A Peep of History and Lifestyle through Cookbooks - Essay Example

A Peep of History and Lifestyle Through Cookbooks Unlike any other books, cookbooks can be considered as something expectedly personal. It is a peep in the hole for new cultures, traditions, lifestyle and appreciation. Oftentimes, it puts you in a sense of nostalgia, wherein it aids you to remember childhood memories of home cooking. Or sometimes it transports you to new cultures, which takes you to a journey filled with adventure through your palette. It is rather difficult to really decipher the nature and purpose of cookbooks but it can be understood in following simple ways such as; for educational purpose, for leisure, historical and its artistic characteristics. Educational Cookbooks are ought to teach new knowledge such as basic ways of cooking, introduction to spices, ingredients or more advanced knowledge such as bread making or cheese making books. Leisure cookbooks are more so written mainly to entertain people. An example of which is basic recipe book for baking cookies or cocktail mixing. Historical cookbooks are mainly to pass on certain traditions of food preparation. It is also ought to preserve the heritage brought about by cultural evolution which happened in local kitchens. These kinds of cookbooks tell a story. It teaches the passionate cook about how such food came about- the story behind the ingredients, the reason for its conception etc. These kinds of books are very exact. If it is Italian cooking then expect the prominence of cheeses, tomatoes and other herbs. For French, the prominence of wine and butter are expected. And for most Asian dishes, chilli spices and noodles are to be look forward to. Artistic cookbooks bring about new ways of preparing traditional foods so it can be appreciated by more people, or specific types of people. An example is a vegetarian cookbook or a cookbook which targets diabetics. These are the "usual" dishes but meat is sometimes changed to vegetables or tofu, and carbohydrates are often changed to whole wheat and whole grains. Cookbooks are definitely helpful in understanding the way of life of different societies. These books tell a story of survival, celebration, scarcity or bounty or certain places, regions, era, or century. It can also be observed that the diet of different societies sometimes depend on their faith, beliefs, demography or most often than not, climate. It is of course, expected for people who live near the sea to have lots of sea foods in their diets. Food as Nostalgia Some women in the study conducted by Jean Duruz (1999), considered their successful food making practice as derived from natural ability. Most confess early interests in cooking, as they watch their mothers prepare the favorite foods of the family. However, through their narration of experiences, they illustrated how they learned to cook through a layering of knowledge from different influences. The women learned to cook from mothers, mothers-in-law, grandmothers, sisters, servants, aunts, female friends and neighbours, and occasionally fathers, fathers-in-law and husbands. They augmented this knowledge with domestic-science classes in high school and adult-education classes at technical college. Some were self-taught, both before and after marriage, through trial and error and reading cookbooks. According to Jean Duruz (1999), food brings about so much nostalgia in the Australian Society. Duruz describes for cookbooks which evoke 1950s nostalgia in Australia, a nostalgia for times perceived as conflict-free, pre-political, and child-like: "the fifties as a childhood for the nineties." Duruz' nostalgia is comprised of memories, such as the idealized 1950s nuclear family, which never in fact existed. According to Duruz(1999), he recipes and reminiscences are meant to evoke a lost Eden, a time before the fall, with the stress not only on the extended family, but the harmonious community. It is interesting to note that Duruz did not learn to cook as a child, as she recalls that household helpers did most of the cooking in her household. Unlike most young girls during her time, she did not learn cooking through apprenticeship to a mother, aunt or grandmother, but rather got a school education, and remembers childhood as a period of "so much time for playing" . Thus her childhood memories are that of a consumer, unclouded by labor or responsibility, adding, perhaps to the sense of "lost Eden" represented by foods past (Duruz, 1999). As a literate woman, she can celebrate pre-Castro Cuban cuisine and life "like so many writers, artists and musicians" without any conflict over the commodification of practical knowledge. As we will see, this is not the case for our other cookbook writers. History has begun to reclaim the 1950s from its original designation as dull, dreary and conformist, the high point of the suburban dream. Women are frequently deemed to have contributed little to the task of developing citizenship or the newer self required for postwar modernity. This essay focuses on highly educated women who confronted head on the contradictions of the period. Taught by the emerging disciplines of psychology and sociology that their family role was crucial, they were also urged to join the growing workforce, to avoid becoming a 'wasted resource', and to express their real selves. Many crafted a new form of citizenship, one which combined a sense of individuality with the tasks of contributing to the nation through both family and work. Indeed, the skill and knowledge that women gained from manifold sources enabled them to cook for their families. These recipes were learnt by heart, written down and reproduced through generations from mother to daughter (or grandmother to granddaughter). The women in my study made a distinction between everyday cooking, in which they did not need recipes, and specialty cooking, such as cakes, pastries, desserts and biscuits, where recipes were used to ensure correct measurements. Those women who were self-professed 'good cooks' tended to improvise or alter recipes as part of their everyday practice. However, other women adhered to recipe rules strictly. The majority of women eventually cooked their everyday meals from memory - they no longer consulted recipes or cookbooks to ensure they were doing the 'right' thing. Haunted Kitchens: Cooking and Remembering Most often than not, kitchens reflect a heritage of a certain family. The overall "feel" of the kitchen gives you an understanding on how residents live their daily lives. The dominating smell gives you an idea what herbs such family enjoy having. And even with the kitchen tools, you will see what kinds of foods they enjoy preparing. Cooking can be understood as a process. As such, when mastery or familiarity is achieved, the need to follow recipes (either from cookbooks or written down in scrapbooks) is often lessened, but women still rely on them for particular types of recipes and still collect recipes to augment their knowledge. Each woman also had 'special' recipes for main-course meals and cakes and desserts, which were regarded as 'family favourites'. For migrant women, these 'special' recipes were often the traditional foods from their countries of origin. These "special" recipes do not only apply to ingredients, but also to the best tools to be used or pre-cooking mantras and preparations. These things make a certain dish " authentic" probably to one ethnicity, or tradition. Hence, each woman's recipes and cookbooks: textually draw together vestiges of woman's work, intellect, and social interactions: the food she prepares or hopes to prepare daily and ceremonially for her family and the people who comprise her world, or random acquaintances who entered her "world". Going back to the 1950s, women at that time were torn between traditional roles and new pressures to join the working class. Spending money on cookbooks was considered as a luxury in the 1950s. In their stories of 1950s kitchen life, women stated that during their cooking trial-and- error period they believed that they had to be careful with what they cooked because they could not afford to waste either food or money. It was also observed that during this era, many migrant women brought cookbooks with them, and some purchased cookbooks in Australia in their languages of origin - Polish, Croatian, Dutch, Italian and German. These cookbooks sometimes become part of 'rite of passage', the cookbook in most migrant traditional families is passed on to generations once descendants enter marriage. Through cooking and cookbooks, migrant women maintained links with their mothers and their cultural traditions, and some lament that it is a tradition that perhaps will not last because of the influences of their host societies not only to the mindsets of younger generations, but to the palette of family members as well. Romanced By Cook Books Cooks books are usually very attractive. Looking at the sumptuous viands in the picture either make you want to try cooking it, or it makes you crave to eat it. Either way, it was a hypnotic effect on the reader. Bower argues that reading cookbooks has a two-fold effect. First, reading cookbooks allows women to: maintain a self-image that fits some variation of a fairly traditional female role - the nourisher, the giver, the homemaker; and secondly escape the mundane aspects of that 'feminine' role into an elevated or new vision/version of herself as she identifies with the cookbook author, a different role or way of life, a different culture (Anne Bower, 2004). It is possible to see these effects in the women's stories of their cookbook collections. For example, many women use cookbooks as inspiration for their cooking. In addition to collecting cookbooks, many women collected recipes, swapped them with friends, read them in magazines and newspapers, wrote them down, collated them and placed them in scrapbooks. For them, this practice became a 'hobby'. Tami, a Pakistani woman, voices a commonly expressed desire to have a wide variety of recipes, but states that she does not use them. It is my contention that the women like to have a variety of recipes because it increases their food making knowledge; even though they may never use the recipes, the knowledge gained from reading recipe 'methods' or ingredients lists enables women to practice their food making skills in a broader manner. The interweaving of knowledge and practice provides a disjuncture in dualistic knowledge; the women have to know to be able to 'do', yet they have to 'do' in order to know. The women interviewed for this study manifest a type of knowledge that bridges the gap between knowing and doing, forming an interrelationship that is both circular and unified. For these women, food making relies on an embodied practice. Women use cookbooks and recipes as a guide, but they apply their learned skills to make the food. Perhaps, in this way, these women transgress the intended use of recipes and cookbooks in a way that is subversive of cookbook discourse; that is, the recipes are used in a way that infused them with the women's own practice. Hence their food making knowledge is transformative - it indicates a level of competence and confidence that is only gained with practice. Moreover, these women used cookbooks to record and recall cultural traditions. While their cookbooks acted as a source of inspiration, they also provide an insight into the women's daily lives, the types of meals they cooked for their families and the foods they created for celebrations. Importantly, their cookbooks allowed these women to extend and develop their foodmaking knowledge and provided an opportunity for the women to share their knowledge intergenerationally, passing down and recreating their 'thoughtful practice'. For Cooking or Looking However, according to Marion Halligan (2002), sometimes people buy cook books, or watch cooking shows merely to get themselves entertained and get the feel of cooking. Observing the television, cooking shows that have beautiful cooks get a lot of attention such as Nigella's kitchen show. According to Halligan (2002), she is pretty celebrated these days for her beauty and sexiness as she cooks, her erotic greed as she opens that gorgeous red mouth wide and stuffs it full of wicked food, or sensuously licks a utensil, before dropping it down for some unseen fairy to whisk away and wash. The slight frisson: how much of that tumbling black hair is actually falling in the food My first observance of Nigella was as the acerbic restaurant critic of The Spectator, which is very low down in the fame register. She turned up cooking on the telly bearing the sad narrative of her husband's illness and death. She achieved considerable celebrity in this medium; we watched her cooking for friends and small children on family occasions, such as birthday parties, or jolly Christmases. We saw, rather jerkily photographed, her friends. We went shopping with her at local specialty shops. Just like other viewers, Halligan also admired her pantry, much larger than most of our kitchens, which she raided for the goodies she'd put there for that purpose. We wondered how she kept such a small waist with all that gorging, though clearly her bottom was pretty large and her breasts were opulent. Some people didn't give a stuff about the food; they watched the program for its sexy presenter. In conclusion, this writer believes that cookbooks are somewhat reflective of every individual's desire, sense of history and personality. It gives people the opportunity to recall amazing experiences in a very interactive way. It makes people remember people who have made their eating experiences memorable. It makes migrants, not only trace back their roots, but also preserve it, as they interact with new cultures. Overall, the nature of cookbooks is meant to be nostalgic. Because every idea of a new dish, or old, or even totally new, makes you wonder and recall if you have already encountered such flavors in the past, and why. It is very refreshing, at the same time, wonderful to take a peek in old experiences and new more ones to come, through the love of food. References: Duruz, Jean. 1999. Food as nostalgia: eating the fifties and sixties. Australian Historical Studies 113 (2930): 231250. Duruz, Jean. 2004. Haunted kitchens: cooking and remembering. Gastronomica: the Journal of Food and Culture 4(1): 5768. Bower, Anne L. 2004. Romanced by cookbooks. Gastronomica: the Journal of Food and Culture 4(2): 3542 Halligan, Marion. 2002. For cooking or looking The Age, January 8. 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