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Italianità in America: A history of the cultural politics and social construction of authentic Italian cuisine in the U.S.
Ken Albala
This paper recounts the changing ways Americans have viewed authentic Italian cuisine in the US through history. The conception of traditional cookery has undergone numerous shifts stretching back to the 18th century, when the Grand Tour, Italian fashions and the image of the "macaroni" in the era of Thomas Jefferson was largely inherited from Britain. 19th century immigration and a significant population largely drawn from Southern Italy introduced a whole new set of foodways toward which Americans were extremely ambivalent. They feared strong aromas and garlic and consciously sought to assimilate immigrant children under the pretext of improving nutrition, introducing mainstream Anglo-Saxon foods in government programs. Despite these efforts Italian cuisine became mainstream in the early 20th century. This was thanks to industrially made pasta, canned tomatoes and other vegetables grown in the US, and of course through pizzerie. Italian cuisine, or an Italian-American version of it, more heavily based on meat and a profusion of ingredients gradually became ubiquitous, especially in restaurants featuring red checked table cloths and raffia covered bottles of chianti in the "dolce vita" era. Gastronomically minded authors soon found a series of very different cuisines among the regions of Italy and in cookbooks of the latter 20th century introduced several “authentic” Italian cuisines based on fresh ingredients and hitherto unknown techniques and cooking equipment. Americans raised on canned spaghettios soon learned how to make fresh pasta, drank espresso and Super Tuscan Reds, discovered dishes like polenta and moved far beyond the spaghetti and meatball version of Italian cookery. These books were targeted to social aspirants for whom cooking became a leisure activity and an expression of class. It took another generation, in the past decade or so, to recover and Italian-American cuisine, abandoning the pretentions of expensive imported cheese, wine and prosciutto and revalorizing the native local Italian-American cuisine which they perceived was in danger of being lost. Authentic in this case was drawn not from elitist products and recipes, but from nonna’s lost recipes cooked from scratch. These shifts reflect not only generational shifts among immigrant populations: the first generation holding on to foodways of their homeland, the second for the most part assimilating and the third desperately trying to hold onto their traditions, but also reflects a dramatically changing attitude toward Italy among all Americans. These various attitudes will be analyzed in terms of larger political and social movements, shifts in the economy and other historical forces including agriculture and patterns of import. How Americans conceive of real Italian food is a product not only of changing culinary fashions but larger socio-economic forces.
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The Impact of Christian Food Prohibitions on the Evolution of Cuisine from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period
Ken Albala
Many cookbooks explore Jewish culinary heritages from Brooklyn to Tashkent; almost no books try to do the same for the world’s Christian food traditions. Why? Food symbolism was and to an extent still is central to Christianity; world Christian communities represent extraordinary ethnic and cultural diversity; the richness of food-centered Christian historical legacies over the past two millennia is almost unimaginable. This panel is meant to fill in a little of the blank space on a huge, unaccountably unexplored map.
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パンケーキの歴史物語 (Pankeki no rekishi monogatari)
Ken Albala and Mitsuhuro Sekine
Round, thin, and made of starchy batter cooked on a flat surface, it is a food that goes by many names: flapjack, crêpe, and okonomiyaki, to name just a few. The pancake is a treasured food the world over, and now Ken Albala unearths the surprisingly rich history of pancakes and their sizzling goodness.
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Chew
Ken Albala
The human proclivity to chew is as instinctively hard wired as sucking and stays with us throughout our lives. We chew not only daily in the act of eating, but as an outlet for pent up anxiety, a displacement for our aggressive urges, or as a way to simply mitigate boredom. People grind their teeth in sleep or chew the insides of their cheeks, but most peoples through history have also found plant materials to satisfy the urge to chew, often with pharmaceutical or breath-freshening properties. The very word masticate derives from the mastic tree, native to Chios, whose resiny-flavored gum the ancient Greeks chewed and still do to this day. American chicle is the origin of the modern form of chewing gum, and lends its name to the Chiclets brand, though most is now made of synthetic ingredients and rubber. Native Americans in what is now Maine and Canada chewed spruce gum, a source of vitamin C, coincidentally, preventing scurvy. Throughout the world we find comparable substances chewed for their mildly stimulant effects. Coca leaves activated with lime (calcium carbonate) prevent altitude sickness and stave off hunger in the Andes. Qat in Somalia and East Africa, a green leaf chewed communally by men and the source of much controversy among these communities, reputedly has similar mind-altering properties. And no one doubts the nicotine buzz one gets from a plug of chewing tobacco or the refreshing taste of betel nuts, popular in South East Asia, not to mention cola nuts in Africa, slivers of which are shared with visitors. The latter carry a good dose of natural caffeine. This paper will explore the activity of chewing from a psychological, sociological and pharmaceutical perspective. Who chews, why and with whom? And what specific social connotations does it carry? When does it become déclassé? And when do corporations capitalize on specific types of gums–think of sugar free gum or nicorette. The focus of this paper will be upon the handful of the plants most commonly chewed throughout the world and their historical uses. It will question why humans have always had the need to chew and why it is in many ways essential to our happiness and well-being, especially between meals. It will be suggested that the modern meal pattern essentially upsets what was in evolutionary terms useful for us though most of our existence as hunters and gatherers–constant munching on leaves, bark and anything we could get our teeth around. It is only in modern civilized contexts that we end up inventing other more or less socially acceptable forms of chewing–though spitting, the logical adjunct of chewing has often been attacked precisely because it is deemed anti-social.
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Food for Healing: Convalescent Cookery in the Early Modern Era
Ken Albala
Despite major theoretical shifts in early modern nutritional theory, from humoralism to chemical and mechanical systems, the form and structure of convalescent cookery remained remarkably constant throughout the era and to a large extent even down to the present. In medical texts, cookbooks and in the popular imagination convalescent food generally mirrored food for infants, being soft and bland, based on dairy and grains, as well as foods considered highly nutritious yet easy to digest like concentrated broths. This article traces the development of ideas about convalescent food and how little they change over time.
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