The Own and the Foreign. Traces of Local, Regional and National Cuisines in Medieval and Early Modern Recipes (original) (raw)

2021, International Conference “The Culinary Recipe from the XIIth to the XVIIth centuries. Europe, Islam, Far East”

This paper asks whether and how there are geographical spaces that are located within German-language lines and that have local cookery recipes up to the 16 th century, and what kind of conclusions these words and phrases allow us to make about the realms of identity and alterity, or of the own and the foreign. An outstanding example for this is Marx Rumpolt's "Ein new Kochbuch" (Frankfurt 1581), 1 which contains numerous recipes attributed to specific regions, cities, countries, or populations. 2 From older recipe collections we know already generic attributes such as "foreign," "pagan," 3 "welsh," and probably also "strange/seltsam," which in a certain way are markers for the exotic and the unusual. The recipes gathered by the CoReMa project, together with later collections, serve as a starting point for a diachronic and synchronic comparison of the mentions just outlined: In the case of Marx Rumpolt, for example, the sheer mass of mentions on the one hand allows conclusions on the personal knowledge focus of the of electoral prince's personal chef. On the other hand, the similarities of the recipes declared as Hungarian, for example, allow insights into the early modern ideas of a Hungarian national cuisine. In older recipe collections this kind of traces are much rarer to find, however: A comprehensive compilation should therefore help to elaborate these implicit and explicit semantics and to show possible temporal and spatial continuities and changes. Do geographical localizations and markers of foreignness become more frequent over time and/or are they confined to smaller-scale areas? Do such developments reflect the development of regional cuisines and do they indicate an increasing and more specific culinary knowledge? Are geographically located recipes an evidence for regionalisms or are they foreign attributions? To answer this question, a comparison is made of those marked recipes that appear in several collections. Also, of interest are geographically marked ingredients that are either recognizable by a foreign-language or a presumably Germanized name or are clearly labeled as "Welsh" or "Indian." Finally, what is peculiar to the medieval and early modern recipes is much more difficult to grasp. Recipes clearly designated as "traditional" or "typical" do not seem to exist. But also, the perception of the closer or further origin of dishes and ingredients seems to have gained importance only gradually and to have found its way into the written recipes slowly. The investigation of this aspect is part of a broader dissertation project on the comparative analysis of German-language recipes of the Middle Ages and the early modern period as a cultural-historical source. 4