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[twospots]

The link to the "Foodie Food Storage" article got me wishing I had more info about a few things. Sharon Astyk writes:

[I]t is worth remembering that the peasant cuisines that we base much of our best food upon never contained meat, milk and eggs in the quantities we have them now, never ate them all year round. That is, no one ever ate osso buco

Comments

[cis]

I suppose the problem with learning about "peasant cuisines as they existed for ordinary people" is that the old cookbooks we have are more often written for the middle classes at a time when meat was more abundant, or discuss only the more lavish, dinner-party-food type recipes.

My parents use an ancient falling-apart book called something like "ricette regionali d'italia" which is amazingly comprehensive (the number of minestrone variations alone!) and full of low-meat or no-meat recipes. It's possible that there are equivalent collections for different countries - I suppose the special thing about italy is that, having only been unified in the nineteenth-century, there was as it were a nationalist reason to record local peasant cuisine as a marker of identity.

The only book I can really think of that functions as a study into traditional food life is Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery, which obviously is very limited in its remit and doesn't cover the limitations of the seasonal diet very much, though it is fascinating. But there seems to be a greater focus in history these days on material culture, etc, so maybe that kind of research will soon appear?

[twospots]

the problem with learning about "peasant cuisines as they existed for ordinary people" is that the old cookbooks we have are more often written for the middle classes at a time when meat was more abundant, or discuss only the more lavish, dinner-party-food type recipes.

Yes, exactly. Same problem with most social history, really: the lives of ordinary people are much less documented, and what did exist tends to disappear more quickly (even the material stuff, like clothes and tools).

so maybe that kind of research will soon appear?

Oh, I hope so! Perhaps I ought to go back for a PhD and do that "Food Storage and Preparation in Ontario, 1850-1950." :)