Eating Out. Food Culture in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. (original) (raw)
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A n intimate association of eating with sensual pleasure in Muslim theologydepicted in the Garden of Delights-had occasioned serious unease in the Christian world that could barely digest the bonding of religion and sensuousness. What caused immense concern was the fact that this 'philosophy of gratification' did not only promise joys after death. It spoke of, indeed encouraged, the reaping of pleasure in life by associating good life with good eating (Peterson, 1980, 321). This was in stark contrast to the austerity and temperance demanded of Christians in this life as a step toward an angelic society in heaven (Peterson, 1980, 322). Hence, after the Qu'ran was translated into Latin by the mid-twelfth century, scholars devoted themselves to the task of discerning whether this association was real or allegorical. Others, however, found a different use for this bonding of eating and pleasure in this life. An 'upheaval' occurred in the cooking of the European elite from about 1300 CE, accompanied by a marked change in the attitude toward food (Peterson, 1980, 317). I begin the introduction on this note to divulge, at the outset, an important argument of the book. The volume seeks to explore how food, cooking and cuisine, in different societies, cultures and over different periods of time, are essentially results of confection-combination-of ingredients, ideas, ideologies and imagination, inflected by relations of power and experiments with creativity. Such blends, churned out of transcultural flows of goods, people and ideas, colonial encounters and engagements, adventure and adaptation, and change in attitude and taste, enable convergent histories of the globe kneaded by food www.cambridge.org © in this web service Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-14036-3-Cooking Cultures: Convergent Histories of Food and Feeling Edited by Ishita Banerjee-Dube Excerpt More information Ishita Banerjee-Dube 2 and cooking that tell us about being and belonging, pride, identity, hospitality and sociability, class and power, and nation and culture that are ever ready to be cast in different moulds. They also point to a convergence between the histories of the world as one of 'species migration', whether through climate or habitat change or population pressure, or through more active processes of human intervention, and of food, eating and cuisine as being constituted by such mixing and migration. The different chapters of the book look at the evolution of food in distinct parts of the globe over different periods of time from diverse perspectives. Yet, together they portray and convey the polyphony that surrounds food and cooking, a polyphony often subsumed by the attempted homogenisation that underlies the construction of 'national', 'natural' or 'regional' cultures. In contrast to such homogenisation, this book offers a tale strewn together from a variety of smells and tastes, peoples and places and their multiple mixtures. The chapters also highlight the importance of sharing and exchanging food as vital elements of 'culture' and sociability, elements that are often used to mark social distinctions and not erase them (Peters, 2016; Pilcher, 1998). An early cookery book of Baghdad had drawn upon the Qu'ran to declare food to be 'the noblest and most consequential' of the six human pleasures, along with drinks, clothes, sex, scent and sound (Peterson, 1980, 322). The write-up on an adventurous book on the history of food calls cuisine 'the defining characteristic of a culture' (Fernández-Armesto, 2002). What makes food and cuisine tick as the 'noblest pleasure', and the most significant element of a culture? What makes Indian food serve as 'street food' in Cairo and 'court food' in Isfahan and yet remain a prop of national culture? How has 'curry', invented during British rule in India, moved back and forth between India and England and come to signify 'Indian food' in the world? This volume addresses some of these issues in its attempt to track how peoples and cultures relate to food and cuisine, and how such bonding shapes cartographies of belonging and identities. It explores the elements and processes that go into the cooking of cultures, in which food and cuisine are flavoured by adaptation and innovation, transcultural and trans-regional flows, and nostalgia and recreation ; and 'national', 'regional' and 'cosmopolitan' cultures, along with personhood, are concocted and confected. The volume takes into serious account reminders that food, as an important element of material culture, significantly shapes individual and collective identities (Palmer, 1998, 183) and that food is neither neutral nor innocent but a product of dominant ideologies and power structures (Cusack, 2000, 208). Indeed, the first essay of the volume examines and interrogates why and how certain plant and animal species are constructed as 'natural', 'native' and www.cambridge.org
International Review of Social Research , 2016
As an everyday activity, sustaining our life, eating experiences reveal complex relationship between food and society, involving material and symbolic aspects of cultures, dietary order, but also aesthetics or hedonism (Levi-Strauss, 1964, Douglas, 1966, Fischler, 1980, Beardsworth & Keil, 1997). Bringing on stage cultural values, food becomes a central identity marker, defining personality, social class, lifestyles, gender roles and relationships, from family, to community, to ethnic groups or nationality, changing through time and place. Food is a lens to analyze society order, historical changes, power and politics, if we think of the pioneering works in this area of studies, from Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the social classes’ taste (1979), Jack Goody’s connection between cuisine and class in West Africa (1982), Sidney Mintz research on sugar, modern times and colonialism (1985), to Arjun Appadurai’s work on nationalism and cuisines (1988). The more recent trend towards food heritage and heritagisation reveals the dynamic role of history in understanding culture, as well as the marketization of culinary traditions. Social changes, like evolutions in intergroup relations within societies, migration phenomena such as nomadism, refugees, expatriates, tourism, alongside with the industrialization of food production or the globalization of foods, the role of mass media and new technologies, all have their impact on the food production, distribution, preparation, foodways or drinkways changing either by expressing individual or group preferences for alternative consumption manners, or at collective level. This issue on ‘Food and Culture. Cultural patterns and practices related to food in everyday life’ gives, once *Corresponding author: Anda Georgiana Becuţ, National Institute for Research and Cultural Training, Ministry of Culture, Bucharest, Romania, E-mail: andabecut@yahoo.com. Jean-Jacques, Boutaud Universite de Bourgogne Angelica Marinescu, University of Bucharest more, reason to Roland Barthes who, in his introduction to Brillat Savarin’s Physiologie du gout, understands food, generally (and gastronomy, particularly) as a domain fit for developing a humanistic approach, seen as total social fact, including different metalanguages. As he explains, ‘It is this encyclopedic view, - this ”humanism” - that encompasses, for Brillat-Savarin, the name of gastronomy” (Barthes, 1975).
Food, Culture & Society An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research
Productive new openings can be found in food studies through provincializing European and American conceptualizations of the aesthetics of good taste and the ethics of foodwork. The liberal arts can be reinvigorated for the twenty-first century by drawing on feminism and everyday Hinduism of care-work and devotion, in part by using the immigrant body not merely as an object of analysis but as a tool kit to open up the epistemological discussion on how we know what to do.
In projects developed in the area of food history and in the different symposia organised by ICREFH in the past 30 years, the history of the senses has remained in the background. However, the senses of smell, touch, sight, hearing, and taste are appealed to when we deal with the production of foods for consumption. The use of the senses, which is quotidian, but equally ephemeral, seems to be outside of the written scholarship produced by historians. The creation, by elites, of taste, of fashion, of " bon gout " , are familiar areas of discussion today. This symposium, which will be presented for the 30th anniversary of ICREFH, proposes moving forward in our analysis of this area by drawing on recent research. Each sense can be a separate topic of historical research. However, separating each sense activated by food presents a somewhat impoverished image. In fact, all the senses are at work when we are eating. Thus, let us take them as a whole so as to seize a " balance of the senses " (Corbin), a rapport among them which can appear in the form of a hierarchy or of a balance. This ensemble is produced, it grows, it transforms, and then it sometimes disappears. Actually, the enhancement of taste indicates a constructed and deliberate hierarchical organization. In the same way, a crunch activates our sense of hearing initially, with the other senses staying in the background. All of this remains to be explored in order to evaluate and historicise the place accorded to the senses vis-à-vis food by 19th and 20th century society. We shall approach the history of food and the senses by means of an event, a product, a particular source (a family journal, a cookery book...), prohibitions, speeches… On the basis of already familiar archives or by utilising lesser known sources is it possible to generate new avenues of research or to reinterpret previous research? Three main themes have been adopted, but the organizing committee is open to other proposals: 1 – An analysis of the hierarchy of the senses in the 19th and 20th centuries, and their transformations: these can be produced in various ways: • By vocabulary: In this time period how was specific vocabulary constructed (e.g., for wine), how were words for food and the senses created? Some words disappear or change their meaning. • Can we observe geographical food distinctions that arose from the senses? Did the combination of the senses and food play a part in the creation of nations or of nationalism (national dishes and the senses that are particularly connected to them). Can we distinguish between the senses developed at home, and those developed outside of the home? Do there exist places of intensity for the senses (the kitchen, for example)? Seasons? • Is the appeal of the senses a function of social group, stages in life, type, body type (fat or thin, small or large, healthy?). The analogy between body odours or social position and certain dishes and their odours should perhaps be explored: foot odour/ cheese; poverty/cabbage smell; wealth/gameyness. • The industrialization of the senses: a new hierarchy? 2 – Production and construction of norms Are there rules, and how are they applied when it is a question of combining colours, forms, tastes, and odours? We can envisage the roles of regulations, European or national, of specific trades (doctors, cooks…), hygiene and the senses, the media: the press, radio, books, religion…
A Mirror of Society: Ottoman Cuisine
Account of the historical development of Ottoman cuisine and its influence on European cuisine. The Turkish version of this article was published in Osmanlı Mutfak İmparatorluğu, Kitap Yayınevi, Istanbul 2014, pp. 7-29.