We're food folk.

(Sorry guys, this is a long post. I promise I’ll make my next few posts extra pithy to make up for it.)

I am immensely grateful for Julia Child. In case you don’t know or have somehow forgotten, she’s the really tall TV chef from the 1970s and 80s, and the author of several renowned cookbooks, like this one:

Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child

I’m grateful for Julia’s recipes, and her spunk and flair, and because she wore pearls in the kitchen. Mostly, though, I’m thankful for what she stands for—for the fact that my experiences of eating and cooking have not been limited to those produced solely by the passing down, from generation to generation, of food folk knowledge through my family.

But more on that later.

If I only knew how to cook using the folk knowledge of my ancestors, I would be eating a lot of boiled potatoes and barley bread. If my mother only knew how to cook the things my grandmother taught her, I would have grown up eating nothing but “salad” (code for lettuce with Thousand Island Dressing), “pizza” (code for cheddar cheese and hamburger baked on bread dough), and a dessert all of my grandmother’s descendants refer to fondly as “Shirley’s Famous Chocolate Texas Sheet Cake.”

When you go back far enough that all my family history is highly suspect, my ancestors were limited in their diet and methods of food preparation by financial means, local availability of food, and availability of knowledge.

A number of my progenitors would have been peasants in medieval England. (I know everyone likes to talk about the royalty they found on their pedigree chart, but let’s get real. Most of us came mostly from toothless swamp people who couldn’t read and never saw a crown in their lives.) They would have prepared nearly all of their own food and grown much of it themselves too. They would have eaten a lot of heavy, brown rye and barley bread—white bread was only for rich people—and pottage made of leeks, beans, and the like. Since the water in villages was often too dirty to drink, they would have had a lot of ale, and when they had meat, it probably would have been pork, mutton, or certain types of fish.

They might have looked like this. Probably not.

My peasant ancestors in medieval England would have been limited to the foods that they could afford (not things like trout or salmon or wheat flour for white bread) and to foods that were grown locally (nothing imported). They also would have been limited by the folk knowledge passed on to them by family or close friends. The women would be the primary chefs, and they would have learned to cook primarily from their mothers. Domestic knowledge had not entered the public sphere of shared intellectual knowledge.

Over time, the emergence of a middle class and a tremendous increase in continental and global trade would have allowed my ancestors to expand the types of foods they consumed. They would have bought more from more places and made unfamiliar foods familiar. They left England for South Africa in 1820 and found new foods there, combining what was locally available with new traditions and methods from the Afrikaans Voortrekkers and native tribes. They would have discovered and made familiar the foods that still taste like home to me, things like guavas for breakfast and rusks soaked in rooibos tea. 

For hundreds of years, cooking was a wide spectrum of folk knowledge, passed down in traditional folk ways—mother to daughter, together in the kitchen, here’s when the bread dough is just sticky enough and not too dry. The cookbook changed that.

Recipe books had been around, in some form, since about 1475, but standardized measurements and strictly quantified recipes had not. Fannie Famer’s The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (published in 1896) took recipes that had called for things like “a piece of butter the size of an egg” or “a teacup full of milk” and rewrote them in terms of tablespoons and teaspoons, measured level and always the same. There’s something charming that’s lost in the departure from those ambiguous measurements, but there’s something gained too—you could learn to cook from a book. Remember Julia Child? This is where she comes in again. While living in France, she learned to cook with French master chefs, and she wrote a cookbook in which she painstakingly quantified and qualified their recipes. She brought French cooking into the homes of American housewives who had never seen the Eiffel Tower.

But take a look at where we are now—you can hardly look at a magazine rack or turn on a television without being bombarded by cooking shows or new recipes. Whenever I’m home, my fifteen-year-old brother and I watch Iron Chef: America. It’s how we bond on Sunday afternoons.  My mom, newly-married, taught herself to cook using The Lion House Cook Book. Now, she loves Ina Garten (the Food Network’s Barefoot Contessa) and Molly Wizenberg (the author of the food blog Orangette). We love to talk about Jeffrey, the Barefoot Contessa’s husband, because he kind of looks like a hobbit.

I have come to realize that my experience with food and with cooking is a combination of folk knowledge and book knowledge. I love South African curry on rice with coconut, carrots, and bananas on top. It is one of my family’s cultural meals, one that has been passed down through generations (though not via my culinarily inept grandmother). I love buttered radishes on baguettes with fleur de sel, thanks to Molly. I love baked eggs for dinner and apricot tarts when the apricots at home are ripe. 

These are my favorite banana pancakes:

I learned to make them from my mother. She learned to make them from the Barefoot Contessa.  

SOURCES

           Beck, Simone, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child. Mastering the Art of French Cooking,. New York: Knopf, 1961.

           Brears, Peter. Cooking and Dining in Medieval England. David Brown Book, 2008

           Farmer, Fannie Merritt. The Original Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896. New York: H. L. Levin Associates; Distributed by Crown, 1973.

           Henisch, Bridget Ann. Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1976