Rebellion in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 35. 39. Austin, Alcohol in Western Society, p. 87. 40. E. C. Rodgers, Discussion of Holidays in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), pp. 69, 101–2, 108; B. Chevalier, Les bonnes villes de France du XIVe au XVIe siècle (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982), p. 273; Y-M. Bercé, Fête et révolte: Des mentalités populaires du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1976), pp. 149–51. 41. R. Muchembled, ‘Les jeunes, les jeux et la violence en Artois au XVIe siècle’, in P. Ariès and J-C. Margoin (eds), Les jeux à la Renaissance (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982), p. 572. 42. K. Norberg, Rich and Poor in Grenoble, 1600–1814 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 36. 43. Quoted from Bercé, History of Peasant Revolts, p. 35.

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44. J. Estèbe and B. Vogler, ‘La genèse d’une société protestante: Etude comparée de quelques registres consistoriaux languedociens et palatins vers 1600’, Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations, XXXI (1976) 380. 45. Le mystère de la résurrection, P. Servet (ed) (Angers, 1456; Geneva: Droz, 1993), pp. 716, 720. 46. Rodgers, Discussion of Holidays, pp. 100–2; P. Adam, La vie paroissiale en France au XIVe siècle (Paris: Sirey, 1964), p. 262. 47. The Goodman of Paris (Le Ménagier de Paris): A Treatise on Moral and Domestic Economy by a Citizen of Paris (c. 1393), trans. and ed. E. Power (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1928), p. 84. 48. C. de Pizan, A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies, trans. and intro. C. C. Willard; ed. and intro. M. P. Cosman (New York: Bard Hall, 1989), p. 210; Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture, p. 282; A. Cowell, At Play in the Tavern: Signs, Coins, and Bodies in the Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 121, 229; E. Faral, La vie quotidienne au temps de Saint Louis (Paris: Hachette, 1938), pp. 76–7; C. Gauvard, ‘De Grace Especial’: Crime, état et société à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: Publications de La Sorbonne, 1991), p. 803n; Geremek, The Margins of Society, pp. 279–80; Norberg, Rich and Poor in Grenoble, p. 36. 49. E. Fiumi, ‘Economia e vita privata dei fiorentini nelle rilevazioni statistiche di Giovanni Villani’, Archivio Storico Italiano, CXI (1953) 233. 50. D. Balestracci, ‘Il consumo del vino nella Toscana bassomedievale’, in Il vino nell’economia e nella società italiana Medioevale e Moderna (Florence: Accademia economico-agraria dei Georgofili, 1988), I, p. 21. 51. D. Balestracci, ‘La produzione e la vendità del vino nella Toscana medievale’, in F. M. García (ed), Vino y viñedo en la Europa medieval (Pamplona: Alfonso López de Corella, 1996), p. 52; L. Paronetto, Chianti: The History of Florence and its Wines (London: Wine and Spirit Publications, 1970), pp. 26, 31. 52. R. C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic, 1980), p. 350. 53. Agostino Lapini’s Diario fiorentino dal 252 al 1596, quoted from R. F. E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic, 1982), p. 203. 54. M. S. Mazzi, Prostitute e lenoni nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1991), p. 271 and n. 48; G. Cherubini, ‘La taverna nel basso medioevo’, in Il lavoro, la taverna, la strada: Scorci di medioevo (Naples: Liguori Editore, 1997), p. 209; C. Caduff, ‘I “publici latrones” nella città e nel contado di Firenze a metà trecento’, Ricerche storiche, XVI (1988) 516 and n. 59; M. Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 160. 55. R. J. Goy, Chioggia and the Villages of the Venetian Lagoon: Studies in Urban History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 25. 56. E. Crouzet-Pavan, ‘Sopra le acque salse’: Espaces, pouvoir et société à Venise à la fin du Moyen Age (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1992), pp. 309, 861–2; R. Mackenney, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250-c. 1650 (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 147–8. 57. E. Pavan, ‘Police des moeurs, société et politique à Venise à la fin du Moyen Age’, Revue historique, CCLXIV (1980) 243–54, 270–1.

A. Lynn Martin 135 58. Crouzet-Pavan, Sopra le acque salse, p. 857; see D. Chambers and B. Pullan (eds), Venice: A Documentary History, 1450–1630 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), p. 129. 59. P. Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 136. 60. J. Delumeau, La mort des pays de cocagne: Comportement collectifs de la Renaissance à l’âge classique (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1976), p. 118. 61. Cherubini, ‘La taverna nel basso medioevo’, p. 204. 62. R. Soriga, ‘La vite e il vino nella letteratura e nelle figurazioni italiane del medievo’, in A. Marescalchi and G. Dalmasso (eds), Storia della vite e del vino in Italia (Milan: n.p., 1933), pp. 157, 160. 63. P. da Certaldo, Libro di buoni costumi, A. Schiaffini (ed) (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1945), pp. 133–4. 64. Storie Fiorentine, in J. B. Ross and M. M. McLaughlin (eds), The Portable Renaissance Reader (New York: Viking, 1953), p. 649. 65. Cherubini, ‘La taverna nel basso medioevo’, pp. 219–20; B. Pullan, A History of Early Renaissance Italy from the Mid-Thirteenth to the Mid-Fifteenth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 335; L. Chatellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 25. 66. A. Lanza (ed), Lirici toscani del quattrocento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1973–75), II, 565. 67. P. Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 138. 68. D. B. Heath, Drinking Occasions: Comparative Perspectives on Alcohol and Culture (Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel, 2000), pp. 50–1.

Further reading P. Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200–1830 (London: Longmans, 1983). M. Holt (ed), Alcohol: A Social and Cultural Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2006). A. L. Martin, Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

8 ‘Beer, Women and Grub’: Pubs, Food and the Industrial Working Class Diane Kirkby

Historians know little about the food history and especially the eating out customs of the industrial working class. Most studies focus on diet and the quality of the food eaten in households or institutions.1 Yet for many workers in late nineteenth and early twentieth century industrialising cities, eating away from home was a necessity, done during the working day, of food that was purchased at street stalls, or the local pub, tavern or saloon.2 Although primarily catering to the demand for alcoholic refreshment, public drinking venues thus also became important sources of food and sociable recreation. They provided meals that were both cheap and could be eaten quickly and in the evenings their dining rooms offered venues for special occasion dining. Thus one way to address this gap is through a focus on the important part licensed drinking venues, pubs, have played in the working-class history of eating out. Scholarly studies of pubs and taverns have concentrated on their role in selling alcohol and providing congenial spaces for working class recreation and political organising.3 They have not paid much attention to the pub’s role as provider of food. This was a development that gained momentum in the later decades of the nineteenth century with the emergence of an urban industrial working-class. It appears to be more significant in the new immigrant societies of the United States and Australia than in the older traditional societies of Europe and England, suggesting that the American saloon and the Australian pub had more in common with each other than they did with their English progenitor.4 So important did the provision of food become to pubs in Australia that in 1933 one applicant before a state Licensing Court claimed that being a good cook was a more important skill for a hotelkeeper than being able 136

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to pull beers. He went so far as to joke that the law should be amended to make it compulsory for every pub to have a good cook.5 This tradition began long before industrialisation but its trajectory took a new direction in the colonies where the industrial labour force was largely drawn from a mobile immigrant population. The important traditional pub function of providing food for travellers became one of providing food for workers. In doing so pubs also therefore became important places of work. This was particularly significant for women. The history of pubs, food and the industrial working class is intricately intertwined, and women are at its centre.

Inns and taverns In pre-industrial Europe, England and the United States, inns and hostelries were the principal providers of meals to travellers and itinerants.6 This they did in eating halls, and subsequently dining rooms that were not to be confused with restaurants. Inns, and in colonial New England taverns, offered regularly scheduled, fixed-price meals each noon, and in France, meals by means of a table d’hote, at a dictated hour, and at a communal table that required interaction with other diners.7 Restaurants, on the other hand, specialised in the provision of well-cooked food, on demand. They had their genesis in eighteenth century France as places where restorative bouillon could be drunk. ‘Thanks to their place at the intersection of medicine and diet, they marketed not just health, but taste and sensibility as well’ as they gradually evolved into places where restaurateurs (those who sold the restorative drinks) dispensed their trade. ‘It was as much its style of service as its menu of bouillons    that distinguished the restaurant from other, already existing eateries’, one historian has claimed.8 Restaurants, distinguished by use of a menu of items to select from, the option of service at any moment, intimate tables and private rooms, offered flexibility, particularised service, ‘the illusion of public privacy, of sociable idiosyncrasy, of individual taste’. Because they catered for the sickly, those needing restorative bouillon, ‘restaurants were obliged to use high-quality ingredients and to hire the most talented chefs’. Consequently they were likely to charge higher prices and attract customers of a particular kind, subtly blurring medical or physical need into social differentiation and taste.Their customers were not the working-class urban poor who could only watch ‘with hungry eyes’. Eating for taste and health was beyond their means and experience as the nineteenth century restaurant catered to sensibility not sustenance. Restaurant dining was ‘a fantasy

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[which] implicitly required the presence of somebody outside: some poor devil with his nose pressed to the window    or some group of young street urchins devouring their bread seasoned only by the savoury fumes emanating from a restaurant’s hard metal grate’.9 As in France so in England inns, not restaurants, catered to the need for sustenance but most travellers frequenting the inns were merchants or professionals, not the working-class agricultural labourers who of necessity ate away from home more than any other group. Their food was carried to the fields to sustain them throughout the day. When they ate for pleasure it was at the village fair, church festival, or ‘harvest homes’, only the more prosperous, or city workers bought from street vendors, cook-shops or the local alehouse.10 The alehouse, unlike the inn, catered for the local neighbourhood with freshly-brewed ale sold from the ale-wife’s own house.11 Food was occasionally also available when the ale-wife shared her household meal with strangers. By the late Middle Ages proper established alehouses were becoming more common, selling ‘not only drink on the premises but also probably food’. Over time alehouses gradually became known as public houses but their provision of refreshments to a predominately local clientele continued.12 In the early modern period alehouses became larger, more respectable, and catered to a more ‘moderately prosperous’ trade. They provided simple food – bread, buns and cheese, pies, or toasted bread and cheese steeped in ale – or customers could also have their own meat cooked and served by the landlord.13 Industrialisation disrupted this village life as it created large towns, drew labourers away from their village communities into factory labour and created a working-class living in poor housing or boarding-house accommodation. As strangers the working-class now met at the local public house for recreation after work.14 ‘Serving food was never regarded as one of the principal duties of the alehouse-keeper, as it was for the innkeeper, but its importance probably grew in the course of the early modern period. During the late eighteenth century demand for alehouse meals may have increased’ as cities grew and employees had to travel longer distances to work, servants no longer lived in their master’s houses or received food as part of their wages. Journeymen could stop at the public house to eat on the way to work or enjoy a midday meal in the taproom. Mostly this was simply bread and butter and cheese. In the early nineteenth century many poorer people could no longer afford to eat at the public house and landlords refused to cook their food or provide free food for them. Journeymen and labourers now could also eat at cook-shops (‘boiled meat and flour and pease puddings at a very reasonable rate’), small oyster,

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tripe and chop shops, or pastry shops (pies, tarts and gingerbread) which appeared on city streets and were opened at all hours, some of them also selling liquor.15 Pubs were central to the social lives of the working class and also operated as ‘houses of call’ for unemployed workers tramping from town to town. As they arrived in each new town and presented their membership card they would be served a small supper and beer, provided with a bed and breakfast and helped on their way.16 By this means public houses provided working men with meals and accommodation but it was for sustenance not principally pleasure. Gradually as workers’ wages increased, living standards improved, and time for leisure activities grew, eating out in the public house for recreation replaced the purely functional. Pubs provided simple, affordable, well-cooked food served in pleasant surroundings. In France and Italy the sociability of this new urban life was found in cafes which had been an institution since coffee – Le cafe – had been introduced into the European diet in the seventeenth century.17 A Sicilian, Francesco Procopio, is thought to be responsible for creating a special place for enjoying this new exotic drink, a place like an elegant drawing room, sparkling with mirrors, chandeliers, marble and gilding that ‘made traditional inns    seem old-fashioned’ and no longer desirable to the intelligentsia, the privileged and the political cliques of pre-revolutionary Paris18 Cafes were licensed to sell liquor and this was often accompanied by food. By the late eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century the urban industrial working-class was also enjoying café life, and women were an integral part.19 Women’s place in cafes and pubs was altered by changes in the interior design. When inns and alehouses were also the homes of the licensee, patrons were guests and refreshments were served by the host and the host’s family at long communal tables. Beer was carried from the cellar in large jugs and poured for the guests. This work was frequently done by women. As the science and trade of brewing grew in complexity and men replaced women as brewers, the work of serving beer in the inns and alehouses remained available to women.20 The introduction of counters in the early nineteenth century transformed this interior design of public houses and the relationships within them. Now guests were separated from their host by a large barrier and in turn they ceased to be guests and became customers. While elements of the old relationship remained for the licensee/owner of a public house catering for travellers, the rise of wage labour in towns and cities altered the employment experience of staff serving behind the bar. Having ‘an attractive

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maidservant was    an important asset for a house’, helpful in pulling in customers and doing work that was largely drudgery.21 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century this work in pubs became a distinct occupation, ‘barmaid’.22 French cafes similarly introduced a serving counter which profoundly altered café relations and the place of women. ‘Women at the counter, either as owner or as server, were at the very heart of café sociability’, historian Scott Haine has observed.23 The resemblance to barmaids in pubs was remarkable. Being a barmaid was a highly sex-specific occupation. Although men also worked in public houses as barmen, the skills required of each were differentiated. Women found ready employment if they were attractive and well-dressed and by the middle of the nineteenth century this was becoming the prime attribute.24 So too in French cafes. ‘By the 1840s, almost all writers [on] Parisian mores commented on the desirability, if not the necessity, of a pretty woman behind the counter    [and] the predominantly male clientele of the working-class café were reassured to have a woman behind the counter    serving food and drink.’25 Sometimes married couples ran cafes, and while the husband socialised with customers, the wife was often responsible for handling the financial aspects of the business, acting as manager, cashier and accountant.26 Yet in pubs the work itself was a superior form of domestic service and most of the women seeking work behind the bar were former domestic servants who saw the opportunity to improve their chances. The skills required of barmaids were even more akin to running a house as they kept the premises clean and catered to the wants of their thirsty ‘boys’.27 Bar work offered better wages than either domestic service or any other similar work. It was categorised as ‘unskilled’: it was not a trade but a service occupation and the skills required were those associated with other service occupations such as shop assistant. It also had attributes similar to the work of acting as the space behind the counter (the bar) became like a stage where the bar staff ‘performed’ their skills. At the close of the nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century, bar fixtures replicated the internal architecture – the mirrors, brass and gas lighting – of continental cafes. Victorian and Edwardian pubs of English and Scottish cities were luxuriously designed to frame and reflect the fantasy world which had ‘the barmaid’ at its centre.28 Mirrors, glass, polished brass, wood panelling and beautiful women tantalised and mimicked the world of the theatre and disguised the real work women had to do behind the bar. Long hours in stuffy, poorly ventilated, smokefilled rooms meant fatigue and poor health. Publicans themselves had

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the highest mortality rate of any employer group. Furthermore the work could be dangerous – from broken glass, slippery floors and violent customers.29 Many women café owners in France became widows when their husbands’ heavy drinking, an occupational hazard, led to their premature death.30

In the colonies The European model of tavern and public house was transported to the colonies and adapted for local needs. In the North American colonies taverns and inns perpetuated the characteristics of providing food and refreshment to travellers and sociable drinking venues in towns and cities. They were patronised by all ranks in society including the elites and intelligentsia and facilitated the spread of revolutionary ideas.31 In the post-revolutionary period drinking establishments became more differentiated by class differences. By the later decades of the nineteenth century the middle class were drinking in private clubs or homes and taverns and inns were superseded by saloons patronised by the working class as European immigrants arrived to provide the labour needed for industrialisation. In the towns and cities of the United States the saloon provided the working-class with the camaraderie of drinking with other workers, a venue for union meetings, and for cheap food.32 Cafes, diners and boarding-houses also provided cheap food until the emergence of chain restaurants and hamburger outlets in the mid-twentieth century.33 With the advent of prohibition on the sale of alcohol in 1920, saloons were closed down.34 On its repeal 13 years later the provision of liquor in bars and saloons was separated from the provision of food. Union restrictions also meant the work of serving alcohol was restricted to men.35 In the colonies of Australia (and New Zealand) the public house developed into a new distinctive entity as liquor licenses allowed pubs to serve spirits and wines as well as beer, and also required licensed premises to provide all the services to travellers which in England were provided by inns.36 By the turn of the twentieth century the majority of pubs were owned by or tied to the breweries which meant that beer (the German style lager beer) was the main alcohol served. In the Australian colonial version of the alehouse and tavern, ‘beer, women and grub’37 went together as licensing laws stipulated that before a license to retail liquor to urban as well as rural workers would be granted, pubs must provide meal and accommodation services for travellers, a category which now also included the mobile, itinerant working-class. Pubs thus provided food as well as liquor and the accommodation and meals requirements

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gave colonial women an opportunity for wage employment and business success. In the Australian colonies the demands of accommodating and refreshing travellers led to a distinctive style of public house while the absence of other forms of waged work (such as in manufacturing) made hotelkeeping a very attractive option for colonial women. Pubs flourished in country areas and cities alike and as the number of pubs proliferated, by 1890 running a hotel was the major avenue of selfemployment for women. This meant that young women working behind the bar could also expect to become licensees in their own right if they saved enough. It was a means to economic independence from wage labour and it gave women working there a certain autonomy. Wages in the colonies were high for barmaids who, compared to other women workers, were paid well and by the early twentieth century were organising into trade unions. In an industry that has always been heavily regulated changes in the licensing laws could affect the definition of the work and the conditions under which it was performed. Law also enabled the proportion of women in the trade to rise or fall. While the wage labour of barmaids was curtailed by legislation in some jurisdictions the number of women holding licenses or running pubs increased and by the mid-twentieth century the state of Victoria could boast it had more female publicans than anywhere else in the world.38 Pubs continued to be a major source of employment for women throughout the twentieth century not only in the bar but especially in the many housekeeping-related occupations – as domestic staff, cooks and waitresses in the kitchens and dining rooms.

The pub dining room Until the second half of the twentieth century (indeed before the 1970s according to historian John Burnett39 ) dining out for recreation and leisure was an unusual custom for ordinary workers, saved for special occasions when the dining-room of a hotel was the place they would go. In that era before milk bars, cafes and fast-food take-away, people – whether couples, families or groups – had little choice. It ‘was not only the proper place’ to eat away from home ‘but the sole one’ novelist Hal Porter recollected of his working-class youth in an Australian country town.40 All Australian pubs had dining rooms in order to meet their legal obligation to travellers and these dining-rooms lasted well into the twentieth century, but hotel dining rooms were not unique to Australia. Historian Richard Pillsbury recalled a similar experience growing up

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in the United States when his mother ‘would periodically attempt to civilize us and drag the family downtown so that we would learn how to eat in polite society at the Park Hotel. Mostly we learned to eat by ourselves, the occasional salesman and traveler being the only others who still dined at this anachronistic leftover from another time’ (Figure 8.1).41 Pub dining rooms provided dining that was formal, sometimes lavish and where service, not food, was important. They emphasised the specialness of the occasion and the status of the diners. They provided white tablecloths, silver service and waiters (male and female) all of which created an atmosphere of respectability and propriety. Hotel dining rooms of this formal kind were not restaurants but were scaleddown versions of the nineteenth century grand hotels, a tradition continuing from the age of great hotels in Europe and North America which had grown up in response to an increased affluent tourist class. For ordinary family dining ‘the hotel dining room was stuffy, cold and formal – much like the food’, Pillsbury recalled of his experience in small-town California, and Porter similarly found the hotel dining-room food of rural Victoria was ‘monotonous – boring and traditional’.42

Figure 8.1 Dining room at the Lakes Hotel, Tuggerah, New South Wales, ca.1941. From the Tooth and Co. collection of the Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Australian National University, Canberra. (Z223/157T)

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This was a consequence of the late nineteenth century temperance movement which had been very successful in closing down ‘unrespectable’ pubs and saloons. In Australia temperance did not lead to prohibition as it did in the United States but to the introduction of early closing which meant that for most of the twentieth century the importance of providing better quality food got pushed aside.43 Drinking returned a higher profit than food but now had to be limited to a short period of time. Still required by law to provide a minimum number of bedrooms and meals, which put a heavy burden on their running costs, pubs concentrated on the profitability of selling alcohol in the public bar, and offering food in their dining rooms so patrons could continue to drink beyond the early closing time. The consequence of making pubs ‘respectable’ was to make dining in them dull. What food patrons ate or how interesting it may have been was not the important consideration. Licensing laws thus ensured a demarkation line between pubs, which provided meals to accompany liquor refreshments, and restaurants, which provided quality food to their clientele but who were not licensed to serve liquor. This meant that in Australia pubs had almost a monopoly on the meal trade because of their liquor license. Licensing laws ensured pub dining room food had little competition from restaurants. The introduction of automobiles affected the frequency and nature of travel and made car trips for holidays and weekends a popular form of recreation. At first limited to the middle and upper classes, car travel led to new kinds of public houses being built along arterial roads, to offer catering to a travelling public. In England ‘reformed’ public houses provided wider facilities and refreshments and by the 1930s old refurbished inns were being joined by the new institution of the Road House, ‘an extension of the city nightclub into a rural environment’.44 As real incomes rose and working hours lessened, other new eating-out opportunities opened up for ordinary families, and manual workers. Most popular of all were beachside holidays in boarding lodges, unlicensed accommodations where families could either bring their own food to be cooked by the proprietor or pay full board.45

The pub lunch and counter meal Where the Australian pubs excelled in the mid-twentieth century was not in their dining rooms but in providing meals at the bar counter. This they did even more cheaply, quickly and informally than they did in the dining room. The custom began in the nineteenth century

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colonial period because of fierce competition for trade. At first colonial pubs provided bread and cheese for a small charge, which followed the practice of pubs in England, but they subsequently began providing food free of any charge and the type of food offered also grew, to a range of cold meats, a variety of sandwiches and biscuits in addition to the original bread and cheese. By the 1880s the practice was so widespread that everyone had to join in: those pubs in the most competitive districts having to provide huge plates of roast lamb, beef, turkey, goose and hot fried fish, salads, bread and cheese all at no cost to their lunchtime customers (Figure 8.2).46 In England the provision of free snacks from the bar did emerge following a decline in alcohol consumption as the temperance movement gained ground. In the first decade of the twentieth century brewery companies undertook refurbishment of their ‘tied houses’ in recognition that customers expected more from their pubs than just drinking. Free snacks were introduced or cheap food like potato pies, cheese and pickles were offered to accompany a pint of beer and some tobacco. A similar custom prevailed in the United States. There, breweries provided bulk purchases of meat, eggs, bread and vegetables to saloon-keepers in the

Figure 8.2 Newspaper illustration of a counter lunch being provided in the public bar by a city hotel in colonial Brisbane, from the Figaro, 11 August 1888, p. 87

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industrialised cities, and factory workers ‘stampeded to nearby saloons’ at mealtimes where lunch was provided free with the purchase of a glass of beer. The type of food provided depended on the ethnic mix of the neighbourhood. In German neighbourhoods in Chicago and New York bars served potato salad, sauerkraut, pickled herring and wienerwurst. In cities like San Francisco saloons served spaghetti and Italian bread, in New Orleans customers ate gumbo, and in other neighbourhoods saloons offered Mexican hot beans.47 Not surprisingly conflict ensued with the restaurant owners who disliked this unfair competition. In Chicago in 1903 restaurant owners began lobbying the Chicago City Council to put a stop to the practice, and they were supported by the Liquor Dealers’ Association.48 Some saloon-keepers thought it good publicity for the bar trade but like Australian publicans also found it burdensome to cover the cost of the food – from lunchtime meals to edibles at five o’clock – all for a pint of beer. In Australia costs were estimated to be about £3000 a year by some proprietors.49 Others complained about the unsavoury and unhygienic practices of eating: ‘After a few dozen dirty fists have been dug into a pot of public-house stew it must be indeed a queer mixture.’50 In the United States after 1910 these sanitary considerations took on greater strength as city health commissioners succeeded in removing dirty serving forks, covering food to keep off the flies and cleaning up other areas of the saloon (like the rest rooms). Liquor dealers’ associations (in Australia the Licensed Victuallers) took efforts to end the practice did not succeed however until World War One. The wartime cost of bread and food conservation programs brought an end to the free counter lunch: in Chicago when the City Council finally legislated a ban in 1917 and in Melbourne in 1918 when the brewers decided not to supply beer to any hotelkeeper who persisted with free lunches. The practice of the free counter meal was abandoned.51 The introduction of prohibition in 1920 meant the end of the saloon and any possibility of a counter meal for American drinkers. In Australia, however, the provision of food from the bar continued. For a small charge (one penny) Australian drinkers could have a hot pie, a cheese, fish or ham sandwich, or a hot saveloy with bread, provided the brewers who owned many of the pubs were assured that the charge covered the costs of the food.52 Cheap pub food was meeting a demand from customers wanting a hot meal but not wanting to eat in the dining room. The counter meal at the smaller pub particularly suited workers eating alone or in a group. By the 1930s it also assisted publicans feeling the downturn in trade during the years of the Great Depression when for

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the price of a glass of beer plus another threepence ‘the famished could eat their fill of bread, cheese, boiled mutton, or German sausage’.53 For the pub proprietors food was a way of attracting custom, but it was also a way of surviving the Australian licensing laws which continued to require hotels, even in the city or suburbs, to provide both food and accommodation in order to retail alcohol. Without food hotels became only drinking places which made them very vulnerable to being abolished by the Licenses Reduction Board.54 After World War Two many hotels once again started serving counter lunches despite opposition from the United Licensed Victuallers Association (ULVA) because hotel proprietors believed they were catering to public desires. The ULVA argued that the dining room was the proper place to eat, and that bars were for drinking only. Licensees regarded the provision of counter lunches as a way of building up goodwill with their customers who wanted to return to the system before the war. A typical meal then was steak and kidney pie which a customer could buy for a shilling.55 Some served food similar to that provided in their diningrooms for between one shilling and one shilling and threepence. Others sold quick meals for as little as sixpence or ninepence for which lucky customers had a ‘choice of sausages, tripe, rissoles or braised steak – all with vegetables’.56 The ULVA imposed a ban but it ‘just died’ as hotel proprietors instead responded to their customers. The ULVA capitulated and no longer objected to them being sold so long as it was for a profit. What began with the few very quickly accelerated. The provision of meals made pubs hospitable at a time when social custom and some state licensing laws made public bars off-limits to women. It is perhaps then no coincidence that in 1952 in the city and inner suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria, the state which at that time claimed the highest proportion of women licensees, more than half the pubs were serving counter lunches57 Many bigger hotels were selling attractive ‘leftovers’ from their dining rooms. So popular did the trade become for city workers that by the 1960s it was an institution and a tourist attraction: Melbourne was ‘the home of the counter lunch’, the organisers of the Australian Librarians’ conference told their out-of-town delegates in 1961 and they listed the pubs nearby where their delegates could get variety (‘Hotel Gresham, “30+ dishes”; Prince Alfred, “Chinese dishes also” ’) and women could eat in comfort (Hotel Mayfair, ‘suitable for ladies’; New Lincoln Inn, ‘smorgasbord suitable for ladies’).58 There is no doubt that a connection existed between the provision of meals, the encouragement of women’s custom, and the importance of women in the trade. Haine describes in detail the female networks surrounding women cafe proprietors in turn

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of the century Paris. Their presence ‘facilitated the growth of a female clientele in the café’, he says, as working-class women from a range of occupations ‘frequently talked and drank with the proprietress at the bar’.59 Pubs were the place women and men, as travellers, workers and city residents without their own kitchens, could get a hot meal cheaply. It was always a means for publicans to attract custom. For city shoppers and workers pubs started to come into competition with low-cost cafeterias, such as those provided by city department stores. As early as 1930, members of the Licensing Court expressed concern that a new generation of the public was ‘growing up not regarding the hotel as a place where a meal could be obtained’.60 In return the ULVA therefore suggested that hotels, especially those small establishments situated in densely populated localities, could now well consider the introduction of buffets or cafeterias instead of their dining-rooms, again following a practice already in place in England.61 After World War Two the idea grew and pubs developed special provisions for serving food. More informal bistro meals for quick eating by city workers was also more varied than the old style counter meal and frequently offered innovations like ‘real Italian’ style ravioli and meat sauce.62 By the 1960s very few English pubs were providing meals to workers but ‘interest in food, cooking and eating out was becoming a national preoccupation’, in England, ‘no longer restricted to wealthier gourmets, but shared across gender, regions, ages and social classes’.63 This was also true in Australia. Pubs could not help being affected by this demand. By the end of the decade the attention given to food and the standard of pub catering had considerably advanced. There were now more people, as individuals and families, travelling by road and pubs offered a ‘less pretentious atmosphere’ and lower prices than ‘higher grade eating places’, a selection of wines which accompanied meals, and an alternative homely environment, all of which ‘seem[ed] to answer a definite need’.64 A sophisticated and travelled public wanted to indulge their fantasies, and prosperity meant they had the means to do so. This put pressure on hotelkeepers to provide good food and good service, to engage in ‘constant renovations and re-fitting of the kitchen’.65 The old-style Australian pub dining room and counter meals now disappeared as new licensing laws allowed pubs to close later and thus shift the emphasis to relaxed drinking and eating in bistro-style lounges. Reform of the English Licensing Act in 1961 overturned discretions that licensing justices had held since 1904, relaxed trading hours on Sundays, and introduced new kinds of licenses: for restaurant, for residential, and

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for combined restaurant and residential.66 From the 1970s large English brewery companies began transforming their tied houses into family restaurant chains and 20 years later were outselling burger chains and the old favourites, Chinese and Indian restaurants, by three times. With food made cheap by bulk purchasing and alcohol profits, these new pubs were providing working-class diners with an evening or lunchtime eating-out experience which was informal and familiar, and with non-gourmet food that appealed to popular taste.67 Hotelkeepers argued that ‘the battle for wholesome eating out at affordable prices must take place in the pub – the cultural parallel of Europe’s cafes and bistros’.68 However by the end of the century even these meals were undergoing change as the old boundary lines between pubs and restaurants blurred. ‘A pub cannot profitably exist today without food’, pub managers were advised in the 1980s, ‘the really successful ones have built their reputation, and their bar trade, around snacks or restaurant or both    A drink may be a drink wherever it’s drunk. But the imaginative snack chef will build a following which will quickly improve the overall lunch trade.’69 In England ‘the complementary functions of eating and drinking blend very happily in the cosmopolitan and traditional atmosphere of the pub’.70 Yet establishing a restaurant in a pub was ‘a whole new ballgame’ fraught with risk. ‘You will have an uphill struggle today to create a successful pub restaurant where none has existed unless you can pinpoint and fill a gap in the existing market’, licensees were warned. Restaurants needed ‘a formula, a style and an atmosphere’ and built their reputation much more slowly than pubs for a clientele who ate out much less regularly than they drank out.71 Businessmen’s lunches being taken in pubs were ‘growing in visibility and significance to the trade’ as pubs offered informality, displays of food – ‘the groaning board’ with the inevitable roast beef at its centre evoking associations with Olde England feasts of history – and distinctive décor features (‘leather, oak and dark colours’) not found in cafes or restaurants. Away from this business lunch trade pubs still sold mainly snacks (steak and kidney pies and bags of potato crisps) and very few working class pubgoers ever ate a full meal. One 1970 study reportedly found approximately only one-third of pubgoers (21 per cent of English adults) ate in pubs.72 Pub catering had come a long way from the old saveloy-in-bread days as Australian pubs too increasingly provided European-style restaurant food but to a new class of patron. Now chefs worked in pub restaurants and the traditional importance of licensed public houses as venues for working class recreational eating entered a new phase of gastronomic significance.73

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The consequences for women workers were profound. On one level the importance of women to this trade continued and even grew. In the post-industrial service economy of the later decades of the twentieth century, women were an even larger proportion of the wage-labour force in the hospitality industry than they had been in the later nineteenth century. In the United States women held 2.5 per cent of bartending jobs in 1940, 21 per cent in 1970, 44 per cent in 1980 and nearly 50 per cent by 1990. In Australia in 1983 women were 60 per cent of the hotel workforce and 80 per cent of the motel workforce.74 Similar trends prevailed in the UK: as the labour market became more casualised the ratio of women to men rose in those jobs. But as chefs took over the pub kitchens, and dining rooms became restaurants and bistros, men were displacing women as the good cooks.

Notes 1. Some examples of such work are B. G. Smith, The ‘Lower Sort’: Philadelphia’s Laboring People 1750–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 34–5, 95–103; E. M. Crawford, ‘The Irish Workhouse Diet, 1840–90’, in C. Geissler and D. Oddy (eds), Food Diet and Economic Change Past and Present (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), pp. 83–100; A. Gibson and T. C. Smout, ‘From Meat to Meal: Changes in Diet in Scotland’, in Geissler and Oddy (eds), Food Diet and Economic Change, pp. 10–34; D. Oddy and D. S. Miller (eds), Diet and Health in Modern Britain (London: University of London, Historians and Nutritionists Seminar, 1985). Notable exceptions are J. Burnett, England Eats Out: A Social History of Eating Out in England From 1830 to the Present (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004); and J. K. Walton, Fish and Chips and the British Working Class 1870–1920 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992). 2. M. Powers, ‘The Lore of the Brotherhood: Continuity and Change in Urban American Saloon Culture’, in M. Holt (ed), Alcohol: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 2006), p. 149. 3. T. Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); P. Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200–1830 (London: Longmans, 1983); D. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); P. Duis, The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); M. Powers, Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); P. Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 4. J. M. Freeland, The Australian Pub (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966), p. 5, claimed the Australian pub was a fusion of the three English establishments – the alehouse, the tavern and the inn. 5. Reported in the Argus, Melbourne, 20 June 1933.

Diane Kirkby 151 6. H. C. Peyer, ‘The Origins of Public Hostelries in Europe’, in J-L. Flandrin and M. Montanari (eds), Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. C. Botsford, A. Goldhammer, C. Lambert, F. M. Lopez-Morillas and S. Stevens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 287–94; Beat Kumin, ‘Eating Out Before the Restaurant: Dining Cultures in Early-modern Inns’, in M. Jacobs and P. Scholliers (eds), Eating Out in Europe: Picnics, Gourmet Dining and Snacks Since the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 71–88. 7. Burnett, England Eats Out, p. 2; a more complex interpretation of dining culture in inns and the rise of restaurants is provided by Kumin, Eating out before the restaurant. 8. R. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 86. 9. Spang, Invention of the Restaurant, p. 245. 10. Burnett, England Eats Out, pp. 23–4. 11. J. M. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World 1300–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Clark, English Alehouse. 12. Clark, English Alehouse, pp. 11, 195. 13. Ibid., p. 227. 14. B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–72 (London: Faber, 1971); Clark, English Alehouse, pp. 250–4; Powers, ‘Lore of the Brotherhood’, pp. 145–7. 15. Clark, English Alehouse, pp. 312–13. 16. Burnett, England Eats Out, p. 58. 17. T. Brennan, ‘Taverns and the Public Sphere in the French Revolution’, in Holt (ed), Alcohol, p. 107. 18. M-F. Boyer, The French Café (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), p. 21. 19. W. S. Haine, The World of the Paris Café: Sociability Among the French Working Class 1789–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 180– 92; see also Haine, ‘Drink, Sociability, and Social Class in France, 1789–1945: The Emergence of a Proletarian Public Sphere’, in Holt (ed), Alcohol, pp. 121–44. 20. J. Bennett, ‘Misogyny, Popular Culture and Women’s Work’, History Workshop Journal, XXXI (1991) 166–88. 21. Clark, English Alehouse, p. 206. 22. D. Kirkby, Barmaids: A History of Women’s Work in Pubs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 23. Haine, World of the Paris Café, p. 183. 24. Kirkby, Barmaids; see also D. Kirkby, ‘ “Barmaids” and “Barmen”: Sexing “Work” in Australia, 1870s-1940s’, in H. Brash, J. Gothard and J. Long (eds), Forging Identities: Bodies, Gender and Feminist History (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1997), pp. 161–80. 25. Haine, World of the Paris Café, p. 184. 26. Ibid., p. 185. 27. D. Kirkby, ‘ “The Barmaid”, “The Landlady”, and “The Publican’s Wife”: History, Law and the Popular Culture of Women’s Work in Pubs’, in M. Thornton (ed), Romancing the Tomes (London: Cavendish, 2002), pp. 167–83.

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28. M. Girouard, Victorian Pubs (London: Studio Vista, 1975); R. Kenna and A. Mooney, People’s Palaces: Victorian and Edwardian Pubs of Scotland (Edinburgh: Paul Harris Publishing, 1983); P. Bailey, ‘Parasexuality and Glamour: The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype’, Gender and History, II (1990) 148–72. 29. Kirkby, Barmaids. 30. Haine, World of the Paris Café, p. 185. 31. Conroy, In Public Houses; Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution. 32. Powers, Faces along the Bar; Duis, The Saloon. 33. R. Pillsbury, From Boarding House to Bistro: The American Restaurant Then and Now (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990). 34. M. Powers, ‘Decay from Within: The Inevitable Doom of the American Saloon’, in S. Barrows and R. Room (eds), Drinking: Behaviour and Belief in Modern History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 112–31. 35. D. S. Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Union in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 156–60. 36. Freeland, Australian Pub; P. McGuire, Inns of Australia (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1952). 37. The phrase is Cyril Pearl’s, So You Want to be an Australian (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1959), p. 33. 38 See also C. Wright, Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australian Women Publicans (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003). 39. Burnett, England Eats Out, p. 292. 40. H. Porter, Bairnsdale: Portrait of a Country Town (Sydney: Ferguson, 1977), p. 11. 41. Pillsbury, From Boarding House to Bistro, p. 1. 42. Ibid.; Porter, Bairnsdale, p. 11. 43. Freeland, Australian Pub, pp. 175–8. 44. Burnett, England Eats Out, p. 213; see also D. W. Gutzke, Pubs and Progressives: Reinventing the Public House in England, 1896–1960 (De Kalb: Northern University of Illinois Press, 2006). 45. Burnett, p. 221. 46. Freeland, Australian Pub, pp. 135–6. 47. Powers, ‘Lore of the Brotherhood’, p. 154. 48. Duis, The Saloon, p. 296. 49. Freeland, Australian Pub, pp. 135–6. 50. Australian Brewers’ Journal, December 1905, p. 170. 51. Duis, The Saloon, p. 297; Australian Brewers’ Journal, February 1918, p. 239. 52. Australian Brewers’ Journal, July 1918, p. 465. 53. Freeland, Australian Pub, p. 179. 54. Herald, Melbourne, 30 May 1930. 55. Wine and Spirit News, 20 June 1949, p. 5. 56. Herald, Melbourne, 26 April 1952 & 18 May 1949. 57. Herald, Melbourne, Herald, 26 April 1952. 58. Library Association of Australia, Where to Eat in Melbourne (Melbourne: LAA Conference, 1961) (typescript held in State Library of Victoria). 59. Haine, World of the Paris Café, p. 185. 60. Herald, Melbourne, 30 May 1930. 61. Ibid.

Diane Kirkby 153 62. Herald, Melbourne, 26 April 1952; see advertisements in the 1950s in the ULVA’s paper, Vigilante. 63. Burnett, England Eats Out, p. 273; Gutzke, Pubs and Progressives, p. 235. 64. H. A. Monckton, A History of the English Public House (London: Bodley Head, 1969), p. 125. 65. Vigilante, 10 January 1974, p. 8. 66. Monckton, English Public House, p. 108. 67. Burnett, England Eats Out, p. 300. 68. Quoted in Burnett, England Eats Out, p. 302. 69. S. Wright, Running Your Own Pub (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 43. 70. Monckton, English Public House, p. 125. 71. Wright, Running Your Own Pub. 72. D. E. Vasey, The Pub and English Social Change (New York: AMS Press, 1990), pp. 141–5. 73. D. Kirkby, ‘ “In love with a café and what he could buy”: Commodity, Desire and the Transformation of Dining Out in 1960s Melbourne’, in S. O’Hanlon and T. Luckins (eds), GO! Melbourne in the Sixties (Melbourne: Circa, 2005), pp. 160–73. 74. L. Detman, ‘Women behind Bars: The Feminization of Bartending’, in B. Reskin and P. Roos (eds), Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women’s Inroads into Male Occupations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 241–55; S. Charlesworth, Employment in the Hospitality Industry (Melbourne: Victorian Branch, Federated Liquor and Allied Industries Employees Union of Australia, 1983); International Labor Office, New Technologies and Working Conditions in the Hotel, Catering and Tourism Sector (Geneva: ILO, 1997).

Further reading J. Burnett, England Eats Out: A Social History of Eating Out in England From 1830 to the Present (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004). P. Duis, The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983). S. W. Haine, World of the Paris Café: Sociability Among the French Working Class 1789–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). D. Kirkby, Barmaids: A History of Women’s Work in Pubs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). M. Powers, Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

9 Community Cookbooks, Women and the ‘Building of the Civil Society’ in Australia, 1900–38 Sarah Black

Cookbooks are amongst the most often-used sources for understanding various elements of food history. They also provide insight into aspects of cultural and political identity and the function of social and community groups. The community cookbook genre has its origins in the United States Civil War, and was well established in North America by the 1870s. It is quite likely the idea came to Australia with the 1891 publication, in Sydney, of a Canadian community cookbook, The Home Cookbook, compiled by the Ladies of Toronto and districts in 1874. (This, incidentally, appears to be the first instance of a community cookbook going international.) The idea took hold, and before long Australian women were producing their own recipe compilations. Colin Bannerman refers to the 1894 publication of a cookery book by the Queensland Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union (PWMU), shortly followed by the Cookery Book of Good and Tried Receipts, by the New South Wales PWMU in 1895, as the first recorded publications of community cookbooks in Australia.1 Their Australian origins are thus in the last years of colonialism, but they enjoyed their first real flush in the heady period of Federation, from 1901 up until the start of World War One. Community cookbooks remained on the landscape through the difficult years of the two world wars and the Depression, but underwent a renewed flowering of different types in the postwar era, accompanied by an ever-greater range of groups producing them. They continue to fulfil a significant niche today, as a fundraiser, a statement of group identity and a way to share culinary and domestic information, often of a type particularly useful to a certain group. Though the genre is referred to variously as the charity or charitable cookbook, the fundraising cookbook, the compiled cookbook and 154

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the community cookbook, I have chosen to use the name ‘community cookbook’ as it is the most inclusive of the range of different characteristics of the genre: the community focus of the fundraising, the outward social focus of the charitable cause, and the inward social focus of the group of compilers. If cookbooks are ‘artifacts of cultural production’,2 community cookbooks are a unique subset, notable for their accurate reflection of food fashions and habits. Margaret Cook, writing in 1971 what is probably the first piece of critical scholarship on this topic, was already able to state, ‘they reflect the cooking fashions of the period    more accurately than the standard works by professional authors’.3 The significance of this type of cookbook, from a historical perspective, is that it is produced by the community, for the community. It is because of how community cookbooks are made that they can function as accurate records of community tastes.4 But their mode of production also means that they hold more than what Australian food historian Colin Bannerman has termed merely ‘one of the most authentic accounts of the popular culture of the    kitchen’.5 In the small amount of scholarship which exists on community cookbooks, the argument has been made that this unique cookery genre arose as an excellent medium through which women could participate in the building of their societies. Anne Lieberman Bower, writing about the American scene, argues that ‘community cookbooks do more than simply “reflect” the society in which they were published. These books demonstrate the participation of the women who wrote them in the creation of that society.’6 Similarly, Elizabeth Driver finds that in Canada, community cookbooks allowed women to contribute to the ‘building of the civil society’ (an apt phrase, which I have appropriated in my title).7 Jeffrey Pilcher has noted the role of community cookbooks in helping to redefine Mexican gender roles and national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.8 In Australia, where scant attention has been paid to this form of cookbook, there has been no examination of the multifaceted link between community cookbooks and the ‘civil society’. Yet visible in community cookbooks is something of the role and contribution made by women to the development of community institutions and social culture in Australia. As well as the publicly acknowledged processes of nationbuilding there are many ‘hidden’ or historically overlooked facets, which largely are the preserve of people rendered invisible by community disregard and the passage of time. Community cookbooks represent one such nation-building project by a generally ‘invisible’ group of

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people – the homemakers and home cooks of Australia. An attentive study of community cookbooks reveals how, by publishing recipe collections, groups of women have been able to turn a major element of their collective intellectual and cultural property – their kitchen lore – to broader financial and cultural account.9 As previously mentioned, community cookbooks in Australia date from the 1890s. One of the very first the Cookery Book of Good and Tried Receipts, later named the Presbyterian Cookery Book and affectionately known as the Presbyterian, rates as one of the spectactularly successful Australian community cookbooks, remaining in print for 100 years, raising thousands of pounds (and later dollars) for the PWMU’s missionary concerns, and remaining for at least 85 of its years a valid reflection of its community’s foodways – ‘a recorder of already accepted ideas among Australian cooks’.10 By 1908 the production of cookery books had become so common that Maude Overell and Annie Barnett, in the Hobart Cookery Book of Tested Recipes, were able to comment, ‘The publication of tested recipes in connection with Church efforts for raising funds has become so general throughout the Commonwealth, that there will not be any necessity for explaining the purpose of this book.’11 Bannerman, taking the longer historical view, notes ‘[t]here can hardly be a church, charity or community organisation    that has not at some time rallied its members to a fundraising cause and put together a cookery book’.12 To come to grips with this question of how community cookbooks relate to the civil society, one must take account of both the private and the public effects of a community cookbook. While the public and the private are in essence indivisible – the concerns of one being also the concerns of the other – for the purposes of this investigation it makes sense to consider each in turn, before standing back to look at the whole picture. Bower refers to the private benefits to women of participation in a community cookbook project as including personal development, friendship and cultural stimulation.13 Furthermore, especially in the early years, by sharing their recipes and home hints, women could help one another to ameliorate their common domestic burden. The preface to the fifteenth edition of the Presbyterian, in 1918, states its aim in terms of supporting women: ‘not only to provide wholesome and economical recipes for capable housewives, but to help those who have not had the benefit of maternal guidance and home training’.14 Community cookbooks have also allowed women to reflect together on what constitutes sound domestic practice. Any community cookbook, no matter

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how humble, constitutes in essence a group statement (though it may be diverse and even contradictory) about the nature of good cooking, tasty and nourishing food and appropriate ways, as defined by a particular group of people of incorporating cooking and eating into daily life. Cookbooks ‘are central to the establishment of the socially sanctioned ordering of the private sphere’.15 In sharing their recipes for good food women could build a collective image of ‘the good life’. In the years during which the community cookbook first flourished in Australia, in the Federation era, this was likely to be characterised by substantial cuts of meat, hefty puddings and dainty baked goods. It would probably have an element of romance; most community cookbooks of this era contain recipes for ‘Kiss Biscuits’ and ‘Love Cakes’. Food historian Michael Symons’ comments on ‘daintiness’ are interesting in this context.16 In the history of eating in Australia during the period between the two world wars, he finds a polarisation between ‘male’ roughness, characterised by the drinking of bad beer, hankering for the bush, meat pies, and wolfing down great slabs of meat, and ‘female’ daintiness, symbolised by the drinking of tea, baked goods and the love of pink things and consumer embellishments. ‘Daintiness – which embodied “feminine” qualities like lightness, prettiness and gentility – was part of a long campaign to subvert the traditional caring concerns of women into petty materialist preoccupations’ charges Symons. Though he focuses on the interwar period in making these comments, daintiness has a much longer history in Australia. The obsession of the Victorian age with daintiness has been much remarked. In The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, set in the mid-nineteenth century, Henry Handel Richardson describes how Richard’s wife Mary serves a supper, [F]or the best part of an hour Mary’s sandwiches, sausage-rolls and meat-pies; her jam-rolls, pastries and lemon-sponges, her jellies, custards and creams; her blanc and jaune-manges and whipped syllabubs; her trifles, tipsy-cakes and charlotte-russes formed the theme of talk and objects of attention. And though the ladies picked with becoming daintiness, the gentlemen made up for their partners’ deficiencies; and there was none present who did not, in the shape of a hearty and well-turned compliment, add yet another laurel to Mary’s crown.17 Mary’s dishes are so dainty her helper, Mrs Devine, describes them breathlessly as ‘Fit for Buckin’am Palace and Queen Victoria! And all

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by your little self, too.’18 Though Mrs Devine, as suggested by her dropped ‘h’, perhaps may lack sufficient delicacy herself to be a credible witness, the narrator chimes in, assuring the reader that this triumphant display of culinary nicety earns Mary ‘yet another laurel’ in the crown of her womanhood. Furthermore, the female guests at the supper also show ‘becoming daintiness’ in their restrained consumption of her delicacies. For quite some time, daintiness appears to have been the golden standard by which to judge more than one facet of female performance. During the years of Federation the Delicate Pies,19 the fancy tins used for small cakes, the Egg and Violet Sandwiches, on plates decorated with violets,20 all function as an affirmation of women’s ‘rightful’ role, identity and preoccupations, as well as reflecting an ongoing resolve to bring culture to the wide, brown land of Australia. The romance of bakery in these years (as well as many to come) shows broad agreement, among women from many walks of life and many corners of the nation, on one of the necessary facets of ‘the good life’. There was a whiff of nationalism about certain Federation era recipes. Sometimes the association was intended to honour a prominent person, as in Crème Caramel au Melba.21 Other times the recipe claimed a particular association with a place, probably on the basis that its inventor lived there, rather than any more intimate or intrinsic link with the locale. Adelaide Biscuits, Terang Cake, Killoolah Cakes and Leura Sauce (for Fish) in all likelihood owe their names to this phenomenon. In rarer cases, foods are marked as Australian by their use of a key indigenous ingredient, such as Baked Barracouta22 or Kangaroo Tail Soup, which in the Kookaburra’s recipe also calls for a spoonful of Native currant jam.23 Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, foods could be ‘Australian’ due to a particular cultural condition or habit of settler communities, such as Colonial Goose or Queensland Duck, both of which were attempts to make the eternal mutton taste like something else. Australian Drink, a combination of equal quantities of ginger beer and port wine, probably was justified in the name (at least from the perspective of its originators) in that it was a distinctive local version of the wine cup, based on the limited stores available to a 1912 Adelaide housewife during a scorching hot summer. That most archetypally Australian of foods, damper, with all its romantic connotations of bush, outback and the settler lifestyle, by the early twentieth century (by this time already two-thirds of Australians were urban dwellers) was rapidly being romanticised, and as such it is a natural expression of nationalist sentiment.

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The upmarket Kookaburra includes two recipes for damper; the first is as rustic as possible, the second ‘more modern’. 1) A Bushman’s recipe, which some people swear by and others swear at. Make a hole in some flour in a ration bag, pour in a quart pot of boiling water and stir it with a stick until you have a lump of dough, which you lift out from the surrounding flour, slightly flatten and bake in the ashes. A more luxurious way to mix it is to take off your leather legging and mix it on that, or a piece of bark. Hint from S. R. 2) A More Modern Damper: 1 1/2lbs of flour; a little salt; 2 teaspoonfuls of cream of tartar; 1 teaspoonful of carbonate of soda; enough butter milk, milk or water to make a fairly stiff dough. Knead lightly and cook in a camp oven, over the bottom of which flour has been thickly sprinkled. This may, of course, be cooked in the ashes, if you are camping out with no camp oven. Alison Field24 Clearly neither of these compounds was intended to enter the closed wood-fired or gas ranges of upper middle class homes. They do, however, connect even these women, tenuously, to the world of the outback. It is interesting that all of the entries in this last category of ‘Australian’ foods are very much products of the nineteenth century, not of the twentieth; the unique and generally difficult conditions which gave rise to distinctive settler dishes were fast disappearing. All of this does nothing to undermine the fact that the world of these cookery books remains fundamentally Anglo-European in outlook. Federation-era community cookbooks are filled with Dutch Cutlets, French Pancakes, German Egg Sauce, Devonshire Dumplings, Brosy Bannocks, London Buns and Kirkcudbright Puddings, as well, needless to say, as dozens of other variations on the Anglo-Continental theme. Though German foods were dropped from some community cookbooks like the proverbial hot potato at the outbreak of World War One, in the early years of the twentieth century German cakes, breads, sauces and savouries are de rigeur, as well as the French influence which has long marked aspirational British cuisine. Mouton a la Jardiniere, Chaud Froid Chicken25 and Miroton of Beef, as well as Irish Stew, Essex Stew and Canterbury Cake, proclaim Australian cooks’ adherence to the timehonoured British tradition of cooking and eating, and therewith their Anglo-European cultural identity.

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That women often needed to work hard to produce the actual culinary manifestations of the good life is evident in recipes for Half-Pay Pudding, Economical Plain Cake and Poor Man’s Goose. But the mere existence of these recipes reflects the depth of the cultural value placed, in those years, on a well-laden table. The full figure which was fashionable for women in early twentieth century Australia is evidence that the hearty food on the groaning board was intended for enthusiastic consumption as well as for display. Furthermore, full stomachs and sturdy limbs were a sign and a celebration of the fledgling nation’s prosperity. Community cookbooks were also a forum in which women could work out social distinctions and agreed ways of expressing both social and familial identity. The finer points of social differentiation are sometimes mentioned in recipes, either as a subheading or as a note appended to the instruction. For example, The Kookaburra Cookery Book26 informs the reader that Brownie is ‘The Shearer’s Loaf’, and that Damper is ‘A Bushman’s recipe’. Auburn Methodist Tested Recipes assures the harried housewife and mother that Sponge Pudding is ‘A Favourite with Children’27 – a reminder that food can be socially differentiated in many other ways than just in terms of race, class, occupation and income. To these must be added both gender and age. Of course, food is also differentiated by social context. For example, certain foods are defined as appropriate to the family context, such as perhaps Family Soup28 or Joan’s Busy Day Dish,29 whereas other foods or ways of cooking are appropriate for more public forums. Even here, specific foods can have very particular relationships to specific kinds of events (like wedding cake, for example). A mid-century cookbook, The CWA Cookery Book and Household Hints,30 in an effort to help readers come to grips with this issue, includes menus for a variety of different community events, including afternoon tea at a fete, a wedding breakfast for 100 guests, and catering for a public stock sale attended by 300 adults. Sample menus are common in community cookbooks, and tend to fulfil two main roles. First, they often reflect on the social roles claimed or aspired to by the creators of the books. Secondly, they constitute a guideline for appropriate social and culinary behaviour. The great social and geographic shifts experienced by so many as a result of migration to Australia, both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, created a real need for this kind of information. Women needed to know how to deal with unfamiliar landscapes, new foods, more advanced or (in many cases) more primitive domestic technologies, and new social milieus. How does one know, without being told, the best, easiest, most

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economical and most highly approved way to provide for the 300 adults, plus accompanying minors, dogs and livestock who will shortly be descending on one’s property? Community cookbooks allowed women to disseminate, for their own and one another’s reassurance, the agreed social formats as well as the necessary practical know-how. As well as helping women to define appropriate private and public social behaviours, community cookbooks have allowed Australians to experiment with old and new identities through experimentation with food. The Federation era cookbooks, as noted, represent a firmly British culinary tradition, and what ‘international’ presence there is largely takes the form of European place-names in dishes like Spanish Pudding, Aberdeen Sausage and so on. An upper-middle class, urban cookery book is more likely to explore the romance of otherness, or to reflect the high social status associated with ‘authentic’ international cultural knowledge. The Kookaburra, for example, includes recipes for more authentically Italian-style vegetable dishes and even a real Indian curry. But this is rare. It is not until the post-World War Two period that community cookbooks begin to reflect a sustained experimentation with different cuisines, in response to new migrations. The ‘public’ effects of participation in a cookbook project are typically focussed around a fundraising purpose. By raising money for worthy causes women have contributed, sometimes decisively, to the founding and furthering of social institutions. However, not all community cookbooks are fundraisers, and in any case many of them have further social purposes – to provide a project for a group, to make a statement of group identity, or simply to present a public face to the world. Beyond this, however, community cookbooks have given groups of women a forum through which to ‘project their values’.31 One example worthy of investigation is teetotalism. The Housewife’s Companion, published for the Inkerman Street Methodist Sunday School in the Victorian country town of Maryborough in 1902, contains two recipes for alcohol substitutes which draw on this set of values. The first, ‘Temperance Brandy’, recommended as ‘a good restorative in shock or faintness’, consists of rather a lot of cinnamon powder in hot water. The second, entitled a ‘Substitute for Brandy, etc (To be used in sudden illness or pain)’, is composed of ginger, sal volatile, and chloric aether.32 Either of these would be quite a stimulant! Together they offer a glimpse, tantalisingly brief, of Maryborough Methodist teetotalism in theory and practice. Another illustration of values projected can be taken from an acrostic poem on the title page of the Women’s Methodist Union Cookery Book,

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which reflects some of the worldview behind the charitable projects of the missionary unions: May those who buy this little Book Find its contents a boon; And as they work its dainties up, Remember far Mapoon! Prevent, as far as in them lies, The dying out too soon Of Queensland’s Aborigines By helping on Mapoon! Our duty stares us in the face Our hearts should beat in tune; Nor mar by want of harmony The mission at Mapoon! A. S. L.33 This poem reflects the race and gender outlook of the PWMU as well as their sense of religious mission. The Aborigines of far-north Queensland, though considered to be ‘doomed’, should not be allowed to die out ‘too soon’ – the classically White Australian paternalistic view of the aboriginal subaltern. This is reflected also in the Preface where mention is made of another cause, ‘the Kanaka Home – a real home for “boys” passing through the city, either to plantations, or going home to their islands’.34 Philosopher Richard Baker names this phenomenon ‘metaphorical identification’: For example, southerners frequently say such things as ‘Where did that girl get to’ and ‘Who is the new boy that Lou hired to help out at the filling station?’ If the persons the terms apply to are adult AfroAmericans, then ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ are metaphorical identifications. The fact that the metaphorical identifications in question are standard in the language reflects the fact that certain characteristics of the objects properly classified as boys and girls (for example, immaturity, inability to take care of themselves, need for guidance) are generally held by those who use identifications to be properly attributable to AfroAmericans. One might say that the whole theory of southern white paternalism is implicit in the metaphorical identification ‘boy’.35 What of gender? Again, the language used reveals much about the women whom the book metonymically represents. Self-deprecatingly

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‘little’, the WMU Cookery Book aims to be ‘a boon’ in the ‘dainties’ it provides. In this, it appears to be affecting an embodiment of ‘feminine’ qualities and virtues. Is this related to a tension about the proper role of women? After all, pushing oneself onto the public stage, even behind a veil of discrete anonymity, did not accord with the nineteenth century view of women’s place. Women’s role was to be a helpmeet, a nurturer and promoter of harmony in all things. It can be seen how the correct motivation for the provision of recipes in a cookery book is fused fittingly with the motive behind the fundraising, in the single phrase ‘Our duty’. The model of ‘duty’ as motivation neatly excuses the ‘unfeminine’ activity of book publication as well as the public influence which may be wielded as a consequence. In the wake of the 1890s – an era of increased female participation in the workforce and lowered marriage and birth rates, when women were slowly winning the right to vote, the era of the New Woman – the editresses of a cookery book may well have felt it necessary to justify their project in traditionally feminine terms. Community cookbooks of much of the twentieth century deploy a range of techniques to deflect possible charges of ‘unfeminine’ and hence inappropriate public agency. Discourses of femininity are often deeply embedded in their form and content, through advertising materials, cover illustrations, and the adages, proverbs, and literary quotes which often graced their pages. The ideal woman, to judge from the early and mid-century books, was pretty, sweet, merry, hardworking, well-groomed, intelligent but not overly so, and strongly focussed on her husband, children and home. The CWA Cookery Book and Household Hints (1942) contains a charming poem which may or may not have struck a chord with many of its readers: ‘The Light Heart’, by Elizabeth Fleming. A light heart means light pastry. Or so I’ve heard folk say; So keep your household happy And make your duties gay; And when you stir the mixtures For scones and cakes and pies, They’ll all reflect your spirits And rise! – and rise! – and rise!36 Though the church groups were the first to use the community cookbook genre, they were not long alone. Community groups of all kinds were quick to realise the potential of this activity for direct public and

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social influence. The Green and Gold Cookery Book, for example, was first published in Adelaide in the early 1920s, to support the newly established and financially fragile King’s College. It was such a tremendous success that for a whole generation of Adelaide cooks it was the only cookery book in their kitchen. The moneys raised by the book allowed King’s College and its successor school, Pembroke, not only to survive but to prosper, and despite its culinary anachronism (revisions ceased by the early 1960s) the Green and Gold continues to raise money as a nostalgic item today. In the foreword to the most recent edition principal Malcolm Lamb comments, ‘[t]his wonderful cookbook still fulfils its two original purposes: that is, to provide funds for a worthy school (now Pembroke), and to provide splendid and established recipes, tried and true, for its many purchasers’.37 As time went on other kinds of women’s charitable groups, such as Hospital Auxiliaries, Mother’s Clubs and civic service groups produced their own cookbooks. The CWA’s body of community cookbooks is worth a study of its own. By the 1970s there were many hundreds of different examples from across the country, and in them can be seen something of the growing diversity of Australian communities, social network and group enterprises. The Girl Guides, the Rotary Club, the Isolated Children’s Parents Association, golf clubs,38 political parties,39 the Soroptimists, disability support groups, the RSPCA, the Yass Town and District Band and a vast range of others, reflecting the incredible diversity of community enterprise of this era. The financial outcomes could range from something as humble as new hymn books for the choir to a new town swimming pool, an extension of a hospital, a school canteen or immunisation for Third World children. The shillings and dollars the public spent on community cookbooks added up to, in many cases, significant sums of money to be outlayed by the women who produced them. The Presbyterian, that most successful of community cookbooks, listed on the frontispieces of succeeding editions the number of copies sold, which by the end of the nineteenth edition, released in 1927, amounted to 350,000. Even at a shilling apiece (and the price must have gone up over time), this was a substantial achievement. Though this chapter has thus far dealt separately with the public and private aspects of community cookbook endeavours, it is time to bring the two together. In her article ‘Things a bushwoman cannot do’, Sue Rowley has noted the seemingly increased porosity of the barriers between public and private spheres in the late nineteenth century, commenting that ‘the idea of discrete domains    masked the extent to which the relations between men and women were characterised

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by uncertainty, anxiety and change’.40 Pilcher’s work on community cookbooks in Mexican national history reveals the potential cross-over points between ‘public’ and ‘private’ effects, which indeed can never be untangled, as they ultimately are two sides of the same coin, two visions of the same society. ‘Private’ domestic concerns ultimately are about ‘public’ culture as well, and vice versa. Just as Mexican women’s re-imagining of Mexican society and nation in their compiled cookbooks helped to fuel a new national identity, so in Australia community cookbooks have contributed not only to the nourishment of the people, but also, amongst other things, to the basic conventions of social interaction. By the 1970s a significant number of community cookbooks with a multicultural focus was being published. Multicultural groups such as the Ecumenical Migration Centre, the Australian Indonesian Association of Victoria, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Asian Students’ Association, various American Women’s clubs and associations and others were producing their own exemplars.41 So too were many groups not multicultural of their nature. An increasingly wide range of community groups wanted to celebrate their multicultural composition through cookbooks,42 and in many cases their ethnic heritage as well.43 Multiculturalism was the great new name for Australian social heterogeneity, replacing a century’s worth of official policy focussed on keeping the country white. Though the angst over multicultural policy continues to this day, the community cookbooks show Australians of all hues re-valorising the foreign connection. Recipes become increasingly adventurous, partly as a result of increasing prosperity and social and geographic mobility. During these years curries become much closer to the south-east Asian and Indian models, using spices more confidently and breaking the chutney-raisin-and-banana habit. A much wider variety of cuisines is represented (often very much industrially bastardised, for example with packets of Dutch curry and rice or chicken noodle soup), and dishes like lasagne, for so long a walk on the Continental wild side, slide comfortably into the middle-Australian family repertoire. All these changes are indications of a new social atmosphere. In Recipes of the Orient, compiled by Azhar Ilias Abbas in 1962 (Mrs) Mavis Mosel comments in her Foreword: I am sure this recipe book will open up new avenues in the culinary arts. To those of us who are already enjoying the friendship of our Asian friends living among us and have sampled so many of these unusual dishes, this book will serve as a pleasant reminder of happy

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times spent together.    I have every confidence that these recipes will help the discerning hostess to make every meal at which she serves them an outstanding success.44 By the 1970s social identities were changing, as were personal and domestic identities. By participating in the public discourse of ethnicity and multiculturalism, community cookbook producers took an active role in one of the most sweeping changes in Australian social history, offering an account, for the community, of how individuals and families were digesting social change. They shared, in some instances, their own tensions about ‘foreign’ food (some books studiously sticking to Toadin-the-Hole and Baked Lamb Chops), but they also led by example in offering recipes for Satay. As the preserve, by and large, of the caring institutions and the independent community groups, community cookbooks have continued to mirror the lives of ordinary Australians. They depict a panorama of community effort, and show the range of social institutions behind which Australians have chosen to throw their weight. They have been a vehicle for women’s public participation – a journey from, at the start of the century, the Missionary Associations and church guilds into the Hospital Auxiliaries, the Parent and Friend Associations, the Family Planning Societies, the Third World development groups, and ultimately into the paid workforce. Just as significantly, they also show the increasing validation of men’s role in domestic and caring situations. They embody middle Australia’s responses to waves of migration and have been one forum for the unfolding of Australia multicultural identity. As historical documents, they reflect on the one hand the Australian concern for heritage and on the other, the increasingly inclusive activities of our kitchens and our communities. Ultimately, community cookbooks bear testimony to the Australian response to social change. This genre truly has functioned as ‘a powerful form of cultural expression and a vehicle for promoting social cohesion’.45 I would like to conclude by considering one recent community cookbook: The Sauce: The Source, produced in the Victorian country town of Mildura in 2003 to mark the Mildura Wentworth Arts Festival.46 It wraps up nicely the issues of community cookbooks, women, and the civil society in the current era. Firstly it is important to note that that this community cookbook, though the recipes are contributed in roughly equivalent numbers by men and women, was conceived, researched, compiled and typed by women. It is in this sense a women’s work. It reflects with great clarity and purpose the multiculturalism of modern

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Australia and the validation of widely varying migrant histories, from the ‘typical Australian’ migrant history (English, Welsh, German and Scottish) of Donnie Byrne, the compiler, to the kaleidoscope of histories represented by the recipe contributors, of 21 different nationalities. It should be pointed out that for this cookbook, contributions were directly solicited with the aim of representing Mildura’s cultural diversity; in this way the compilers of the book have sought to make a very specific statement about their community. The recipes in The Sauce: The Source show the accommodations made by migrants to life in a new country; the accommodations between our delicious, sometimes indulgent culinary heritage and our new ideas of health and ‘good living’; our desire to cook and eat ‘authentically’ but our modern time-poverty, resulting in our heightened use of laboursaving kitchen technologies and pre-prepared food items. One illustrative recipe is for a Polish Babka. The contributor supplies two quite different versions of the same dish. The first is the traditional version – her mother’s recipe as her mother gave it to her, complete with a cup of icing sugar, 18 egg yolks and 1 1/2 cups of butter. The second is her own revised method, which aims to achieve the same qualities of colour, texture and flavour but requires half the sugar, only one egg plus two egg yolks, seven tablespoons of butter and some yellow colouring. The Source: The Sauce, in its focus on the multiculturalism of Mildura, does not aim accurately to reflect the foods eaten by Mildurans generally. It constructs a picture of Mildura as a town of plenty, a town of diversity, a town where men and women can, in their food, live out the cultural identities of their hearts. In creating this vision, in the photograph of the mighty Murray and the smiling faces of the recipe donors superimposed over rural Australian landscapes, the compilers of this book are, in effect, helping to define, contributing to the ongoing creation of the ‘civil society’ in which they live.

Notes 1. C. Bannerman, Acquired Tastes: Celebrating Australia’s Culinary History (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1998), p. 49. 2. As Steven Tobias suggests; see S. M. Tobias, ‘Early American Cookbooks as Cultural Artefacts’, Papers on Language and Literature, XXXIV, 1 (1998) 3; See also A. Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India’, Contemporary Studies in Society and History, XXX, 1 (1988) 3–24.

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3. M. Cook, America’s Charitable Cooks: A Bibliography of Fundraising Cook Books Published in the United States (1861–1915) (Kent: Ohio University Press, 1971), p. 7. 4. Sometimes, and increasingly in recent times, they are also produced from recipes solicited from celebrities – a special case, with which this chapter will not deal. Similarly, I hold the ‘historical society’ group of community cookbooks, which frequently contain nostalgic or historical recipes, constitute a special case for the purposes of this argument, due to their focus on the food, society and domestic arrangements of the past. 5. C. Bannerman, Acquired Tastes, p. 49. 6. A. L. Bower, ‘Our Sisters’ Recipes: Exploring “Community” in a Community Cookbook’, Journal of Popular Culture, XXXI, 3 (1997) 138. 7. E. Driver, ‘Cookbooks and Community-Building: How The Home Cook Book, launched a new type of culinary publication in Canada’, Paper presented by Elizabeth Driver at the Open Conference for the History of the Book in Canada, vol. 2 (1840–1918), held at the Bibliotheque Nationale du Quebec, Montreal, 18 May 2001. 8. J. M Pilcher, ‘Recipes for Patria: Cuisine, Gender and Nation in Nineteenthcentury Mexico’, in A. Bower (ed), Recipes for Reading (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), pp. 200–15. 9. Although this genre is to a great extent a female preserve, the contribution of men to community cookbooks has increased greatly in recent decades, and the fact of their growing involvement is significant. However, that is another essay; here I wish to consider the particular relationship of women to this genre. 10. C. Bannerman, Acquired Tastes, p. 49; See also his closer discussion of these texts in A Friend in the Kitchen: Old Australian Cookery Books (Kenthurst: Kangaroo Press, 1996), pp. 61–79. 11. Hobart Cookery Book of Tested Recipes, Household Hints and Home Remedies/ Hobart Methodist Central Mission, 1st? 2nd or 3rd? edn (Hobart: Davies Brothers, 1908). 12. Bannerman, Acquired Tastes, p. 49. 13. Bower, ‘Our Sisters’ Recipes’, p. 137. 14. Cookery Book of Good and Tried Receipts / compiled for the Women’s Missionary Association of the Presbyterian Church of New South Wales, 15th edn (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1918). 15. Tobias, ‘Early American Cookbooks’, p. 16. 16. M. Symons, One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia (Adelaide: Duck Press, 1982), pp. 135–52. 17. B. Santich (ed), In the Land of the Magic Pudding: A Gastronomic Miscellany (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2000), p. 93. 18. Santich, In the Land of the Magic Pudding, p. 92. 19. Auburn Methodist Church: Methodist Ladies Guild / [600 tested recipes] (Melbourne: The Church, 1906). 20. Guild Cookery Book / Holy Trinity Church, Port Melbourne, Ladies’ Working Guild (Port Melbourne: Riall Brothers, 1909). 21. Kookaburra Cookery Book, 1st edn (Melbourne: EW Cole, 1911). 22. Home Cookery for Australia: All Tested Recipes / Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union of Victoria, 2nd enl. edn ([Melbourne]: Gordon & Gotch, 1906). 23. Kookaburra Cookery Book.

Sarah Black 169 24. Ibid. 25. Cookery Book of Good and Tried Receipts / compiled for the Women’s Missionary Association sale and exhibition, Sydney, September 1895, 7th enl. edn (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1902). 26. Kookaburra Cookery Book. 27. Auburn Methodist Church. 28. Home Cookery for Australia. 29. Once a Jolly Jumbuck: A Mutton Cookbook / compiled by Members of the Wangi Club (Brisbane: Bush Children’s Health Scheme, ca.1960s). 30. CWA denotes Country Women’s Association. 31. Bower, ‘Our Sisters’ Recipes’, 137. 32. The Housewife’s Companion, 2nd edn (Maryborough: Inkerman Street Methodist Sunday School, 1902), p. 61. 33. WMU Cookery Book: Every one a Tried Recipe, 7th rev. and enl. edn (Brisbane: WR Smith and Paterson for the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union, 1908). 34. A further level of irony in this issue of language, representation and power is evident in the fact that the world ‘kanaka’ derives from the Melanesian word for ‘man’. 35. R. Baker, ‘ “Pricks” and “Chicks”: A Plea for “Persons” ’, in M. VetterlingBraggin (ed), Sexist Language: A Modern Philosophical Analysis (Littlefield: Adams & Co, 1981), p. 162. 36. A. Barnes, The CWA Cookery Book and Household Hints / Compiled by Agnes KB Barnes and Assisting Committee and published under the direction of the Country Women’s Association of Western Australia (Incorp) (Perth and Adelaide: ES Wigg & Son, 1942). 37. Green and Gold Cookery Book: Containing Many Good and Proved Recipes, 75th anniversary edn (Sydney: Lansdowne Press, 1999). 38. Recipes from the Golf Bags of the Galloping Golfers (Canberra: Federal Golf Club, 1973), Wakehurst Golf Club’s Selected Recipe Book (Wakehurst: Wakehurst Golf Club, ca.1970s). 39. Forty Favourites for Forty Cents: For West Australian Cooks / [    collected by the Country Party Women’s Auxiliary for the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Fountain Committee] (Perth: Pioneer Women’s Memorial Fountain Committee, ca.1960s); The Liberal Lovers’ Recipe Book / Compiled by Margaret Ward-Harvey, designed and illustrated by Shirley Bridges (Cremorne: Cremorne Branch of the Liberal Party of Australia, ca.1970s); Mirani Cookbook / National Party of Australia, Queensland, Women’s Section Branch (Mirani: Mirani Branch, Women’s Section, National Party of Australia, Queensland, ca.1970s); A Taste of Tasmania / Produced for the Australian Labor Party, Tasmania Branch, by Georgina Simmonds, Rita Baxter, Jean Hearn (Hobart: Australian Labor Party, Tasmania Branch, ca.1970s). 40. S. Rowley, ‘Things a bushwoman cannot do’, in S. Magarey, S. Rowley and S. Sheridan (eds), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), pp. 185–98. 41. Australian American Cook Book / Presented by Australian-American Association, Women’s Group; drawings by Peter Russell-Clarke (Melbourne: The Group, 1960); I Love to eat Jewish: Home Tested Jewish Recipes Collected throughout Australia and published / by the Mothers Book Committee of the Bialik College

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42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

Food, Drink and Community Parents Association (East Brunswick: Altshul & Co for the Committee, 1968); 46 Indonesian Recipes for You: To Australians Interested in Cooking    (Melbourne: Australian Indonesian Association, ca.1960s); A. I. Abbas, Recipes of the Orient: With Easily Obtainable Ingredients (Adelaide: Rigby, 1962); Festival of Asia Cookbook (Sydney: Festival of Asia Committee, 1963); A. Zainu’ddin, How to Cook Indonesian Food / A.G. Zainu’ddin (Melbourne: Australian Indonesian Association of Victoria, 1965; reprinted in 1967, 1971, 1973); International Gourmet Cooking/the American Women’s Club of Perth (Perth: The Club, 1972), The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Asian Students’ Association, A Collection of Asian Recipes (Melbourne: [s.n.], 1971); J. Van Doren Smith, American Recipes Through the Years: American Revolutional Bicentennial, 1886–1976 (Hobart: Australian-American Association, 1976);. Star Spangled Cooking Down Under: Recipes/collected by the American Women’s Club of Sydney, Australia (St. Leonards: The Club, 1979). The World of Cooking: Featuring Favourite Dishes from all Countries Plus Selected Recipes/The Oral School of SA (Adelaide: The Oral School of SA, 1968). A. Spencer, D. Lovett and L. Davis, United Nations Day Cookbook (North Turramurra: Ku-ring-gai High School, ca.1970s) Cooking around the World (Canberra: National Memorial Methodist Church, 1971). Chinese Cook Book No 10 / St George School for Spastic and Crippled Children (Rockdale: Westminster Press, 1974); Cooking the Greek Way (Norwood: Norwood Primary School, 1977); The Lee Street International Cookbook / compiled by P Irwin and S Djoneff (Carlton North: Carlton North Primary School, 1978). Recipes from my Grossmutter: A Collection of Recipes from Hahndorf Women of Today and Yesterday (Hahndorf: Women of the Auxiliary of St Michael’s Lutheran Primary School Auxiliary, 1975). Abbas, Recipes of the Orient. Driver, ‘Cookbooks and Community-Building’. The Source: The Sauce: Recipes from the People of Mildura, 1st edn (Mildura: Mildura Wentworth Arts Festival, 2003).

Further reading C. Bannerman, Acquired Tastes: Celebrating Australia’s Culinary History (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1998). C. Bannerman, A Friend in the Kitchen: Old Australian Cookery Books (Kenthurst: Kangaroo Press, 1996). A. L. Bower, ‘Our Sisters’ Recipes: Exploring “Community” in a Community Cookbook’, Journal of Popular Culture, XXXI, 3 (1997).

10 Remembering Cyprus: ‘Traditional’ Cypriot Cooking and Food Preparation Practices in the Memories of Greek Cypriot Emigrants Tina Kalivas

In recent decades there has been much interest in food as an important marker of self and identity for various cultural groups, and especially migrants.1 For those who live in countries other than their homelands, associations with sensual experiences of taste, flavours, smell and embodied repetitive tasks are central to a remembered self and the shaping of individual and community identities. This chapter explores food as a remembered experience among some who emigrated from Cyprus in the post-World War Two period, based on a series of oral history interviews about their food cultures more generally.2 The emphasis is on their status as Greek Cypriot emigrants, whose memories are located within a broader context of economic, social and political changes in Cyprus during the time of their emigration.3 Their descriptions of their food cultures were – and are – often tied to a series of memories and emotions which arise from their understandings of themselves as Cypriot emigrants, and how they lived their lives in the Cyprus they left behind. For this group of emigrants, specific foods, ingredients, recipes, methods of preparation and cooking were central to their understandings of their ‘traditional’ food cultures, and what it meant to be Cypriot away from Cyprus. However, so too were the social and communal, gendered and generational relationships through which they organised them: this is the primary focus of this chapter. In particular, their memories reveal ways in which ‘traditional’ cultural practices work to reconstruct new identities. What, for many emigrants, represented their 171

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‘traditional’ relationships and ways of organising food practices, were in fact not static, but fluid cultural practices that were reinterpreted to fit the changing needs of the present.4 In remembering them, they revealed an awareness of these changes simultaneously as they thought of them as ‘traditional’. Cyprus is the third largest island in the Mediterranean, lying 80 kilometres south of Turkey. Prior to World War Two it was largely an island of peasant farmers.5 Cypriot emigration over the last two centuries started with a trickle of migrants looking for financial betterment, largely in British colonies and the United States. Larger scale emigration, often following in a chain migration pattern of those who had preceded them, did not occur until after World War Two and was often in response to political instability and socio-economic insecurity in Cyprus, as well as increasing labour and economic opportunities in their countries of destination. During the 1950s and 1960s many migrated to Britain, Australia and North America, often following family members in a chain migration pattern. Others migrated after the 1974 war, and the resultant division of the island into the two political and ethnic territories (the Greek, Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish, Northern Republic of Cyprus).6 For those who left in search of a better life, memories of their food cultures were part of their stories of hardship and the reasons why they left Cyprus. For others, their remembered food cultures were part of a nostalgia for a simpler preferred life, of a close community they still long for. Emigrants’ memories and understandings of their food cultures and relationships helped to shape their sense of identity as Cypriot emigrants, and their view of the Cyprus they left behind. As other scholars have suggested, for cultural and community groups – including emigrants – food often acts as a significant reminder of the past, notably through ‘embodied triggers’ of association, of specific people and places.7 Emigrants defined their understandings of their past food practices, themselves, and their relationships with others in the present through ‘memories of the familiar’ (and exposure to the unfamiliar), through repetition and structures of daily meals, annualseasonal agricultural cycles, ritualistic events in the past, and associations of taste and smell. In doing so, emigrants also exhibited important and useful details for understanding the ‘how and why’ of their daily lives. Similarly, through what anthropologist David Sutton calls a process of ‘memory adaptation’ of the agricultural and ‘culinary grammar-methods’, recipes and ‘ancestral tastes’ from a remembered homeland, the emigrants in this study took with them their understandings of who they were and where they came from. Most importantly,

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they took with them memories of the relationships which shaped the context and conditions in which the recipes and food preparation occurred. These relationships also shaped how foods and practices were remembered. These relationships in Cyprus were multi-faceted: gendered, generational, family and community. They shaped and were shaped by enduring cultural expectations of who performed various tasks of food cultivation, food acquisition, cooking and religious food practices. In turn, these were based on the agricultural and subsistence economies and peasant holdings which made up a large part of Cypriot society, at least until the 1950s when light manufacturing, industrial production and urbanisation started to change the social organisation of households and the nature of work.8 Family units comprised a married couple and their unmarried children, rarely including extended family other than perhaps a widowed parent or both parents of one of the couple, with the family unit household functioning as an economic self-sufficient unit. The ideal structure of the traditional Cypriot village family was based on a patriarchal division of labour, whereby the male householder was the economic provider for his family’s economic needs, while his wife tended to the domestic needs of the household through housework. Traditional understandings of the roles of a woman, and the protection of her sexual honour, also helped define the domestic and other gendered spaces in which women worked. Thus, emigrants’ memories of the division of food tasks in Cyprus need to be seen not only in terms of their roles as carers and providers, but also through the gendered and generational spaces and expectations, family structures and hierarchies that the individual was understood to contribute to the domestic food economy.9 However, emigrants’ memories not only suggest that these roles were changeable and adapted to larger social and political forces, but that remembering these tasks was a means of remembering these relationships, shaping not only their identity as Cypriots, but their understandings of the nature of Cypriot society, however incomplete their memories actually were. The memories of the Cypriot emigrants whom I interviewed suggest that, during pre- and early post-World War Two, all members of their family could be and were involved, in some form or another, in the various tasks associated with their subsistence agricultural food acquisition; this reflected understandings that their involvement in some way challenged particular gendered and generational cultural expectations. Emigrants recalled how, in the slowly changing pre- and post war Cyprus economy, many husbands also worked beyond the family household to

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supplement their incomes or to aid others in the labour on their farms, thus challenging what they felt to be traditional responsibilities and roles. It seems that this was particularly during those decades when war and economic hardship left many wives alone, while their husbands worked locally or abroad, were at war, or had died.10 Several of the Greek Cypriots I interviewed told of their mothers’ work when their husbands were absent. As such it was a mark of hardship. Tony described how when his father was away during World War Two, ‘because of the times and the nature of the times, you know, mum had five kids to raise, so off she went to the fields and the orange picking and the potato digging and all that sort of stuff, you know, pretty much farm work’. Tony’s memory, while suggesting women were involved in running domestic household subsistence and cash crop economies, also reflects his understanding that it was only in exceptional circumstances like times of war that this would occur. This is despite anthropologists’ suggestions that family agricultural labour had traditionally been an acceptable role for women regardless of class, and that a wife’s domestic space could extend to the fields, allowing her to participate in agricultural labour on the family property when needed, and when a husband had paid work it was considered her sole responsibility.11 In contrast to their present lives in a new land, emigrants’ memories of such hardship during their lives in Cyprus defined them as emigrants. As children, they played a large part in food production and cultivation activities on the family land. However, for many this also evoked feelings of hardship, and therefore challenged current understandings of the role of children in household economies. Nick described how, as a young child during the 1930s Depression, he stopped going to school to help his widowed mother and five older brothers, doing simple tasks such as taking their goats, sheep and pigs to the lower fields to feed.12 Tony also recalled the hardship of doing ‘a lot of farming, up to the age of nearly twelve when I left to go to the UK’, while his father was away, also taking wheat to the mill on the back of a donkey as another of his required chores. Eli remembered helping her cousin to mill the wheat when she visited her paternal grandparents in the country during her childhood in the 1930s, but as a fun task because her family were poor and had no land or wheat to work, like richer families. Her memories of hardship instead lay in other forms of food acquisition labour, like gathering snails and vegetables from the fields, or domestic duties like washing the clothes and chopping meat into mince. Scholars suggest that child labour was also a common part of any agricultural society. In Cyprus it was a common practice and expectation that children be put

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to work at an early age, not only as a valued asset in the running of the family economy, but also to develop skills and resources (for example, a dowry), for their futures.13 Even in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Cyprus was economically more prosperous, children whose fathers were at home to run their farms as well as employing workers, were still expected to work in food cultivation, albeit as helpers. Jane described how she was expected to be involved in ‘picking up the broad beans [and] potatoes’ after school, emphasising her difficulty in negotiating her school homework with these chores because her father considered secondary school a luxury his family could ill afford. She recalled her hardship in long hours of travel to school by bus, attempts to finish her homework during daylight hours (they had no electricity) and helping her family with the harvest, explaining ‘we all had to give a hand, otherwise it was too much’. These memories of hardship and ‘chores’ may reflect some of these emigrants’ memories of the emotional hardship of their absent fathers, interconnecting the various aspects of their relationships and responsibility towards other family members. They also compare against a present where children do not have to do such work, and instead are encouraged to engage in education to improve their financial potential as adults. However, migrants’ nostalgia also included memories of communal reciprocity and a reliance on the land. This was in contrast to the increased modernisation and commercialisation that Cyprus underwent particularly after World War Two, and which Cypriots experienced after their migration. Many Cypriot emigrants recalled that, until the early post-war period, adults in rural parts of Cyprus engaged in reciprocal relationships with kin and neighbours by exchanging agricultural labour and produce to meet labour and food needs. While anthropologists stress the importance of kinship in reciprocal adult relations in mainland Greek villages in the pre and post-war period, Juliet Du Boulay suggests that limited amenities and resources and internal village affairs often led to a degree of mutual co-operation and reciprocity of field labour and produce amongst neighbours and villagers.14 Cypriot emigrants also recalled how men often traded labour and goods they produced themselves and women engaged in reciprocal relations within their domestic and gendered food activities such as cheese and bread making. They reflected on these relationships as part of a happy and co-operative part of life and community in Cyprus, even when in light of the poverty and hardship they simultaneously experienced. Nick recalled that during the 1930s, his adult older brothers went to work to subsidise the family economy, but ‘the only thing they could do

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was help other people on their land, and that wasn’t really for money, getting paid. [It was] because I need you, you need me, and so on; we help each other.’ In this sense, economic need also engendered a sense of community and reciprocity, cast in the light of what life was like in Cyprus. Similarly, Turkish Cypriot Nazmiye recalled that when her parents moved to Nicosia in 1958 in order for her father to find work during the rise of ethnic tensions, her mother returned to her village each year, continuing to engage in these reciprocal relationships with her neighbours, not only in harvesting crops but in processing them into edible products like grape syrup.15 Nazmiye claimed they did ‘not pay money each other    share each other you know, the job. Sometime I help you anyway, and another day you help me anyway, like, no pay money, it’s just like that’, even in an environment of rising ethnic tensions in Cyprus at the time. For Nazmiye, this was a fondly recalled memory of nostalgia and community to which she has since desired to return, particularly against her memories of loneliness and lack of support from family or neighbours as a new emigrant, but also a time before the separation of Greek and Turkish Cypriots were divided by the wars of 1974. It defined not only her memory of life in Cyprus, but herself as a reluctant immigrant, such was her longing for the past she remembered. Emigrants also liked to remember men and women in Cyprus sharing and trading goods with extended family and other community members in order to overcome limited food availability and diversity within particular households; their memories of life in Cyprus thus are of mutuality of support and reciprocity. However, their descriptions also highlight the importance of rules and remembering their obligations to each other. For instance, women pooled their milk resources together as part of an exchange system. Jane described how making haloumi required more than just one bucket of milk, so the women would get milk from close friends and relatives; thus each week one person would have the milk, and then the next someone else would, each using a stick to mark how much milk they owed each other. Nazmiye also described how village neighbours

exchange[ed] yeah, but not with money, you know, if you [got] olives and my mum got grapes or uh, syrup, you know, honey [grape] syrup    [you] give that one and she take the olives, or if she have flour, she give it and she take the bread, and [they] share like that, not with money.

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But emigrants’ memories do not suggest that trading food items was solely a woman’s practice within their domestic economies, but that sharing and trade amongst kinship groups and the community also characterised elements of support and reciprocity in Cypriot society. Jane recalled how her brother, whose property had a well to provide water for growing zucchini, cucumbers and other produce, would share them with his parents’ household. Men also traded goods as part of their own trades and pre-occupations. Jane recalled how her father acquired meat from the neighbouring village’s butcher, who would offer him cuts, sometimes in exchange for peas, which were an otherwise rare and sought-after commodity. However, their memories also reflect the degree to which food acquisition and production tasks were shared within a family household. Emigrants recalled how men, as the key food providers, also contributed to food acquisition through hunting and fishing for meat, either as a contribution to the domestic economy, or as a source of income, reflecting their understanding that this was primarily a male and provider’s role within their family groups. Tony’s family lived in a coastal area, where men worked on fishing boats to catch fish to sell to the market, although they sometimes kept small fish to take home for a meal. Migrants did, however, recall with fond memories their fathers and grandfathers bringing home hunted animals, which were a treat because they did not regularly eat them. Tony said that during periods when his own father was overseas, his grandfather sometimes hunted rabbit for the evening meal, suggesting that there were cooperative extended family supports. But, generally, migrants recollected that men also caught and hunted animals that were something special, particularly when they were in season, because they were protected species and thus could not be hunted. Maro remembered how men would catch small birds, called tsickles, or mavropoulos, which were considered a delicacy, while Nick described the ‘grape birds’ they would trap in the vines. Jane also recalled her father sometimes hunted rabbit and perthikes [partridge], and deer, even though ‘it was against the law, but because we were hungry, we didn’t have anything. Sometimes he would go, and bring one’. Sandra instead retold a family story of her Greek Cypriot grandfather bringing frogs to her Syrian mother, against his own wife’s approval and wishes, because he loved his daughter-in-law, although frogs were a food considered inappropriate to eat by the community for religious reasons. By doing so he expressed affection for his daughter-in-law through food. This story of love within family across generations, was important for Sandra as

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part of her Cypriot identity, family history, and brought her closer to her deceased mother, who she had little personal memory of. However, this also shows how traditional foods, family relationships and gendered food practices were contested within individual households, especially when food types crossed cultural boundaries and socially accepted norms. Because different foods were made by men and women according their roles within the family, various tasks associated with food preservation and preparation were also divided according to gendered and generational family relationships and expectations. In ‘traditional’ subsistence village economies, food preparation and preservation – such as making cheeses, bread, trahana (cracked wheat cooked/fermented with yogurt and then dried into pasta like shapes) and pastas and noodles – was part of a wife’s domestic duties. Many emigrants remembered their mothers and grandmothers making bread, olives, dried products, like pasta or trahana, and particularly haloumi and other cheeses. Milking the animals and cheese making itself were solitary activities, yet emigrants described the pooling of milk resources as a communal and social activity. Jane, recalling her childhood, says ‘it was fun    I used to watch the ladies come    and they would talk, a little bit    but my mother was busy’, so she did not stay. Nazmiye suggested that Greek and Turkish Cypriot villagers sometimes made haloumi (cheese) together, reflecting her sentiments of commensality and community in a Cyprus she remembered before its geographic and ethnic division. Migrants’ memories also suggest that in rural subsistence economies women’s work could also extend beyond the home into other communal spaces. Many food processes and domestic duties, including water gathering, were part of female communal reciprocity and sociability, but also part of larger economic and labour relations, or sharing of resources. Eli recalled all her neighbours getting together to make trahana by moonlight, helping the wealthy lady in the village who had the wheat to make it. Although young girls rarely participated in tasks such as making haloumi, other than as helpers, or as Maria suggested, when their mothers were ill and incapacitated, they often watched to learn by observation, in preparation for when they too would become wives. By way of contrast, the preparation of meat was divided between men and women, and other family members in various ways. Wives who kept chickens and pigeons would slaughter them for cooking weekly meals, while children also helped in their preparation. Tony claimed that as a boy it was often his job to help his grandmother skin the rabbits

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and chickens. However, larger animals from family farms in rural areas, were usually only killed for special occasions, and by men, possibly originating from a masculine shepherd tradition associated with ritual sacrifice. However many interviewees recalled that it was not done by their fathers: ‘they use[d] to get the [male] butcher around and kill the pig’ or goat and lamb for special occasions like Christmas or Easter.16 During the 1960s, Jane’s father sometimes killed a goat on a Sunday, but like many others, he often just traded or bought meat from the butcher, doing the weekend kill in their own or a near-by village. Wives in rural villages were responsible for the preservation of many foods, including products from the yearly slaughter of the pig, although husbands were also involved in certain processes. Many emigrants recall their mothers making zaladina, and other cooked meat stored in its fat; Jane said her father helped to smoke meats. However, except in paid occupations such as a baker or kafenion (tavern) proprietor, cooking and other ‘domestic’ duties were not considered appropriate work for men. The kitchen was considered a female, and more specifically, a wife’s space. In contrast, the outdoors, and the area of the wood-fired oven was a shared space, where women and their neighbours baked bread, but where men could also cook meat like souvla, and was similar in many respects to the Australian and American barbecue, but only for special occasions when a pig, lamb, or goat were killed for Christmas or Easter, or the later two animals for the Turkish Bayrums. Men were also known to prepare kleftico,17 especially in ovens they had made themselves, a method of cooking meat traditionally associated with an oral tradition of shepherds and thieves who cooked meat in sealed holes in the ground to avoid detection by the authorities. The impacts of increasing urbanisation and modernisation after World War Two, which altered the organisation of agricultural labour and changing social expectations (including a lessened desirability for women to do agricultural labour as a sign of class and status, increased expectations and requirements of child education, and an increased sense of individualism18 ), were also reflected in emigrants’ memories of life in Cyprus. Those already living in urban areas, often without sufficient land to live in a subsistence economy, and those who subsequently moved from rural to urban and other areas to find work, also described their householder’s reliance on non-agricultural areas of paid work, such as mining and building labouring to supply a living, often in non-food production related industries. Exceptions included those like Georgina’s father, who worked in the emergent commercial food and

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manufacturing industries which began to replace women’s domestic duties.19 As a baker, he brought bread home from work, therefore relieving her mother from baking bread like many others had done. In the meanwhile, rural subsistence economies were also being supplemented by specialised cash crops such as lemons, nuts, potatoes, olives and carob in different areas, which had been encouraged by the British Administration since the late nineteenth century.20 These factors had created an environment where landowners, such as Jane’s and Maro’s fathers, employed adult workers rather than rely on household labour or community reciprocity. This was even the case if a husband worked outside the home for supplementary income. Jane recalled how her father worked as a public servant poisoning waterways against mosquito propagation, while employing workers to work his land. Not only did this lessen these householders’ involvement in agricultural food production, but it also limited some wives’ roles to domestic duties within the home, reinforcing traditional understandings of a wife’s duty and worth and as good domestic carer, and her husband as the breadwinner. Yet women’s participation in agricultural and other paid labour did not necessarily lessen, representing for some emigrants the kind of hardship that was part of their lifestyle in Cyprus, but in a different way. Many migrants suggested women who worked for money did so in cottage industries, utilising domestic skills such as cloth, embroidery, lace work and cheese making, while others, like Jane and her sister moved directly into agricultural and other forms of paid work, not considered appropriate for women. Jane said her older sister had worked to help put her through school prior to the 1974 war ‘in a saw mill    working, very heavy jobs, it wasn’t easy for ladies, or    any job really, picking up oranges, or carrots when it was the season    the whole village would go, all the ladies or something, the bus [would] take them there’. She also recalled working during school breaks ‘Christmas holidays    Easter holidays I used to work for school    just to get some money to buy my own shoes or something.’ After the 1974 wars, she joined her sister in ‘the saw mills there, but it was very hard job’, later finding work in a gift shop to help support her refugee family. Maro recalled her father employing Turkish Cypriot women to pick fruit and work fields in the 1960s, which reflected changing expectations of a wife as a domestic carer and/or provider, depending on a family’s economic situation and land holdings, suggesting that gender roles were defined by, and therefore also reflective of, social standing and class status.21

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This need for women to work was part of a more general shift in food production and acquisition into market driven and commercial arenas, which were also reshaping family roles and relationships. Although many emigrants from rural origins recalled that much of their food was acquired through their own agricultural economy, they did also buy or trade foods at local stores or with neighbours. Some bought products like vegetable oil, coffee and sugar, alcohol, and items like fruit which were not part of the local economy, at a small local store, café or tavern. But emigrants’ memories suggest that, in the rural context, these were gendered and generational tasks women were discouraged from entering into. They described how mothers often sent their children to buy these items as an errand, although they never explicitly said that this was because the tavern or cafénion in particular was a male space from which women were then discouraged from entering alone, as scholars suggest was the case in Cyprus and other parts of the Hellenic world.22 Tony recalled: ‘It was my job, I’d go to a little tavern, and go in the back of the little kitchen they have, and they have these huge barrels of vinegar and wine    And I’d go home with this wine and vinegar.’ Jane also remembered her mother sending her to buy olive oil from the local store when she was 12, because they had run out of their home-produced olive oil. Fathers also bought foods from outside the home, Jane and Georgina recalling their fathers buying meat, either through exchange or purchase from the butcher.23 Without specifying by whom, Tony merely claimed that meat was bought on the weekend on the way home from church. Like those in rural areas, migrants suggested that many wives in urban areas continued to keep chickens and small vegetable gardens in their yards, however, women also increasingly had to venture beyond the home. As suggested above, Nazmiye and Georgina recalled their mothers taking on the new task of travelling to their old villages, where they acquired produce via old kinship ties to take back to their urban homes for the year ahead. In outer-urban areas, women and their children also gathered/scavenged resources from whatever they could access. Eli and her grandmother collected snails from the fields after the rains, or picked greens and other vegetables which grew amongst other people’s wheat fields and crops; a practice that emigrants like Eli recalled family members being employed to patrol against. Otherwise, they bought foods from other locals or stores. Eli recalled her grandmother buying more exotic products, like sausages and dates on her trips to the city during the 1930s and 1940s, which Campbell suggests was more acceptable for older women.24 In later years, wives also bought their foods

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from vendors selling their wares from a truck, or a horse and carriage in the street. Georgina’s mother and Jane’s sister bought fish and water from vendors during the 1950s, and Georgina recalled Turkish people coming into the town to sell kataifi (fine stringy pastry). In these cases sellers brought the produce to the wife’s home and kitchen for her to buy. However, as urbanisation and commercialisation increased during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, women increasingly shopped in stores, and Jane often shopped for food, even meals, at shops, local stalls and takeaway outlets when she moved with her brother and friend to Limmasol to find work during the late 1970s. However, migrants suggest that cooking continued to remain, both in rural and urban Cyprus, a woman’s domain, and in particular the responsibility and duty of the wife and mother. All the interviewees said their mothers cooked most of their meals (in Eli’s case, her grandmother because her mother died when she was an infant). Eli emphasised that it was the unquestionable duty, not choice, of her grandmother to cook for her husband during the 1930s, even though she also worked at home making cloth: In those days, oh my grandfather was, when he came home from work, the tea had to be on the table. Ready, ready on the table, or there was a big troubles    When the men came home from work, the tea had to be on the table, already cooked. Even though there were non-negotiable expectations of when food was served, a wife generally chose what she wanted to cook, although pandering to children’s and husbands’ tastes was an area of negotiation and contention which varied within each household. Sandra’s grandmother, in particular, objected to her husband bringing her daughterin-law frog’s legs to eat, while Eli recalled the challenges her dislike for tomatoes, silver beet, eggplant or okra had caused her grandmother, who had to prepare something extra for her, for which her ‘grandfather used to give her [grandmother] hell’. This task of a wife as cook was understood to extend not only to the care of the family, but also to others temporarily part of the household economy. Jane and Maro both recalled that their mothers also fed their paid farm workers, sometimes with the help of other family members. When a wife could not fulfill this role as cook and care-giver of family sustenance because she was working or caring for the farm while her husband was absent, ideally a daughter or grandparent would then take over her role. Tony explained that ‘what a lot of the families used to

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do    the eldest daughters used to cook and look after the kids while the parents used to go out to work’. He elaborated that ‘My sister, for instance, got taken out of school when she was eleven, to look after us three [younger children]    so she could be a little mum at home, you know    or grandma would do something, and then send it over with us, or granddad.’ Similarly, Maria described how her sisters took over more complex duties like making trahana when her mother broke her arm. Emigrants also suggest that sharing individual specialities and skills with certain foods also led to meals shared amongst female family members, as grandmothers (often living close by) and daughters also cooked to help a wife with her many tasks and when she worked on the land or because they were especially good at or knew how to make dishes that she did not. Jane’s grandmother made fettuccini for her family, helping her mother prepare food for the family and workers, while her sister made dolmades, which her mother had little patience for. While not cooks themselves, other children also helped with food preparation, Tony claiming he learnt to cook by helping his grandmother, ‘plucking the chickens for instance once a week    Skinning the rabbit whenever there was one    [and helping] to grind down the pepper’. He also claimed that making koupepia (dolma) was a task the family would all do together – keeping in mind his father was absent much of this time. There were also certain dishes and occasions that emigrants considered were the tasks of women and young girls more generally, rather than specifically wives, as Tony described how ‘the young girls and the women in particular, used to make glycon’, a sweet preserve or jam made from fruit. Food practices and rituals associated with religion and spiritual wellbeing were also more often practiced by wives and mothers, and the elderly, as part of the family domestic and spiritual economy. As carrier of the family moral virtue, a wife was caretaker of the spiritual well-being of her family, not only by preparing religious foods, but undertaking Lenten fasts, representation at church, and observation of memorial days.25 This was more specifically discussed in relation to fasting before, and feasting for, Easter, Christmas and other Saints days, which in theory was practiced by everyone in the family.26 Yet, the reality could be different. Many emigrants described how in practice children and husbands only fasted during the last week or few days of Lent, while mothers and ‘older people’ often proved to be the ‘more devout’ by fasting for the full 40 days before Easter. Husbands and fathers’ nonpractice was explained as being due to work, or because they found it difficult to give up smoking and coffee, sometimes causing friction

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between a married couple. Jane explained ‘my father would eat, and [my mother] would fight with him, you know. “You are making the kids to want to eat.” ’ She explained how her father would ‘fast only 2 or 3 days before communion    but he couldn’t wait, he wanted to have his smoke’. As cooks, migrants suggested wives also prepared many ritualistic meals, like avgolemeni soupa [egg and lemon, rice, chicken soup] for Easter, or dough, breads and kolliva (boiled wheat) for Saints days and death memorials, not only because they utilised food preparation skills otherwise part of their everyday cooking practices, but as practitioners of the church rituals and fasts. While husbands were involved in the preparation and cooking of meats like souvla and kleftico, it was only for these special occasions within an agricultural economy where meat was scarce and the pig kept for the yearly slaughter, often during the two important ritual religious events of Easter and Christmas, amongst a range of other saints’ days. Cooking for weddings, which commentators suggest is the single most important cultural celebration in Cyprus,27 was considered by emigrants to be predominantly undertaken by women, as a communal affair, involving family, neighbours and various village members in various tasks for the occasion within gendered and generational defined spheres. The emphasis was different for various migrants, as some described the role of the family and/or community, while others highlighted the gendered aspects of these roles, each highlighting the sense of community and reciprocity they remembered in Cyprus, even if it was through distant memories of the past. Dimitra suggested that when she was young, during the late 1960s, weddings were prepared and paid for by only the families involved, while Tony and Jane instead described the communal nature of the organisation of wedding feasts during the 1950s and 1960s. Tony recalled: ‘everyone would do their bit, you know, somebody would bring in X amount of sacks of potatoes    [and] other people would start rolling up the vine leaves’. Jane also recalled that sometimes relatives from different villages came to help, not only contributing their skills, labour and resources, suggesting ‘everyone took food, like a chicken, your flour, your olive oil, that would go towards the cooking’. Emigrants’ memories of these food preparation tasks, associated with communal rites of passage, also illustrated gendered, generational and communal activity in traditional Cypriot village weddings. In his analysis of the changing form and role of the wedding in Cyprus, anthropologist Vassos Argyrou describes the ritualistic beating of the cracked wheat by women at various stages of the communal making of resi in

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traditional wedding ceremonies. This was a ‘traditional’ wedding dish some interviewees were familiar with, but only those from the mountainous districts of Cyprus had actually taken part in it themselves, and often without the meanings and associations Argyrou attributed to the various rites of food preparation, as part of the couple’s passage from adolescence to adulthood, and a means of legitimising gender inequalities and hierarchical relations between age groups.28 In an interview Georgina instead spoke of how ‘[women] would do pasticcio, they would do their, [pause] roast, their kieftethes, their dolmathakia, all the ladies from the town’, reflecting her sense of community and social inclusion when women made these foods. Jane, like Georgina also remembered kourumbiethes and loukoumia, two sweet cakes, which were specifically made by young girls, in a communal fashion some time before the wedding. Georgina remembered: ‘Yes, all the girls would go and make those and wrap them up and have them ready’, Jane further expressing the communal sense of giving, emphasising ‘if you got married they would do it for you’. Analysing emigrants’ understandings of their ‘traditional’ Cypriot food cultures and practices reveals layers of meaning of identity, community and the fluency of tradition. Cypriot emigrants’ memories show complex cultural understandings of the gendered, generational, and other kinship and communal aspects of rural and urban food production and preparation in ritualistic food tasks. Embedded in many of their memories of life in Cyprus lay an awareness of socio-economic change, but expressed through narratives of hardship and nostalgia, consistent with their identity as émigrés from Cyprus. They revealed the extent to which relationships were shaped by, and an inherent part of, food practices and their domestic economies, and those broader economic, social and political forces, such as poverty, World War Two and the following periods of industrialisation and urbanisation, also shaped how migrants organised their food practices. For some this was partly an expression of nostalgia for remembered home-grown produce and shared communal support, identified and associated with ‘traditions’ of a simple rural village subsistence lifestyle. For others it was an unspoken explanation for emigration, an expression of their current identity as Greek-Cypriot emigrants with continuing ties to Cyprus and an emigrant expatriate Cypriot community. For all of those interviewed, the concept of ‘tradition’ in their food culture was a fluid and personal memory, inherently tied, as a central organising element of daily life and existence, to their family and community relationships.

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Notes 1. D. Bell and G Valentine, Consuming Geographies: We are Where we Eat (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 3; M. Bosworth, ‘Conversations with Italian Women: Close Encounters of a Culinary Kind’, in R. Bosworth and M. Melia (eds), Aspects of Ethnicity: Studies in Western Australian History XII (Perth: Centre for Western Australian History, University of Western Australia, 1991), pp. 95–102; D. Sutton, ‘Syntethesia, Memory, and the Taste of Home’, in C. Korsmeyer (ed), The Taste Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005), pp. 304–16; H. R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 2. This chapter is based on my research with a group of Cypriot émigrés living in Melbourne, Australia, for my doctoral dissertation, on the development of their food cultures; See also T. Kalivas, ‘Olive Oil, Eggplants and Haloumi Cheese: Food Availability and the Maintenance of Greek-Cypriot Migrant Food Cultures in Melbourne in the 1960s’, in T. Luckins and S. O’Hanlon (eds), GO! Melbourne in the Sixties (Melbourne: Circa, 2005), pp. 148–59. 3. While largely based on the testimonies of Greek Cypriots, it also includes an interview with a Turkish Cypriot. However, it is not intended to represent Greek or Turkish emigrants more generally in any way. 4. R. T. Peterson, ‘The Production Perspective’, in D. Crane (ed), The Sociology of Culture: Emerging Theoretical Perspectives (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1994), pp. 183–4; E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in E. J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 1–2. 5. S. Josephides, ‘Honour, Family and Work: Greek Cypriot Women before and after Migration’, in S. Westwood and P. Bhachu (eds), Enterprising Women: Ethnicity, Economy and Gender Relations (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 35. 6. P. Constantinides, ‘The Greek Cypriots: Factors in the Maintenance of Ethnic Identity’, in J. L. Watson (ed), Between Two Cultures: Migrants and Minorities in Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), pp. 269–72; M. Attalides, Social Change and Urbanisation: A Study of Nicosia (Nicosia: Publications of the Social Research Centre, 1981), p. 63; C. Price, Southern Europeans in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 9. 7. A few examples in a growing literature include D. Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 61, 103–8; C. Joyner, Down By the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 91; M. Langfield and P. MacLean, ‘ “But Pineapple I’m Still a Bit Wary Of”: Sensory Memories of Jewish Women Who Migrated to Australia as Children 1938–39’, in A. J. Hammerton and E. Richards (eds), Speaking to Immigrants: Oral Testimony and the History of Australian Migration (Canberra: Australian National University, 2000), pp. 83–109. 8. F. Anthias, Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Migration: Greek Cypriots in Britain (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992), pp. 79–80; Attalides, Social Change and Urbanization, p. 53. 9. Josephides, ‘Honour, Family and Work’, p. 35; P. Loizos, The Greek Gift: Politics in a Cypriot Village (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), pp. 54–5, 64–5.

Tina Kalivas 187 10. V. Argyrou, Tradition and Modernity in Mediterranean Society: The Wedding as Cultural Symbol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 31. 11. Anthias, Ethnicity, p. 83; Loizos, Greek Gift, pp. 55–6. 12. The 1930s was a period of extreme poverty, and it was common to put children to work at an early age, taking older children into the fields with them while a daughter might stay home and look after the younger children; See Argyrou, Tradition and Modernity, p. 31. 13. K. C. Markides, E. S. Nikita and E. N. Rangou, Lysi: Social Change in a Cypriot Village (Nicosia: Zavallis Press, 1978), p. 92; Argyrou, Tradition and Modernity, p. 31 14. J. Du Boulay, Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 151, 158, 248. 15. Loizos also suggests Turkish Cypriots returned to Villages to tend and harvest crops. Loizos, Greek Gift, p. 305. 16. J. K. Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 352. 17. From the word Kleftes meaning to steal or theft. 18. Du Boulay, pp. 247–8; J. G. Peristiany, ‘Honour and Shame in a Highland Village’, in J. G. Peristiany (ed), Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1965), pp. 174–5; Loizos, Greek Gift, pp. 55–6. 19 Carol Counihan documents a similar shift in Sardinia in ‘Bread as World, Food Habits and Social Relations in Modernizing Sardinia’, in C. Counihan and P. Van Esterik (eds), Food and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 283–95. 20. Attalides, Social Change, pp. 46, 48. 21. Josephides, ‘Honour, Family and Work’, pp. 35–9. 22. J. K. Cowan, ‘Going out for Coffee? Contesting the Grounds of Gendered Pleasures in Everyday Sociability’, in P. Loizos and E. Papataxiarchis (eds), Contested Identities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 188. 23. Sutton’s study of a Greek village suggests that husbands were equally involved in handling and purchasing food from markets. Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts, pp. 21–4. 24. Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage, pp. 278, 290. 25. Cowan, Dance and the Body Politic, p. 51. 26. Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage, pp. 352–5. 27. Argyrou, Tradition and Modernity, p. 60. 28. Ibid., pp. 62, 67.

Further reading M. Attalides, Social Change and Urbanisation: A Study of Nicosia (Nicosia: Publications of the Social Research Centre, 1981). K. C. Markides, E. S. Nikita and E. N. Rangou, Lysi: Social Change in a Cypriot Village (Nicosia: Zavallis Press, 1978). D. Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Oxford: Berg, 2001).

11 ‘Just Sugar’? Food and Landscape along Queensland’s Sunshine Coast Chris McConville

The sugar she had filled into the countless basins during six years of waiting on restaurant tables had never been vocal for her. Just sugar; white crystalline substance. Fine or coarse. And here! How mighty the fields! Never ending! And always the sugar. Cane everywhere, everywhere; filling the tiny valleys, embroidering the roads. In the steaming hot air of the coastlands its feathery plumes were still as its heavy purple sticks. Jean Devanny, Sugar Heaven (1936)1 Of all the foods which have been the subject of scholarship, sugar has probably received the most attention. Yet there are dimensions to the history of sugar’s cultivation that have not yet been subjected to historical enquiry. In what sense has the growing, cutting and milling of Australian cane sugar created a distinctive cultural landscape, one that displays in its enduring patterns, a vernacular way of life? Novelist Jean Devanny’s classic account of the Weil’s disease strikes in Queensland’s canefields captures one phase in Australian sugar farming, conjuring up for us a working life now vanished.2 Her story of a young Sydney woman who marries a cane cutter at the end of the inter-war Depression and finds herself at the heart of an angry strike in the mills around Mourilyan and Innisfail in far north Queensland, opened readers’ minds to the beauty of the cane landscape, the solidarity of cane cutters and their families, the ethnic diversity of the cane towns and the fundamentally exhausting nature of cane cutting itself. The threat central to the strike, of illness, through Weil’s disease – spread from rats’ urine in canefields – eventually led to a signature image of the cane landscape: the firing 188

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of fields prior to cutting. Australia’s canelands still burn in the weeks before winter harvesting, even though cutting by hand has ended and farmers and mill workers look nervously, not to the threat posed by local rodents, but to a possible catastrophe brought on by new trade agreements with the United States and endemic corruption in world markets.3 A recently announced Commonwealth sugar ‘rescue package’ seems destined to remove many if not most of the 6000 cane growers currently farming in Queensland. Whilst the landscape of sugar farming will no doubt be radically refashioned within a decade, for the moment, we still have an opportunity to reflect on sugar as both landscape and food. This is particularly the case, not so much as regards those vast sugar regions described by Devanny, and which run, in coastal Queensland, for hundreds of kilometres from Mackay north to Mossman and the Daintree River, but rather in the southern regions around smaller milltowns like Nambour on the Sunshine Coast or Rocky Point on the Gold Coast. This chapter draws essentially on the character of the sugar landscape of the Sunshine Coast in south-east Queensland, where the central Moreton Mill, in the town of Nambour, shut down for good in 2003, at the end of the crushing season.4 Whereas several economic and environmental commentators seem, gleefully, to welcome the demise of an industry painted as polluting, inefficient and culturally ‘redneck’, this chapter adopts a different stance. It argues that cane landscapes and the way of life of cane farmers are culturally valuable. Cane landscapes at the end of the twentieth century, the history of their evolution, especially in the era since the 1940s, and the readings we can make of these as representing a vernacular way of life, present cane farming and its ubiquitous foodstuff as more than ‘just sugar’.

The cane landscape Within 50 years of the strike captured so hauntingly by Jean Devanny, the cane cutter and his family had disappeared, as mechanical cutters brought to an end the ritualised seasonal work of hand-cutting and hauling sugar cane. However the broader landscape for this work, the coastal canelands of Australia and the substance which they produced, the crystalline sugar, have not. Unfolding along the continent’s eastern coast, the Australian sugar-cane regions run through the damp subtropical coastal strip of northern New South Wales and Queensland. Backed by forested and often wild mountains, the sugar lands are cut through by enormous river estuaries. Increasingly sugar farmers compete

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on this coastal fringe with expanding coastal towns and sprawling tourist ‘resorts’. The heaviest concentrations of sugar farming remain in the far north of Queensland, between Mackay and Cairns. The southern Queensland regions for sugar farming are less expansive and increasingly subject to an encroaching coastal suburbia. However canefields still stand at the core of the riverine landscape around Maclean and the Clarence River in New South Wales, the Tweed Valley on the New South Wales-Queensland border and along the Maroochy River in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Even amidst the post-modernity of theme parks and hotel towers along the Gold Coast, a small cane-farming community survives at Rocky Point. Whereas the northern sugar regions are so vast as to defy any comprehension as a bounded landscape, these southern canefields created a common foodstuff within a distinctively enclosed agricultural and industrial landscape. This is especially the case for the surviving canefields of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, an area only 120 kilometres north of Brisbane. Between the pineapple-growing farms of the Glasshouse Mountains and the state forests of Cooloola and Gympie to the north, cane farmers established a miniaturised sugar landscape during the first half of the twentieth century. Cane farms followed the valleys of the Maroochy and Mooloola Rivers and their tributaries like Petrie Creek. Points along these waterways were used as wharves from which cane was hauled by barge to railyards. These farms, compact in comparison to those of north Queensland, had survived through co-operative ownership of the local mill (recently replaced by integration into a European transnational conglomerate) a strong canegrowers’ association and by farmers supporting cane income in years of low price by fruit growing or labouring work. Between the escarpment of the Blackall Range and the suburban expanse of coastal tourism and ex-urban residential estates, the canelands are a reminder of an older, localised way-of-life, once central to the culture and politics of tropical Australia and linked distinctively through the sugar trade and its labour demands, to the wider world. The Sunshine Coast cane region was once more extensive than it is now. Growers planted cane in the nineteenth century along river valleys and on the central plateau of Mount Buderim. They then moved inland and planted on the Blackall Range which divides the damp coastal strip from the drier interior, and where crops and fruit give way to cattle grazing. As cane farming exhausted the higher slopes of the Range, cane farmers moved onto river flats across the three local government areas of Landsborough, Maroochy and Noosa. The opening of a

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mill at Nambour, alongside the main northern rail line, concentrated growing and grower activity around the town, so that cane trains ran through the streets of Nambour each season. In the terms by which geographers and heritage professionals understand it, we can define this area of farmlands, central mill and town as a ‘cultural landscape’.5 As a product of human activity and one whose elements are altered over time, the idea of cultural landscape encompasses notions of layers of activity registered in buildings, plantings and landforms, the idea of a bounded viewshed and linkages between key structures in some form of network.6 Underlying this interpretative approach to material form is the assumption that landscapes, especially rural landscapes, reflect and reshape a communal, even to a degree, organic way of life. Whilst the application of post-structuralist theory to ideas of landscape has destabilised any sense of organic wholeness in landscape analysis, the essential ideas of cultural landscape can still be employed in understanding culinary tradition and way of life, as expressed through material form and social network, in the sugar regions of the Sunshine Coast.7 The cane fields have distinctive boundaries and appearance; they are networked by cane-train tracks and were centred, until recently, on the iconic structure of the mill. They meet the essential criteria for reading as landscape, and compose a register of distinctive localised culture.8

Sugar growing and cooking The landscapes of sugar cane owe their origins to nineteenth century Britain’s insatiable desire for sugar, a taste which ensured a market for exports and at the same time enshrined an even sweeter culinary tradition amongst voracious and sugar-addicted Australians.9 By the midnineteenth century successful sugar production had been achieved in New South Wales, with finer quality white granules replacing dark and moist molasses-laden sugar. In Queensland, the Sugar Regulations Act of 1864 stimulated shortlived attempts to grow sugar along valleys of the Maroochy River and its tributaries on the Sunshine Coast. However the Mooloola Quaker community abandoned their mill on the river flats. Other early lowland farmers joined them on Mount Buderim where a sugar mill was reformed and cane grown along with grapes, peaches and guava.10 The sugar boom of the 1870s brought farmers to the inland ranges and back to the river valleys along the North Arm of the Maroochy River and lower Blackall Ranges with farms at Dulong, Image Flat and Burnside, all on the fringes of what is now the town

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of Nambour.11 In 1880, the Buderim Mountain Sugar Company began crushing. The near collapse of the industry in the 1890s (through a combination of widespread economic depression and a forced ending to the forced labour schemes by which Melanesian indentured workers were exploited in cutting and crushing) led to great changes.12 Small farms with often mixed production based around one central mill established the resultant character of the industry, one which survived for more than 100 years. After much conflict about where a central mill would be located the Moreton Mill opened in Nambour in 1894. By 1911, 80 per cent of the approximately 200 farmers supplying the mill were also shareholders in the mill company.13 Over the twentieth century, this sugar industry survived cycles of economic and environmental strain. Farming was gradually concentrated on the lowland river flats as dairy farming and soil exhaustion forced sugar growers away from the inland Blackall Range. The mechanisation of cutting ultimately brought an end to the human exhaustion of cane cutting. This transition to mechanised cutting was slow on the Sunshine Coast where small producers lacked capital for investment in expensive mobile cutters. Mechanised cane loaders were initially combined with hand cutting and then stalk harvesters were introduced after 1960.14 Within a decade local farmers were using combined ‘chopper-harvesters’. In 1977, three local farms cut cane by hand and in 1978 the last two families to hand-cut cane, the Graveners and the Atkinsons, were obliged to look to machine cutting (younger men in the families were happy to go on cutting by hand but different bin sizes at the mill forced their families to adopt mechanical harvesters).15 The Nambour mill crushed Queensland’s last bins of hand-cut cane in the 1979 season. The disappearance of the cane cutters at the heart of Devanny’s tale of class conflict occurred at the end of the sugar farmers’ most profitable era. A ‘sugar boom’ expanded acreage in the 1950s after two major international agreements were signed, the 1951 Commonwealth Sugar Agreement and the 1953 International Sugar Agreement. New fertilisers were trialled on farms at Bli Bli on the Maroochy River and after several experiments growers began planting the ‘Q series’ cane developed in Queensland. These sugar growers could look to a potentially vast market by the middle of the twentieth century. By midcentury, humans were consuming on average three times as much sugar per year as in 1900. World sugar markets had come to be dominated by the United States and its acolyte producer states in Latin America, although not all Central American sugar cropping fitted a pattern of

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American dominance.16 In Mexico, for example, the power of the small farmers’ political representatives and an entrenched sense of mutual obligation, gave peasant producers a say in milling and marketing structures, an arrangement sharing some of its broad characteristics with the Australian industry during the era of Country Party dominance in Queensland.17 In the years between the end of the World War Two and 1960, Australia had emerged as one of the world’s leading sugar producers, listed amongst the 12 nations which produced more than a million tons of sugar per year (the others were Argentina, Brazil, France, West Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Philippines, Poland, Russia and the United States). Of these about half relied on beet rather than cane sugar. At this stage Cuba was the largest exporting country and the United States the largest consumer.18 Thanks to the victorious Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro, the USA sought more congenial, if more distant suppliers, and Queensland growers looked increasingly to their new ‘Yanqui’ market. Australia’s subsequent sugar boom extended into the 1970s, only to be halted by the collapse of a proposed new international sugar agreement in 1984. Even though the number of farmers in the Sunshine Coast area was decreasing during the decade, acreage planted continued to increase, so that sugar remained the major local industry right through to 1984.19

Sugar: An Australian staple By the time farmers turned to an international market, Australian cooks had made sugar an established staple in the kitchen. One popular recipe after another relied on copious quantities of sugar, a sweetness most pronounced in Queensland. Australian cooks augmented the growing desire for sweetness inherited from the European and especially the English diet. Dated in some histories to consumption in India in 1200 BC, cane sugar was familiar to medieval Europe as ‘white salt’. Tenth century Venetians exported sugar throughout Western Europe and 500 years later, sugar became a part of the colonial production regimes of Spain, Portugal and Holland with plantations in Hispaniola, Brazil and the Dutch East Indies.20 By the middle of the nineteenth century, sugar production in Britain’s West Indian colonies had allowed for a massive rise in consumption. The British Sugar Act of 1846 exposed these islands to competition, and British teeth to the huge sugar production of Cuba, which by 1856 was source for one quarter of all world sugar.21 Sugar was

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no longer spice for the wealthy but a ubiquitous additive to standard fare amongst the British labouring classes. In adapting British cuisine to the Antipodes, Australians speedily outdid the sweet teeth of the Old World and by the later-nineteenth century the Australian colonies were estimated to have the highest per capita sugar consumption in the world.22 Coghlan, the New South Wales colonial statistician, made the extraordinary estimate that 8.4 per cent of New South Wales family budgets went on the consumption of sugar! Grigg’s excellent tables for sugar consumption in nineteenth-century Australia demonstrate further that amongst the world’s most insatiable sugar eaters, Queensland far outdid all the other colonies. In the period 1890–94 each Queenslander devoured, annually, 141.3 pounds of sugar! In contrast Tasmanians consumed 82 pounds and Victorians 99.4 pounds. Well into the twentieth century, as cookbooks indicate, sugar was not just a staple additive to tea or to porridge, but a basic ingredient for cakes, chutneys and preserves, essential items in Australian kitchens, especially in the sub-tropics. To some, an unchallengeable guide to the finest culinary arts, the CWA [Country Women’s Association] Cookery Book listed standard recipes from soups to desserts in which sugar seemed the most frequently used commodity.23 Whilst breakfast recipes were largely free from sugar, even such staple main courses as mutton and rissoles required the addition of sugar.24 In desserts, puddings and pastries the sugar content was raised dramatically and additions of one or half a cup, sometimes two cups of sugar to make flummery or orange snow were common. These sugar additions ranged from castor to icing to standard white or brown sugar and included the iconic caramelised liquid, Golden Syrup. Even cooks of wheatmeal biscuits were advised to add two ‘large’ cups of sugar to the recipe.25 Queensland recipes, as might be expected, relied even more heavily on sugar. A pineapple jam recipe collected by the Museum of Queensland from the later nineteenth century asked for 3/4 lb of sugar for every 1lb of pineapple pulp. An 1869 alternative reversed the proportions and called for 1 1/4 pounds of white sugar to each one pound of pineapple pulp.26 Then of course there were the constant additions of sugar to drinks and its use in the alcohol most identified with colonial Australia, rum, and with the discerning twentieth century Queenslander’s favourite, rum and cola. For men cutting cane, sweetened tea provided both replacement liquids and short-term energy. So Jean Devanny’s cane cutters were sustained in their exhausting work by gallons of tea. Devanny described the workers’ ‘smoko’ on the first day of cutting when:

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They [the cutting gang] grabbed their billies and gustily swilled great draughts of tea. They spat and coughed. They disposed of the contents of their tins. Their sweat dappled the scarlet lining of the trash upon which they sprawled. Thirty minutes and then back to the knife.27 Sugar, of course, remains a basic fermentation agent for Australian brewers and a recognisable taste additive in their sweet Australian lagers.28

Sugar and wine Sugar has thus shaped the appearance of a vast belt of tropical Australia, brought Australian farmers into world markets for food and labour and sustained culinary traditions for more than a century. Yet even though Australian cooks have seemed incapable of preparing any meal without piles of sugar, the sugar landscape and its culture have achieved none of the iconic status in Australia of say sheep and wheat farmlands with their woolsheds and silos. In specialist food writing, the contiguity between recognisable landscapes of, for example, grapegrowing, and the valuing of a special foodstuff in wine or in the culinary traditions of the grapegrowers, has not been paralleled with sugar. Sugar remains, it seems, a commodity rather than a food, a victim of its universal popularity, and the sugar-farming regions, an environment rather than a landscape. This is in marked contrast to the Barossa wine landscape in South Australia. Writing of this region in terms as much reflective of theories of urban ecology (the enmeshing of the environment with social patterns) as of food history, Noris Ioannou called the Barossa ‘a laboratory for the study of the interaction of tradition and place’. Ioannou proposed ‘the process of the vernacular’ as a way of comprehending Barossan cultural patterns and recurrent rituals The present Barossa landscape shows unmistakable traces of 157 years of distinctive European occupation and use. Material signs on a smaller scale, such as buildings, furnishings and kitchen utensils and even the food still prepared and eaten in the valley, combine the patterns of ritual and domestic behaviour associated with them to tie the changing landscape to ancient, often medieval, traditions of folklore and foodways.29 The ‘process of the vernacular’ reiterates some common assumptions underlying the concept of cultural landscape. The Barossa here is a

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distinctive landscape reflecting an organic and localised way of life. The vernacular day-to-day traditions of winemaking leave behind layers of marking on the land and these in turn inform and shape patterns of vernacular life in a gradually evolving process.30 The landscape becomes a laboratory-like enclosed world through which social and cultural traditions and change can be analysed in microcosm; an Australian and rural parallel to the way sociologists have approached immigrant areas at the heart of American cities or post-structuralists have interpreted the suburban landscape.31 This useful approach to Australian food history and to Europeanised landscape in Australia seems barely to register in depictions of sugar and its Australian history. Sugar recurrently appears in public debate as a source of environmental destructiveness, as in the current concern over the death of coral on the Great Barrier Reef, as a danger to health, as in controversy over new World Health Organisation dietary guidelines, or as a signature industry of racial oppression, as evident in historical accounts of the lives of South Sea Islanders in Australia and their indentured work in cane cutting.32 These take us a long way from benign imagery of a vernacular process inscribed into Barossa Valley folkways. Alongside the importance of special places such as the Barossa, we might however want to investigate ecological processes discernible in more prosaic foods and landscapes, of which sugar is a prime example. Food offers a way of writing about the intimate history of Australia and reinterpreting landscapes which are essentially Europeanised. Ideas about vernacular process and of the ecology of tradition and place in a social laboratory, expressed through material culture, aid that historical endeavour, as readily understood through popular foods as in the eccentric or exceptional ingredient. Sugar is a classic commodity of modern, mass, food production, which explains why a nineteenth century food processor, Colonial Sugar Refineries, has been able to reinvent itself one of Australia’s most diversified conglomerates in the new century. At the same time sugar exists within a definable landscape, it is a commodity avidly consumed and the sugar farmers do have a way of life, albeit one now coming under severe strain, which can be read in ecological terms. The very mechanisation of sugar for example is as much a local inventive activity as one imposed by agribusiness. Local cutters created their own mechanical cutters and improved on the technology long before these interested corporate agricultural suppliers. Sugar itself, the recent history of its farming in one region of Queensland, the Maroochy River valley, and proposals for the future of this landscape,

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allow us to revisit this notion of the ‘process of the vernacular’, of cultural landscape and social ecology.

Around the Nambour mill The historical vernacular of localised sugar farming has only recently begun to break down, particularly in regions like the Sunshine Coast.33 The Moreton Mill was sold in 1997 and ceased to operate at the end of the 2003 crushing season.34 Sugar pricing and industrial structure have remained for much of the twentieth century subject to a volatile demand and recurrent and rapacious forays into cartelisation by major producers. A large part of the effort of growers has gone into maintaining supportive government policies for marketing and pricing especially in exports. These structures are now threatened and along with them the way of life of farming families and the landscape of sugar. Over more than 100 years, the growing, firing, harvesting, transport and crushing of cane sugar in this region has created a distinctive local landscape. The mill, its workforce and the cane tramlines running into the mill shape the town of Nambour itself. This vernacular environment is as different from the agribusiness landscape of Southern United States as it is distinct again from the less mechanised canelands of Latin America and other major producing regions.35 In many ways the character of the mill, the town, the surrounding landscape and the political and cultural networks of farming families on the Sunshine Coast do measure up to standard accounts of a ‘cultural landscape’. At first glance, however, the cane farmers do not have a ‘traditional’ way-of-life, even allowing for the inventive transitions now associated with the idea of tradition. Cane farming relied initially on a plantation-like system and a range of indentured, patriarchal labour schemes, not all of them restricted to Melanesian labourers. The creation of a mill co-operative, the shift from hand-cutting to mechanical harvesting and constricted exports markets have subsequently transformed canefield lives. At the same time the survival of family farms, the persistence of local extended families through all of these changes, and the very idea of the co-operative enterprise around a foodstuff, together bring some distinctiveness to the local ‘vernacular’. The tradition of the producers’ co-operative, as noted above, has remained a distinguishing characteristic of local life. Farmers in the district pioneered co-operatives so as to get fruit to the markets of Melbourne and Sydney at the beginning of the twentieth century. The co-operative structure of the mill mirrored the sense of common

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interest expressed in fruit-growing co-operatives. These in turn became the driving force for state-based co-operatives for fruit and vegetable marketing.36 Farming families were for generations the mainstay in a highly ordered web of voluntary work in and around the town of Nambour. The standard country town social centres of church, school, sport and pub were overlain in Nambour by the vigorous and confident networks of farming co-operatives.37 In the smaller towns these extensive integrative activities are embodied in the landscape features of a timber neogothic school of arts, a smaller Country Women’s Association hall, a timber-fronted pub and verandahed store. The waning but still recognisable political strength of the cane growers has meant that even in the smallest town there is a local primary school. Where cane farming supported Italian and some Spanish (perhaps more accurately Basque) families, the Roman Catholic Church occupied a central place in the town. For despite common stereotyping of canefarmers in the metropolitan media as narrowly Anglo-Saxon, the industry has for long been ethically diverse. Initially this was an enforced diversity, depending on the ‘blackbirding’ of Melanesian labourers. From 1919 onwards cane drew on Southern European workers who often became smallholders themselves, or moved inconsistently between work in cutting gangs and roles as small-scale employers of cutters. The canefields of the Sunshine Coast have never obtained the same multicultural character as those of far north Queensland. Yet the mill at Buderim was thought to employ a large labour force of Spanish workers and, as elsewhere in Australian canefields, Italian workers and small-holders formed a crucial element in the industry. Not surprisingly the more radical Australian trade unions drew great strength from cutters and the Mediterranean political traditions brought to the canelands attracted interest from those hoping to extend the co-operative movement into a more thoroughly socialist enterprise. Italians from the canelands were prominent amongst the handful of Australians who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.38 Not much of this radicalism still clings to caneland life, but in Nambour, whilst the mill has now vanished, and both unionism and multiculturalism are comparatively muted, the local Catholic church remains the town’s iconic structure. Such a degree of close social involvement extended popular interest in sugar prices and marketing to the engineering and scientific aspects of production. Farmers took an interest in technological opportunities, world markets and disease control as much as in the churches and clubs of their town. Mr A. W. Thorp who died in 1972 typified the range of interests of cane

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farmers. A farmer and active participant in the leadership of the Moreton Mill, he also developed engineering solutions to harvesting and transport, headed local charities like the Red Cross and took a principal role in the canegrowers’ association.39 His many public efforts demonstrated the richness of the cultural order sustained within the sugar landscape. So rich seemed the sense of communal solidarity in cane farming that, by mid-century, the Australian Communist Party had produced a plan for the complete socialisation of the industry!40 Material markers of this history survive precariously. Each cane farm has its corrugated iron machinery shed and a farmhouse often dated from the mid-twentieth century and sometimes earlier. Here and there in the cane fields, older cane cutters’ barracks, small timber and tin huts with narrow verandahs and long rows of small windows, fall apart. Sometimes these older stilted barracks-houses are painted and leased out; farmers find ways to reap at least some of the economic benefits from the tourist industry which is about to replace them. Prior to the mill’s closure in 2003, cane crushing lasted from June to November with tramlines holding up traffic at the many level crossings throughout the canefields (and in the heart of Nambour).41 The cutting season’s firing of the canefields remained a stock image of the region, one of course decried by environmentalists and by many in the surf and sand tourist industry. Where cane waste is not fired it is bundled and sold across the Sunshine Coast as garden mulch; a means of squeezing out the last profit before fields are regraded for the next season. These vernacular characteristics are now rarely valued for their distinctiveness. Sugar-laden recipes are frowned upon, the integrated town life seems insular and the cane farmlands are vanishing, just at the moment in which sugar prices are again rising and Australian demand exceeds sources of supply. Some few canefields do survive. Unfenced and with dense neat rows of cane, sometimes under the feathery tops described by Devanny, they roll across the valley of the broad Maroochy River. Here the cane is bounded by forested hills. Across gentle slopes there are dirt tracks and on the flatter lands run the narrow-gauge lines of the cane tramways, which converge on the heart of Nambour and the mill. Cane has become a symbol for the farmlands centred on the town of Nambour and for the town itself. The mill had occupied a central position in the town of Nambour where its chimney was once visible from all directions. In crushing season, the cookers and the chimney sent out a black and alternatively white vapour over the town. Black burnt cane trash fell to the ground and the sweet smell of the cooking drifted from one of the hills surrounding Nambour to the next. Annually, the

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mill hosted a Sugar Festival.42 Each Christmas a helicopter placed neon decorations atop the mill chimney, signalling not so much the festive season, as an end to months of burnt waste, vapour and odour in town. Despite the mill’s closure, murals in downtown Nambour still celebrate the cane tramways, cane cutters, mill workers and farming families. Nambour remains proud of itself as a sugar town, even though each year pineapples, strawberries and lychees are presented as the crops of the future. Sugar-free fruit recipes and condiments are circulated at local markets and festivals. In an interesting social reversion to ‘tradition’ the growers who abandon cane for fruit are beginning to speak in an older language of the co-operative. If farming landscapes can be understood as ‘social laboratories’ the farms of the Maroochy River, the central mill and town and their linking network of tramways, even their prized recipes, certainly provide ample scope for analysis of the integration between people, place and vernacular, perhaps no less so than in more obviously harmonised material and cultural worlds such as the Barossa Valley. In the terms in which the Barossa Valley was analysed by Ioannou, these elements are evidences of long traditions, with sugar farming in the region dating back to the later-nineteenth century. Many in the farming community have brought their own European traditions to the region.43 Surprisingly, this ‘process of the vernacular’ in sugar has been recognised most clearly in the smallest sugar landscape in Queensland, that of the Gold Coast. The City of the Gold Coast’s heritage survey has made out a strong case for treating the small cane district around Rocky Point as a ‘cultural landscape’.44 In other now transformed cane regions, this essentially vernacular landscape has been identified as a significant if vanishing cultural landform. In the Pacific and Central America, small and poorly mechanised farming practices shape the landscape. The social division between planter and labourer is visible in some of the major producing regions. In Cuba, traces of a once confident collectivisation of farming can be read across a vast sugar region. Elsewhere changing prices and corporate ownership have made their own landscapes. John Rehder’s exhaustive survey of the plantation landscape of Louisiana was based on the simple exercise of driving around all of the roadways in the state’s sugar cane region. Over a 30 year period, Rehder was able to document the virtual halving of the number of plantation houses and sugar mills and the disappearance of many subsidiary buildings, field markers and homesteads.45 To Rehder the principal cause could be found in the fall in sugar price followed by dominance of the industry by an agribusiness model imported from beyond the state. Resident workers and farmers

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were dispensed with, their buildings were flattened and that process of the vernacular disappeared. Whilst the landscape transition in coastal Queensland has not been so severe, small barracks buildings are now abandoned because of the mechanisation of cutting. Old wharves used for cane-carrying punts sometimes survive along the rivers but are everywhere crumbling away.46 One by one the tram lines are abandoned or pulled up.47 Bridges and sidings along the rivers are allowed to collapse as, in its last years, the mill sought to bring all cane into the site by truck. Farmers, looking at a bleak future for cane, and finding little sympathy at several levels of government, seek other uses for land from residential estates to intensive fruit growing. Perhaps accepting the inevitable, canegrowers met in December 2003 to reminisce at the site of the first planting, above the Maroochy River near Bli Bli.48 Around them, it seems increasingly likely that the bounded cultural landscape will disappear, perhaps not for agribusiness as in Louisiana, but for riverfront residential estates, eco-friendly forest plantings or for some more intensive fruit-growing. Even if local hopes for an ethanol plant were to proceed, and cane became a fuel commodity rather than a food, the landscape of production, number of farmers and the annual ritual of cane farming would be fundamentally transformed.

Sugar and the vernacular Sugar might be thus effortlessly transformed from a food into an industrial product.49 The ease with which sugar farming can be turned from food production to ethanol or other uses suggests that the link between a commodity as produced and a foodstuff as consumed can be easily broken. As a popular food, sugar is able to arouse a phalanx of articulate critics, who blame the crop for high taxes, the destruction of the natural environment, ruination of adult health because of obesity and in unflouridated Queensland, the demolition of children’s teeth.50 The problems ascribed by critics to sugar would seem to prevent any positive heritage assessment of the sugar landscape. Sugar farming meets all of the criteria of a cultural landscape, in its boundedness, the existence of riverine viewsheds, its network of tram lines, its central focus on the mill and its long traditions of voluntary association, co-operative mill ownership, work and production. Yet in the Maroochy Valley, the site which seems to have attracted most interest has no extant buildings or obvious connection to sugar. The one-time village of South Sea Island cane-cutters has been located along the banks of the Maroochy River.

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Although there are no physical remnants of residence there exists some popular interest in finding a way of marking this location.51 More broadly, sugar has created a special and distinctive landscape around which traditions of farming and community life have been structured. Sugar has, at the same time, created a strong and widely recognised tradition of Australian cookery. This may not meet the approval of dietary experts; it remains a popular and to a degree enduring tradition nonetheless. Sugar, as much as any other foodstuff has its own rituals. Agribusiness, free trade agreements, the expansion of coastal residential estates, environmental and health concerns all weigh against the recognition of sugar and the landscape of its production. Yet the sugar landscape is as much demonstrative of a vernacular if not quite organic lifestyle as exists in any other Australian rural environment. The canelands are as much a cultural landscape as is the world from which wine is created. Sugar cultivation and processing provide the elements by which social ecology can be explored through connections between place and cultural practice. In the case of sugar these are firmly of the modern industrial era and not of a more distant and perhaps idealised medieval southern Europe, even though many cane regions, sustain more vital European (Italian, Basque or Serbian or Croatian) communities than now survive in most wine-producing areas.52 Where wine or wheat suggest an ecologically sound meshing of decent food with producing landscape in some organic chain, sugar is an example of a food produced in industrial conditions and consumed largely as a basis for ubiquitous mass products, with none of the discrete character of wines or the stuff of life associations of wheat. Sugar is an industry and a commodity. Such a disparity indicates one direction in the emerging historiography of food in Australia: that the search is not so much for a history of Australian foods, but foods which have cultural import and significance as vernacular process by their very absence from most Australian kitchens. Food history becomes a history of a special group, perhaps only appreciated by an historico-culinary elite and set apart from the broader social and cultural transitions of which cuisine, or better cooking, has formed one part. Throughout 2004, ‘for sale’ signs went up along roads winding their way through the flats of the Maroochy River. Whilst suggestions for continued farming on the cane lands are routinely announced, from fuel ethanol to ‘sweet candy’ for livestock, many growers along the Maroochy River valley have produced their last crop of sugar and the cane train has had its last run into the Nambour mill. The mill is now flattened. The networks of farming communities who adapted well to changed

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technology and pricing structures has not been able to resist the local disintegrations of a neo-liberal trade deal. By reassessing the landscape created over generations, as cultural, as a process of the vernacular, cane farming and its products, in Jean Devanny’s words, might emerge even in the twenty-first century, as more than ‘just sugar’.

Notes 1. J. Devanny, Sugar Heaven (Melbourne: Vulgar Press (1936) 2002), pp. 24–6. 2. B. Penrose, ‘Medical Experts and Occupational Illness: Weil’s Disease in North Queensland’, Labour History, 75 (1998) 125–43; D. Menghetti, The Red North (Townsville: James Cook University, 1981); Sugar Industry Organisation, The Australian Cane Sugar Industry: Cane Sugar Production (Brisbane: The Sugar Industry Organisations, 1936). 3. Brisbane Courier Mail, 9 February 2004; Sugar Industry Commissioner, Annual Reports, 1999–2000 (Brisbane). 4. See Sunshine Coast Daily, reports July–December 2003. 5. R. H. Schein, ‘The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, LXXXVIII, 4 (1997) 660–80. 6. See generally, D. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Ottowa: Barnes & Noble, 1984). 7. For one example of the more critical analyses of landscape see S. Daniels, ‘Marxism, Culture and the Duplicity of Landscape’, in R. Peet and N. Thrift (eds), New Models in Geography, vol. 2 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 196–220. 8. See generally, G. Seddon, Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 9. P. Griggs, ‘Sugar Demand and Consumption in Colonial Australia, 1788–1900’, in R. Dare (ed), Food, Power and Community (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 1999), pp. 74–90. 10. H. Gregory, Making Maroochy: A History of the Land, the People and the Shire (Fortitude Valley: Boolarong & Maroochy, 1991), pp. 18–21. 11. Gregory, Making Maroochy, p. 162. 12. Nambour Chronicle, 17 June 1904. 13. B. Kerr and K. Blyth, They’re all Half Crazy: 100 Years of Mechanised Cane Harvesting (Brisbane: Canegrowers, 1993). 14. B. Alcorn and C. Dunn, Moreton Sugar Mill: Sweet Heart of Nambour (Nambour: Alcorn & Dunn, 1997). 15. Ibid. 16. H. Thomas, Cuba or the Pursuit of Freedom (New York: DaCapo, 1971), pp. 1138–9. 17. See generally, A. Lara and P. Rich, ‘Commodity Policy in an Era of Globalization: The Mexican Sugar Industry and its Problems Under NAFTA’, Policy Studies Journal, XXXI, 1 (2003) 101–11. 18. Thomas, Cuba, p. 1139. 19. Gregory, Maroochy, p. 162.

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20. M. Toussaint-Samat, History of Food, trans. Anthea Bell (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell (1987) 1994), pp. 552–8. 21. N. Deerr, The History of Sugar, two volumes (London: Chapman & Hall, 1949), vol. 2, p. 531. 22. Griggs, ‘Sugar Demand’. 23. Griggs, ‘Sugar Demand’, Table 1, p. 77. 24. The CWA Cookery Book and Household Hints, 51st edn (West Perth: CWA, 2000). 25. See for example, CWA Cookery Book, pp. 41, 77. 26. S. Addison and J. McKay, A Good Plain Cook: An Edible History of Queensland (Brisbane: Queensland Museum, n.d.), p. 84; see also, A. Schauer, The Schauer Cookery Book (Brisbane: W. R. Smith and Paterson, 1909). 27. Devanny, Sugar Heaven, p. 48. 28. CWA Cookery Book, p. 261. 29. N. Ioannou, ‘The Material Culture of Barossan Regional Cuisine’, in R. Dare (ed), Food Power and Community, pp. 65–73. 30. Ibid., p. 72. 31. See for example, D. Mitchell, ‘Landscape and Surplus Value: The Making of the Ordinary in Brentwood, California’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, XII (1994) 7–30. 32. C. Moore, Kanaka: A History of Melanesian Mackay (Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press, 1985), and Gutteridge, Haskins and Davey, Environmental Audit of the Queensland Canegrowing Industry (Brisbane: Canegrowers, 1996). 33. Alcorn and Dunn, Moreton Sugar Mill. 34. See Sunshine Coast Daily, various dates, March–November 2003 and press cuttings file, Local History Collection, Robertson Room, Shire of Maroochy Library, Nambour branch. 35. J. B. Rehder, Delta Sugar: Louisiana’s Vanishing Plantation Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 36. See generally, Annual Report of the Committee for the Direction of Fruit Marketing, June 1974 (Brisbane: Government of Queensland, 1974). 37. See D. Shogren, ‘The Creation of the Committee of Direction of Fruit Marketing’, Queensland Heritage, II, 5 (1971) 31, and Annual Reports, Committee of Direction of Fruit Marketing (Brisbane). 38. See generally, W. A. Douglass, From Italy to Ingham: Italians in North Queensland (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995) and G. Cresciani, ‘The Proletarian Migrants: Fascism and Italian Anarchists in Australia’, Australian Quarterly (March 1979) 4–19. It is interesting to note that two prominent leaders of the Australian Labor Party grew up in Nambour and that the national leader of the essentially left-wing construction union spent much of his childhood in and around Nambour. 39. Nambour Chronicle, 29 February 1972. 40. Communist Party of Australia, A People’s Plan for the Australian Sugar Industry (Brisbane: Communist Party of Australia, 1951). 41. V. A. Law, Howard Street Nambour: The Cane Train Street (Nambour: Law, 2001). 42. Sunshine Coast Daily, Weekend edn, 29 November 2003. 43. Nambour Chronicle, 19 December 1958.

Chris McConville 205 44. Gold Coast City Council Heritage Advisory Service, Sweet Survivor: The Sugar Industry and the Gold Coast (Gold Coast City Council, 2000) and F. Heck, The Rocky Point Saga, 1878–1970 (Beenleigh: n.p., 1970). 45. Rehder, Delta Sugar. 46. Nambour Chronicle, 19 December 1958. 47. I. R. Crellin, Australian Sugar Tramways: The Challenge of the 1980s (n.p.: Light Rail Research Society of Australia, 1979). 48. Sunshine Coast Daily, various dates during 2001–2, especially 2 November 2002 and 16 November 2002. 49. Ibid. 50. For one such vituperative, not-to-say unfair, critique see Australia’s most iconoclastic political website, Crikey. Crikey took the 2004 Sugar Industry Reform measures to task, complaining: ‘latte-sipping Crikey down here in cosmopolitan Melbourne resents paying some of the highest tax rates in the world to bail out these blundering buffoons on the land    It’s not the taxpayer who owes the cane farmer, it’s the other way around. Why won’t anyone stand up to this bleating free-lunch brigade?’, http://www.crikey.co.au. 51. A. Wilkins, Report on Preserving the Historical Islander Village in the Maroochy River Wetlands (Maroochy: n.p., 2000). 52. See generally Menghetti, The Red North.

Further reading B. Alcorn and C. Dunn, Moreton Sugar Mill: Sweet Heart of Nambour (Nambour: Alcorn & Dunn, 1997). J. Devanny, Sugar Heaven (Melbourne: Vulgar Press (1936) 2002). B. Kerr and K. Blyth, They’re All Half Crazy: 100 Years of Mechanised Cane Harvesting (Brisbane: Canegrowers, 1993).

Index

Africa, 8 agriculture, 174ff alcohol, 7, 27, 50–1, 87, 89, 92–7, 102–20, 121–35, 180, 194 ale, 121ff, 124, 125, 138 alehouses, 122ff, 131, 138, 139, 141 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 25 Amerindians, 64–81 Ariosto, Ludovico, 38ff Arthur, Reginald, 26 Asian food, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 165 Australia, 8, 9–10, 56–60, 82–100, 141–2, 144, 146–50, 154–70, 188–205 Banks, Joseph, 2–3 banquets, 1, 6, 9, 55, 86, 90–1 Ancient Greece, 16, 19, 83 Ancient Rome, 15–32 Late Renaissance Italy, 33–45 see also feasts barmaids, 140, 142 Barossa Valley, 195–6 beer, 85, 89, 93–4, 103, 121, 139, 141, 144–5, 195 Braudel, Fernand, 4 Burns, Robert, 46, 48, 52 cabarets, 104, 106, 108–11, 114ff Caen, 102–20 cafes, 83, 84, 86–9, 139ff, 147, 149 camembert, 7 Canada, 64–87, 154–5 canefields, 188–205 Caribbean, 2–3, 29 charivari, 105, 107, 112 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 125 children, 7, 18ff, 27–8, 53, 74, 107, 127, 128, 164, 173ff, 178, 181, 183 Chinese food, 85, 89ff, 147, 149 Cicero, 19–20

cider, 103–5, 107, 109, 114, 115, 117, 118 class, 18, 27–9, 54, 122–3, 127, 129, 131, 136ff, 141, 159, 179 coffee, 2, 4, 59, 88, 92, 97, 121, 139, 181, 183 colonialism, 1–3, 8, 141ff, 154 cookbooks, 1, 6–7, 9, 35, 91, 154–70, 194 cooking, 1, 3, 5–7, 21, 35, 41, 43, 64, 69, 70, 85, 87, 90, 91, 137, 148, 155–71, 174, 180, 183–6, 191ff cosmopolitanism, 82–100, 149 Couture, Thomas, 22ff Cuba, 193, 200 cultural landscapes, 9, 191, 195–7 Cyprus, 171–87 damper, 90, 158–9 desserts, see sweets diet, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 21, 29, 48, 55, 65, 68, 70, 85, 122, 123, 136ff, 193, 196 dining, 18–20, 28, 30, 94 dining rooms, 28, 142ff, 148 drinking, see ale; alehouses; beer; cider; drunkenness; hotels; inns; liquor laws; pubs; rum; taverns; whisky; wine drunkenness, 24, 54, 60, 103, 106ff, 121ff, 128, 130 Dutch food, 89, 92, 159, 165 England, 1–3, 6, 9, 25, 48, 51, 58, 94, 122ff, 136ff, 144, 147–9 entertainment, 20, 30, 33, 52, 56 Epicureanism, 5, 21 etiquette, 3, 90, 109 families, 20, 28, 173, 177, 197–8 feasts, 2, 3, 9, 15, 16, 21–2, 24ff, 28, 29, 33–45, 46, 48, 50ff, 71, 96 see also banquets 206

Index 207 femininity, 54ff, 59, 157–8, 163 see also gender Fergusson, Robert, 48–50 Ferrara, 33–45 festivals, 17, 96 fish, 1, 2, 33, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 72, 89, 92, 144, 145, 158, 177, 182 food in art, 20, 22–6, 28–9, 31, 109, 122 in film, 25, 31 historiography of, 3–9, 15, 22–3, 26, 30–1, 46–7, 65, 84–5, 102–3, 122–3, 131, 136, 155, 195–6 in literature, 1, 21, 27–8, 38–9, 47–50, 55, 60, 123–5, 127, 130, 142–3, 157–8, 188, 195 see also banquets; feasts; interior design and decoration France, 7, 9, 34, 42–4, 94, 103–21, 124, 125, 127–9, 138ff French food, 7, 91, 159 fruit, 9, 33, 36, 41–3, 68–9, 90, 174, 180, 183, 190–1, 194, 200 gender, 7, 9, 25, 53ff, 58–60, 94, 102ff, 116, 139, 155, 157, 162–4, 174, 178–9, 182–3 see also femininity; masculinity German food, 36, 144ff, 159 Germany, 6, 37, 91, 123, 193 Glasse, Hannah, 1 Greek Cypriots, 9, 171–87 Greek food, 9, 83, 89 haggis, 9, 46ff, 56ff, 60 hospitality, 16, 68, 73–5, 82, 86–7, 92, 94, 97, 115 hotels, 87–9, 93–7, 142, 143, 146, 147, 190 see also pubs hunting, 68ff, 78, 177 identity, 6, 30, 46ff, 65, 83, 97, 155, 156, 158ff, 166, 167, 171ff, 178, 185 imperialism, 8, 16, 17, 34, 37, 162, 192–3 India, 51, 52, 55, 56, 58, 91, 193 Indian food, 90, 92, 149, 161, 165

industrialisation, 6, 7–8, 136ff, 144, 173, 179–80, 192 inns, 102ff, 137–8, 141 interior design and decoration, 18, 19, 27, 33, 56, 57, 139, 140, 149 see also banquets; feasts; food Ireland, 6 Italian food, 35ff, 43, 83, 85, 88, 89, 145, 147, 165 Italy, 9, 15–32, 33–45, 123, 128–30, 139 Johnson, Samuel, 48–9 Juvenal, 24ff, 30 Kant, Immanuel, 85, 92, 94 kitchens, 3, 8, 18, 21, 34ff, 46, 48, 143, 147ff, 155, 164, 166, 179, 181, 182, 193, 194 Langland, William, 124 liquor laws, 54, 87, 89, 93–7, 121–2, 125, 129, 136–7, 141–3, 146, 148 Livy, 16–17 Macrobius, 21, 27 masculinity, 93–4, 102–20, 129, 173, 179, 184 see also gender meat, 1, 2, 21, 33, 38, 41, 42, 46ff, 57, 64–81, 85, 88, 89, 90, 92, 96, 144ff, 157, 158, 159, 174, 177, 179, 184 Mediterranean food cultures, 15–32, 83, 85, 171–87 Melbourne, 56, 59, 60, 82–100, 147 memory, 9, 52–3, 171ff menus, 1, 21, 33, 35ff, 41–3, 49, 50, 57, 86, 89, 90–1, 92, 137, 160 Mexico, 102, 165, 193 migrants, 6, 56, 82–4, 88, 97, 136, 161, 165–7, 171–87 moose, 69, 71, 75, 76–7 Nambour, 189ff nationalism, 46–63, 84, 154, 155, 158, 162 see also identity Netherlands, 39, 40, 123

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Index

New World, 1, 2 Normandy, 103ff nutrition, 3, 4, 5, 29 oysters, 89, 107–8, 111, 138 Paris, 5, 88, 103, 108, 112, 117, 118, 139ff, 165 pemmican, 69, 72, 74, 76 Petronius, 27 Pliny the Younger, 30 Polish food, 167 Pompeii, 23–4 Port Phillip District (Victoria), 51ff private eating/dining, 18–20, 55, 90, 141, 156, 157 propaganda, 9, 17, 34–44 public eating/dining, 18–19, 54–5, 57, 60, 88, 94 pubs, 9, 84, 87–9, 93–4, 97, 136–53 see also hotels Queensland, 188–205 religion, 21, 27–8, 30–1, 94, 113, 114, 118, 122ff, 127, 154, 161, 163, 183–4 restaurants, 86–9, 137, 145, 149 ritual, 3, 17–19, 23, 24, 29–30, 46, 47, 51, 56, 60, 65, 73, 93, 102ff, 112, 118, 179, 183, 195 Rome, 15–32 Rossetti, Giovanni Battista, 33, 35 rum, 73, 194 saloons, 137, 142, 143ff Scotland, 9, 46ff Scottish food, 46–63 Shakespeare, William, 121, 124

slaves, 8, 21, 28ff Smollett, Tobias, 47–9 sociability, 8, 18, 82, 85, 92, 94, 102ff, 113, 117, 137, 139, 140 Spain, 9, 34, 42–4 spices, 2, 33, 44, 92 sugar, 2, 4, 8, 9, 37, 41–4, 167, 180, 188–205 sweets, 33, 41–4, 55, 85, 157ff, 167, 183, 185, 194 symposium, 5, 19 taverns, 102–20, 122, 126–30, 136–7, 141, 181 tea, 2, 8, 55, 85, 88, 90, 97, 121, 157, 160, 194, 195 temperance movement, 83, 93, 121ff, 143, 161 trade, 2, 3, 8, 64–81, 103, 177, 189 tradition, 7–8, 15–17, 20, 30, 47, 50, 52–3, 57, 65, 69, 70, 73, 78, 124, 125, 127, 143, 159, 161, 171–87, 197, 200 turtles, 1–3 United States, 5, 6, 8, 30, 86–7, 93, 94, 136, 137, 141, 143, 145–6, 150, 154, 172, 189, 192–3, 197 vegetables, 6, 42, 43, 92, 145, 174, 175, 184 Vitruvius, 18, 30 whisky, 50–1, 56ff, 60, 93 wine, 1, 5, 9, 15, 18–19, 21–2, 25, 35, 50, 55, 85, 86, 89ff, 104, 106, 107, 119, 122, 126ff, 141, 148, 158, 181, 195, 202