Culturing Food

Author(s): susan tax freeman

Source: Gastronomica , Vol. 6, No. 4 (Fall 2006), pp. 99-107
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2006.6.4.99

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forum | susan t ax freema n

Culturing Food

Food Culture around the World Food Culture in Spain

Ken Albala, Series Editor F. Javier Medina
Westport, Connecticut & London: Greenwood Press 2005, xix + 169 pp.

Food Culture in Japan Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa

Michael Ashkenazi and Jeanne Jacob Fran Osseo-Asare
2003, xx + 207 pp. 2005, xxvii + 191 pp.

Food Culture in the Near East, Middle East, and North Africa All titles have illustrations and are priced at $49.95 (cloth).
Peter Heine Titles yet to appear are Food Culture in France and Food Culture in
2004, xii + 181 pp. Southeast Asia.

Food Culture in Great Britain Each volume contains an outline map of the region or regions treated,
Laura Mason a historical time line, black-and-white photographs, occasional drawings,
2004, xxii + 238 pp. a few author-selected recipes, a glossary, a resource guide, a bibliography,
and an index. Recipes are not indexed separately. There may be several
Food Culture in China
bibliographic sections, as some are organized by chapter and in chapter
Jacqueline M. Newman
endnotes as well as at the end of a volume. The texts include a series
2004, xviii + 230 pp.
introduction by editor Albala (missing in Japan), authors’ introductions,
Food Culture in Italy and the following chapters: “Historical [Geographic and Cultural]
Fabio Parasecoli Overview”; “Major Foods and Ingredients”; “Cooking [and the Kitchen]”;
2004, xix + 229 pp. “Typical Meals”; “Eating Out”; “Special Occasions [Holidays,
Celebrations, and Religious Rituals]”; and “Diet and Health.” India
Food Culture in India
considers attitudes toward food in “Historical Overview.” Three volumes,
Colleen Taylor Sen

FALL 200 6
Great Britain, China, and Mexico, have extra chapters on regional or
2004, xxvi + 197 pp.
cultural variations; Spain includes these under “Typical Meals”; and
Food Culture in the Caribbean Sub-Saharan Africa considers all chapter topics separately for each of
Lynn Marie Houston four geographic subdivisions of this large area. Russia includes separate
2005, xxxii + 166 pp. historical chapters for Russia and Central Asia and subdivides other
99
GASTR O N O M I CA

treatments similarly. The other volumes address regional, cultural, and

Food Culture in Mexico
social complexities and attitudes within the basic seven-chapter format.
Janet Long-Solís and Luís Alberto Vargas
2005, xx + 194 pp.
Any study of food culture presupposes a concept
Food Culture in South America
of culture as well as knowledge of the culture of which the
José Rafael Lovera (translated by Ainoa Larrauri)
food system, or cuisine, is a part. The topic is enormous.
2005, xx + 184 pp.
E.B. Tylor’s 1871 definition of culture is still in use:
Food Culture in Russia and Central Asia “Culture…is that complex whole which includes knowledge,
Glenn R. Mack and Asele Surina belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities
2005, xxxvi + 222 pp. and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”1
gastronomica: the journal of food and culture, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 99–107, issn 1529-3262. © 2006 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press ’ s rights and permissions web site, at www.ucpress.edu / journals/ rights.htm.

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 Contemporary anthropologists inject into this or comparable
definitions a more explicit recognition of culture’s dynamic
nature, as human groups continually encounter new things,
people, and situations, and individual members and new
generations continually re-create the culture they learned.
The human experience of culture begins in the womb
(as does experience of a cuisine). This experience grows—at
the breast, in the care of older members of society; in the
kitchen; in fields and forest, garden and seaside, desert and
jungle; in schools, village plazas, and neighborhood streets;
and in all the activities and workplaces in which a culture
places its children and adults. All space is experienced and
codified culturally, and for the understanding of a cuisine,
the hearth or kitchen is a crucial cultural space on which to
focus.2 Culture, like language (which is part of culture), has
structure, and it structures experience: people approach
experience via learned structures. A cuisine is thus also
structured, and I will address this later.
An anthropologist struggles to discover a culture from
within, through intimate interaction with its members, let-
ting them lead him to understand how they perceive and
classify spaces, people, and objects; the principles by which
they order nature, society, and experience; and the kinds of
meaning that they invest in their surroundings, and in their
transactions in society, nature, and with the supernatural.
An anthropologist attempts to see the universe from the
native’s perspective in order to achieve the deepest possible
understanding of how he lives in it. It becomes clear that
systems we tend to regard as separate—the political, reli-
gious, or economic, for example—are deeply intertwined,
even in our own culture. Analysis finds human action
embedded in a diversity of culturally defined contexts and
propelled by a mixture of motives that defy what are to us
familiar kinds of separation.
FALL 200 6
A cuisine, broadly defined, is first a categorization of
the universe of potential foodstuffs into the edible and the
inedible. Among the inedible some foods may be taboo—
100 and therefore clearly invested with significance—and others
may be either not conceived of as food or simply unknown.
GASTR O N O M I CA
Culturally defined foodstuffs also may or may not be locally
produced or gathered, so cuisine intersects with systems of
local food production and acquisition and with systems of
acquisition through various forms of exchange. There are
culturally transmitted modes of preservation and preparation
and styles of condimentation, as well, and two cuisines can
render identical foodstuffs in utterly different ways through
differing styles of preparation and condimentation. Culinary
preparation includes different fuels, heating elements, and
cooking implements and vessels, along with temporal prin-
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ciples governing both cooking times and when different
ingredients are added. Raw foods, condimentation (if any),
and the contexts of consumption must also be considered.
There are also overarching notions of which foodstuffs can
appropriately be combined in single dishes and single meals
and in what sequences and by whom foods or dishes and meals
are appropriately consumed. There are ordinary consumption
patterns and those defined as extraordinary—ritual, celebra-
tory, special in some way—including abstinence or total
fasting as well as feasting.
A cuisine intersects with major topics of scholarship
such as environmental studies, economics, politics, philoso-
phy, religion, kinship and social organization, population
biology and nutrition, and taste and aesthetics. It provides
probably the richest source of symbol and metaphor in
cultural expression. It is hardly surprising that no cuisine
has been completely studied, as the same can be said of any
single culture or even any culture’s politics, religion, eco-
nomics, or philosophy.
A kitchen—or the place in which the ultimate culinary
product, the dish, is produced for those who will eat it—is
virtually everywhere a signal place where food is daily pre-
pared but also a place of social interaction and, for children,
socialization and enculturation. Anthropologists, even
though they may be fed there, have often forsaken the study
of what goes on in the kitchen to pursue such academically
instituted topics as politics, economics, or religion (though
food may figure significantly in these studies), and so most
have not paid enough attention to what happens in that
homely place. The culinary arts and aesthetic judgment are
being taught, much of the household economy managed,
family life lived, and many larger aspects of a culture enacted,
discussed, and transmitted there. Happily, anthropologist
Mary Weismantel has made kitchen life one focus of her
study of an Ecuadorian mountain parish:
The kitchen in Zumbagua is the locus of early socialization, not only
through social interaction but through the sense experiences of taste,
touch, and smell, the spatial orientations implicit in its architecture
and the arrangement of objects, and the physical and temporal rhythms
found in the work performed there.
And on the way in which a soup is served to a hierarchy of
eaters, she writes: “This act of composing each bowl of soup
is an acknowledged stage in making a meal…a woman thus
displays her skill in assembling a filling, aesthetically pleas-
ing, and socially appropriate serving.”3
Anthropologists are hardly the only keen observers of
other cultures, but their academic discipline above all others
 privileges the extended study of culture at the wellspring of
human thought and action: they are in direct daily interaction
over long periods with populations pursuing their ordinary
life activities. Other disciplines depend more heavily upon
more narrowly focused inquiries, on various kinds of written
sources, and on aggregate statistics to approach the lives of
the populations they study. They work in greater breadth, in
many respects, but at lesser depth than anthropology.
How does the study of food culture fare in the
twelve world areas thus far covered by the Greenwood Press
series, by different kinds of scholars, and under a prescribed
format? Some of these authors might have produced inti-
mate perspectives like Weismantel’s from some place in the
areas they describe (authors of at least three books—Japan,
Mexico, and Spain—have anthropological training), but the
format drives them otherwise. This is not necessarily a bad
thing: the traditional means of anthropological study could
not have produced this series of books. The complete series
will cover much of the world beyond North America and, as
the publisher suggests, can serve students and scholars at
the college and university level in a number of kinds of
courses and inquiries. Readers from outside academic set-
tings can also gain much from them. The time lines,
jean du boisberranger, getty images
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bibliographies, and resource guides are generally useful,
though of varied quality; the black-and-white photographs
and line drawings are both charming and informative; and
the quality of the recipes provided varies, but most are well
chosen and presented and few pander to American tastes.
The studies themselves vary considerably, sometimes from
chapter to chapter, with an author’s expertise. There are
omissions and errors but relatively few serious ones. Lentils,
however, are not South American, nor are cashews and
almonds legumes as claimed in The Caribbean, and neither
are plantains a New World cultivar as stated in Mexico. And
several authors apply the Amerindian word “squash” to the
gourds in use in the Old World before Columbus. Serious
editorial failures occur mostly in the volume on Spain,
which is not independently translated—only South America
lists an official translator—and whose author appears to have
written directly in non-native English. Thus, the Spanish
folk category of “blue fish” is unexplained (it refers to fatty
fish and includes many that are not blue; an Italian counter-
part is less confusingly presented in Italy). There are a few
correct but lugubriously translated terms and identifications
and more typographical errors in the text and bibliography
than occur in the other volumes.4 At least two volumes lack
endnotes for some of the in-text citations.5 There is some
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101
GASTR O N O M I CA
 want of editorial oversight (or conscience?) as well, in that
virtually all of the references in Italy are in Italian, which
speaks well for Italian food scholarship but bodes ill for
readership in the publisher’s intended market—and some of
the important Italian sources that have been brought into
English are not cited. Also problematic for the publisher’s
intended market is the price of $49.95 per volume.
These problems aside, a parallel reading of the dozen
volumes now out gives much food for comparative thought.
I have read them for general accuracy in factual matters
(such as foodstuff origins, bibliographic coverage, and cita-
tion) within my own capabilities and, most important, for
the extent to which authors (all with, at worst, variable
expertise in most of the formatted subjects) have succeeded
in representing cultural perspectives, working as well as pos-
sible from inside the large systems described to give the
reader the deepest possible understanding of how people of
the region relate to food and the principles by which they
produce (or acquire) and ideologically reproduce their cui-
sine. Of course, this requires the analytical reduction of the
welter of facts that whole nations and world regions present
in their complex histories, social structures, and admixtures
of cultural traditions both past and present. I will skirt minor
factual issues in order to comment on the general treatments.
The authors of India (Sen), Japan (Ashkenazi and Jacob),
and China (Newman) take us well inside the aesthetics,
stylistics, and philosophies, if not all the kitchens, of the
cuisines they describe. China, first, and Japan, second, both
benefit from significant culinary literature, but Sen has done
a stellar job in India without benefit of a large literature on
cookery per se. If the formatted order of chapters had been
altered, the last, on diet and health, might have opened the
book on China, as the cuisine hangs on medical precepts,
and Newman makes this clear. Japan (all food cultures in
FALL 200 6
fact) could have used a separate chapter on aesthetic princi-
ples, but the authors pay excellent attention to them anyway.
The case of Japan also suggests that the consumption of
102 raw foodstuffs (beyond pickled ones) merits attention in the
format; they are not much covered in any of the studies.
GASTR O N O M I CA
India benefits from the format’s early coverage of philosophy
and religion in the historical section, and Sen deals well
throughout with variables of caste in different regions. But
her major contribution may be in her coverage of the uses
of herbs and spices, the preventive and therapeutic notions
about them, and the myriad ways in which they enter cooked
dishes differently. Sen offers a detailed inventory and a table
profiling their uses in different regions, dishes, and cooking
mediums.6 Among its other virtues, this treatment enhances
our understanding of the aesthetics governing the produc-
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tion of dishes. There is another important table enumerat-
ing traditional breads by region, ingredients, and method of
manufacture. Sen expresses her surprise at realizing that no
“comprehensive overview of the cuisine of India” preceded
her book.7 Her book now makes a noteworthy beginning.
The authors of China and India approach the chapter
on diet and health almost entirely from inside the respective
cultures, addressing native philosophies of eating and thera-
peutics. Other authors offer less of an inside view. They
detail common diseases and causes of death, environmental
hazards, life expectancy statistics, and the like. Some (Near
East…, Mexico) cite ancient and medieval as well as indige-
nous medical theories but also (especially Mexico) display
what might be called “nutritional hysteria” and “sanitation
paranoia”—particularly in regard to street food, as if written
as warnings for tourists—and they apply measures of diet
and health almost entirely from without. Several authors
recite aggregate statistics on consumption trends in different
kinds of foodstuffs. Most of these chapters, excepting the
Chinese and Indian, while informative, seem routine and
predictable. Both The Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa,
in particular, document widespread poverty as a health
issue, and everywhere working classes in burgeoning cities
are seen to suffer losses from the earlier rural conditions
they once enjoyed as consumers of a more local food sup-
ply. It is also in these contexts that dependencies upon
either local or imported chain-style fast foods impinge upon
traditional diets and cookery, for almost everywhere there
are fewer full-time cooks. Almost everywhere, kitchens are
or were traditionally run by women (although outdoor cook-
ing and the tending of outdoor fires is almost universally
done by men), and the entry of women into the labor force in
modernizing nations much affects home cookery. Predictably,
the mention of chain-produced cookery raises nutritional
warnings, but authors do not have real information on the
true balance of individual or family daily diets—a problem
that plagues the nutrition field in general.
Many of the chapters on cooking comment on the entry
into homes of modern conveniences: there is a predictability
in this subject as well. But most authors give well-textured
accounts of traditional kitchens and their material culture.
Heine, in Near East…, has produced an excellent survey of
kitchens from desert tents to urban apartments, aided, he says,
by material from traditional cookbooks—an important ethno-
graphic source that not all authors attend to as well as he.
The authors of Italy (Parasecoli) and Spain (Medina)
are modernists, both involved from their respective nations
in the European Union. Parasecoli, in particular, writes of
eu Food Authority actions, Protected Designations of Origin
for selected foods and beverages, official actions to protect
against mad cow disease, etc. He also writes better than
most of child-feeding practices, a subject that should have
been part of the format. He brings Italy’s long documented
history into consideration as well, and his time line does an
excellent job of highlighting classical literature relating to
cuisine. Medina’s work is historically more shallow and his
bibliography thin. He derives more information from con-
temporary urban life (and from aggregate statistics) than
from Spain’s countryside, which he has perhaps not experi-
enced. In any case, his list of the cuisine’s principal ingredients
omits lamb (one of Spain’s iconic animals, in some areas
coterminous with the word for meat, carne) and goat, and
he assigns one iconic dish, olla podrida, to the past, whereas
it is in fact synonymous with the various cocidos, which he
translates colorlessly as “stews.” At the same time, paellas of
mixed meat and seafood are listed as late twentieth-century
inventions expressly for the tourist trade when they are actu-
ally very much older.8
Mason’s Great Britain rests heavily on aggregate statistics
about contemporary consumption patterns and not much at
all on views, or attempts to achieve them, from inside Britons’
relationships to food. She first says, regarding skepticism
about Great Britain having a food culture at all, “But every-
one has to eat, and inevitably a food culture does exist.” And
then, “British food is heavily industrialized and dependent
on imports, both of raw ingredients and ideas. It is urban
and metropolitan, dominated by London as a source of new
ideas.”9 Mason seems depressed by her subject and settles
for a statistical overview, finding little aid in other kinds
of literature (except historical) and resorting to cataloging
in most sections of the format at a low level of abstraction.
Because Mason knows a great deal about British food, a
hungry, well-read, well-traveled reader can conjure from
her lists the roasts, preserves, puddings, meat pies, and fruit
desserts of British middle-class cookery, but with little real
help from the author. Mason recognizes cultural commit-
ments to roasts, to family recipes for rich fruitcakes, and to
the central importance of the Sunday meal, but she under-
mines as well. For example, in relation to English cheddar
cheese, she notes that cheddars can be made outside the
region of origin and, indeed, around the world.10 No author
in this series so thoroughly skirts the issue of sentiment in
food practice. And, while seeing regionalism as virtually
gone, she gives too-short shrift to the foodways of Ireland,
Scotland, and Wales.
If, in fact, Great Britain’s small size and high levels of
industrialization and transport have driven traditional food-
ways into obscurity (still to be proven), wouldn’t a student of
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British food culture learn a great deal from some considera-
tion of its existence in the Commonwealth, particularly
Australia, New Zealand, and Canada? One hopes the editor’s
format did not prohibit excursion to these areas otherwise
unrepresented in the series; one wishes for the enrichment
they might have provided to a study of British food culture.
The authors of Russia and Central Asia (Mack and
Surina) and Sub-Saharan Africa (Osseo-Asare) are accom-
plished scholars of these vast areas and succeed in conveying
general overviews of the regions’ food systems without
sacrificing texture. With Mack and Surina we move, with
good guides, from classic Russian meals served in cramped
Moscow apartments to outdoor gatherings in Central Asia,
where traditional pilafs are served from enormous vats, and
from the grain fields of Ukraine to the orchards and pastoral
expanses of Central Asia. They pay good attention to the
important cultural contacts of the Silk Road and, generally,
exchanges with neighboring populations. This enhances
reading of the series volumes on China and India.
Osseo-Asare considers the formatted subjects separately
for East, West, Southern, and Central Africa. Everywhere,
of course, are tribal presences, and here again we have a
knowledgeable and respectful guide to the different (but
also generically similar) traditions. This study, as well as
taking us from the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and the
Pygmies of the Ituri Forest to the homes of Johannesburg
or Cape Town, is instructive about the kinds of geographic
displacement within Africa suffered by some of the popula-
tions studied and gives perspective on that great historical
displacement—of Africans to the Caribbean, whose tradi-
tions we meet in Houston’s The Caribbean, and to South
America, covered by Lovera’s study.
The Caribbean island populations are the heteroge-
neous descendents of their many European conquerors,
FALL 200 6
settlers, and forcible immigrants—African slaves. Houston
manages to give a vibrant sense of the culinary mosaic even
within a quite uniform tropical environment, as well as of
the social environment. The portrait succeeds despite a lack 103
of real cultural depth: the only “principle” governing cui-
GASTR O N O M I CA
sine that Houston identifies is what she calls “making do,”
which involves a fluid use of resources and the use of ingre-
dients that may be denigrated elsewhere. This does not
merit the given designation as a “cultural philosophy of
food,” but Houston is nonetheless successful in turning her
knowledge of the area into a useful portrait of its cookery.
The two other New World areas treated in the series,
Mexico and South America, have large indigenous popula-
tions overlain by similarly large populations of colonizers and
immigrants. In addition, both were homes to the prehistoric
 civilizations of the New World, whose descendants still use
the native foodstuffs of their ancestors and carry on—we can
assume, to some degree—some of their food-related practices.
Mexico is a complex nation with a long past. Long-Solís
and Vargas have been bogged down in its presentation and
failed to organize and reduce analytically some and omit
FALL 200 6
traditional in many tribal areas. There is disordered geo-
graphic reference; there is repetition. A myth regarding the
origin of the dish mole poblano in a convent is repeated
blandly as truth early in the book before it is finally
exploded in later pages not once but twice!12
In South America Lovera has produced a beautifully

others of the facts at hand. A rush to deal with the national
scene along with the rich historical sources of the Conquest
period and, sometimes superfluously, archeological data,
104 have led away from an organized approach to the various
strata of current food culture. The indigenous stratum could
GASTR O N O M I CA
organized overview of a continent, covering indigenous,
European, African, and other immigrant populations
separately and examining the traditions each has brought
to it. He covers different historical periods and, where
relevant, different national traditions. Lovera manages to

have been better distilled from ethnographic works and
more generally presented in relation to only the closely rele-
vant pre-Columbian data and aided by the masterful work of
Sophie Coe on pre-Columbian and contact-period Mexican
cuisines.11 The oft-named staple ingredients of Mexican cui-
show the color and texture of the various South American
food cultures, and to differentiate indigenous traditions,
without getting lost in detail. The traditions he treats are
too diverse to admit a unitary cultural (inside) approach
to food attitudes and systems of meaning, but he gives a
tom owen edmunds, getty images

sine’s indigenous substratum are maize, squash, and beans, but
their contemporary guardians, modern indigenous households,
are not paid good attention (as, in contrast, Osseo-Asare does
for sub-Saharan Africa). And Mexico’s section on kitchens
ignores the one-room houses with hearth at center that are
historically, botanically, bibliographically sophisticated
overview of a continent, including its very contemporary
and urban dimensions. Recipe collections aside, I do not
know that a similar synthesis has been done for the South
American continent.13

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These books are about ordinary people and their
collective foodways. Eating out is indigenous to all of the
peoples described—once it is clearly defined—and is a sep-
arate chapter in the series format. All of the populations
under study know such traditional establishments as taverns,
coffee- or teahouses, roadside inns, and market stalls, as well
as street-food vendors (some of the latter perhaps itinerant,
thus moving the concept of “street food” into villages and
countryside, as I think must be done). Several authors also
include food services in workplaces or in schools. All con-
sider traditional eateries—cafés and restaurants patronized
by local populations.
Writing in particular of such areas as the Caribbean,
sub-Saharan Africa, the Near East, the Middle East, and
North Africa, authors point out that “eating out” is often
simply “eating out-of-doors” or joining other members of a
community in a gathering in some common place or in
another home. Thus we are reminded, most importantly,
that hospitality patterns and interhousehold food exchanges
are indigenous aspects of “eating out” that deserved a more
explicit place in the format.
Restaurants may hold some place in commensal tradi-
tions—as they clearly do in China, for most Chinese on at
least some occasions—but it is important to define the kinds
of restaurants at issue. Some chapters on eating out show
an ambiguity of purpose that rests with the authors them-
selves. The format should have placed word limits on the
description of eating places commensurate with the per-
centage of the population that eats there, and thus we may
have been spared the detail about “fine” (read “preten-
tious”) dining places at which only tourists, food writers
on expense accounts, and a handful of wealthy locals can
entertain themselves. The worst offender here is Russia…,
in which five pages are spent on restaurants that Russians
do not visit and cannot afford—on the pretext that concepts
of “Russianness” are being displayed in food and décor
there. These pages belong in another kind of publication.
At the same time, while Mack and Surina change gears
admirably for describing eating out in Central Asia, they
remark that, among other issues that negatively affect the
establishment of new Central Asian restaurants, “for
Western tastes, Central Asian cuisine tends to be too heavy
in the use of oil and animal fat.”14 Why need Central Asians
worry about catering to Western tastes? Maybe they never
will and will stay free of entrepreneurial managers who
promote restaurants for outsiders. This inquiry needed to
take as its model Clementine Paddleford rather than the
narcissistic restaurant reviewing of our metropolitan
newspapers and glossy magazines.15
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The Paddleford model is well honored, however, in the
series sections “Typical Meals” and “Special Occasions.”
These chapters form much of the ethnographic heart of the
books.16 Many authors include near-recipe kinds of detail
(as well as recipes) on the dishes of significance under these
headings, and there are good inclusions on etiquette and
manners, attitudes toward principal foodstuffs, food symbol-
ism, and the calendars and timetables that govern a culture’s
annual and seasonal life and daily meals, respectively. Mack
and Surina do a fine job here, in the company of most of the
other authors. The materials of these chapters are by nature
too particulate to yield to easy general review. They are in
good part catalogs of cultural events of the kind that under-
lie but do not of themselves constitute cultural analysis.
The existence of cuisines is at least as old as Homo
sapiens, but individual cuisines, of course, vary in age. The
time lines of the series volumes invite comparative questions.
It seems inevitable that writings on China contain the
adjective “ancient” in some disproportion to the actual ages
of many of the phenomena referred to. Newman describes
the time elapsed since Han times (202 b.c.e.) as “thousands
of years”; she says medical conceptions have not changed
“for millennia” and that codified table manners have been
practiced “for eons.” Hyperbole aside, Newman makes the
more substantial claim that China’s is “the longest continu-
ous food culture of the world.”17 This merits examination.
The earliest frankly culinary writing in Chinese, the
Shih Ching or Book of Odes, dates from ca. 1100 b.c.e. (the
beginning of the Chou Dynasty) and through the following
five hundred years to ca. 600 b.c.e.18 The prior Shang Dynasty
did not yield explicitly culinary texts, but it is nonetheless
the source of some information and of important legends in
Chinese culinary reference. Legend is social fact to be
FALL 200 6
regarded seriously, and there are significant culinary elements
in legends about the Shang period, including the figure of
a legendary Shang chef, I Yin, and his counsels. Possibly,
citation of Shang usages in later literature simply lent the 105
weight of antiquity to practices of the later time. Scholars
GASTR O N O M I CA
cite I Yin as legendary, not real. But perhaps there is some
element of reality, too. We should probably grant China an
“unbroken food culture” that predates 1100 b.c.e. and the
first culinary literature: after all, we know well that practice
usually precedes its documentation. Medical beliefs that are
so central to the modern Chinese food system are also evi-
denced in early literary sources.
Long before the Greenwood series began to appear,
Jean Bottéro was studying Mesopotamian recipes recorded
on three cuneiform tablets dating from ca. 1600 b.c.e.19
 These texts are clearly older than comparable Chinese texts,
but the culinary tradition they represent is hardly unbroken:
Mesopotamian cuisine is extinct.20
What is an unbroken, or continuous, food culture? A
cuisine has a structure through which its creators define,
classify, and transform foodstuffs into dishes, meals, and also
ideas about food. Surely a culinary tradition is not broken
every time its inventory of foodstuffs changes through losses
or new encounters. Columbus saw hot Caribbean ajís (hot
capsicums, chilies) as equivalent to the black pepper he had
been seeking. It came to serve in Spain in the same struc-
tural position in which black pepper served, even though it
has never replaced piper nigrum. Chile peppers were received
in China in the structural position of fagara (Szechuan
“pepper”) and ginger, broadening the inventory of pungent
condiments. In Spain potatoes eventually replaced turnips
and chestnuts in stews in most regions (Medina, in Spain,
recognizes this), and New World beans expanded the inven-
tory of legumes without replacing those of the Old World.
Spaniards regarded tomatoes as a source of acid, and they
ultimately replaced sorrel, verjuice, and other acidulants in
traditional recipes.21 That tomatoes also entered new dishes
is not problematic: new dishes are always being created in a
living cuisine, but not all of them survive. Old dishes die,
also, but a cuisine itself persists unless the population bear-
ing the culture of which the cuisine is part becomes, like
the Mesopotamian, extinct. American family cookery has
adopted the language but not the technique of the Chinese
stir-fry and placed the ingredients, some of which are Chinese,
into what is essentially a premade gravy—an American, not
a Chinese, concept. An Asian grocer in my Chicago neigh-
borhood in the 1950s supplied Mexican flour tortillas to
Chinese housewives, who used them as “Mandarin pan-
cakes” for the requisite wrapping of some of their utterly
FALL 200 6
non-Mexican dishes. Of course, the flour tortilla itself was
an adaptation in some parts of Mexico of a new grain,
wheat, to established aboriginal forms and uses. The mod-
106 ern world produces thousands of such examples of the ways
in which cooks impose the structures and strictures of their
GASTR O N O M I CA
traditional cuisines upon new ingredients.
And so, we need to look into the structure of cuisines as
well as their ingredients or current recipes to discover their
continuities. A few of the series authors (Italy, China, Spain,
perhaps others) pay brief attention to the structural integra-
tion of new foods. All of the cuisines the series covers have,
of course, integrated new foods and created new dishes
throughout their histories.
Have Mexican or South American food cultures remained
unbroken? Their authors do not pose the question. Many of
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the indigenous peoples whose ancestors first met European
explorers are still in their native places, producing, eating,
and celebrating such native ingredients as maize, beans,
squash, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, turkeys,
guinea pigs, pineapples, and peppers. Even if European
contact enlarged their inventories of foodstuffs, and even if
colonial and immigrant populations now compose the
majorities in their various nations, have the indigenous
cuisines died? The volumes on Mexico and South America
indicate not. How old are these unbroken traditions?
Understood as culturally structured approaches to food-
stuffs, as they must be, these cuisines may well challenge
China’s in age, but we do not have all of the right kinds of
documents to inform us, and historians of cuisine have not
been around for long enough, asking the right questions.
The Greenwood series Food Culture around the World
is predictably uneven, and its format, limiting, but it helps
to propel food scholarship into the twenty-first century with
the task of culturing how we think about food culture.g
notes
1. Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1871), 1.
2. One writer opposes “a culinary place—the recipe box on the kitchen counter”
to “cultural space” in which culinary writing exists. Such an opposition is anthro-
pologically untenable. See Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The
Triumph of French Cuisine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 25.
3. Mary J. Weismantel, Food, Gender, and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 25, 180. [Reprint: Prospect
Heights, il: Waveland Press, 1998.]
4. There are errors in the presentation of Spain’s historical culinary bibliography
as well; this is clearly beyond the author’s expertise. Most important, he has dated
the Marqués de Villena’s Arte Cisoria in 1766 when in fact the manuscript,
Europe’s earliest known carving manual, is dated 1423 and was well known and
consulted in aristocratic circles before it saw the first (1766) of several print editions.
5. The Caribbean, notes 1 and 2 on pages xxv and xxvii, respectively, and Sub-
Saharan Africa, note 6 on page 152, are missing endnotes.
6. It is a pity that no author cites the seminal paper by Jennifer Billing and Paul
W. Sherman, “Antimicrobial Functions of Spices: Why Some Like It Hot,” The
Quarterly Review of Biology 73 (1998): no. 1, 3–49. Among other things, using tra-
ditional cookbooks, the authors are able to profile world cuisines from both
culinary and preventive/therapeutic perspectives. Acquaintance with this work
might have added a dimension especially to the “Diet and Health” chapters of
the volumes here reviewed.
7. Aside from Achaya’s historical work, Sen notes Madhur Jaffrey’s A Taste of
India, but while Jaffrey’s is a panregional recipe collection with elegant essays on
India’s regions, it is not an analytical essay comparable with Sen’s. See K.T.
Achaya, Indian Food: A Historical Companion (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1994) and Madhur Jaffrey, A Taste of India (New York: Atheneum, 1988).
8. Food Culture in Spain, 119. Mixed paellas of meat and fish (seafood, vegeta-
bles) are traditional in the eastern provinces (Valencia, Alicante, Murcia) and are
reported as traditional in the late nineteenth century in the earliest generation of
modern cookbooks. They are a minority among the inventory of traditional rice
dishes, some of which include only fish and/or shellfish, only meats and/or poul-
try, or only vegetables, including legumes. The mixed meat, poultry, and seafood
paellas are the principal ones offered to the tourist trade, but they are not newer
than the others.
9. Food Culture in Great Britain, 1.
10. Food Culture in Great Britain, 196.
11. Sophie D. Coe, America’s First Cuisines (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). 17. Food Culture in China, 70, 189, 109, 1.
12. Food Culture in Mexico, 19, 60, 109. 18. Here I follow H.T. Huang, Fermentations and Food Science, Joseph Needham,
Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6, part v (Cambridge: Cambridge University
13. Central America—Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, and Panama—
Press, 2000). See also K.C. Chang, ed., Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological
is not covered at all in the series. Perhaps most seriously, its exclusion truncates
and Historical Perspectives (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1977).
the Mayan area at Mexico’s southern boundary; Mayan archeological sites and
contemporary communities extend importantly into Central America. 19. Jean Bottéro, “The Most Ancient Recipes of All,” Food in Antiquity, John
Wilkins, David Harvey, and Mike Dobson, eds. (Exeter: University of Exeter
14. Food Culture in Central Asia, 151.
Press, 1995), 248–255. Jean Bottéro, The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in
15. Clementine Paddleford, How America Eats (New York: Charles Scribner’s Mesopotamia, Teresa Lavender Fagan, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Sons, 1960). Food journalist Paddleford honored home cooks and regional cook- Press, 2004). [Reedition of La plus vielle cuisine du monde (Paris: Éditions Louis
ing in the United States, documenting the foods of private homes in towns and Audibert, 2002).]
cities and farms and orchards and of such collective events as church potlucks,
20. Extinct or not, Mesopotamian and other cuisines of the ancient Near East are
barbecues, clambakes, community festivals, and friends’ dinner clubs. She also
excluded from the chronological time line of Heine’s Food Culture of the Near
ate at restaurants and wrote for magazines both newsprint and glossy, but she
East, Middle East, and North Africa. It is remarkable, even alarming, that Heine’s
worked before food writing became beholden to the commercial interests of the
time line, the most deficient one in the series, begins only with the birth of
foodstuff, restaurant, and travel industries and before the demands of fashionable-
Muhammad.
ness admitted only reference to Gourmet and not to Taste of Home.
21. Susan Tax Freeman, “The Capsicums in Old World Culinary Structures,”
16. It should be noted that Osseo-Asare’s section on Southern Africa in Sub-
Leonard Plotnicov and Richard Scaglion, eds., Ethnology Monographs 17
Saharan Africa is explicitly focused on black traditions rather than on the
(Pittsburgh: Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, 1999), 75–83.
better-documented, more-cosmopolitan ones of nonblack society. Readers should
[Reedition, The Globalization of Food (Prospect Heights, il: Waveland Press,
also note the urban and middle-class bias of the two authors I have called “mod-
2002).] Susan Tax Freeman, “Cocina española: platos españoles vestidos de viaje,”
ernists.” In Italy Parasecoli devotes significant space to “business meals,” the
La antropología como pasión y como práctica: ensayos in honorem Julian Pitt-
celebration of “academic and professional achievements,” and “romantic dinners”
Rivers, Honorio Velasco, ed. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
in his brief chapter on “Special Occasions.” In Spain Medina projects the image
Científicas, 2004), 95–104.
of a secularized urban bourgeois society; this skews the very complex truth. He
also suggests changes in traditional meal hours since the nineteenth century,
which certainly have not occurred everywhere. He does not mention meal hours
in the countryside at all. It is worth noting that the lateness of afternoon and
evening meals in Spain is sometimes seen as fashionably cosmopolitan, but in
fact these are traditionally even later in the countryside, where the heat of the sun
and length of the day—hardly fashion at all—influence meal hours, siesta time,
and the structure of the work day.

FALL 200 6
107
GASTR O N O M I CA

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