Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages

Notes on Contributors......Page 8
Foreword......Page 12
Part I Overture......Page 14
  A Starter: Some Meditations on Gastronomy......Page 16
  One’s Place in the World......Page 18
  Feelings of Belonging, and Food......Page 20
  Identity and Historical Food Studies......Page 23
  The Scope of this Book......Page 25
 –2–Commensality and Social Morphology:An Essay of Typology......Page 36
  Domestic Commensality, Institutional Commensality......Page 38
  Everyday Commensality, Exceptional Commensality......Page 40
  Segregative Commensality, Transgressive Commensality......Page 41
Part II Class and Group Identities......Page 48
 –3–Upholding Status: The Diet of a Noble Familyin Early Nineteenth-Century La Mancha......Page 50
  Almagro: Agriculture and Herding......Page 53
  Some Unexpected Features in a Traditional Aristocratic Diet......Page 55
  The Casa as a Factory......Page 65
  The End of an Era, the Ruin of a Family......Page 67
  Conclusion......Page 68
 – 4–Promise of More. The Rhetoric of (Food)Consumption in a Society Searching for Itself:West Germany in the 1950s......Page 76
  Black-market Experience, and Confidence in Good Money......Page 77
  A New Horizon after Years of Restraint......Page 79
  Connecting to the World......Page 82
  Exuberant Signs......Page 84
  The (Gendered) Meaning of Canned Food......Page 87
  Healthy and Slim......Page 89
  Conclusions......Page 91
 –5–Identification Process at Work:Virtues of the Italian Working-ClassDiet in the First Half of theTwentieth Century......Page 94
  Peasant Frugality as a Virtue in the Inter-war Years......Page 95
  Post-war Diets: “Facing Poverty after having Lost its Place inthe Sun”......Page 103
  Concluding: the Italian Way of Eating . . . Moderately......Page 107
 – 6 –A Bourgeois Good? Sugar, Norms ofConsumption and the Labouring Classes inNineteenth-Century France......Page 112
  The Uses of Sugar......Page 115
  Classifying Sugar......Page 117
  Introducing a Norm of Consumption......Page 120
  Conclusion......Page 125
  Alcohol in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe......Page 132
  The Old in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe......Page 135
  Alcohol and the Old: The Reality......Page 137
  Alcohol and the Old: The Rhetoric......Page 138
  Alcohol, the Old and Medical Opinion......Page 140
  Sex and Alcohol......Page 141
  The Sociability of Drinking......Page 143
Part IIINational Identities......Page 152
 –8–The National Nutrition Exhibition:A New Nutritional Narrative inNorway in the 1930s......Page 154
  Building and Exhibition, Form and Content, Words and Images......Page 156
  The Exhibition......Page 159
  Some Notes on Norwegian Modernity in the 1930s......Page 161
  Vitamins – “these wonderful substances”......Page 165
  Who Were the Recipients?......Page 168
  Returning to the Web of Narratives......Page 170
 –9–Wine, Champagne and the Making ofFrench Identity in the Belle Epoque......Page 176
  Appellations d’Origine......Page 178
  The Origins of the War......Page 182
  Conclusions......Page 185
 –10–Reading Food Riots: Scarcity,Abundance and National Identity......Page 192
  A Historiography of Food Riots......Page 195
  Cultural Meanings of Food in Food Disturbances: An AmericanBackdrop......Page 200
 –11–French Bread and Algerian Wine:Conflicting Identities inFrench Algeria......Page 208
  Bread as a Staple......Page 209
  French Colonisation......Page 213
  The Construction of Identity Through Bread and Wine......Page 215
  Arab Bread Versus French Bread......Page 216
  Wine and Meat......Page 220
  Changes in Production Processes and the Gendered Divisionof Labour......Page 222
  The Limitations of Bread as Identity Marker......Page 224
  Conclusion......Page 227
Index......Page 232