BIO:

Nelleke Teughels (1982) obtained a Master's degree in Art History and Archaeology in 2005 (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). In September 2011 she defended her dissertation on the iconography and material culture of modern food retailing (1867-1940) as markers for social and cultural distinction. Between 2012 and 2016 she carried out postdoctoral research for the FWO-Vlaanderen, analysing the food that was presented and served by the Belgian participants at the world exhibitions in Belgium and abroad between 1851 and 2010 and investigating whether the construction and promotion of a 'traditional food culture' was used as an instrument in the legitimation and identity construction of the Belgian nation. After three years as a doctor-assistant at the research group Cultural History since 1750, she started in October 2018 as a postdoctoral researcher on the research project B-Magic. The Magic Lantern and its Cultural Impact as a Visual Mass Medium in Belgium.

Ana Carolina de Carvalho Viotti & Gabriel Ferreira Gurian: The table of an independent nation: nature, ingredients, habits and identity in the 'Cozinheiro Nacional' (Brazil,  19th century) 

BIO: Ana Carolina de Carvalho Viotti 

Historian, has a Master's degree (2012) and a PhD (2017) in History and Social Culture granted by the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the São Paulo State University (UNESP), having developed postdoctoral research in History of the Sciences and Health at the Foundation Oswaldo Cruz (FIOCRUZ). Recently started new postdoc studies at the Centre Alexandre Koyré – École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), in Paris. Is an adjunct professor at the Graduate Program of the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the São Paulo State University. Authored many papers, chapters and books, amongst them “Pano, pau e pão. Escravos no Brasil Colônia” [Cloth, stick and bread: slaves in Colonial Brazil], which was awarded third place in the Social Sciences category in the Brazilian University Publishers Association Award (ABEU) in 2020. 

BIO: Gabriel Ferreira Gurian 

Historian, has a Master's degree (2018) in History and Social Culture granted by the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the São Paulo State University (UNESP), where he is currently a PhD candidate. Authored papers, chapters, and the book “Bebidas e bebedores no Brasil Holandês, 1624-1654” [Drinking in Dutch Brazil, 1624-1654], published in 2019

ABSTRACT

Most of the first culinary recipe books published in Latin America followed the windows of independence, opening and early modernization of its nations. Such publications provide rich perspectives of such processes, showcasing the adoption of foreign habits, as well as their adaptation and the subsequent creation of new elements guided by local traditions and resources, in tune with the efforts towards consolidating national identities. In Brazil, where the forbiddance of printing presses only came to an end with the coming of the Portuguese royal family and its court in 1808, and the country’s Independence from Portugal being declared in 1822, such editorial movement regarding culinary literature seemed to have followed the same steps. It was only in 1839-40 that the first book of such category was published, still very much in accordance to parameters and postulates inherited from France, as well as Brazil’s former metropole. However, such framework started to change with the publication of other titles that intended to be explicitly “national” or “Brazilian”. The ‘Cozinheiro Nacional’ [National Cook] (1874-88) is one such document, quite resolute in its “solemn commitment, that is the presentation of a cuisine entirely Brazilian”. Registering a series of dishes considered typically national – whilst also pointing out regional particularities –, the anonymous author, sometimes identified by scholars as Paulo Sales, reiterates tirelessly the idea that many species of plants, fruit and animals native or seamlessly adapted to Brazil were equivalent to foreign varieties that were featured in many imported recipes. Highlighting multiple endemic animals, such as macaws and anteaters, tropical fruits, like guava and passion fruit, the author also introduces to its readers many possible substitutions to the imported items that were favored by the most demanding eaters. For instance, the replacement of artichoke with banana flower – called “navel” or “heart” – in a handful of recipes. A comprehensive relation of such items and ingredients that could be interchangeable is also featured in the book, as an attempt to showcase the value of the country’s natural resources. Therefore, the proposed paper, aligned with the topic regarding the interdependence of landscapes and cuisines, consists of the presentation of the referred document and the examination of its particularities, its nationalizing efforts around food items and habits intimately associated with Brazilian nature, as well as the limits of such nationalist discourse through culinary recipes, instructions and techniques.  

Christian Reynolds: The evolution of “sustainable” and vegetarian recipes from manuscripts and cookbooks to online: Their environmental impact, and what this means for the future.  

BIO

Dr. Christian Reynolds is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Food Policy, City University of London. Christian is recognised as a global expert on food loss and waste and sustainable diets. He has worked on these issues in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, the UK, US, and Europe. He is the lead editor of the Routledge Handbook of Food Waste (2019); he has also co-authored over 50 peer reviewed publications, as well as multiple reports and book chapters. Christian has given evidence to UK and NZ parliaments on FLW and contributed to the Food Loss and Waste Accounting and Reporting Standard. Christian also researches sustainable cookery; food history; and the political power of food in international relations.

ABSTRACT

This contribution examines selected historic and contemporary “sustainable” and vegetarian recipes and cookbooks over time. Specifically, it investigates how the ingredients, methods, and environmental impacts of the food have been changing, and what this means for the future.  

We will first provide a literature review of the development of European “sustainable” and vegetarian cookbooks, linking the publication of these texts to wider global events and societal trends since the 1600s.  

In our project, we use pilot digital humanities methods to explore digitised historical recipe texts from cookbooks, magazines and websites in English, Dutch and German using the natural language processing tool GATE [1] to automatically extract ingredients, quantities and units from modern/contemporary recipes, and examine historical recipes composition and ingredient inclusion.  Through this analysis we highlight how “sustainable” and vegetarian cookbooks and recipes have changed. 

Through this resource, we then explore the environmental impacts of vegan, vegetarian and non-vegetarian recipes if we were to cook these recipes using contemporary ingredients. To do this we link the extracted recipe ingredients to a database that contains the environmental impacts of 4,500 food ingredients. This provides us with the information on the environmental impacts of each recipe if it were cooked today in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, water footprint, and land use per recipe/portion etc.  

This paper concludes by examining what future diets may look like based on current trends. 

Authors: Christian Reynolds, Marieke van Erp, Christoph Trattner, Alain Starke, Diana Maynard 

Vicky Hayward: Of refrescos - snow and ice in spanish kitchen culture 

BIO

Vicky Hayward is an independent food historian, writer, features journalist, editor and arts consultant living in Spain. She learned to cook professionally before studying History at the University of Cambridge (BA/MA Cantab), where she was introduced to methodologies in food history within wider social and cultural studies supervised by Tony Judt, Michael O’Brien, Roy Porter and Roger Schofield (Campop). Her writing and journalism have covered many areas, from food to visual and performance art, social and women’s issues, often viewed within a historical context. Since living in Spain her work has included food, gastronomy and wine culture essays for Spain Gourmetour; flamenco features, live programming, film and audio; pocket guides and essays on Spanish cities and regions. In recent years her projects on food, culture and history have converged. Vicky is the author of New Art of Cookery, A Spanish Friar’s Kitchen Notebook (June 2017, Rowman & Littlefield) and Nuevo arte de la cocina española de Juan Altamiras (October 2017, Ariel), recreations of a seminal 1745 Spanish cookbook in which she contextualizes the original text within social history, also giving modernized recipes highlighting dishes’ evolution. In 2017 she received the Jane Grigson Trust Award and the Aragonese Academy of Gastronomy’s Award for Best Gastronomic Research, in 2018 the Spanish Real Academia de Gastronomía’s prize for the best publication of 2017, and in 2019 the Juan Altamiras prize. A 2020 essay looking at mixed methodological approaches in close readings of historic cookbooks, including flavour analysis in New Art with chef Kiko Moya, was highly commended in the Sophie Coe Prize in Food History 2020.

ABSTRACT

“Paris, so superior in everything, is behind in this one respect,” wrote Théophile Gautier, surprised by Madrid’s nineteenth century iced “refreshments” ranging from granizadas, bebidas heladas, sorbetes, garrapiñeras and spumas to ice-cream quesitos. Even today little is written of Spain’s refrescos, their early origins in sugar cane cultivation, snow harvesting and Arab scholars’ medicinal ideas, and their survival today in the hands of artesanal makers. The mid-sixteenth century onset of the so-called “mini ice-age”, bringing snowfall closer to cities and reviving theoretical debate on health and snow, was decisive in refrescos’ growing popularity. Authors now endorsed snow’s virtues, but marked their distance from nature and Muslim practices, ironically allowing more complex recipes to develop. Two early modern kitchen snow cultures developed in parallel: one, urban and courtly, emphasized gastronomy and luxury alongside medicinal drinks’ value; a second, popular and rural, used sparing seasonal snow supplies for health, preserving and a small range of drinks for fiestas. Snowharvesting for cities developed around storage in open-air hollows and ice wells designed to allow variously priced qualities of snow and ice to be offered as urban commodities. As business grew, it was taxed, then franchised and finally taken under crown control in 1681. Alongside this, rural monastic and municipal ice wells flourished, leading communities to overcome fear and venture into inhospitable wild landscapes for collective harvesting. A particularly cold decade, the 1740s, saw the convergence of bothl culinary repertoires in recipe books: one, by friar Juan Altamiras, published the first recipes for economic popular drinks, many of which are still made today; the second, by court confectioner Juan de la Mata, offered a lavish, now largely forgotten gastronomic repertoire for wealthy homes and guild confectioners licensed to sell to the public. In their cafés Gautier would enjoy his refrescos and note distinctive Spanish specialities of variously textured ices. Today, in an age of rising temperatures and receding snows, Spanish archaeologists, chefs, confectioners and specialist iced-drink makers are reevaluating this lost culture of ice and snow, often now known as la cultura del frío. This paper follows its development from medieval times and, in particular, assesses the relative importance of contributing dynamic elements, among them climate change, medicinal beliefs, cultural fashions, economics, entrepreneurialism, and an often unarticulated search for closeness to, or distance from, nature.