Entries Tagged 'Food Studies' ↓

Every year the Australian Women’s History Forum runs a themed “Women’s History Month” in March. This year’s theme is music to the ears of a pointy-headed food nerd:

Demeter’s daughters: women’s harvest history
The history of food farming in Australia is much more than the record of agricultural production. When the focus is on women, the story starts with Indigenous food harvesting and includes the pioneering cultivation of familiar crops in unfamiliar soil by colonial women.

It also involves meat producers, dairy and poultry farmers, and market gardeners of Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese and many other nationalities. Demeter, Greek goddess of agriculture, also symbolises women growing food in the Depression and those of the wartime Women’s Land Army; women in wartime ‘victory gardens’ when food was still rationed, those who pioneered viticulture and those whose hand was on the plough of agricultural education and research.

The poster shows a portrait of Lu Moo (‘Granny Lum Loy’) by Sydney artist Karolina Venter. Chinese-born, she arrived in Darwin in 1894 and became a very successful market gardener, so beloved that her funeral in 1980 was “one of the biggest and longest in Darwin’s history” – which given the Territorian’s propensity to party on must have been something to see.

Other featured women include Yvonne Aitken, an agricultural scholar and scientist and the pioneering winemaker Mary Penfold.

There’s a growing list of relevant resources, and a calendar of events searchable by area, and a blog, where they’re seeking community input. They’ve already attracted the interest of the Gooloogong Historical Society who are searching for Women’s Land Army members and their descendants, so if you know someone who dug for victory, they’d love to hear from you.

My only sadness is that they have kept the theme to food production, rather than to other forms of women’s economic activity around food – there’s some very interesting work to be done on the Australian female chefs of the late 1970s and 1980s. (And if anyone’s doing that work, I happen to have a really awesome collection of old food mags and forgotten volumes on the subject …)

So, cooking – it’s not really my thing.

Some people get really into cookery and use seasonal ingredients and make their own gnocchi and everything. I would like to be one of those people. But sadly, I can muster up very little enthusiasm for cooking. But I still cook a little. After all, one must eat!

Since my cookery repertoire is so meagre I often find myself browsing big recipe sites to get spinach ideas and the like.

And I read the comments.

Comments are the scourge of the non-feminist internet. The more general and mainstream the site, the more bigoted and venomous the comments, and usually I avoid reading them unless I’m feeling very masochistic.

But I always read comments on recipe sites because they are 1) informative, and 2) quite low on bigotry (I suppose it is difficult to inject a lot of racist / sexist bile when you’re commenting on something as apolitical as spinach and potato soup).

But recipe comments suffer from their own pollution.

It seems every second or third comment makes reference to the commenter’s husband. Like:

I thought this recipe was okay, but my husband thought it was way too spicy!

Or:

My husband usually hates vegetables, but he thought this was nice. Will make again!

In fact, it seems that maximum husband-approval is the greatest compliment one can pay a recipe:

Wow! 5 stars!!! My husband loved this! He went back for seconds! And thirds! Thanks so much for this!!!

It is incredibly annoying!

It makes me feel like I have teleported into 1950s suburbia (a magical 1950s suburbia, with consumer net access).

It is a reminder of how little things have changed, at least on the domestic front.

I am waiting for the day when I come across a recipe comment along the lines of:

Zomg! My wife loved this. Will make again and again! Thanks!

On that day, I will make my own gnocchi. With a sauce made from seasonal ingredients!

This post is crossposted from Tor’s blog Adrift and Awake. See the comments on the original post here.

The Australian Conservation Foundation has just released its From Paddock to Plate: Rethinking Food and Farming report. Along with lots of recommendations about how we should do food production in rural and peri-urban areas, it also contains a number of recommendations about food production in urban areas. For instance, it talks about food sensitive urban design, which includes how we might design new housing estates, but also, where urban planning calls for consolidation and medium-density housing, it might be useful to factor in community gardens, roof gardens and so on.

But this would surely require a change in the current approach of local councils and planning authorities. For example, a vibrant urban food production system directed at household self-provisioning would require some relaxation of current water restrictions. Here in Melbourne, water restrictions serve as a restriction on water use, rather than a restriction on water consumption, and water use for household provisioning rather than commercial profit is severely restricted.

Continue reading →

Kids these days just aren’t hungry enough. Wedges of fruitcake, ginger beer, fresh butter and eggs, jam sandwiches, sausages – none of these stir the reader the way they used to in the heyday of The Famous Five.

I think one of the successes of Harry Potter is the nostalgic updating of boarding school type food treats.

My children are cooking these holidays. They’ve been told that if they want to eat something, they’re going to have to cook it themselves. I used to cook sweets and puddings and pies and slices. As a child, I made jam and toffee and fudge and ices.

We’ve had a couple of experiments, some choc chip cookies, sorbet and shepherds’ pie and they’re bored. They can buy better and they’re prepared to wait me out.

I believe this trend has been reflected in modern children’s literature. Harry Potter is the only series I’ve read recently that gave me a full feeling in my stomach. Where are the endless dishes of mushrooms and cider from The Hobbit? The picnics and fry-ups from The Wind in the Willows? The tea parties of Alice and Wonderland?

This post originally appeared at andragy.

So my women’s group tries to have one session each term run by one of the members because this is cheap called “capacity building” and helps the government justify giving us money.

I put my hand up to do a “demystifying what is in the Asian supermarket” kind of session, and I need your help, because it’s on next Wednesday and I’ve just remembered. For many years now I have been wandering home with random bags of things from the Asian grocery and I’ve lost track of what might freak out your average whitegirl. I don’ t know it all by any means, but I know where to find out and I’ve quite a few Asian cooking reference books. I’ll be concentrating on Chinese and Vietnamese foods, as they’re the cuisines I know best.

I should be able to get whatever groceries we need, and I’ll take a rice cooker, gas ring and wok. I’ll also set up a table with the reference books. Ideally, I’d like it to be part demonstration, part chatting, part Q&A.

When I think about what would be the most useful things to show someone who was starting to learn about cooking Asian-style food, this is what comes to mind for me:

• why you shouldn’t spend a lot of money on a wok and how to season one properly
• light soy sauce and dark soy sauce, which are very nearly the same shade of black although that’s not the point
• what “hot” means (hint: fucking hot)
• that stir fries are much better if they have one or two ingredients (not counting oils or seasoning)
• bottled sauces that are worth it (eg toban djian, aka broad bean chilli sauce) and those that are not worth anything at all (black bean, plum, lemon, etc, etc, etc)
• how to make aromatic oils to dress veggies, etc, with
• the logistics of cooking a Chinese/Vietnamese dinner

I might pre-cook a red-braised dish, take the rice cooker, and do a veggie stir fry and maybe another dish – perhaps the insanely good steamed chicken from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. Enough for the 15 or so people to have a taste of a few different styles

I’m also wondering what “novel” ingredients it might be most useful to spend some time on – maybe fresh rice noodle sheets, jicama (aka Mexican yam bean, often used as a water chestnut substitute). dried black beans, kang kong (aka water spinach, aka water convolvulus), frozen edamame and ….

I’d be interested to hear any good or bad experiences you’ve had with Asian supermarket shopping, and what you think it would be useful to teach some noobs. If you and I were wandering through the Asian grocery, what foodstuffs would you be asking about? Would you just be so excited to use the word “foodstuffs” that nothing else mattered?

[Disclaimer: I am 5'11" and of frecklishly obvious Irish heritage]

BiliOdyssey is one of those blogs that makes you think “that’s what the internet is for!” A chap called peacay hunts and gathers historical images of interesting and wonderful things all over the interwebs and presents them for our enjoyment and education. It is one of Australia’s most beautiful blogs.

Today’s post is called “The Renaissance Kitchen” and features illustrations (like this one) from the 1570 Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi, a highly influential work by a wildly famous chef.

Go and enjoy the images and links to more medieval and renaissance culinary history, and check out too peacay’s flickr stream. Be careful, you can get lost there for hours.

I belong to a wonderful womens group which does a major project each year. This year we’re working with local fibre artist Ann McMahon, who asked us to bring along to our last session a piece of writing and a container that were meaningful to us.

I took one of my woks (a 12″ flat bottomed one) and this extract from Marion Halligan’s book Eat my Words:

Children like being around adults who are busy with their hands, because they know their minds are available whenever they want them. Mine would sit at the kitchen table drawing or colouring in, or make train tracks down the hall, or build Lego castles, or do their homework, while I made gateaux of pancakes with two different fillings and a sauce, or stuffed frozen orange shells with sorbet, or boned chickens to make galantines, and we were all busy and contented. They made desultory conversation, but didn’t always bother; the companionship was enough. Whereas if I’d sat down to read a book or write a novel they’d have been clamouring to talk to me because they’d have known my mind was somewhere else.

I look back on the days of my complicated culinary activities as a kind of golden age because it was nice practising these skills with my children about me. Happy families, with comfortable aproned mother pottering around in the kitchen, as children’s books these days aren’t supposed to show lest they reinforce stereotypes.

We were supposed to talk about why it was meaningful to us. I cried a little bit, but kept on talking.

Pottering around the kitchen on Wednesday afternoon I heard Joanna Savill talking about restaurant reviewing on Alan Saunders’ By Design. (And so did Rita of Eating Hobart).

Savill is Co-Editor of the The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Food Guideand has actually had dinner with a food blogger. Fancy that! But what does she mean by “a food blogger”? I transcribed the relevant bit of the interview, starting after Alan Saunders asks her if she takes notes at the table: she reacts strongly, saying no despite the fact that “half the world is a food blogger these days and people seem to be all around me taking notes and photographing and doing everything else with their meal. I think that discretion is the better part of valour“.

(Where valour comes into the role description of a restaurant reviewer is not exactly clear, but I’m snarking now.) Savill says that if she’s desperate to remember something precisely she’ll send herself a text or sit hunched in the loo scribbling into her moleskine. The conversation continues:

Alan Saunders – Yeah, well, I know people who do that [take notes at the table]. I take the view that if you and I are having dinner and I take out a notebook, well this could be a business meeting, I could be keeping notes not to do with the food.

Joanna Savill – Look, absolutely. But I can tell you I once went to dinner with a food blogger, you know people who, who, go out to restaurants and photograph it and then write all about it online, put it online, and there’s a huge community of people doing that these days, and he proceeded to photograph everything that moved in the restaurant and to take notes at the table and we had the whole restaurant galvanised. (Alan exhales!) And I was just – I wanted to hide under the table, actually, you really don’t want to stand out, that’s the bottom line.

Phil Lees of The Last Appetite opened his recent post on food blogging as Wunderkammer by saying:

More than occasionally I wonder what is food blogging and how can it continue to differ (and differentiate itself) from other media.

It’s going to be pretty hard for that differentiation to occur in the minds of food mass media professionals, it seems. It seems that they only see two kinds of food blogs – the cheese sandwich variety or sites that review restaurants but don’t need to observe the same kind of strictures that professional journalists do (other than legal ones, of course).

To me the issue is clearly one of differentiation – if it hasn’t happened already, there’s a whole taxonomy of food blogs that will make a nice thesis for someone one day. I wouldn’t mind it being me, but I can’t come up with the $27,500 that the University of Adelaide and Le Cordon Bleu charge for their Masters degree in Gastronomy. Yes, $27,500.

I do read some review-type blogs, and some recipe-type blogs, some cook-the-book blogs, some food-history blogs, some just-because-they’re-local and some smart-people-obsessed-with-food blogs. And about eighty others, from time to time. What keeps me coming back is snappy writing and a clearly considered point of view. There’s not a lot of that about in the broadsheet lifestyle inserts.

As for reviews – I almost never do them here because with two small kids I don’t eat out much. However I can offer some advice from Saturday night’s dinner at Sammy’s Kitchen in Canberra – Do Not Order the Ma Po Tofu. It’s shocking.

You can download or stream the By Design program here. Skip forward to about 43 minutes for this segment (then go back and hear about designing Orang Utan enclosures).