History in the everyday, the importance of community cookbooks - Gillian Polack

I collect cookbooks produced by communities. Sometimes they’re big volumes, stuffed with recipes from every single family that attends a primary school, sometimes the recipes are full of healthy ingredients to reflect the interests of a life-saving organisation. One book is full of recipes from tins and packets. A whole group of books are simply copied from a stock source, with the names of the organisations changed. 

Last year a hundred of my community cookbooks were stolen and this week a friend posted a few replacements as a gift.

This is why I’m writing about them today. The changes in my collection and the emotions behind them – the sorrow of losing so much and the joy of friends remembering me and sending me more – brings the history of cookbooks into the forefront of my mind.

This post is dedicated to those kind friends who are watching out for community cookbooks for me because of last year’s loss. I want to talk about why it matters to me so very much. As well as what I talk about here, I use my collection to build foodways for characters in my fiction, but that’s a different story. It’s just as important: fiction rings out to the reader more clearly when the food is the right food for the place and time and when a character has their own interpretation of it. If the interpretation is sound then a simple cooking scene will resonate with every single reader who has a share in such a foodway. A different story, but a fascinating one.

This type of volume is a by-product of printing. It never has been a major part of the industry, but it’s been around for a while.

The reason for a community to order a cookbook are varied. Some are to raise funds and some are to commemorate a big event and some are ‘because we felt like it.’ My own recipes are in several of the volumes that survived the theft. One of the volumes (Homemade, 2009) raised money for bushfire victims, and another (Scary Food) is part of a horror anthology edited by Cat Sparks. The first is all recipes, dense and rich. Half the copies printed were given to those who lost everything in the 2009 bushfires, which means some of us who contributed gave important family recipes, in the hopes that we might replicate recipes that had been lost in the fire. Scary Food is mostly short stories, with just a sprinkling of dark recipes.

This kind of book, like the seventeenth century chapbook, a form of cultural ephemera. While a few volumes may be treasured for years or may enter collections, most fade. Some of the volumes are foodie treasures and some of them echo the worst food of a time and place, or the idea (when the book is pre-packaged and just the name of the organisation is changed) that there is a shared cuisine in a given place at a given time.

These books are fragments of our foodways. 

If I were making a time capsule, I would include a community cookbook. It would tell the person who opened the time capsule so much about the people who buried it. What recipes were worth including in the book? What group of people does the volume’s creation tell us about and what background do they share? 

What does it tell us about the foodways of the group that published it? If the book is laid out according to courses, as many are, it tells us a lot about the way food was served. How much fat/spice/sugar do recipes have? It tells about eating habits and dietary preferences. There’s a lot of information scrunched between the covers of a community cookbook.

Sometimes I pull out volumes from a single geographical region and arrange them in time order and discover what has happened over time to a given place. Sometimes I pull out the volumes published in a five year period and arrange them geographically. Sometimes I pull out the volumes shared by sports teams and sometimes primary schools. Each time I do this, I learn more about the culture and history that underpin our food. I also learn about people.

Edited and professional cookbooks have a different focus. They share just as much wonderful information, but they share it differently. Even the ones that are published to represent a group or who are from a food writer who is lovingly detailing the family’s past read differently to most community cookbooks. Professionalism changes the context of a cookbook and that book tells us a different story because of it.

Sometimes I think that the community books are like seventeenth century chapbooks. I still love seventeenth century chapbooks and my volumes of reprints are fewer, too, because of that theft, but this isn’t the parallel I’m making today. Nor is the obvious one: that both are printed ephemera. The audience is the interesting bit for me. Chapbooks have a different audience to bigger volumes because they wee cheap and more disposable. They also have a different audience because they were often brought into lives by peddlers and on streets rather than being the stuff of up-market bookshops. The peddler and the community stall at a fete have overlapping social roles.

The other book that has something important in common with the community cookbooks is the handwritten record of family histories. They linked to the other end of the market, during their earlier days, because literacy was not even close to universal when individuals started writing down their family recipes. Household notes, or detailed recipes - some families kept them. They cover some of the same functions as the community cookbook, preserving local foodways.

Although there is overlap in the writing down of foodways, these handwritten collections often don’t reflect quite the same aspects of culture as appear in a community cookbook. An individual writing recipes (Martha Lloyd, for instance, in Jane Austen’s family) makes personal choices about what part of the family’s food experience need preserving. It’s not the same as a “We have two weeks to collet your favourite recipes. Ready, set, go!” 

What they share is that need to define what’s valuable to the family, to the community. Many of the recipes In the bushfire cookbook are nothing like those in some of the community cookbooks lost in the fires. Most of those parts of rural Victoria had very Anglo cuisines in its community books for many years. Recipes for dishes such as scones were consistent across space and even time in that region. Homemade, the bushfire book, has three scone recipes, and none of them are for plain scones. One is for ham and cheese (in pinwheels) and the others are lemonade scones and pumpkin scones. Scones are still a recipe that helps heal, but the type of scone has changed just as the culture of the community has changed over time.

That’s why I love these cookbooks so very much. I can read the foodways over time and those foodways are magic.

Denying the doldrums through history, food, and favourite cookbooks - by Gillian Polack

I’m having a bad day. Not a day when big things go wrong and the world is a walking disaster. Just one of the those days that don’t feel quite right. 

Normally, to fix bad days, I cook. I can’t do that today, because I’ve had a lot of bad days recently, and my refrigerator is full. If anyone wants mango pasta with berry sauce, or homemade bread or a number of other delectable foodstuffs, I’m your person. However, I still have a way out of the badness of the day. You’re going to help me: I’m going to introduce you two a couple of historical (food-related) books. It would cheer me up even more if we talked about historical food in the comments!

Nicholas Stavroulakis’ The Cookbook of the Jews of Greece is one of the best cookbooks I own. So many amazing recipes. So much history. What interests me today is the history, for the recipes are among those I cooked last week.

The Jews of Greece have a complex and fascinating past. Thre is not one simple Jewish culture or group in Greece, but several, so they don’t have just one cuisine. Stravroulakis gives us recipes from Jews who come from the Greece of Classical times, and from later Sephardi arrivals. Just the two. The Sephardi dishes aren’t the same (although there are overlaps) as Sephardi dishes from elsewhere. And the Romaniot (the ancient Jews of Greec) are purely Greek in their cooking, but Jewish. Some of the names of recipes are in Ladino (a cousin of Spanish) and others are in in Greek. And they’re all related to the Jewish dishes I have from my very different set of backgrounds. 

Every now and again I open the book at random and cook from it, because cooking from it gives me more of the history and reminds me of the people. Each dish contains history. 

I was going to talk about one or two recipes with you, but they’re all so lovely. I think I shall make this the type of food I eat for Passover this year. I have no Greek ancestry, but I’m an 1/8 Sephardi, so that will do. Either way, I shall celebrate one of the finest cuisines I’ve encountered.

Passover is an eight day festival that has very specific cooking. No observant Jews eat leavening, Askenazis don’t eat some legumes. It can be complicated. Just for today (for Passover is over a week away) I shall skip the complications and head straight for the special recipes for the festival itself. My family has a chicken soup, and something we call “matzah brie” (its name doesn’t rhyme with the name of the cheese) and we eat a lot of pickles. This is very much the Australian version of Eastern and Central European Jewish food.

This year I shall be adding haminados (an egg dish) to that, along with a chicken soup and bourekia, both made without leavening. 

This cookbook also gives some of the history of the festival. Stravroulakis talks about the picnic that Greek Jews have on the last day of the festival, for instance, and the ovens some localities had that were specifically used for the unleavened bread we eat throughout the eight days. 

History and food are so tightly linked that it’s impossible to separate them. The world likes to assume that Jewish history is simple and that Jews are all the same. Our food reminds us that the world is wrong. We eat our favourite foods to keep our identities straight. We’ve done this for a very long time, so it helps keep our history straight, too. This is one of the critical reasons why food and history are so tightly linked. It’s also a reason why concentration camp victims sometime wrote cookbooks while being starved. We can retain joy in our food-culture even when there is no joy left in the world.

This is my theory, anyhow. Stravroulakis supports my theory (without knowing it) by giving five recipes for charoset. Charoest is a symbolic dish – it’s to remind Jews of the mortar used when we were forced to build for others in Ancient Egypt. It’s the history and the food tightly bound

Add different recipes for different regions and groups within the region and even families, and it’s possible to explain how Jewish cultural integrity works, historically, just by eating. The Greek charoseth recipes have dates and raisins and currants. My family’s recipe has almonds and apple and cinnamon. All our recipes have wine.

The other cookbook is the polar opposite in history terms. It’s someone saying “Look at me!” Not “We shall remember who we are and celebrate survival” but “I am important enough to write my own cookbook.”

I don’t use this volume very often, but I look at it a lot. It reminds me that some people are shiny and get a lot of attention in their time, but are forgotten very soon after. In this case, Mrs Mary Eales is remembered only through her cookbook. 

Eales claims in her book that she was the confectioner to Queen Anne. Shiny. Someone who pushed her own importance during her lifetime and was probably given great respect for it, but whose star waned and who is now largely forgotten. This is important to me now because of the number of people who push and say “Look how important I am.”

We can judge Eales by her recipes and her cuisine. We no longer get the glamour. Some historical figures retain glamour – Richard I, for instance, or Madame de Pompadour. In everyday life, these aren’t the people we would think are shiny if we were around them. They wouldn’t move in our circles, or even at the edge of our circles. We’d focus on those closer to home and talk about how special they are. Some of them would genuinely be special and some of them would be hollow with only the shine making them worthy of attention. 

The fact that Eales wrote down her recipes and that someone published them after her death means that she was one of these shiny people. Not so many people published in the early eighteenth century, so this small cookbook says a lot about how she was seen. It enabled her to continue to be seen, too, for the book was published and republished, and republished again. Mrs Mary Eales was very shiny for a while. This is certain. Her shine faded later in the century and her book went out of print. 

The book is a careful listing of the types of sweets one can make with a set range of ingredients. The recipes are mostly not very original. They’re very much of their time, which is the early eighteenth century. She wasn’t testing herself by creating the limited range: those were the ingredients available just then. 

Those ingredients reflect the trade routes and the local farms. They show us a lot about the society Mrs Eales lived in. They also show us a careful woman who didn’t just buy ingredients and cook with them. She thought about preservation and making sure there was food across the null seasons. Angelica was dried, green apricots were preserved, cherries were turned into jam, currants were transformed into clear-cakes. 

Mrs Eales gives a complete guide for making sure that the fruit and even some of the nuts and vegetables of one season could be available for cooking all year round. Then she gives the recipes using both fresh and preserved fruit.

It’s very much the food of the south of England. So much cream! Clouted Cream and Spanish Butter and “all sorts of Fruit-Cream” and, for the first time in any English language cookbook, ice cream.

It’s a household manual as much as a cookbook, but it’s at the luxury end. How to make the food that enriches the day and widens the waistline and makes many people much happier. Given how even writing about it makes me happier, I’d say that the woman who carefully worked all this out and made all these recipes (which I have tested for deliciousness, but which I don’t make any more because of the sheer abundance of cream and because some of the ingredients are not easy to find or even safe) is a woman of substance. Not just shiny. 

These recipes make history sexier. So do those of the Jews of Greece. They do so, however, in entirely different ways.

Discovering what characters eat - Gillian Polack

Food history is important to me. When I wrote The Time of the Ghosts, I made sure that every single character’s cooking and eating habits reflected their lives. You can deduce who has lived where and what they’ve done by what they cook and what they eat. You can also deduce those for whom food is not terribly important. In fact, if you watch the food, you can unravel characters’ secrets.

This means that when Elizabeth Chadwick wrote her History Girls’ post on medieval food, it brought me to my next novel and made me think “What did I do with the food in it?” This last month or so I’ve been working on my non-fiction, so I had to actually go back into the world of my novel and reconstitute my thoughts about food. Since a significant part of the food in The Wizardry of Women's Stuff (which will be out in a couple of months) is based on my family’s foodways from the nineteenth century until the 1980s (when my cooking and eating started to diverge drastically from family tradition) this little exploration also took me into my family’s past.

What I discovered was that London Jewish cooking was different in the early part of the century to the later. The food early on was partway between traditional Sephardi and very London. There were lots of flavours from the Mediterranean and North Africa and the Netherlands – a legacy of where Sephardi Jews fled to after they were expelled from Spain in 1492. My family brought those flavours to Australia in its cuisine, which shows where that side of the family comes from. We have recipes for popular foods (stuffed monkeys, Madeira cake, seed cake) but also for scones and raisin wine. What was lost in my family’s transition to the colonies were the Sephardi festive foodstuffs, the ones that appear in the very first Jewish English-language published cookery book. Subtract those recipes from the book and you have my grandmother’s personal cookbook. I don’t just know this from a general guess: I actually made a table of the recipes from each book and compared them and tested critical elements (and cool recipes) from each. 

This says a lot about nineteenth century Australian Jews. They came from many places, and, for my novel, I had to be careful to develop a tradition that belonged to one family. I didn’t want a generic Jewish culture in my novel. I’ve been doing some reading of other novels that contain Jewish characters recently, and all too often, authors decide that a generic Jewish culture is good enough – that takes individual lives out of the story, which makes the story so much less interesting for readers. So, no generic. I needed something as precise as my family’s food tradition.

I worked out when the family came to Australia (just before the Goldrush) and where they came from (Home Counties) and what their background was (educated and innovative, but with some very interesting hidden heritage). This drew me inexorably to Mrs Montefiore’s cookbook as a basis for the tradition. The book was known in Australia around that period, so that was easy. 

How do we know it was known in Australia? The very first published Australian cookbook plagiarises it. There’s a copy online at the National Library of Australia if you want to check this out!  I discovered the plagiarism when I was trying to find out if my ancestors had access to chorissa (kosher chorizo) in Melbourne (I was trying to find out why my family lost and gained different dishes) and was torn between horror and amusement. Abbott (the author) felt there was a need for “Hebrew” recipes in his book and he lifted straight from Montefiore's The Jewish Manual, down to the footnote on where to buy chorissa in London.

Plate from Abbott's book courtesy National Library of Australia

I had the book, I had proof it was known in Australia, and, thanks to my grandmother's enthusiasm for writing everything down, I even knew how the cuisine was changed to fit Victorian surroundings. Victorian in both senses, for it was during the later Victorian period that items like chorissa were dropped and that meat and three vegetable became the staple dinner. Some London region style puddings replaced the dishes that disappeared. Apart from dishes where the ingredients were unobtainable (why I was checking chorissa) the main dishes to be replaced were mostly sweet dishes of various varieties – what were called in my childhood ‘sweets’ and ‘pudding’.

That was almost all of the work done. I just had to add my characters’ lives and their personal tastes, and I had a cuisine! What’s more, I had both a historical cuisine that I could include as family history and a current one that one of my characters could burn with aplomb. 

The work for The Wizardry of Women’s Stuff was a lot easier than the work for The Time of the Ghosts. I only needed the one cuisine, for one thing. I developed three major ones for The Time of the Ghosts and bits of others and some of the dishes have fascinating histories. Some of those histories are linked to the plot, however, so I can’t tell you them without giving spoilers. If you’ve read the book and you find me somewhere, ask me and I’ll tell you all the secrets.

It strikes me that one day my readers might want the cookbook for my novels. It would contain a lot of very good food! In the meantime, I shall continue to cook that food. 

Every time I create a cuisine for a character, I get to eat wonderfully. Right now I’m testing seventeenth century food for the St Ives novel I'm writing this year. Seventeenth century English food was not one of the great cuisines in world history, but it's fascinating nonetheless. If anyone wants to learn my processes up close, I’m always happy to share the testing. It helps to know what other people think of recipes.

Foodways, Fiction and the Inquisition - Gillian Polack

One of my favourite things when I read historical novels is reading about the food. I love it when writers get the food wrong, for I can call in my historian self and mentally shout “You cook the honey inside not drizzle it on top if you’re going to eat it with your fingers” or “How can they be eating potatoes in twelfth century England?” I like it even better when writers understand what researching food and writing about it well does to a novel. I mentally create cookbooks and recipes and have been known to check my sources and see if a dish really tastes the way the writer claims. I am a food tragic. 

Because food history is one of my specialisations, I mostly know what I’m doing. This means that I am continually learning and thinking and querying and seldom taking my knowledge for granted. it also means I actively seek out models for my work. Food history is an amazing place, for it’s changing and growing and developing. Food in novels can be equally amazing. Another day I’ll talk about the fiction side of it. Today, I have other plans.

My new novel is called The Time of the Ghosts. It’s a contemporary novel, but food history creeps in everywhere. This novel began as a series of dinner party menus that reflected the food history of the characters doing the cooking. I built up four menus for each character. Two of them were Anglo-Australian, but the characters (Mabel and Ann) are fifteen years apart in age. Mabel cooks the older Australian foodstuffs: very English, very robust. Ann is a more modern cook and is the sort of woman who likes food magazines. The third character, Lil, comes from a quite different background, and her menus had to reflect that. I had to develop a set of research tools that would enable me to create what she cooked.

My novel is released today, which is entirely fortuitous, for my publisher decided on the release date, not me. I want to celebrate,  in my best historian-foodie way: I’m going to introduce you to one of the best pieces of forensic food history I know. This book gave me my method for developing Lil's foodways, on a platter.

It's called A Drizzle of Honey, and it's by David Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson. This is the book that made me think “We understand these people because of this work on their food. I want my readers to know my characters from the same direction.” This is the book that spawned my fictional dinner parties as well as giving me a method of handling the more complicated aspects of those dinners. In a way, my novel is a tribute to the men and women introduced by Davidson and Gitlitz. Some of these people were killed because of how the Inquisition interpreted their foodways.

In 1492, the Jews of Spain were given three choices: convert, flee, or die. Many of them converted to Christianity. Converting to Christianity required a profession of faith. I presume conversos were given religious guidance, but they were (as far as I know) not given detailed cultural guidance. They were expected to be fully Christian forthwith. Despite this expectation, they were given a second-class status in Spain. Those who had once been Jews or whose families had been were considered to be of bad lineage. (When I was studying Old French insults, ‘you come of bad lineage’ was an appalling thing to say to someone – this is a serious accusation. )

Then insult was added to injury, and more injury was added to that. Conversion was not sufficient. The Inquisition started looking into the lifestyles of those who had once been Jewish. 

The Inquisition was worried about heretics. It was specifically set up to worry about heretics and to persuade them to return to the Faith. It was 'merely' doing its job. Christians who lapsed back into Judaism were considered heretics. The punishment for heretics relapsing was death. The question over the centuries has been whether the Inquisition was merely doing its job, or whether it was doing more than that; whether it was seeking repentance, seeking punishment, or persecuting. The evidence has come down on the side of persecution. Food helps explain this.

In the early days of the Inquisition the Inquisition was more concerned about form of belief and focussed on the Cathars. The questions devised checked profession of faith and the like. 

The Inquisition that sought to get rid of hidden Jews was different. It wasn’t consistently different: Jews were not universally persecuted. But because Judaism was seen (is still seen) as cultural as well as a religion, Inquisitors and their staff often inquired into daily living habits. If someone had a bath before Friday dinner, they might be Jewish. If a woman met with other women on a Saturday afternoon and they ate salad together, they might be Jewish. 

Sevilla. Picture by Gillian Polack

The Inquisition demanded (as far as I can tell) that their religion where a profession of faith was sufficient to join had also to encompass every element of life. Without being taught the cultural norms (when does one cross oneself, for instance? What does a fast day mean?) families of the converted were expected to conform to them, completely. They were expected to eat meat after funerals, instead of the vegetables and legumes that they were used to. They couldn’t sprinkle cheese on a vegetable dish on a fast day, even if they had no idea that this particular saint’s day was a fast day or that cheese was forbidden. 

Christian culture was complex and required learning. Not only was their lack of teaching not taken into account, conversos were expected to sacrifice much of their daily lives to demonstrate that they were not, in their hearts, still Jewish. This was despite the fact that society regarded them as never being quite fully Christianised. They were discriminated against in employment, in lifestyle, in religion. 

No matter what these people did, it would probably not have been enough. Judaism was seen as a contaminant and culture left over was potentially a sign that the person was a heretic. Burning at the stake was the ultimate sanction, but there were many punishments and daily trials that were lesser and that pushed down into family life and hurt people.

It’s very depressing. 

Society participated in identifying hidden Jews. Neighbour informed on neighbour. Maids said of their employers “They bake eggs in the ashes of a fire.” It led to a society that was persecutorial in the worst possible way. People were killed for their eating habits, their washing habits, for doing things the way their families had. 

The Church was demanding, in effect, that even the way one wore clothes had to be not-Jewish, and obviously not-Jewish. Daily life in a region dominated by this kind of thinking would have been bad for everyone. Is this a Jewish salad? Are you lighting candles secretly on holy days? Are you certain that when you took Mass you swallowed the wafer?

Out of bad things, historians create understanding. David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson used the Inquisition records to find out what food Jews ate before the enforced cultural/religious shift. Without their work in A Drizzle of Honey, I would never have known about salad on Saturday afternoons. I would be missing my favourite doughnut recipe. And I wouldn’t know anything about the men and women who cooked and ate this food.

A Drizzle of Honey doesn’t just recreate foodways and reconstruct possible recipes from the Inquisition record. It gives us back the lives of those lost people. It tells us the methods used to reconstruct and the author give a bunch of information about the cultural contexts, so that we, as readers, can make our own decisions about whether a particular argument holds true and whether a particular recipe is a sensible reconstruction. 

It gave me a process I could use for my own fiction. I followed their research path for the foodways of my characters. It gave me a lot more understanding of my characters’ lives and their families, for food is essential to these things. I made one of my characters Jewish, to remind myself of this path. And this Chanukah, I’ll make one of those recipes for fried pastries,in memory of Jews whose foodways brought them to the attention of the Inquisition.