The Culinary Browns is an experimental documentary that traces four generations of the Brown family beginning with Bob Brown, my great-grandfather, a writer of pulp fiction, modern poetry, cookbooks and social commentary. This documentary is not a linear history or purely factual document, but instead, uses personal experience as a means to generate more universal connections to the inherently dysfunctional dynamics of family, the fragmentary quality of memory, and to ultimately remind the viewer that history is relative.

The Culinary Browns is an experimental documentary that traces four generations of the Brown family beginning with Bob Brown, my great-grandfather, a writer of pulp fiction, modern poetry, cookbooks and social commentary. This documentary is not a linear history or purely factual document, but instead, uses personal experience as a means to generate more universal connections to the inherently dysfunctional dynamics of family, the fragmentary quality of memory, and to ultimately remind the viewer that history is relative.

Underpinning most anthropological definitions of culture is the concept of the cultural transmission and diffusion of learned behaviour. Anthropological works generally emphasise the outcomes of this transmission rather than the processes, in part because the mechanisms are either ongoing or practically invisible. Recipes have proved a unique tool for tracking cultural transmission because of their inherent precision and characteristically datable contexts. This study uses recipes to explore the many paths of transmission and diffusion of culinary knowledge. The period under review is from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and the focus is on British culinary traditions up-to and after, their transfer to New Zealand. It was found that culinary knowledge was disseminated around New Zealand through both formal and informal mechanisms. Formal transmission involved teachers, their school cookery classes and published teaching manuals, all of which played a major role in training school children to cook the dishes served at family meals. In contrast, informal publications such as cookery columns in magazines and newspapers were transmitting recipes for more fashionable dishes, especially baking, and these incorporated mechanisms that promoted innovation more than retention of traditional recipes. The significant role of material culture in cookery provided another pathway of transmission through appliance recipe books which translated established recipes into a form that could be made with the new technology, thereby preventing their disappearance from the culinary repertoires of cooks. It was established that community cookbooks, a common means of fund-raising, were a significant means of diffusing culinary information. The cookbooks produced by such efforts demonstrated change over time in their recipe content, especially if published as a series and such publications were tangible repositories of the cookery knowledge within the community. This study examined not only the pathways of culinary transmission but also the contexts in which it occurred. These circumstances were found to be influential in determining eventual acceptance or rejection of cookery knowledge and recipes, and provide valuable insights into processes of culture change.

This dissertation analyzes cookery books and domestic manuals published in Chile and Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when both countries were transformed by the wave of industrialization. These best-selling cookbooks put domesticity on a public display and were, for the first time in Latin American history, published by women. I argue that, along with the feminization of the genre, between the 1890s and 1950s, a rhetorical turn took place: from “Cooking” to “Culinary Art.” Considering this shift as a pivot of the modernization of women’s work, I explore cookbooks as part of a broader cultural context that includes teaching, performances, interviews, and women’s interventions in the media industry and public sphere. In opposition to second-wave feminist constructions of domesticity, these cookery manuals do not propose a liberation of women from the kitchen, but an emancipation of the concept of kitchen itself. I examine how these best-selling books went beyond industry mandates and gender subjection and functioned, in fact, as tools of political, social, and cultural change. In so doing, I consider both the space of the kitchen and the genre of cookery books as complex technological artifacts that reshaped both the culture of modernity as the role of women within larger processes of industrialization and economic development. My dissertation takes up the challenge of comparative work; geographically, interdisciplinarily, and methodologically. This comparative perspective serves as an intellectual platform for discussing the interaction between different fields: feminist theory, the history of technology, food studies, labor history, and literary and cultural studies.

This study explores the visual consumption of food and its meanings through the study of narrative and nostalgia in a selection of five South African cookbooks. The aim of this study is to suggest, through the exploration of various cookbook narratives and the role that nostalgia plays in individual and collective identity formation and maintenance, that food, as symbolic goods, can act as a unifying ideology in the construction of a sense of national identity and nationhood. This is made relevant in a South African context through the analysis of a cross-section of five recent South African cookbooks. These are Shiny happy people (2009) by Neil Roake; Waar vye nog soet is (2009) by Emilia Le Roux and Francois Smuts; Evita’s kossie sikelela (2010) by Evita Bezuidenhout (Pieter-Dirk Uys); Tortoises & tumbleweeds (journey through an African kitchen) (2008) by Lannice Snyman; and South Africa eats (2009) by Phillippa Cheifitz. In order to gain an understanding of cookbooks’ significance in modern culture, it is necessary to understand that cookbooks – as postmodern texts – carry meaning and cultural significance. Through the exploration of cookbooks, as material objects of culture, one is also able to explore non-material items of culture such as the society’s knowledge, beliefs and values. Other key concepts to this study include the global growth of interest in food; the shift from the physical consumption of food to the visual consumption thereof; the roles that consumption, narrative and nostalgia play in constructing and maintaining personal and collective identities; and the role of food as a unifying ideology in the construction of a sense of nationhood. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Visual Arts / unrestricted

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1984 J32 / Master of Science

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1985 F66 / Master of Science

Historiskt sett har fermenteringsmetoder främst använts för livsmedelskonservering, och därmed i överlevnadssyfte. Idag växer intresset för fermentering men utifrån nya intresseområden såsom för det ökade näringsinnehållet och metodernas smakförhöjande egenskaper. Detta arbete handlar om fermenteringsmetoder beskrivna i svenska kokböcker från 1736 till 1920, där recepten kategoriseras genom en kvantitativ innehållsanalys efter typ av fermentering och kokbokens publiceringsår. Av de olika fermenteringsmetoderna har särskilt fokus lagts på mjölksyrning, alkoholjäsning och ättiksberedning. Källmaterialet består av 43 kokböcker från den studerade tidsperioden, och utifrån dessa ges en överskådlig bild av metodernas förekomst. Vidare diskuteras vilka omgivande samhällsförändringar som kan ha bidragit till att metoderna har dokumenterats i dessa böcker. Resultatet av detta arbete talar för en något avtagande frekvens av metoderna mot slutet av 1800-talet. Resultatet visar även på att mjölksyrning och alkoholjäsning var ungefär lika vanligt förekommande, och att ättiksberedning var mer sällsynt. I förlängningen visar resultatet på en möjlig koppling mellan receptens frekvens av förekomst, som avtar mot slutet av den studerade perioden, med undantag för ättiksberedningen som avtog närmare sekelskiftet. Skälen till dess detta kan härledas till samhällsförändringar som industrialisering, renlighetsideal och nykterhetsrörelser. / Historically speaking, methods of fermentation have primarily been used in preservation of food stuffs, and hence for a purpose of survival. Today, the interest in fermentation grows, but within new areas of interest like the increased nutritional value and the methods flavour enhancing properties. This essay focuses on the fermentation methods described in Swedish cookbooks between the year of 1736 to 1920, where the recipes are categorized by a quantitative content analysis after the type of fermentation and the publishing year of the cookbook. Out of the different methods for fermenting food stuff, particular focus has been directed towards fermentation by lactic acid bacteria, production of alcoholic beverages and production of vinegar. The source material consists of 43 cookbooks from the studied period, and from these, the occurrence of the fermentation methods is portrayed, which furthermore is discussed to identify societal changes which could have influenced their presence in these books. The result shows a slight declining occurrence of the methods towards the end of the 19th century, and that fermentation by lactic acid bacteria and alcoholic fermentation were similarly frequent, while the production of vinegar was less included in the cookbooks. Furthermore, the result shows a slight correlation between the occurrence of the studied recipes, which are simultaneously declining with the exception for the method of producing vinegar, which frequency was declining closer to the turn of the century. Possible reasons for this are the societal changes brought by the industrialization, a new ideal of hygiene and sobriety movements.

Community cookbooks operate through a rhetoric of place as ways of thinking about belonging and influencing communal identities. They reveal much about a community, including the sharing of memories and tradition, geographical identification, and representation of socio-cultural hierarchies and habits. For that reason, this paper advances the claim that the discourse and visuality in community cookbooks, specifically the cookbooks 200 Years of Charleston Cooking, Charleston Receipts, and Charleston Receipts Repeats published during the height of a renaissance in Southern literature, influenced the identity of “Southerness” which, taken in conjunction with place, space, and time has resulted in a unification of the changing American South. Using Carolyn Miller’s notions of genre criticism on the basis of genres as social movements, community cookbooks qualify for the genre label of domestic literature in terms of content and rhetorical influence. To prove my claim, the use of images, recipes, and folklore within the pages are analyzed with five a posteriori themes that discuss relations between a sense of place and its foodways. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

<p>What does it mean in Spain to talk about national cuisine? This dissertation examines how three of Spain's most prominent intellectuals of the early twentieth century&mdash;Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos, and Gregorio Marañón&mdash;confronted that question in their writing in cookbooks at a pivotal moment in Spain's history. Pardo Bazán, a feminist writer and novelist, authored two cookbooks, <italic>La cocina española antigua</italic> (1913) and <italic>La cocina española moderna</italic> (1914). Burgos, a teacher, newspaper columnist, and novelist, authored <italic>La cocina moderna</italic> (1906), <italic>¿Quiere usted comer bien?</italic> (1916), and <italic>Nueva cocina práctica</italic> (1925). Marañón, a physician and statesman as well as a writer, penned the prologue to Basque chef and restaurant-owner Nicolasa Pradera's 1933 cookbook <italic>La cocina de Nicolasa</italic>. These authors were active during a period that saw enormous changes in Spain's political structure and demographics, and in social and gender roles, and each of them engaged with the debates about Spain and the modern nation that consumed intellectual thinkers of the time. And yet each of these authors chose to write about cooking and food in a genre intended for the use of middle-class women in their homes.</p><p>Their writing in cookbooks, I posit, offered Pardo Bazán, Burgos, and Marañón the opportunity to address directly the middle-class female readers who stood at the nexus of their anxieties regarding Spain's modernization. These anxieties were generated by shifting social structures as women gained access to education and to paid employment outside of the home, and as a newly mobilizing working class threatened the social order through political and labor organization, as well as with violence and unrest. By teasing out the contradictions in their cookbook prologues, I show how these intellectuals use Spanish cuisine to promote a vision of Spain's modernization that corrects for the instabilities generated by those same modernization processes. </p><p>In Chapter One, I demonstrate how Pardo Bazán uses Spain's <italic>cocina antigua</italic>, catalogued in <italic>La cocina española antigua</italic> (1913), to "write the nation into existence" (Labanyi). By positioning cooking and cuisine in parallel to the dominant masculine nation-building discourses of the period, Pardo Bazán maps a role for her women readers, and for herself as a woman writer, in the task of building a modern Spanish nation. In Chapter Two, I focus on Pardo Bazán's second cookbook, <italic>La cocina española moderna</italic> (1914), and show how she uses Spain's modern cuisine to inculcate her female readers with the middle-class values that she believes will serve as a bulwark against the increasing unrest of the working class. In contrast to Pardo Bazán, who designates a conventional role for middle-class women in return for protection against the working class, Carmen de Burgos argues that there is no contradiction between women's domestic roles and having a public role and an intellectual life. Chapter Three analyzes how she uses a strategy of "double writing" (Zubiaurre) to show the importance of cuisine to the public sphere and to criticize the still extant obstacles to women's public activity. Chapter Four focuses on Gregorio Marañón's construction of Basque chef and restaurateur Nicolasa Pradera in his prologue to her cookbook. Marañón uses the prologue to promote a palatable version of Spain and its modernity to outsiders. Yet his version of Spain's modernity depends on reinscribing figures like Pradera into traditional, anti-modern gender and class roles. </p><p>At a moment in which the international media identify in Spanish cuisine "the new source of Europe's most exciting wine and food" (Lubow 1), this project historicizes the notion of "Spanish cuisine" at the center of Spanish haute cuisine. It also represents a foundational study in food cultural studies in Spain, offering a critical examination of cookbooks as a genre and as crucial texts in the <italic>oeuvres</italic> of Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos, and Gregorio Marañón.</p> / Dissertation