Updated: Food in Crisis – Late Victorian, Turn of the Century, WWI, and WWII British and American Working- and Middle-Class Food, Viewed through Contemporary Cookbooks and Food Articles, Personal Accounts, and Autobiographical Fiction

Secondary Works

1. 1. Bentley, Amy. A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age. A Cultural History of Food, vol 6. Gen eds. Fabio Parsecoli and Peter Scholliers. Bloomsbury, 2016.
   2. Bruegel, Martin. A Cultural History of Food in the Age of Empire. A Cultural History of Food, vol 5. Gen eds. Fabio Parasecoli and Peter Scholliers. Bloomsbury, 2016.
   3. Counihan, Carole, and Penny Van Esterik, eds. Food and Culture: A Reader. Routledge, 2013. 3^rd Print.
   4. Freedgood, Elaine. “Introduction: Reading Things.” The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning about the Victorian Novel. The University of Chicago Press, 2006.
   5. Grigson, Jane. Food with the Famous. Hollen Street Press, 1979.
   6. Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. Collins, 1986.
   7. David, Elizabeth. Spices, Salts, and Aromatics in the English Kitchen.
   8. Flandrin, Jean-Louis, Massimo Montanari, and Albert Sonnenfeld. Food: A Culinary History. Columbia University Press, 2013. Web. 

Academic Journal

1. Food, Culture, & Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research. Published quarterly. Routledge. Run by The Association for the Study of Food and Society.

Primary Sources

1. “Artificial Milk.” The Food Journal, v. 3. 1873. J.M. Johnson & Sons. 23-25.
2. Beeton, Mrs. (Isabella Mary). Beeton’s Book of Household Management. 1861. Oxford University Press, 2000.
3. “Domestic Hygeine, No. 3: Drains.” The Food Journal, v. 3. 1873. J.M. Johnson & Sons. 10-12.
4. Eating for Victory: Healthy Home Front Cooking on War Rations. Foreword by Jill Norman. 2007.
5. John Burnett, ed. The Annals of Labour: Autobiographies of British working-class people 1820-1920. Indiana University Press, 1974. Notable sections: Gabriel Tschumi, chef, p. 193-202, and Lilian Westall and Lavinia Swainbank, house-maids, p. 214-226.
6. Lynch, Reah Jeannette. The Win-the-War Cookery Book. St. Louis County Unit, 1918.
7. Powell, Margaret. Below Stairs. St. Martin’s Press, 1968.
8. Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Harper Collins, 1947.
9. Wescott, Alice M. “Pure Food Laws.” The American Journal of Nursing. 13.4. 1913. 274-277.

Keywords and Key Terms

1. “Food culture/society”
2. “_____ British Cookbooks” (insert Victorian, Edwardian, turn of the century, WWI, 1940s/WWII)
3. “Food history”
4. “Gastronomy”
5. “late nineteenth and early twentieth century British food”
6. “Cuisine biography, food accounts”

Description:

I compiled this list based on: two syllabi provided by my aunt, Professor Alison Anrather at Wagner College, who teaches classes on food history and society; stumbling upon books in the food studies section of the library; typing my keywords into Jumpstart; and a conversation with Prof. Su. Because I am not yet sure what portion of the world or segment of history I want to focus on in my thesis – though I am leaning towards Western Europe and perhaps focusing on nineteenth century English food consumption – I intentionally kept my list over-arching and broad. Food: A Culinary History, Food and Culture: A Reader, and A Cultural History of Food will act as sturdy frameworks to contextualize the gradually narrowing scope of my research. Spices, Salts, and Aromatics in the English Kitchen and Food with the Famous will offer more detailed explorations of English-oriented food research and literary traditions of food writing.

Many questions currently frame my inquiry, some academic (in an effort to gear my food hobby towards a researchable topic), and some originating from pure intellectual curiosity. Why has food become the central focus of societies, and why would I argue that it has? What historical events – wars, famines – or traditions signify that cultures operate around the production of food and the social aspect of eating it? What were the food “norms” in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Early Modern Period, and the past two hundred years, and how do all those varying approaches to or treatments of food illuminate the state of a culture’s economy, commerce, or government? In summary, how does history support the notion that food is a cultural signifier? I realize the scope of history that I am exploring is extremely wide but I am excited to investigate my questions and hopefully emerge with a more detailed, exclusionary (in that it will provide specificity, not a limited perspective) focus for my thesis.

Update:

I am now focusing on mostly British (and some American) food consumption in the late Victorian, Turn of the Century, WWI, and WWII eras. My guiding questions are: How do cookbooks reflect morphing American and British cultural attitudes toward food, as affected by political or economic challenges, national crises, or technological advancements such as the industrial revolution? How does a close reading of these cookbooks expose era-specific anxieties relating to food and resources? I want to examine food as affected by major infrastructural changes, for instance the industrial revolution, WWI, and WWII. Those three moments in history saw a transformation in the way citizens were forced to view food consumption. Though I wish to mainly focus on Britain, because they experienced more dire shortages than America during the world wars and because they are the makers of the Victorian era, I have chosen one American cookbook and novel for lack of British examples.

I have selected two volumes from the Cultural History collection that explore adaptations in nineteenth and twentieth century food attitudes. I added the Freedgood article because Prof. Kersh suggested it to me as an ideology to apply to food in the literature and nonfiction works I am examining; the article focuses on using objects in novels as evidence of cultural anxieties. Shapiro’s book applies directly to my interest in domesticity and home cooking during the Turn of the Century.

Many of the revisions I made to my reading list resulted from wading through primary texts and allowing them to inform the trajectory of my research. I discovered that there were more WWI cookbooks than I could ever study in a thesis, and by exposing myself to 1930s and 1950s materials along with my chosen time periods, I learned that the 1930s and 1950s did not interest me. I am more compelled by infrastructural crises expressed in the home kitchen (i.e. alterations made during the industrial revolution, sanitation and poverty challenges at the Turn of the Century, food shortages during WWI and WWII). The Food Journal provides context for Victorian anxieties over food being discussed in the 1870s, and most of its articles focus on production and sanitation concerns (hence “Artificial Milk” and “Domestic Hygeine No. 3: Drains”). Beeton’s book provides a Victorian example of domestic cooking advice and has been abridged by Oxford University Press, which confers academic value on it – it is not an obscure cookbook existing on the peripheries of the internet, but rather a text already marketed as scholarly. Burnett’s anthology of Turn of the Century autobiographies provides accounts of domestic servants who, though they worked for upper class employers, performed the work and earned the wages of working-class citizens, so their perspectives reflect the home kitchen. The Win-the-War Cookery Book appears to have been printed both in Britain and America, but I can only locate the full American text, so I am using that. I have been unable to find a complete WWII British cookbook and can only locate either anthologized recipe clippings or modernized recipe books marketing themselves as “healthy” rationing books. (There is disturbing misappropriation on the internet of WWII rationing recipes being marketed as weight-loss regimens. Considering that British WWII rationing resulted in serious malnutrition and starvation, I think this appreciation for the scant diet these recipes create is misguided.) I may have to use these clippings as primary sources for WWII. Margaret Powell’s autobiography records her years as a domestic servant from the 1910s-1930s, and Smith’s novel chronicles a working-class Irish immigrant family living in Brooklyn at the Turn of the Century. I selected Smith’s semi-autobiographical novel because much of the family’s poverty is signaled through food consumption and waste and therefore acts as a literary example of my subject.