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[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 nightly, or cassoulet daily. And the cassoulet was born as a way to extend small amounts of meat with beans and other foods. [...]
So the first reality of food storage is that we’re headed back to the peasant cusines - as they existed for ordinary people. [...] The cookbooks are written mostly for Americans and their huge, seasonless quantities of milk, eggs and meat, and the restaurant menus emphasize these foods that were once special. [emphasis mine]
Where does one find information about "peasant cuisines as they existed for ordinary people"? I've seen lots of book and articles that refer to this, but little in the way of a comprehensive resource. Maybe there's a great book out there that I've missed; my googling isn't turning up much other than lists of seasonal veggies and how-to-can articles.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to where this info is hiding? Not as background to support theoretical arguments, but perhaps a "Guide to"? My other thought is that perhaps someone's written a historical study of, say, "Food Storage and Preparation in Ontario, 1850-1950."
I would far prefer to hear about info for northern climes. Last frost here is not until mid-May.
ETA: Something like Anglo-Saxon food and drink : production, processing, distribution and consumption (Ann Hagen; Oxbow Books/Anglo-Saxon Books, 2006) would be great--but most stuff like this seems either very general (more sociology, less specific) or not really useful in northern North America...
January 25 2009, 22:19:16 UTC 3 years ago
As far as "traditional peasant foods," one thing I've found very useful for me is looking at local history museums and historical documents-- extremely easy for me since I live one town away from Plymouth, MA and the well-researched Plimoth Plantation. Also, crappy as it is, there is sort of a cannon of "traditional New England cuisine." Things like fish, various types of pork, corn (just what every American needs, right?), beans, molasses, cranberries, blueberries, anadama bread, sharp cheddar, maple syrup for a sweetener. So maybe get familiar with what's native to your area and then seek out (or develop your own) recipes for what you've got?
I know this is getting long, sorry about that, but one last thing is that I got to where I am with my family's diet in steps. First I went all natural (this was about five or six years ago), cutting out artificial colors, flavors, preservatives and things like MSG. Then I worked on getting rid of corn derivatives and getting as much organic as possible, until I was getting almost nothing at the local supermarket. Last year we made the big leap to "as local as possible," joining CSAs for veggies and meat, and getting delivery from a local dairy. And now I'm working on refining that, getting even more local, and making more from scratch.
January 25 2009, 22:38:27 UTC 3 years ago
And yes, I certainly do know what is in season when here, but also I know that our local "traditional cuisine" is... er... a bit idealized. I've certainly picked up bits and pieces here and there from various historical sources; I was just wondering whether anyone has done any more comprehensive work on the topic in the way that historians seem to have descended, for example, on medieval or Roman food habits.
January 25 2009, 22:45:47 UTC 3 years ago Edited: January 25 2009, 22:46:08 UTC
Boiled down to its essence, his approach is - plants first. Whatever meal you consume, make sure the vast majority of it is constituted from plants of some kind or another, and that animal proteins are not the focus on the dish. (He's made the decision for himself to be more or less vegan until dinner time, and then to eat whatever he likes so long as he's following the 'mostly plants' guideline.) I followed his guidelines for a frittata yesterday, for example. Where I would usually eat an egg and cheese omlette, using two eggs in one serving, I instead sauteed a red pepper, a green pepper, onion, and a sliced sweet potato in a little oil, and poured two beaten eggs over the whole thing when the veggies were soft. I ate half for dinner, so the majority of my meal was vegetable based, and my animal protein was cut by half.
Does this help?
January 25 2009, 23:27:26 UTC 3 years ago
January 25 2009, 23:34:14 UTC 3 years ago
That said, I have a government-issued guide to food preparation and storage, published in Britain in the 1930s, and it advises boiling carrots for up to an hour. So perhaps Britain isn't the way to go . . .
January 25 2009, 23:49:43 UTC 3 years ago
January 25 2009, 22:51:26 UTC 3 years ago
Here are some links:
http://www.westonaprice.org/ (they have a book that is like a guide with recipes http://www.amazon.com/Nourishing-Tradit
http://www.wisefoodways.com/ (her book is one of the best books I have ever bought)
and here are some crazy old cookery books that are quite hard to read, but may give you ideas http://www.thousandeggs.com/cookbooks.h
I don't know if thats the kind of thing you were looking for?
January 25 2009, 23:24:36 UTC 3 years ago
Yes, absolutely. That said, my preliminary search has turned up very little in terms of info on *any* lower-class cuisine (a common historiographical problem), so anything in a relatively northern clime would be interesting.
I don't know if thats the kind of thing you were looking for?
Yes, especially the old cookbooks link! I will have to take a closer look at the others. A number of the "eat like your ancestors" books I've seen tend to do a lot of handwavy stuff about what was actually eaten, and base their recommendations on spotty or nonexistant research. I'm mostly hoping to find some that are a bit more sound.
January 26 2009, 02:05:43 UTC 3 years ago
January 26 2009, 04:43:07 UTC 3 years ago
one way to research it is to find books written 100-150 years ago where your forebears lived, and read about every day foods there, either in novels, receipt books, household management books, etc.
January 25 2009, 23:38:01 UTC 3 years ago
January 26 2009, 16:44:24 UTC 3 years ago
January 25 2009, 23:22:22 UTC 3 years ago
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?
January 25 2009, 23:32:00 UTC 3 years ago
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." :)
January 25 2009, 23:41:40 UTC 3 years ago
I'm really becoming less and less a fan of Sharon Astyk, which makes me really sad because I used to have a blog-crush on her.
But as far as storing eggs and butter and cheese, I think she's out of her mind. My experience is that first, these are things that store exceedingly well as long as you store them correctly even without refrigeration -- cheese, for instance, would HAVE to store well since it's an aged product! -- and that second, they continue to be available all year round. For instance, my friends with city chickens still get eggs in the winter and while winter milk isn't as rich and creamy it's certainly still available.
Don't get me wrong, I think her point is a good one -- we've got to give up the idea that we can eat pasta margarita in the winter or make pesto in the spring. But the local cuisine that is available to people who live in the north in the winter is by necessity going to run high toward meat (frozen or preserved), root veggies, dried beans, pickled/canned food, cheese, and beer because you cannot grow anything under 3-4 feet of snow. And that's OKAY. You can be a foodie eating that sort of thing 3 months out of the year. People have been doing it for years.
January 25 2009, 23:52:57 UTC 3 years ago
And yes, I agree that Astyk's argument is a bit... questionable at times. It was more that she--like so many others--was going "blah blah blah traditions," which prompted me to start poking around to see whether there were actually any reliable, comprehensive sources for said traditions. So far, nothing comprehensive, but lots of reliable-looking interesting tidbits.
January 26 2009, 00:55:35 UTC 3 years ago
Even some of our supposedly "traditional" ways of eating don't always follow seasonal patterns. When, for example, did green beans become a traditional part of a Thanksgiving feast? I would be very surprised to learn that the Pilgrims were able to grow fresh beans in late November!
January 26 2009, 00:31:16 UTC 3 years ago
January 26 2009, 00:54:13 UTC 3 years ago
But academic leads would be wonderful, especially since, despite having done a whole lot of historical research for my thesis, I'm not a trained historian. Anyway, yeah: If you're querying academics who might know, I'm interested in 18C & 19C, Canada or places with similar climate. Also, for fun, Europe, esp. Britain or Finland.
January 26 2009, 00:33:10 UTC 3 years ago
I find the CSA (which is a local box) keeps me pretty honest as far as the "local, in season" thing is concerned.
January 26 2009, 03:43:41 UTC 3 years ago
It's probably too flippant of an answer, but I'll bet that what the peasants ate was whatever the heck they could get their hands on. ;)
I don't have any book suggestions except for fiction and memoirs! I'm a big fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, and she talks a lot about food. Do you have any local authors who write or have written memoirs/local historical fiction? Obviously, the older the book, the more accurate it'll probably be in terms of what was eaten when.
I just read Feeding Nelson's Navy, which describes the logistics and content of feeding the British navy during Lord Nelson's era (though it covers more than that). Their diets were probably more varied and nutritious than the average citizen's, but it's a fascinating read and gives a bit of a picture of what was available in terms of long-term storage in the 1700s.
I wonder if The History of Food would be of interest to you. It's a huge work, and although I owned it for ages I never cracked it open.
January 26 2009, 14:17:16 UTC 3 years ago
Another resource that is not strictly about food are the Foxfire books and newsletters. See if you can find some at your library, because the essays are fascinating and informative. They're not all "how-to" essays, but they are a great snapshot of rural, traditional life (specifically in Appalachia). It goes over everything from how to build a still to how to hunt rabbits — and necessarily covers a lot of what traditional peoples ate and how. Interesting stuff.
January 26 2009, 22:08:58 UTC 3 years ago
"Germinal" [Emil Zola novel, 1885] has quite a bit on what miners in northern France ate.
when I did a 19th c. dinner, I used Fanny Farmer as a primary source (I have a replica edition. what, doesnt everybody? ;)) while it wasnt peasant food per se, it was intended as middle class housewifery type food.
I haven't read it, but ran across http://www.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-1
A couple of interesting scraps:
http://www.international.inra.fr/pr
There's not much on that page except a summary of the study, which focuses on urban workers as opposed to the rural poor, but it mentions the transition from a soup-based diet to a meat-based diet during that century.
The Wikipedia article on European cuisine quotes Fernand Braudel, _Civilization & Capitalism, 15-18th Centuries, Vol 1: The Structures of Everyday Life_ for its summary of the European diet. Presumably Braudel has his own primary sources.
Oddly enough, at the same time that common people were getting more of a chance to eat meat, the vegetarian movement was picking up steam. The word "vegetarian" in English dates from 1847.
January 31 2009, 00:53:43 UTC 3 years ago