A Matter of Taste: The Experiment of a 'Byzantine Food-Lab' placed in Socio-Historical Context (original) (raw)
Related papers
Tastes of Byzantium: The Cuisine of a Legendary Empire by Andrew Dalby
Tastes of Byzantium: The Cuisine of a Legendary Empire by Andrew Dalby, 2010
For centuries the food and culinary delights of the Byzantine empire -- centred on Constantinople -- have captivated the west, although it appeared that very little information had been passed down to us. Andrew Dalby's Tastes of Byzantium now reveals in astonishing detail, for the first time, what was eaten in the court of the Eastern Roman Empire -- and how it was cooked. Fusing the spices of the Romans with the seafood and simple local food of the Aegean and Greek world, the cuisine of the Byzantines was unique and a precursor to much of the food of modern Turkey and Greece. Bringing this vanished cuisine to life in vivid and sensual detail, Dalby describes the sights and smells of Constantinople and its marketplaces, relates travellers' tales and paints a comprehensive picture of the recipes and customs of the empire and their relationship to health and the seasons, love and medicine. For food-lovers and historians alike, Tastes of Byzantium is both essential and riveting -- an extraordinary illumination of everyday life in the Byzantine world.
“Mens et mensa: Thinking of Food in Medieval Cultures (1000-1600 CE)” Introduction
2013
In the last few decades new theoretical perspectives have emphasized the significance of material culture for an understanding of historical and sociocultural developments. As a consequence of this renewed interest in more pragmatic aspects of daily life through the ages scholars have turned to the study of food as a window to the cultural dynamics that are embedded within. The acquisition, preparation and consumption of food is a basic human need that provides a lens through which scholars can explore relationships among economic, religious, literary, legal, political, cultural and social activity. Scholarly study of food, as well as its surrounding ideas and practices, illuminate the boundaries and nexus of material and mental exchanges which are so fundamental to human experience that they often escape a culture’s nominal categories to occasion the crossing of social and political borders. Scholarly interest in food and eating in the Middle Ages increased after the publication of...
Food and Culinary Practices in 17th-Century Moldavia: Tastes, Techniques, Choices
∵ Contents Acknowledgements xi List of Illustrations xii Notes on Contributors xiv Notes on the Translation and Transliteration xxi Chronology xxii Map xxv Introduction 1 Angela Jianu and Violeta Barbu Part 1 Flavours, Tastes and Culinary Exchange: Food and Drink in the Ottoman World 1 Should it be Olives or Butter? Consuming Fatty Titbits in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire 33 Suraiya Faroqhi 2 Simits for the Sultan, Cloves for the Mynah Birds: Records of Food Distribution in the Saray 50 Hedda Reindl-Kiel 3 The Cuisine of Istanbul between East and West during the 19th Century 77 Özge Samancı 4 Turkish Flavours in the Transylvanian Cuisine (17th-19th Centuries) 99 Margareta Aslan 5 Exotic Brew? Coffee and Tea in 18th-Century Moldavia and Wallachia 127 Olivia Senciuc viii contents Part 2 Ingredients, Kitchens and the Pleasures of the Table 6 Kitchen Gardens and Festive Meals in Transylvania (16th-17th Centuries) 149 Kinga S. Tüdős 7 Food and Culinary Practices in 17th-Century Moldavia: Tastes, Techniques, Choices 170
Experimental Archaeology as Participant Observation A Perspective from Medieval Food
EXARC Journal, 2017
Central to anthropology is the concept of participant observation, where a researcher engages in immersive learning through ethnographic fieldwork. This concept is also important for archaeologists as immersive learning provides an avenue for more robust interpretation and the development of better research questions. Participant observation is not directly possible in the study of medieval archaeology, but replication studies of food culture can serve as one avenue toward immersive learning in archaeology. Replication studies of medieval food, notably the use of medieval cookbooks and replicated medieval vessels, offer insights into medieval life and everyday practice. This paper will discuss two specific examples: replicating a medieval beverage from a fourteenth century cookbook and replicating possible foods cooked in pots from a fifteenth-century tavern in Nuremberg.
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…
M. Ghilardi, ed., Géoarchéologie des îles de Méditerranée. Geoarchaeology of the Mediterranean Islands, Paris , 2016
partie 1 / Part 1 21 anthropisation et mutations paysagères à la transition paléolithique/Néolithique anthropization and landscape changes during the Late Paleolithic/Neolithic transition la diffusion du néolithique en Méditerranée 23 GUilaine Jean late pleistocene to early holocene sea-crossings in the aegean: direct, indirect and controversial evidence 33 papoUlia christina Variations relatives du niveau moyen de la mer en corse au cours des 6 000 dernières années 97 Vacchi Matteo, Ghilardi Matthieu, cUrrÁs andrés reconstructing the coastal configuration of lemnos island (northeast aegean sea, Greece) since the last Glacial Maximum 109 chalKioTi areti holocene sea level changes and palaeogeographic reconstruction of the ayia irini prehistoric settlement (Keos island, cyclades archipelago, Greece) 119 MoUrTzas nikos, KolaiTi eleni