From Kebab to Ćevapčići. Foodways in (Post-)Ottoman Europe. (original) (raw)
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2018
* An earlier version of this text was published in Greek as "Apo tis 'koinotites tis omoiotitas' sta fagita tis siopis" [From the 'communities of similarities' to the dishes of silence] in Historica 56 (2012): 81-100. 1 Fernand Braudel's observations remain useful. See his Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XV e-XVIII e siècle, vol. 1: Les structures du quotidien: le possible et l'impossible (Paris: 1979). See also Massimo Montanari and Jean-Robert Pitte (eds.), Les frontières alimentaires (Paris: 2009), an interdisciplinary collection of studies produced by historians and geographers. 2 See Anna Matthaiou, Aspects de l'alimentation en Grèce sous la domination ottomane: Des réglementations au discours normatif (Frankfurt am Main: 1997), 243-340. 3 On various methodological questions relating to travellers' literature, see the collective volume Periigitika themata: Ypodomi kai prosegiseis, ed. Loukia Droulia (Athens: 1993). See also Anna Matthaiou, "The Daily Market and the Economy Experienced," in Greek Economic History 15th-19th Centuries, ed.
The Many Rooms in the House: Research on Past Foodways in Modern Europe
Writing Food History. A Global Perspective (eds: K. Claflin & P. Scholliers), 2012
In 2007 I published a survey dealing with research about Europe's foodways in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 1 Rather than being interested in the conclusions of this research, I wished to examine how scholars study food history, which offered an opportunity for testing the application and relevance of interdisciplinarity. Luckily, not only historians but also scholars who were not trained as historians investigate foodways of the past. Studying food in the modern era has indeed attracted a large number of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and sociology to communication sciences and geography. I wished to learn whether and how these approaches, methods, and insights inspired historians. My conclusions confi rmed the extraordinarily thriving interest in Europe's past foodways by an ever-growing number of disciplines, the total lack of common ground of these studies, and their hesitant interest in interdisciplinary approaches. In this chapter I want to expand this inquiry by using recent literature and asking additional questions. I am, fi rst and foremost, interested in the way historians have dealt with the overwhelming attention from other disciplines since the early 2000s. Would they welcome it and explore new themes, methods, and insights, or resist and ignore the loud knock on their door? Also, I consider the question of how amateur historians (i.e., nontrained historians as well as nonacademics) set off with historical questions and debates, apply historical concepts, search for historical sources, and refer to adequate historical literature. This chapter has three sections: the fi rst two form a chronological survey with the year 2005 as a caesura (in order not to replicate my 2007 survey and to emphasize recent developments), while the third section is a lengthy conclusion. Separate Rooms in a Cozy Hut (1960s–1980s) and Accessible Rooms in a Welcoming House (1990s–2005) Broadly speaking, two intellectual loci in food studies existed between 1900 and 1960: that of economic history and that of folklore. 2 The two neglected each other. Economic historians dealt with the food supply, hunger, and prices, while folklorists studied
“Eating Daintily” Food and Social Practices in the Danubian Principalities, 1780-1850
Food&History, 2023
This article analyses the relation between food, social status and the circulation of knowledge in southeastern Europe. During the long eighteenth century, the mobility of people led to the circulation of culinary practices and information regarding the organization of meals and the spread of good manners. With the help of ego-documents, travel narratives and private archives I examine how the Christian elites in the Ottoman Empire adapted to the flux of new practices and fashions diffused through the intermediary of people, objects, gazettes and books. Together with recipes and new sorts of food, a whole set of utensils was borrowed and adapted to meet the new requirements. The civilizing process was long and difficult, and documentary and visual sources capture very well the delay between the circulation of objects and information, on the one hand, and their assimilation in the nineteenth century, through the generation of the revolutions, on the other
Introduction: Social dimensions of food
2018
choosing cooking recipes, or sitting in a restaurant in front of the menu. Without any doubt, this question has successfully been resolved since the beginning of human existence, although the availability of food sometimes gave a quick answer to the question. In this introduction to the volume, we wish to very briefl y refl ect on approaches within archaeology as well as in Food Studies that have been applied in answering this question, for past and present humankind. We wish to further stimulate the integration of past and present studies on food so that both disciplines – archaeology and Food Studies – can profi t from each other. The case studies presented in this volume should service as an inspiration in this respect. Our region of focus, the Balkans, has played a crucial role in the dissemination and translation of food practices from the Mediterranean, the Near East, and the Eurasian Steppes towards Central Europe, and vice versa, and is, therefore, essential for a deep histo...