Food, drink and identity : cooking, eating and drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages

Foreword......Page 8
Part I Overture......Page 9
A Starter: Some Meditations on Gastronomy......Page 10
One’s Place in the World......Page 12
Feelings of Belonging, and Food......Page 14
Identity and Historical Food Studies......Page 17
The Scope of this Book......Page 19
2 Commensality and Social Morphology:An Essay of Typology......Page 30
Domestic Commensality, Institutional Commensality......Page 32
Everyday Commensality, Exceptional Commensality......Page 34
Segregative Commensality, Transgressive Commensality......Page 35
Part II Class and Group Identities......Page 41
3 Upholding Status: The Diet of a Noble Familyin Early Nineteenth-Century La Mancha......Page 42
Almagro: Agriculture and Herding......Page 45
Some Unexpected Features in a Traditional Aristocratic Diet......Page 47
The Casa as a Factory......Page 57
The End of an Era, the Ruin of a Family......Page 59
Conclusion......Page 60
4 Promise of More. The Rhetoric of (Food)Consumption in a Society Searching for Itself:West Germany in the 1950s......Page 67
Black-market Experience, and Confidence in Good Money......Page 68
A New Horizon after Years of Restraint......Page 70
Connecting to the World......Page 73
Exuberant Signs......Page 75
The (Gendered) Meaning of Canned Food......Page 78
Healthy and Slim......Page 80
Conclusions......Page 82
5 Identification Process at Work:Virtues of the Italian Working-ClassDiet in the First Half of theTwentieth Century......Page 85
Peasant Frugality as a Virtue in the Inter-war Years......Page 86
Post-war Diets: “Facing Poverty after having Lost its Place inthe Sun”......Page 94
Concluding: the Italian Way of Eating . . . Moderately......Page 98
6 A Bourgeois Good? Sugar, Norms ofConsumption and the Labouring Classes inNineteenth-Century France......Page 102
The Uses of Sugar......Page 105
Classifying Sugar......Page 107
Introducing a Norm of Consumption......Page 110
Conclusion......Page 115
Alcohol in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe......Page 122
The Old in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe......Page 125
Alcohol and the Old: The Reality......Page 127
Alcohol and the Old: The Rhetoric......Page 128
Alcohol, the Old and Medical Opinion......Page 130
Sex and Alcohol......Page 131
The Sociability of Drinking......Page 133
Part III National Identities......Page 141
8 The National Nutrition Exhibition:A New Nutritional Narrative inNorway in the 1930s......Page 142
Building and Exhibition, Form and Content, Words and Images......Page 144
The Exhibition......Page 147
Some Notes on Norwegian Modernity in the 1930s......Page 149
Vitamins – “these wonderful substances”......Page 153
Who Were the Recipients?......Page 156
Returning to the Web of Narratives......Page 158
9 Wine, Champagne and the Making ofFrench Identity in the Belle Epoque......Page 163
Appellations d’Origine......Page 165
The Origins of the War......Page 169
Conclusions......Page 172
10 Reading Food Riots: Scarcity,Abundance and National Identity......Page 178
A Historiography of Food Riots......Page 181
Cultural Meanings of Food in Food Disturbances: An AmericanBackdrop......Page 186
11 French Bread and Algerian Wine:Conflicting Identities inFrench Algeria......Page 193
Bread as a Staple......Page 194
French Colonisation......Page 198
The Construction of Identity Through Bread and Wine......Page 200
Arab Bread Versus French Bread......Page 201
Wine and Meat......Page 205
Changes in Production Processes and the Gendered Divisionof Labour......Page 207
The Limitations of Bread as Identity Marker......Page 209
Conclusion......Page 212
Index......Page 217