Food History

Sylvie Vabre is Associate Professor in Modern History at Toulouse Jean Jaures University, France. She is President of the International Commission for Research into European Food History. Her PhD, Le sacre du roquefort – l’émergence d’une industrie agroalimentaire fin XVIIIe siècle–1925, was published in 2015. Her researches and teaching are dedicated to consumer history, business history and the history of local food productions. Martin Bruegel is an historian at the Institut de la Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement (INRAE), Centre Maurice-Halbwachs, Paris, France. He wrote Farm, Shop, Landing. The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley (2002) and edited A Cultural History of Food in the Age of Empire (2016). Peter J. Atkins is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Durham, UK. His principal interest over several decades has been food history, with particular reference to perishable foodstuffs. He is the author of Liquid Materialities: a History of Milk, Science and the Law (2010) and A History of Uncertainty: Bovine Tuberculosis in Britain, 1850 to the Present (2016).

1. Introduction: European food history and the senses 1

SYLVIE VABRE, MARTIN BRUEGEL AND PETER J. ATKINS

2. An equation of the senses? A puzzle in food historiography 8

MARTIN BRUEGEL

PART I

Words, symbols and uses: Describing the senses 23

3. The elevation of taste and the senses in the work of Grimod de La Reynière (18th-early 19th century) 25

YUKA SAITO

4. Last but not least: How the cheese board came to crown the French meal (18th-20th century) 39

SYLVIE VABRE

5. A tactile dinner party: The Futurist Cookbook and the multisensory experience of food 51

AGATA STRONCIWILK

PART II

Industrializing the senses 65

6. The industrialization of the senses: British cheese, 1750 to the present 67

PETER J. ATKINS

7. The sense of reform, a reform of the senses? Belgian working-class diets, 1886–1905 79

FLORE GUIOT

8. ‘The machine known as the human being’: Food, the sense of taste and a modernizing Finland 92

RITVA KYLLI

9. Hidden from view: The art of suggestion on canned food labels in the 20th century 104

RITA D’ERRICO

PART III

Nationhood and the senses 119

10. Sausages, pork delicacies and take-away meals: How German butcher immigrants introduced new tastes and new ways of buying food in 19th century industrial Great Britain 121

KARL-HEINZ WÜSTNER

11. Gendering taste in interwar Romania 134

RALUCA PARFENTIE

12. Full shelves of memories: Sensory memory of food and nutrition in the Czech lands before 1989 145

MARTIN FRANC

13. The palette of tastes in late Soviet home cooking 157

MARIA KAPKAN

PART IV

Food senses and globalization 171

14. The construction of planetary taste: Balsamic vinegar of Modena in the age of globalization 173

STEFANO MAGAGNOLI

15. The ‘offensive’ and ‘abominable’ Spanish garlic: American and Spanish empires in their fight for Cuba (circa 1840–1870s) 186

ILARIA BERTI

16. Experiencing cannibalism: Sensory knowledge of cannibalism from 1770 to the end of the 19th century 199

NICOLAS CAMBON