Journal articles on the topic 'Cookery (Bacon)'

Bacon with a culture of lactic acid-forming bacteria, Pediococcus acidilactici, plus 0.7% sucrose and 40 or 80 mg sodium nitrite/kg (Wisconsin Process), and control bacon with 120 mg sodium nitrite/kg but no lactic acid bacteria and sucrose, were produced at three commercial bacon plants under production conditions. The bacon was stored under refrigeration for 5 to 8 wk, then subjected to sensory analyses by an experienced sensory panel. Quantitative descriptive visual analysis was performed on uncooked as well as cooked samples, and the cooked samples were served for quantitative descriptive sensory analysis. Results indicated that the test bacon with reduced amounts of sodium nitrite was as acceptable as the control bacon with no sugar and lactics, with the 80 mg/kg nitrite-bacon being the most preferred of all. These results and the results of botulinal challenge and nitrosamine tests indicate that the test process can be a satisfactory alternative to processing bacon by the conventional procedure with 120 mg sodium nitrite/kg.

With the knowledge that retail pork products may be contaminated with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the risk of consumers contracting a MRSA infection or foodborne illness from processed meats, especially bacon, is uncertain. Therefore, a study was designed to investigate the survival of MRSA during heat treatment of slab bacon at a commercial process and during cooking of sliced bacon at the consumer level. Fresh pork bellies were injected with a curing solution, inoculated, and heat treated to an internal temperature of 52°C. Three commercial brands of sliced bacon with similar “sell by” dates and fat-to-lean ratios were also inoculated and cooked at a temperature of 177°C for 0, 2, and 5 min on each side. Heat-treated slab bacon showed a log reduction of 1.89, which was significant (P < 0.05) compared with an uncooked inoculated control. Cooked sliced bacon had a reduction of viable MRSA cells of >6.5 log CFU/cm2, and there was not a significant brand interaction (P > 0.05).

ABSTRACT Background Raw meat contains all indispensable amino acids (IAAs), but before human consumption, meat usually undergoes some degree of processing. Processing affects the 3-dimensional structure of proteins, which may affect amino acid (AA) digestibility and, therefore, overall protein quality. Objectives The experiment aimed at determining digestible indispensable amino acid scores (DIAAS) for pork products, and to test the hypothesis that processing increases DIAAS. Methods Ten ileal cannulated gilts (body weight: 26.63 ± 1.62 kg) were randomly allotted to a 10 × 10 Latin square design with ten 7-d periods. Ileal digesta were collected for 9 h on days 6 and 7 of each period. Nine diets contained a single pork product (i.e., raw belly, smoked bacon, smoked-cooked bacon, non-cured ham, alternatively cured ham, conventionally cured ham, and loins heated to 63°C, 68°C, or 72°C) as the sole source of AAs. A nitrogen-free diet was formulated to determine basal endogenous losses of AAs, which enabled calculation of standardized ileal digestibility (SID) of AAs. DIAAS were subsequently calculated according to the FAO. Results All pork products had DIAAS >100 (as-is basis). Loin heated to 63°C had the greatest (P < 0.05) DIAAS for children 6 mo to 3 y and smoked-cooked bacon had the greatest (P < 0.05) DIAAS for children older than 3 y, adolescents, and adults. Raw belly, smoked bacon, and loins heated to 68°C and 72°C had a reduced (P < 0.05) DIAAS for both reference patterns compared with other proteins. Alternatively cured ham had greater (P < 0.05) DIAAS when compared with non-cured ham and conventionally cured ham. Conclusions Bacon, ham, and loin are excellent proteins with DIAAS >100, and processing may sometimes, but not always, increase DIAAS.

Abstract A ready-made dry medium method for aerobic count, the Medi·Ca AC method, was compared to the AOAC Official Method 966.23, Microbiological Methods, for seven different heat-processed meat matrixes: cooked roast beef, Chinese barbecued pork (barbecued pork seasoned with honey-based sauce), bacon, cooked ham, frankfurter (made from beef and pork), and boiled and cooked pork sausage. The 95% confidence interval for the mean difference between the two methods at each contamination level for each matrix fell within the range of −0.50 to 0.50, and no statistical difference was observed at all three contamination levels for five matrixes. These results demonstrate that the Medi·Ca AC method is a reasonable alternative to the AOAC 966.23 method for cooked meat products.

It is unclear how rapidly meat products, such as bacon, that have been heat treated but not fully cooked should be cooled to prevent the outgrowth of spore-forming bacterial pathogens and limit the growth of vegetative cells. Clostridium perfringens spores and vegetative cells and Staphylococcus aureus cells were inoculated into ground cured pork bellies with and without 1.25% liquid smoke. Bellies were subjected to the thermal profiles of industrial smoking to 48.9°C (120°F) and normal cooling of bacon (3 h) as well as a cooling phase of 15 h until the meat reached 7.2°C (45°F). A laboratory-scale bacon smoking and cooling operation was also performed. Under normal smoking and cooling thermal conditions, growth of C. perfringens in ground pork bellies was <1 log regardless of smoke. Increase of S. aureus was 2.38 log CFU/g but only 0.68 log CFU/g with smoke. When cooling spanned 15 h, both C. perfringens and S. aureus grew by a total of about 4 log. The addition of liquid smoke inhibited C. perfringens, but S. aureus still achieved a 3.97-log increase. Staphylococcal enterotoxins were detected in five of six samples cooled for 15 h without smoke but in none of the six samples of smoked bellies. In laboratory-scale smoking of whole belly pieces, initial C. perfringens populations of 2.23 ± 0.25 log CFU/g were reduced during smoking to 0.99 ± 0.50 log CFU/g and were 0.65 ± 0.21 log CFU/g after 15 h of cooling. Populations of S. aureus were reduced from 2.00 ± 0.74 to a final concentration of 0.74 ± 0.53 log CFU/g after cooling. Contrary to findings in the ground pork belly system, the 15-h cooling of whole belly pieces did not permit growth of either pathogen. This study demonstrates that if smoked bacon is cooled from 48.9 to 7.2°C (120 to 45°F) within 15 h, a food safety hazard from either C. perfringens or S. aureus is not likely to occur.

Abstract Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that processing of meat proteins increases the Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score (DIAAS). In Exp. 1, 10 pigs (26.62 ± 1.62 kg) with a T-cannula in the distal ileum were randomly allotted to a 10 x 10 Latin square with 10 diets and ten 7-d periods. In Exp. 2, 9 cannulated pigs (35.50 ± 3.77 kg) were randomly allotted to a 9 x 8 Youden square with 9 diets and eight 7-d periods. Meat proteins (Table 1) were included in the diet as the only source of AA. The DIAAS for each meat protein was calculated using the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) established reference patterns for children 6 mo to 3 yr and older children, adolescents, and adults. Data were analyzed using PROC MIXED of SAS in a randomized complete block design with the pig as the experimental unit. In Exp. 1, all meat proteins had a DIAAS greater than 100% regardless of the reference pattern. For both reference patterns, the DIAAS for smoked-cooked bacon was greater (P < 0.05) than for raw belly and smoked bacon, the 2 cured hams had a numerically greater DIAAS than the uncured ham, and the medium loin had a greater (P < 0.05) DIAAS compared with the medium-well and well-done loins. In Exp. 2, most proteins had a DIAAS value greater than 100%. For both reference patterns, raw ground beef had a greater (P < 0.05) DIAAS than cooked ground beef, and medium ribeye roast had a greater (P < 0.05) DIAAS than medium-rare and well-done ribeye roasts. In conclusion, curing and moderate cooking may increase DIAAS, whereas grinding meat prior to some, but not all, cooking methods or overcooking may reduce the DIAAS of meat proteins.

Australian sequestrate macrofungi have not been studied extensively until recently, even though their presence in Australia was recognised over 120 years ago by Baron Ferdinand von Mueller in connection with mycophagy by marsupials. The early mycological history in Australia is linked to the first expeditions and collections of plant material by naturalists from 1790 to 1830. These collections were sent to, and described by, foreign mycologists such as the Rev. M. J. Berkeley, the Rev. C. Kalchbrenner and E. M. Fries. M. C. Cooke's (1892) Handbook of Australian Fungi was the first attempt at compiling an Australian mycoflora. D. McAlpine and L. Rodway were the first resident collectors to expand on the information collated by Cooke. Later, G. H. Cunningham (1944) wrote The Gasteromycetes of New Zealand and Australia, bringing together the taxonomy of all known sequestrate macrofungi in the region. By 1895 approximately 2000 species of fungi had been recorded from Australia, 32 of them sequestrate. Recent intensive efforts in limited habitats have expanded our knowledge considerably, with more than 600 new species of sequestrate fungi recorded over the past 7 years. Many more remain to be discovered in Australia and New Zealand and knowledge of their biology and ecology needs to be developed.

The aim of this work was to estimate the prevalence and concentration of Listeria monocytogenes in packaged precut (slices or cubes) ready-to-eat (RTE) meat products available in the Hellenic retail market. Samples of these RTE meat products (n = 209) were taken from local supermarkets during a 3-month period and analyzed for the presence of L. monocytogenes with an automated enzymatic qualitative immunoassay followed by biochemical confirmation of positive results. The concentration of the pathogen in the positive samples was also determined. Seventeen samples (8.1%) were positive for L. monocytogenes. Eight (47.1%) of these 17 samples were from the same manufacturer; 36.4% of the products tested from this manufacturer were positive for L. monocytogenes. When bacon samples were not considered, the estimated prevalence of L. monocytogenes in sliced RTE meat products was much lower (3.1%). The L. monocytogenes populations in all positive samples were low, ≤10 CFU/g. In 64.7% of the L. monocytogenes–positive samples, other Listeria species, including L. innocua and L. welshimeri, were also present at &lt;10 to 690 CFU/g. These results indicate that L. monocytogenes is present in low numbers but is in a considerable proportion of the packaged precut RTE meat products that are sold in the Hellenic retail market. Cooked ham and bacon cut in cubes were the sample types most often contaminated with L. monocytogenes. The higher level of handling (e.g., cutting) associated with these products may further increase the risk of contamination with L. monocytogenes.

AbstractObjectiveTo explore the food intake of young migrants living in Germany.DesignChildren and adolescents aged 0 to 17 years living in Germany, including 17·1 % with a migration background, were examined in a representative health survey. Food frequency data of 7186 boys and 6919 girls, aged 3 to 17 years, were analysed separately for Turkish, Russian Germans, other migrants and non-migrants. Daily food intake was calculated and a healthy diet score was used to allow an overall interpretation of the diet. Using stepwise linear regression, the association between migrant status and healthy diet score was analysed.ResultsTurkish participants (4·8 %) consumed significantly more soft drinks, fried potatoes, chocolate cream and snacks than all other groups and significantly less meat than other migrants and non-migrants. Turkish as well as other migrants (8·8 %) ate more poultry, fish and pasta/rice, and less sausage/bacon and cooked potatoes, than Russian Germans and non-migrants. Russian Germans (3·5 %) consumed less cooked vegetables than non-migrants and other migrants. Non-migrants had a better mean dietary score than Russian Germans and other migrants. A less preferable diet score was associated with higher age, male sex, being a migrant from Russia, low or middle socio-economic status, and living in rural or provincial areas.ConclusionsThe study showed considerable differences in dietary habits between young persons of different origin. This underlines the importance of focusing on ethnic groups in dietary interventions.

Fifty one (51) samples of several types of cooked sausage paste, prepared by two meat factories in N. Greece were examined. TPC of these samples ranged between 5,3-6,3 Log10CFU/g. Coliforms were regularly present reaching populations of 93->2.400 MPN/g and lactic acid bacteria ranged between 5-6,3 Log10CFU/g. L. monocytogenes was detected in 56 and 38,4% of the samples collected in each factory. E. coli was detected in 20 and 16,6%, and Salmonella spp in 12 and 16,6% respectively. Neither pathogens nor coliforms were detected in 51 samples of cooked sausages originated from the same pastes examined before. No recovery of any injured cells of the pathogenic bacteria and coliforms was observed after their storage at 4°C for 20 days. TPC of the cooked sausage samples, after thermal treatment, ranged between 3-4,7 Log10CFU/g and consisted mainly of lactic acid bacteria (range <2-4,5 Log10CFU/g) and sporeformers (range 3-4,5 Log10CFU/g). After 20 days storage at 4°C the TPC and lactid acid bacteria counts of the cooked sausages, increased by <1 Log. We also examined 16 surface and center samples of cooked sausages and meat products without casings, consisting of big meat pieces (bacon, smoked ham,etc). Surface TPC ranged between 5-5,3 Log10CFU/g and from the center of the meats they ranged between 2-3,5 Log1 0CFU/g. Coliforms, E. coli, L. monocytogenes and Salmonella spp were not detected. Lactic acid bacteria were the main flora. Furthermore we examined surface samples of cooked meat products, without casings, during several stages following thermal treatment and up to storage for 24 h at 4° C, without any protective package. TPC immediately after thermal treatment were <2 Log^CFU/g, after cooling with water increased they increased at 3 Log10CFU/g and remained the same during the following 24 h storage at 4°C. Coliforms were detected in the stored products. Their populations exceeded 2.400 MPN/g on the surface of the samples after storage for a few days at 4°C. It is assumed that the flora on the surface of these products originated from the environment and the cooling water. Finally we examined 69 samples from surfaces of the slicing and packaging equipment of cooked meat products in 3 meat factories and 28 samples from 12 super markets. L. monocytogenes was detected in 6 and 14,2% of the samples that originated from the slicing blades in the factories and super markets respectively. The results of this study underline the importance of GMP for the prevention of contamination of cooked sausages with pathogens and the control of the growth of the spoilage bacteria population which minimize the self life of these products. This is especially true after thermal treatment during peeling and slicing.

The present analysis aimed to investigate the changes in the reported portion sizes (PS) of foods and beverages commonly consumed by Irish adults (18–64 years) from the North South Ireland Food Consumption Survey (NSIFCS) (1997–2001) and the National Adult Nutrition Survey (NANS) (2008–10). Food PS, which are defined as the weight of food (g) consumed per eating occasion, were calculated for comparable foods and beverages in two nationally representative cross-sectional Irish food consumption surveys and were published in NSIFCS and NANS. Repeated measure mixed model analysis compared reported food PS at the total population level as well as subdivided by sex, age, BMI and social class. A total of thirteen commonly consumed foods were examined. The analysis demonstrated that PS significantly increased for five foods (‘white sliced bread’, ‘brown/wholemeal breads’, ‘all meat, cooked’, ‘poultry, roasted’ and ‘milk’), significantly decreased for three (‘potatoes’, ‘chips/wedges’ and ‘ham, sliced’) and did not significantly change for five foods (‘processed potato products’, ‘bacon/ham’, ‘cheese’, ‘yogurt’ and ‘butter/spreads’) between the NSIFCS and the NANS. The present study demonstrates that there was considerable variation in the trends in reported food PS over this period.

AbstractObjectiveTo investigate socio-economic differences in changes in fruit and vegetable intake between 2004 and 2011 and explore the mediating role of financial barriers in this change.DesignRespondents completed a self-reported questionnaire in 2004 and 2011, including questions on fruit and vegetable intake (frequency per week), indicators of socio-economic position (education, income) and perceived financial barriers (fruits/vegetables are expensive, financial distress). Associations were analysed using ordinal logistic regression. The mediating role of financial barriers in the association between socio-economic position and change in fruit and vegetable intake was studied with the Baron and Kenny approach.SettingLongitudinal GLOBE study.SubjectsA total of 2978 Dutch adults aged 25–75 years.ResultsRespondents with the lowest income in 2004 were more likely to report a decrease in intake of cooked vegetables (P-trend<0·001) and raw vegetables (P-trend<0·001) between 2004 and 2011, compared with those with the highest income level. Respondents with the lowest education level in 2004 were more likely to report a decrease in intake of fruits (P-trend=0·021), cooked vegetables (P-trend=0·033), raw vegetables (P-trend<0·001) and fruit juice (P-trend=0·027) between 2004 and 2011, compared with those with the highest education level. Financial barriers partially mediated the association between income and education and the decrease in fruit and cooked vegetable intake between 2004 and 2011.ConclusionsThese results show a widening of relative income and educational differences in fruit and vegetable intake between 2004 and 2011. Financial barriers explained a small part of this widening.

Ratite meat is usually sold as fresh meat (steaks), with trimmings being processed into products such as burger patties and sausages. Most of the steaks are vacuum packed and exported. With the outbreak of Avian influenza, all fresh meat exports were halted from South Africa. However, if the meat has been exposed to an internal core temperature of 70°C, it may then be exported under the Meat Products Directive (EEC 2004) because it is assumed safe for human consumption; this placed an urgency in developing value-added meat products. These products are sold as vacuum packed and cooked ostrich steaks. Salt infusion is frequently used to improve water retention of these sous vide products. Other products that have been developed are functional foods, such as emu snack sticks (higher creatine levels) for athletes. The quality and composition of other more traditional meat products such as sausages, patties, salami and pâté have also been determined and are discussed. A strong emphasis has been to develop products that will enhance the healthy perception of ratite meat amongst consumers. These include the development of low-salt bacon, hams with lower levels of phosphates and polonies with olive oil replacing pork fat. The quality attributes of these products are also discussed as are future trends in the processing trade.

Steaks have not been recognized as an important vehicle of Escherichia coli O157:H7 infection. During 11 to 27 June 2003, the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) identified four O157 infection cases with the same pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) subtype. All four case patients consumed brand A vacuum packed frozen steaks sold by door-to-door vendors. The steaks were blade tenderized and injected with marinade (i.e., nonintact). Information from single case patients in Michigan and Kansas identified through PulseNet confirmed the outbreak. The MDH issued a press release on 27 June to warn consumers, prompting a nationwide recall of 739,000 lb (335,506 kg) of frozen beef products. The outbreak resulted in six culture-confirmed cases (including one with hemolytic uremic syndrome) and two probable cases in Minnesota and single confirmed cases in four other states. The outbreak PFGE subtype of O157 was isolated from unopened brand A bacon-wrapped fillets from five affected Minnesota households. A fillet from one affected household was partially cooked in the laboratory, and the same O157 subtype was isolated from the uncooked interior. The tenderizing and injection processes likely transferred O157 from the surface to the interior of the steaks. These processing methods create new challenges for prevention of O157 infection. Food regulatory officials should reevaluate safety issues presented by nonintact steak products, such as microbiologic hazards of processing methods, possible labeling to distinguish intact from nonintact steaks, and education of the public and commercial food establishments on the increased risk associated with undercooked nonintact steaks. Information on single cases of O157 infection in individual states identified through PulseNet can be critical in solving multistate outbreaks in a timely manner.

Introduction Food has always been an essential component of daily life. Today, thinking about food is a much more complicated pursuit than planning the next meal, with food studies scholars devoting their efforts to researching “anything pertaining to food and eating, from how food is grown to when and how it is eaten, to who eats it and with whom, and the nutritional quality” (Duran and MacDonald 234). This is in addition to the work undertaken by an increasingly wide variety of popular culture researchers who explore all aspects of food (Risson and Brien 3): including food advertising, food packaging, food on television, and food in popular fiction. In creating stories, from those works that quickly disappear from bookstore shelves to those that become entrenched in the literary canon, writers use food to communicate the everyday and to explore a vast range of ideas from cultural background to social standing, and also use food to provide perspectives “into the cultural and historical uniqueness of a given social group” (Piatti-Farnell 80). For example in Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens, the central character challenges the class system when: “Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless with misery. He rose from the table, and advancing basin and spoon in hand, to the master, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity–‘Please, sir, I want some more’” (11). Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) makes a similar point, a little more dramatically, when she declares: “As God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again” (419). Food can also take us into the depths of another culture: places that many of us will only ever read about. Food is also used to provide insight into a character’s state of mind. In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983) an item as simple as boiled bread tells a reader so much more about Rachel Samstat than her preferred bakery items: “So we got married and I got pregnant and I gave up my New York apartment and moved to Washington. Talk about mistakes [...] there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can’t even buy a decent bagel” (34). There are three ways in which writers can deal with food within their work. Firstly, food can be totally ignored. This approach is sometimes taken despite food being such a standard feature of storytelling that its absence, be it a lonely meal at home, elegant canapés at an impressively catered cocktail party, or a cheap sandwich collected from a local café, is an obvious omission. Food can also add realism to a story, with many authors putting as much effort into conjuring the smell, taste, and texture of food as they do into providing a backstory and a purpose for their characters. In recent years, a third way has emerged with some writers placing such importance upon food in fiction that the line that divides the cookbook and the novel has become distorted. This article looks at cookbooks and cookery in popular fiction with a particular focus on crime novels. Recipes: Ingredients and Preparation Food in fiction has been employed, with great success, to help characters cope with grief; giving them the reassurance that only comes through the familiarity of the kitchen and the concentration required to fulfil routine tasks: to chop and dice, to mix, to sift and roll, to bake, broil, grill, steam, and fry. Such grief can come from the breakdown of a relationship as seen in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983). An autobiography under the guise of fiction, this novel is the first-person story of a cookbook author, a description that irritates the narrator as she feels her works “aren’t merely cookbooks” (95). She is, however, grateful she was not described as “a distraught, rejected, pregnant cookbook author whose husband was in love with a giantess” (95). As the collapse of the marriage is described, her favourite recipes are shared: Bacon Hash; Four Minute Eggs; Toasted Almonds; Lima Beans with Pears; Linguine Alla Cecca; Pot Roast; three types of Potatoes; Sorrel Soup; desserts including Bread Pudding, Cheesecake, Key Lime Pie and Peach Pie; and a Vinaigrette, all in an effort to reassert her personal skills and thus personal value. Grief can also result from loss of hope and the realisation that a life long dreamed of will never be realised. Like Water for Chocolate (1989), by Laura Esquivel, is the magical realist tale of Tita De La Garza who, as the youngest daughter, is forbidden to marry as she must take care of her mother, a woman who: “Unquestionably, when it came to dividing, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, detaching, dispossessing, destroying or dominating […] was a pro” (87). Tita’s life lurches from one painful, unjust episode to the next; the only emotional stability she has comes from the kitchen, and from her cooking of a series of dishes: Christmas Rolls; Chabela Wedding Cake; Quail in Rose Petal Sauce; Turkey Mole; Northern-style Chorizo; Oxtail Soup; Champandongo; Chocolate and Three Kings’s Day Bread; Cream Fritters; and Beans with Chilli Tezcucana-style. This is a series of culinary-based activities that attempts to superimpose normalcy on a life that is far from the everyday. Grief is most commonly associated with death. Undertaking the selection, preparation and presentation of meals in novels dealing with bereavement is both a functional and symbolic act: life must go on for those left behind but it must go on in a very different way. Thus, novels that use food to deal with loss are particularly important because they can “make non-cooks believe they can cook, and for frequent cooks, affirm what they already know: that cooking heals” (Baltazar online). In Angelina’s Bachelors (2011) by Brian O’Reilly, Angelina D’Angelo believes “cooking was not just about food. It was about character” (2). By the end of the first chapter the young woman’s husband is dead and she is in the kitchen looking for solace, and survival, in cookery. In The Kitchen Daughter (2011) by Jael McHenry, Ginny Selvaggio is struggling to cope with the death of her parents and the friends and relations who crowd her home after the funeral. Like Angelina, Ginny retreats to the kitchen. There are, of course, exceptions. In Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), cooking celebrates, comforts, and seduces (Calta). This story of three sisters from South Carolina is told through diary entries, narrative, letters, poetry, songs, and spells. Recipes are also found throughout the text: Turkey; Marmalade; Rice; Spinach; Crabmeat; Fish; Sweetbread; Duck; Lamb; and, Asparagus. Anthony Capella’s The Food of Love (2004), a modern retelling of the classic tale of Cyrano de Bergerac, is about the beautiful Laura, a waiter masquerading as a top chef Tommaso, and the talented Bruno who, “thick-set, heavy, and slightly awkward” (21), covers for Tommaso’s incompetency in the kitchen as he, too, falls for Laura. The novel contains recipes and contains considerable information about food: Take fusilli […] People say this pasta was designed by Leonardo da Vinci himself. The spiral fins carry the biggest amount of sauce relative to the surface area, you see? But it only works with a thick, heavy sauce that can cling to the grooves. Conchiglie, on the other hand, is like a shell, so it holds a thin, liquid sauce inside it perfectly (17). Recipes: Dishing Up Death Crime fiction is a genre with a long history of focusing on food; from the theft of food in the novels of the nineteenth century to the utilisation of many different types of food such as chocolate, marmalade, and sweet omelettes to administer poison (Berkeley, Christie, Sayers), the latter vehicle for arsenic receiving much attention in Harriet Vane’s trial in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison (1930). The Judge, in summing up the case, states to the members of the jury: “Four eggs were brought to the table in their shells, and Mr Urquhart broke them one by one into a bowl, adding sugar from a sifter [...he then] cooked the omelette in a chafing dish, filled it with hot jam” (14). Prior to what Timothy Taylor has described as the “pre-foodie era” the crime fiction genre was “littered with corpses whose last breaths smelled oddly sweet, or bitter, or of almonds” (online). Of course not all murders are committed in such a subtle fashion. In Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter (1953), Mary Maloney murders her policeman husband, clubbing him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb. The meat is roasting nicely when her husband’s colleagues arrive to investigate his death, the lamb is offered and consumed: the murder weapon now beyond the recovery of investigators. Recent years have also seen more and more crime fiction writers present a central protagonist working within the food industry, drawing connections between the skills required for food preparation and those needed to catch a murderer. Working with cooks or crooks, or both, requires planning and people skills in addition to creative thinking, dedication, reliability, stamina, and a willingness to take risks. Kent Carroll insists that “food and mysteries just go together” (Carroll in Calta), with crime fiction website Stop, You’re Killing Me! listing, at the time of writing, over 85 culinary-based crime fiction series, there is certainly sufficient evidence to support his claim. Of the numerous works available that focus on food there are many series that go beyond featuring food and beverages, to present recipes as well as the solving of crimes. These include: the Candy Holliday Murder Mysteries by B. B. Haywood; the Coffeehouse Mysteries by Cleo Coyle; the Hannah Swensen Mysteries by Joanne Fluke; the Hemlock Falls Mysteries by Claudia Bishop; the Memphis BBQ Mysteries by Riley Adams; the Piece of Cake Mysteries by Jacklyn Brady; the Tea Shop Mysteries by Laura Childs; and, the White House Chef Mysteries by Julie Hyzy. The vast majority of offerings within this female dominated sub-genre that has been labelled “Crime and Dine” (Collins online) are American, both in origin and setting. A significant contribution to this increasingly popular formula is, however, from an Australian author Kerry Greenwood. Food features within her famed Phryne Fisher Series with recipes included in A Question of Death (2007). Recipes also form part of Greenwood’s food-themed collection of short crime stories Recipes for Crime (1995), written with Jenny Pausacker. These nine stories, each one imitating the style of one of crime fiction’s greatest contributors (from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler), allow readers to simultaneously access mysteries and recipes. 2004 saw the first publication of Earthly Delights and the introduction of her character, Corinna Chapman. This series follows the adventures of a woman who gave up a career as an accountant to open her own bakery in Melbourne. Corinna also investigates the occasional murder. Recipes can be found at the end of each of these books with the Corinna Chapman Recipe Book (nd), filled with instructions for baking bread, muffins and tea cakes in addition to recipes for main courses such as risotto, goulash, and “Chicken with Pineapple 1971 Style”, available from the publisher’s website. Recipes: Integration and Segregation In Heartburn (1983), Rachel acknowledges that presenting a work of fiction and a collection of recipes within a single volume can present challenges, observing: “I see that I haven’t managed to work in any recipes for a while. It’s hard to work in recipes when you’re moving the plot forward” (99). How Rachel tells her story is, however, a reflection of how she undertakes her work, with her own cookbooks being, she admits, more narration than instruction: “The cookbooks I write do well. They’re very personal and chatty–they’re cookbooks in an almost incidental way. I write chapters about friends or relatives or trips or experiences, and work in the recipes peripherally” (17). Some authors integrate detailed recipes into their narratives through description and dialogue. An excellent example of this approach can be found in the Coffeehouse Mystery Series by Cleo Coyle, in the novel On What Grounds (2003). When the central protagonist is being questioned by police, Clare Cosi’s answers are interrupted by a flashback scene and instructions on how to make Greek coffee: Three ounces of water and one very heaped teaspoon of dark roast coffee per serving. (I used half Italian roast, and half Maracaibo––a lovely Venezuelan coffee, named after the country’s major port; rich in flavour, with delicate wine overtones.) / Water and finely ground beans both go into the ibrik together. The water is then brought to a boil over medium heat (37). This provides insight into Clare’s character; that, when under pressure, she focuses her mind on what she firmly believes to be true – not the information that she is doubtful of or a situation that she is struggling to understand. Yet breaking up the action within a novel in this way–particularly within crime fiction, a genre that is predominantly dependant upon generating tension and building the pacing of the plotting to the climax–is an unusual but ultimately successful style of writing. Inquiry and instruction are comfortable bedfellows; as the central protagonists within these works discover whodunit, the readers discover who committed murder as well as a little bit more about one of the world’s most popular beverages, thus highlighting how cookbooks and novels both serve to entertain and to educate. Many authors will save their recipes, serving them up at the end of a story. This can be seen in Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef Mystery novels, the cover of each volume in the series boasts that it “includes Recipes for a Complete Presidential Menu!” These menus, with detailed ingredients lists, instructions for cooking and options for serving, are segregated from the stories and appear at the end of each work. Yet other writers will deploy a hybrid approach such as the one seen in Like Water for Chocolate (1989), where the ingredients are listed at the commencement of each chapter and the preparation for the recipes form part of the narrative. This method of integration is also deployed in The Kitchen Daughter (2011), which sees most of the chapters introduced with a recipe card, those chapters then going on to deal with action in the kitchen. Using recipes as chapter breaks is a structure that has, very recently, been adopted by Australian celebrity chef, food writer, and, now fiction author, Ed Halmagyi, in his new work, which is both cookbook and novel, The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally (2012). As people exchange recipes in reality, so too do fictional characters. The Recipe Club (2009), by Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel, is the story of two friends, Lilly Stone and Valerie Rudman, which is structured as an epistolary novel. As they exchange feelings, ideas and news in their correspondence, they also exchange recipes: over eighty of them throughout the novel in e-mails and letters. In The Food of Love (2004), written messages between two of the main characters are also used to share recipes. In addition, readers are able to post their own recipes, inspired by this book and other works by Anthony Capella, on the author’s website. From Page to Plate Some readers are contributing to the burgeoning food tourism market by seeking out the meals from the pages of their favourite novels in bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world, expanding the idea of “map as menu” (Spang 79). In Shannon McKenna Schmidt’s and Joni Rendon’s guide to literary tourism, Novel Destinations (2009), there is an entire section, “Eat Your Words: Literary Places to Sip and Sup”, dedicated to beverages and food. The listings include details for John’s Grill, in San Francisco, which still has on the menu Sam Spade’s Lamb Chops, served with baked potato and sliced tomatoes: a meal enjoyed by author Dashiell Hammett and subsequently consumed by his well-known protagonist in The Maltese Falcon (193), and the Café de la Paix, in Paris, frequented by Ian Fleming’s James Bond because “the food was good enough and it amused him to watch the people” (197). Those wanting to follow in the footsteps of writers can go to Harry’s Bar, in Venice, where the likes of Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and Truman Capote have all enjoyed a drink (195) or The Eagle and Child, in Oxford, which hosted the regular meetings of the Inklings––a group which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien––in the wood-panelled Rabbit Room (203). A number of eateries have developed their own literary themes such as the Peacocks Tearooms, in Cambridgeshire, which blends their own teas. Readers who are also tea drinkers can indulge in the Sherlock Holmes (Earl Grey with Lapsang Souchong) and the Doctor Watson (Keemun and Darjeeling with Lapsang Souchong). Alternatively, readers may prefer to side with the criminal mind and indulge in the Moriarty (Black Chai with Star Anise, Pepper, Cinnamon, and Fennel) (Peacocks). The Moat Bar and Café, in Melbourne, situated in the basement of the State Library of Victoria, caters “to the whimsy and fantasy of the fiction housed above” and even runs a book exchange program (The Moat). For those readers who are unable, or unwilling, to travel the globe in search of such savoury and sweet treats there is a wide variety of locally-based literary lunches and other meals, that bring together popular authors and wonderful food, routinely organised by book sellers, literature societies, and publishing houses. There are also many cookbooks now easily obtainable that make it possible to re-create fictional food at home. One of the many examples available is The Book Lover’s Cookbook (2003) by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen, a work containing over three hundred pages of: Breakfasts; Main & Side Dishes; Soups; Salads; Appetizers, Breads & Other Finger Foods; Desserts; and Cookies & Other Sweets based on the pages of children’s books, literary classics, popular fiction, plays, poetry, and proverbs. If crime fiction is your preferred genre then you can turn to Jean Evans’s The Crime Lover’s Cookbook (2007), which features short stories in between the pages of recipes. There is also Estérelle Payany’s Recipe for Murder (2010) a beautifully illustrated volume that presents detailed instructions for Pigs in a Blanket based on the Big Bad Wolf’s appearance in The Three Little Pigs (44–7), and Roast Beef with Truffled Mashed Potatoes, which acknowledges Patrick Bateman’s fondness for fine dining in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (124–7). Conclusion Cookbooks and many popular fiction novels are reflections of each other in terms of creativity, function, and structure. In some instances the two forms are so closely entwined that a single volume will concurrently share a narrative while providing information about, and instruction, on cookery. Indeed, cooking in books is becoming so popular that the line that traditionally separated cookbooks from other types of books, such as romance or crime novels, is becoming increasingly distorted. The separation between food and fiction is further blurred by food tourism and how people strive to experience some of the foods found within fictional works at bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world or, create such experiences in their own homes using fiction-themed recipe books. Food has always been acknowledged as essential for life; books have long been acknowledged as food for thought and food for the soul. Thus food in both the real world and in the imagined world serves to nourish and sustain us in these ways. References Adams, Riley. Delicious and Suspicious. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Finger Lickin’ Dead. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Hickory Smoked Homicide. New York: Berkley, 2011. Baltazar, Lori. “A Novel About Food, Recipes Included [Book review].” Dessert Comes First. 28 Feb. 2012. 20 Aug. 2012 ‹http://dessertcomesfirst.com/archives/8644›. Berkeley, Anthony. The Poisoned Chocolates Case. London: Collins, 1929. Bishop, Claudia. Toast Mortem. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Dread on Arrival. New York: Berkley, 2012. Brady, Jacklyn. A Sheetcake Named Desire. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Cake on a Hot Tin Roof. New York: Berkley, 2012. Calta, Marialisa. “The Art of the Novel as Cookbook.” The New York Times. 17 Feb. 1993. 23 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/17/style/the-art-of-the-novel-as-cookbook.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm›. Capella, Anthony. The Food of Love. London: Time Warner, 2004/2005. Carroll, Kent in Calta, Marialisa. “The Art of the Novel as Cookbook.” The New York Times. 17 Feb. 1993. 23 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/17/style/the-art-of-the-novel-as-cookbook.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm›. Childs, Laura. Death by Darjeeling. New York: Berkley, 2001. –– Shades of Earl Grey. New York: Berkley, 2003. –– Blood Orange Brewing. New York: Berkley, 2006/2007. –– The Teaberry Strangler. New York: Berkley, 2010/2011. Collins, Glenn. “Your Favourite Fictional Crime Moments Involving Food.” The New York Times Diner’s Journal: Notes on Eating, Drinking and Cooking. 16 Jul. 2012. 17 Jul. 2012 ‹http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/your-favorite-fictional-crime-moments-involving-food›. Coyle, Cleo. On What Grounds. New York: Berkley, 2003. –– Murder Most Frothy. New York: Berkley, 2006. –– Holiday Grind. New York: Berkley, 2009/2010. –– Roast Mortem. New York: Berkley, 2010/2011. Christie, Agatha. A Pocket Full of Rye. London: Collins, 1953. Dahl, Roald. Lamb to the Slaughter: A Roald Dahl Short Story. New York: Penguin, 1953/2012. eBook. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist, or, the Parish Boy’s Progress. In Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors, Vol. CCXXIX. Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1838/1839. Duran, Nancy, and Karen MacDonald. “Information Sources for Food Studies Research.” Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 2.9 (2006): 233–43. Ephron, Nora. Heartburn. New York: Vintage, 1983/1996. Esquivel, Laura. Trans. Christensen, Carol, and Thomas Christensen. Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Instalments with Recipes, romances and home remedies. London: Black Swan, 1989/1993. Evans, Jeanne M. The Crime Lovers’s Cookbook. City: Happy Trails, 2007. Fluke, Joanne. Fudge Cupcake Murder. New York: Kensington, 2004. –– Key Lime Pie Murder. New York: Kensington, 2007. –– Cream Puff Murder. New York: Kensington, 2009. –– Apple Turnover Murder. New York: Kensington, 2010. Greenwood, Kerry, and Jenny Pausacker. Recipes for Crime. Carlton: McPhee Gribble, 1995. Greenwood, Kerry. The Corinna Chapman Recipe Book: Mouth-Watering Morsels to Make Your Man Melt, Recipes from Corinna Chapman, Baker and Reluctant Investigator. nd. 25 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.allenandunwin.com/_uploads/documents/minisites/Corinna_recipebook.pdf›. –– A Question of Death: An Illustrated Phryne Fisher Treasury. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2007. Halmagyi, Ed. The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2012. Haywood, B. B. Town in a Blueberry Jam. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Town in a Lobster Stew. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Town in a Wild Moose Chase. New York: Berkley, 2012. Hyzy, Julie. State of the Onion. New York: Berkley, 2008. –– Hail to the Chef. New York: Berkley, 2008. –– Eggsecutive Orders. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Buffalo West Wing. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Affairs of Steak. New York: Berkley, 2012. Israel, Andrea, and Nancy Garfinkel, with Melissa Clark. The Recipe Club: A Novel About Food And Friendship. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. McHenry, Jael. The Kitchen Daughter: A Novel. New York: Gallery, 2011. Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With the Wind. London: Pan, 1936/1974 O’Reilly, Brian, with Virginia O’Reilly. Angelina’s Bachelors: A Novel, with Food. New York: Gallery, 2011. Payany, Estérelle. Recipe for Murder: Frightfully Good Food Inspired by Fiction. Paris: Flammarion, 2010. Peacocks Tearooms. Peacocks Tearooms: Our Unique Selection of Teas. 23 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.peacockstearoom.co.uk/teas/page1.asp›. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. “A Taste of Conflict: Food, History and Popular Culture In Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 79–91. Risson, Toni, and Donna Lee Brien. “Editors’ Letter: That Takes the Cake: A Slice Of Australasian Food Studies Scholarship.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 3–7. Sayers, Dorothy L. Strong Poison. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930/2003. Schmidt, Shannon McKenna, and Joni Rendon. Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009. Shange, Ntozake. Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo: A Novel. New York: St Martin’s, 1982. Spang, Rebecca L. “All the World’s A Restaurant: On The Global Gastronomics Of Tourism and Travel.” In Raymond Grew (Ed). Food in Global History. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999. 79–91. Taylor, Timothy. “Food/Crime Fiction.” Timothy Taylor. 2010. 17 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.timothytaylor.ca/10/08/20/foodcrime-fiction›. The Moat Bar and Café. The Moat Bar and Café: Welcome. nd. 23 Aug. 2012 ‹http://themoat.com.au/Welcome.html›. Wenger, Shaunda Kennedy, and Janet Kay Jensen. The Book Lover’s Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Celebrated Works of Literature, and the Passages that Feature Them. New York: Ballantine, 2003/2005.

Slice and boil the one that got away the one that would play the lead in the Squash that Ate Chicago... the monster that always has the crowd wild eyed and screaming my god! is that really A zucchini. Strain off the water Adding one bouillon cube (any kind) and one tablespoon of olive oil Puree and serve hot and steaming with a slug of cold sour cream dumped into the center of each portion. Top with a sprinkle of dill seed, salt and season to taste. and now let us praise the chef the only artist whose creative work must speak to every sense the literary labors of Shakespeare are immense feeding and filling the soul... but a steady diet of language leaves the stomach growling and although it would garnish your life and delight your eye a garden salad by Picasso would be as tasty as old canvas and varnish and whatever the sculpture Rodin might put on the table would be a masterpiece for sure but nothing you could get your teeth into no doubt the sound of a string quartet is more uplifting than the sizzle of bacon in a pan but by intermission a sweaty musician doesn't smell as good the fine art of cookery demands the heart hand and eye of a complete renaissance man and as always muttering into her napkin counterpoint to this my wife: "Why is it when a woman cooks a meal it is just a meal but when a man cooks a meal it's such a big big deal!" Citation reference for this article MLA style: Ric Masten. "Killer Zucchini." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/zucchini.php>. Chicago style: Ric Masten, "Killer Zucchini," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/zucchini.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Ric Masten. (1999) Killer zucchini. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/zucchini.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Ireland did not have a tradition of printed cookbooks prior to the 20th century. As a consequence, Irish culinary manuscripts from before this period are an important primary source for historians. This paper makes the case that the manuscripts are a unique way of accessing voices that have quotidian concerns seldom heard above the dominant narratives of conquest, colonisation and famine (Higgins; Dawson). Three manuscripts are examined to see how they contribute to an understanding of Irish social and culinary history. The Irish banking crisis of 2008 is a reminder that comments such as the one in the title of this paper may be more then a casual remark, indicating rather an underlying anxiety. Equally important is the evidence in the manuscripts that Ireland had a domestic culinary tradition sited within the culinary traditions of the British Isles. The terms “vernacular”, representing localised needs and traditions, and “polite”, representing stylistic features incorporated for aesthetic reasons, are more usually applied in the architectural world. As terms, they reflect in a politically neutral way the culinary divide witnessed in the manuscripts under discussion here. Two of the three manuscripts are anonymous, but all are written from the perspective of a well-provisioned house. The class background is elite and as such these manuscripts are not representative of the vernacular, which in culinary terms is likely to be a tradition recorded orally (Gold). The first manuscript (NLI, Tervoe) and second manuscript (NLI, Limerick) show the levels of impact of French culinary influence through their recipes for “cullis”. The Limerick manuscript also opens the discussion to wider social concerns. The third manuscript (NLI, Baker) is unusual in that the author, Mrs. Baker, goes to great lengths to record the provenance of the recipes and as such the collection affords a glimpse into the private “polite” world of the landed gentry in Ireland with its multiplicity of familial and societal connections. Cookbooks and Cuisine in Ireland in the 19th Century During the course of the 18th century, there were 136 new cookery book titles and 287 reprints published in Britain (Lehmann, Housewife 383). From the start of the 18th to the end of the 19th century only three cookbooks of Irish, or Anglo-Irish, authorship have been identified. The Lady’s Companion: or Accomplish’d Director In the whole Art of Cookery was published in 1767 by John Mitchell in Skinner-Row, under the pseudonym “Ceres,” while the Countess of Caledon’s Cheap Receipts and Hints on Cookery: Collected for Distribution Amongst the Irish Peasantry was printed in Armagh by J. M. Watters for private circulation in 1847. The modern sounding Dinners at Home, published in London in 1878 under the pseudonym “Short”, appears to be of Irish authorship, a review in The Irish Times describing it as being written by a “Dublin lady”, the inference being that she was known to the reviewer (Farmer). English Copyright Law was extended to Ireland in July 1801 after the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland in 1800 (Ferguson). Prior to this, many titles were pirated in Ireland, a cause of confusion alluded to by Lehmann when she comments regarding the Ceres book that it “does not appear to be simply a Dublin-printed edition of an English book” (Housewife 403). This attribution is based on the dedication in the preface: “To The Ladies of Dublin.” From her statement that she had a “great deal of experience in business of this kind”, one may conclude that Ceres had worked as a housekeeper or cook. Cheap Receipts and Hints on Cookery was the second of two books by Catherine Alexander, Countess of Caledon. While many commentators were offering advice to Irish people on how to alleviate their poverty, in Friendly Advice to Irish Mothers on Training their Children, Alexander was unusual in addressing her book specifically to its intended audience (Bourke). In this cookbook, the tone is of a practical didactic nature, the philosophy that of enablement. Given the paucity of printed material, manuscripts provide the main primary source regarding the existence of an indigenous culinary tradition. Attitudes regarding this tradition lie along the spectrum exemplified by the comments of an Irish journalist, Kevin Myers, and an eminent Irish historian, Louis Cullen. Myers describes Irish cuisine as a “travesty” and claims that the cuisine of “Old Ireland, in texture and in flavour, generally resembles the cinders after the suttee of a very large, but not very tasty widow”, Cullen makes the case that Irish cuisine is “one of the most interesting culinary traditions in Europe” (141). It is not proposed to investigate the ideological standpoints behind the various comments on Irish food. Indeed, the use of the term “Irish” in this context is fraught with difficulty and it should be noted that in the three manuscripts proposed here, the cuisine is that of the gentry class and representative of a particular stratum of society more accurately described as belonging to the Anglo-Irish tradition. It is also questionable how the authors of the three manuscripts discussed would have described themselves in terms of nationality. The anxiety surrounding this issue of identity is abating as scholarship has moved from viewing the cultural artifacts and buildings inherited from this class, not as symbols of an alien heritage, but rather as part of the narrative of a complex country (Rees). The antagonistic attitude towards this heritage could be seen as reaching its apogee in the late 1950s when the then Government minister, Kevin Boland, greeted the decision to demolish a row of Georgian houses in Dublin with jubilation, saying that they stood for everything that he despised, and describing the Georgian Society, who had campaigned for their preservation, as “the preserve of the idle rich and belted earls” (Foster 160). Mac Con Iomaire notes that there has been no comprehensive study of the history of Irish food, and the implications this has for opinions held, drawing attention to the lack of recognition that a “parallel Anglo-Irish cuisine existed among the Protestant elite” (43). To this must be added the observation that Myrtle Allen, the doyenne of the Irish culinary world, made when she observed that while we have an Irish identity in food, “we belong to a geographical and culinary group with Wales, England, and Scotland as all counties share their traditions with their next door neighbour” (1983). Three Irish Culinary Manuscripts The three manuscripts discussed here are held in the National Library of Ireland (NLI). The manuscript known as Tervoe has 402 folio pages with a 22-page index. The National Library purchased the manuscript at auction in December 2011. Although unattributed, it is believed to come from Tervoe House in County Limerick (O’Daly). Built in 1776 by Colonel W.T. Monsell (b.1754), the Monsell family lived there until 1951 (see, Fig. 1). The house was demolished in 1953 (Bence-Jones). William Monsell, 1st Lord Emly (1812–94) could be described as the most distinguished of the family. Raised in an atmosphere of devotion to the Union (with Great Britain), loyalty to the Church of Ireland, and adherence to the Tory Party, he converted in 1850 to the Roman Catholic religion, under the influence of Cardinal Newman and the Oxford Movement, changing his political allegiance from Tory to Whig. It is believed that this change took place as a result of the events surrounding the Great Irish Famine of 1845–50 (Potter). The Tervoe manuscript is catalogued as 18th century, and as the house was built in the last quarter of the century, it would be reasonable to surmise that its conception coincided with that period. It is a handsome volume with original green vellum binding, which has been conserved. Fig. 1. Tervoe House, home of the Monsell family. In terms of culinary prowess, the scope of the Tervoe manuscript is extensive. For the purpose of this discussion, one recipe is of particular interest. The recipe, To make a Cullis for Flesh Soups, instructs the reader to take the fat off four pounds of the best beef, roast the beef, pound it to a paste with crusts of bread and the carcasses of partridges or other fowl “that you have by you” (NLI, Tervoe). This mixture should then be moistened with best gravy, and strong broth, and seasoned with pepper, thyme, cloves, and lemon, then sieved for use with the soup. In 1747 Hannah Glasse published The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy. The 1983 facsimile edition explains the term “cullis” as an Anglicisation of the French word coulis, “a preparation for thickening soups and stews” (182). The coulis was one of the essential components of the nouvelle cuisine of the 18th century. This movement sought to separate itself from “the conspicuous consumption of profusion” to one where the impression created was one of refinement and elegance (Lehmann, Housewife 210). Reactions in England to this French culinary innovation were strong, if not strident. Glasse derides French “tricks”, along with French cooks, and the coulis was singled out for particular opprobrium. In reality, Glasse bestrides both sides of the divide by giving the much-hated recipe and commenting on it. She provides another example of this in her recipe for The French Way of Dressing Partridges to which she adds the comment: “this dish I do not recommend; for I think it an odd jumble of thrash, by that time the Cullis, the Essence of Ham, and all other Ingredients are reckoned, the Partridges will come to a fine penny; but such Receipts as this, is what you have in most Books of Cookery yet printed” (53). When Daniel Defoe in The Complete English Tradesman of 1726 criticised French tradesmen for spending so much on the facades of their shops that they were unable to offer their customers a varied stock within, we can see the antipathy spilling over into other creative fields (Craske). As a critical strategy, it is not dissimilar to Glasse when she comments “now compute the expense, and see if this dish cannot be dressed full as well without this expense” at the end of a recipe for the supposedly despised Cullis for all Sorts of Ragoo (53). Food had become part of the defining image of Britain as an aggressively Protestant culture in opposition to Catholic France (Lehmann Politics 75). The author of the Tervoe manuscript makes no comment about the dish other than “A Cullis is a mixture of things, strained off.” This is in marked contrast to the second manuscript (NLI, Limerick). The author of this anonymous manuscript, from which the title of this paper is taken, is considerably perplexed by the term cullis, despite the manuscript dating 1811 (Fig. 2). Of Limerick provenance also, but considerably more modest in binding and scope, the manuscript was added to for twenty years, entries terminating around 1831. The recipe for Beef Stake (sic) Pie is an exact transcription of a recipe in John Simpson’s A Complete System of Cookery, published in 1806, and reads Cut some beef steaks thin, butter a pan (or as Lord Buckingham’s cook, from whom these rects are taken, calls it a soutis pan, ? [sic] (what does he mean, is it a saucepan) [sic] sprinkle the pan with pepper and salt, shallots thyme and parsley, put the beef steaks in and the pan on the fire for a few minutes then put them to cool, when quite cold put them in the fire, scrape all the herbs in over the fire and ornament as you please, it will take an hour and half, when done take the top off and put in some coulis (what is that?) [sic]. Fig. 2. Beef Stake Pie (NLI, Limerick). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Simpson was cook to Lord Buckingham for at least a year in 1796, and may indeed have travelled to Ireland with the Duke who had several connections there. A feature of this manuscript are the number of Cholera remedies that it contains, including the “Rect for the cholera sent by Dr Shanfer from Warsaw to the Brussels Government”. Cholera had reached Germany by 1830, and England by 1831. By March 1832, it had struck Belfast and Dublin, the following month being noted in Cork, in the south of the country. Lasting a year, the epidemic claimed 50,000 lives in Ireland (Fenning). On 29 April 1832, the diarist Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin notes, “we had a meeting today to keep the cholera from Callan. May God help us” (De Bhaldraithe 132). By 18 June, the cholera is “wrecking destruction in Ennis, Limerick and Tullamore” (135) and on 26 November, “Seed being sown. The end of the month wet and windy. The cholera came to Callan at the beginning of the month. Twenty people went down with it and it left the town then” (139). This situation was obviously of great concern and this is registered in the manuscript. Another concern is that highlighted by the recommendation that “this receipt is as good as the bank. It has been obligingly given to Mrs Hawkesworth by the chief book keeper at the Bank of Ireland” (NLI, Limerick). The Bank of Ireland commenced business at St. Mary’s Abbey in Dublin in June 1783, having been established under the protection of the Irish Parliament as a chartered rather then a central bank. As such, it supplied a currency of solidity. The charter establishing the bank, however, contained a prohibitory clause preventing (until 1824 when it was repealed) more then six persons forming themselves into a company to carry on the business of banking. This led to the formation, especially outside Dublin, of many “small private banks whose failure was the cause of immense wretchedness to all classes of the population” (Gilbert 19). The collapse that caused the most distress was that of the Ffrench bank in 1814, founded eleven years previously by the family of Lord Ffrench, one of the leading Catholic peers, based in Connacht in the west of Ireland. The bank issued notes in exchange for Bank of Ireland notes. Loans from Irish banks were in the form of paper money which were essentially printed promises to pay the amount stated and these notes were used in ordinary transactions. So great was the confidence in the Ffrench bank that their notes were held by the public in preference to Bank of Ireland notes, most particularly in Connacht. On 27 June 1814, there was a run on the bank leading to collapse. The devastation spread through society, from business through tenant farmers to the great estates, and notably so in Galway. Lord Ffrench shot himself in despair (Tennison). Williams and Finn, founded in Kilkenny in 1805, entered bankruptcy proceedings in 1816, and the last private bank outside Dublin, Delacours in Mallow, failed in 1835 (Barrow). The issue of bank failure is commented on by writers of the period, notably so in Dickens, Thackery, and Gaskill, and Edgeworth in Ireland. Following on the Ffrench collapse, notes from the Bank of Ireland were accorded increased respect, reflected in the comment in this recipe. The receipt in question is one for making White Currant Wine, with the unusual addition of a slice of bacon suspended from the bunghole when the wine is turned, for the purpose of enriching it. The recipe was provided to “Mrs Hawkesworth by the chief book keeper of the bank” (NLI, Limerick). In 1812, a John Hawkesworth, agent to Lord CastleCoote, was living at Forest Lodge, Mountrath, County Laois (Ennis Chronicle). The Coote family, although settling in County Laois in the seventeenth century, had strong connections with Limerick through a descendent of the younger brother of the first Earl of Mountrath (Landed Estates). The last manuscript for discussion is the manuscript book of Mrs Abraham Whyte Baker of Ballytobin House, County Kilkenny, 1810 (NLI, Baker). Ballytobin, or more correctly Ballaghtobin, is a townland in the barony of Kells, four miles from the previously mentioned Callan. The land was confiscated from the Tobin family during the Cromwellian campaign in Ireland of 1649–52, and was reputedly purchased by a Captain Baker, to establish what became the estate of Ballaghtobin (Fig. 3) To this day, it is a functioning estate, remaining in the family, twice passing down through the female line. In its heyday, there were two acres of walled gardens from which the house would have drawn for its own provisions (Ballaghtobin). Fig. 3. Ballaghtobin 2013. At the time of writing the manuscript, Mrs. Sophia Baker was widowed and living at Ballaghtobin with her son and daughter-in-law, Charity who was “no beauty, but tall, slight” (Herbert 414). On the succession of her husband to the estate, Charity became mistress of Ballaghtobin, leaving Sophia with time on what were her obviously very capable hands (Nevin). Sophia Baker was the daughter of Sir John Blunden of Castle Blunden and Lucinda Cuffe, daughter of the first Baron Desart. Sophia was also first cousin of the diarist Dorothea Herbert, whose mother was Lucinda’s sister, Martha. Sophia Baker and Dorothea Herbert have left for posterity a record of life in the landed gentry class in rural Georgian Ireland, Dorothea describing Mrs. Baker as “full of life and spirits” (Herbert 70). Their close relationship allows the two manuscripts to converse with each other in a unique way. Mrs. Baker’s detailing of the provenance of her recipes goes beyond the norm, so that what she has left us is not just a remarkable work of culinary history but also a palimpsest of her family and social circle. Among the people she references are: “my grandmother”; Dorothea Beresford, half sister to the Earl of Tyrone, who lived in the nearby Curraghmore House; Lady Tyrone; and Aunt Howth, the sister of Dorothea Beresford, married to William St Lawrence, Lord Howth, and described by Johnathan Swift as “his blue eyed nymph” (195). Other attributions include Lady Anne Fitzgerald, wife of Maurice Fitzgerald, 16th knight of Kerry, Sir William Parsons, Major Labilen, and a Mrs. Beaufort (Fig. 4). Fig. 4. Mrs. Beauforts Rect. (NLI, Baker). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. That this Mrs. Beaufort was the wife of Daniel Augustus Beaufort, mother of the hydrographer Sir Francis Beaufort, may be deduced from the succeeding recipe supplied by a Mrs. Waller. Mrs. Beaufort’s maiden name was Waller. Fanny Beaufort, the elder sister of Sir Francis, was Richard Edgeworth’s fourth wife and close friend and confidante of his daughter Maria, the novelist. There are also entries for “Miss Herbert” and “Aunt Herbert.” While the Baker manuscript is of interest for the fact that it intersects the worlds of the novelist Maria Edgeworth and the diarist Dorothea Herbert, and for the societal references that it documents, it is also a fine collection of recipes that date back to the mid-18th century. An example of this is a recipe for Sligo pickled salmon that Mrs. Baker, nee Blunden, refers to in an index that she gives to a second volume. Unfortunately this second volume is not known to be extant. This recipe features in a Blunden family manuscript of 1760 as referred to in Anelecta Hibernica (McLysaght). The recipe has also appeared in Cookery and Cures of Old Kilkenny (St. Canices’s 24). Unlike the Tervoe and Limerick manuscripts, Mrs. Baker is unconcerned with recipes for “cullis”. Conclusion The three manuscripts that have been examined here are from the period before the famine of 1845–50, known as An Gorta Mór, translated as “the big hunger”. The famine preceding this, Bliain an Áir (the year of carnage) in 1740–1 was caused by extremely cold and rainy weather that wiped out the harvest (Ó Gráda 15). This earlier famine, almost forgotten today, was more severe than the subsequent one, causing the death of an eight of the population of the island over one and a half years (McBride). These manuscripts are written in living memory of both events. Within the world that they inhabit, it may appear there is little said about hunger or social conditions beyond the walls of their estates. Subjected to closer analysis, however, it is evident that they are loquacious in their own unique way, and make an important contribution to the narrative of cookbooks. Through the three manuscripts discussed here, we find evidence of the culinary hegemony of France and how practitioners in Ireland commented on this in comparatively neutral fashion. An awareness of cholera and bank collapses have been communicated in a singular fashion, while a conversation between diarist and culinary networker has allowed a glimpse into the world of the landed gentry in Ireland during the Georgian period. References Allen, M. “Statement by Myrtle Allen at the opening of Ballymaloe Cookery School.” 14 Nov. 1983. Ballaghtobin. “The Grounds”. nd. 13 Mar. 2013. ‹http://www.ballaghtobin.com/gardens.html›. Barrow, G.L. “Some Dublin Private Banks.” Dublin Historical Record 25.2 (1972): 38–53. Bence-Jones, M. A Guide to Irish Country Houses. London: Constable, 1988. Bourke, A. Ed. Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Vol V. Cork: Cork UP, 2002. Craske, M. “Design and the Competitive Spirit in Early and Mid 18th Century England”, Journal of Design History 12.3 (1999): 187–216. Cullen, L. The Emergence of Modern Ireland. London: Batsford, 1981. Dawson, Graham. “Trauma, Memory, Politics. The Irish Troubles.” Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors. Ed. Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff and Graham Dawson. New Jersey: Transaction P, 2004. De Bhaldraithe,T. Ed. Cín Lae Amhlaoibh. Cork: Mercier P, 1979. Ennis Chronicle. 12–23 Feb 1812. 10 Feb. 2013 ‹http://astheywere.blogspot.ie/2012/12/ennis-chronicle-1812-feb-23-feb-12.html› Farmar, A. E-mail correspondence between Farmar and Dr M. Mac Con Iomaire, 26 Jan. 2011. Fenning, H. “The Cholera Epidemic in Ireland 1832–3: Priests, Ministers, Doctors”. Archivium Hibernicum 57 (2003): 77–125. Ferguson, F. “The Industrialisation of Irish Book Production 1790-1900.” The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. IV The Irish Book in English 1800-1891. Ed. J. Murphy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Foster, R.F. Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change from 1970. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Gilbert, James William. The History of Banking in Ireland. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1836. Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by a Lady: Facsimile Edition. Devon: Prospect, 1983. Gold, C. Danish Cookbooks. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2007. Herbert, D. Retrospections of an Outcast or the Life of Dorothea Herbert. London: Gerald Howe, 1929. Higgins, Michael D. “Remarks by President Michael D. Higgins reflecting on the Gorta Mór: the Great famine of Ireland.” Famine Commemoration, Boston, 12 May 2012. 18 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.president.ie/speeches/ › Landed Estates Database, National University of Galway, Moore Institute for Research, 10 Feb. 2013 ‹http://landedestates.nuigalway.ie/LandedEstates/jsp/family-show.jsp?id=633.› Lehmann, G. The British Housewife: Cookery books, cooking and society in eighteenth-century Britain. Totnes: Prospect, 1993. ---. “Politics in the Kitchen.” 18th Century Life 23.2 (1999): 71–83. Mac Con Iomaire, M. “The Emergence, Development and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History”. Vol. 2. PhD thesis. Dublin Institute of Technology. 2009. 8 Mar. 2013 ‹http://arrow.dit.ie/tourdoc/12›. McBride, Ian. Eighteenth Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2009. McLysaght, E.A. Anelecta Hibernica 15. Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1944. Myers, K. “Dinner is served ... But in Our Culinary Dessert it may be Korean.” The Irish Independent 30 Jun. 2006. Nevin, M. “A County Kilkenny Georgian Household Notebook.” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 109 (1979): 5–18. (NLI) National Library of Ireland. Baker. 19th century manuscript. MS 34,952. ---. Limerick. 19th century manuscript. MS 42,105. ---. Tervoe. 18th century manuscript. MS 42,134. Ó Gráda, C. Famine: A Short History. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2009. O’Daly, C. E-mail correspondence between Colette O’Daly, Assistant Keeper, Dept. of Manuscripts, National Library of Ireland and Dorothy Cashman. 8 Dec. 2011. Potter, M. William Monsell of Tervoe 1812-1894. Dublin: Irish Academic P, 2009. Rees, Catherine. “Irish Anxiety, Identity and Narrative in the Plays of McDonagh and Jones.” Redefinitions of Irish Identity: A Postnationalist Approach. Eds. Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Carmen Zamorano Llena. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. St. Canice’s. Cookery and Cures of Old Kilkenny. Kilkenny: Boethius P, 1983. Swift, J. The Works of the Rev Dr J Swift Vol. XIX Dublin: Faulkner, 1772. 8 Feb. 2013. ‹http://www.google.ie/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=works+of+jonathan+swift+Vol+XIX+&btnG=› Tennison, C.M. “The Old Dublin Bankers.” Journal of the Cork Historical and Archeological Society 1.2 (1895): 36–9.

ObjectivesThere is great opportunity for the beef industry to add value to cuts that are currently marketed as low value cuts (i.e., cuts from the chuck, round, and flank/plate). The objective was to evaluate the processing characteristics and sensory attributes of bacon manufactured from seven different cuts of beef.Materials and MethodsThe seven cuts evaluated included the brisket (IMPS#120), the clod heart (IMPS#114E; divided horizontally into two halves; referenced as the wide half or silverskin side and the narrow half or non-silverskin side), the flank (IMPS#193), the outside flat (IMPS#171B), and the short plate (IMPS#121A; broken down into the deboned short rib half and the navel half). The cuts were injected using a standard commercial bacon cure (water, salt, corn syrup solids, sodium phosphate, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrate, sodium bicarbonate, and glycerin; Herman Laue Spice Company Inc.; Uxbridge, Ontario, Canada) to a targeted rested pump uptake of approximately 20% (± 3%). The injected cuts were cooked to an internal temperature of 62°C in a smokehouse (ScottPec, Guelph, Ontario). Following cooking, cuts were cooled to 4°C and then sliced into 4.0 mm slices using a deli slicer. Slices were vacuum packaged, boxed, and stored at 4°C for zero, thirty, sixty, or ninety days. Following the allotted storage period, slices were stored at –20°C until evaluation of sensory attributes and cooking loss. Slices were cooked at 204°C for 15 min in a convection oven. Processing characteristics were conducted in six or seven replications for each cut. Sensory evaluation was conducted on three randomly selected samples for each cut at each of the four storage times (the same samples within each cut was used at each storage time). Processing data were analyzed using PROC GLIMMIX of SAS (v9.4) with fixed effect of cut and random effect of replication. A trained descriptive sensory panel of 6–8 panelists evaluated the differences in oxidative flavor and aroma (using a 4-pt nominal scale), and differences in beef flavor intensity, muscle fiber toughness, and connective tissue amount (using magnitude estimation). Sensory data were analyzed as repeated measures using PROC GLIMMIX of SAS (v9.4) with fixed effect of cut, storage day, and their interaction, and random effects of session, panelist, and replication.ResultsAs expected, dimensions and processing weights differed (P < 0.01) among cuts. Rested pump uptake was not different (P = 0.29) among cuts. Smokehouse yield was greater (P < 0.05) for the brisket, outside flat, and short plate (both halves) compared with the clod heart (both halves) and flank. Bacon slice cooking loss and sensory characteristics are presented in Table 4.ConclusionOverall, this research indicated that a variety of beef cuts can be used to manufacture beef bacon. The differences in sensory properties that were quantified in this study, allow manufacturers to tailor their cut selection to the sensory properties most valued by their consumers. All cuts exhibited oxidative stability when stored up to 90 d.Table 4Bacon slice cooking loss and sensory analysis of bacon manufactured with different beef cuts. Main effects of cut after 0, 30, 60, and 90 d of storage

Introduction Cookbooks are an exceptional written record of what is largely an oral tradition. They have been described as “magician’s hats” due to their ability to reveal much more than they seem to contain (Wheaton, “Finding”). The first book printed in Germany was the Guttenberg Bible in 1456 but, by 1490, printing was introduced into almost every European country (Tierney). The spread of literacy between 1500 and 1800, and the rise in silent reading, helped to create a new private sphere into which the individual could retreat, seeking refuge from the community (Chartier). This new technology had its effects in the world of cookery as in so many spheres of culture (Mennell, All Manners). Trubek notes that cookbooks are the texts most often used by culinary historians, since they usually contain all the requisite materials for analysing a cuisine: ingredients, method, technique, and presentation. Printed cookbooks, beginning in the early modern period, provide culinary historians with sources of evidence of the culinary past. Historians have argued that social differences can be expressed by the way and type of food we consume. Cookbooks are now widely accepted as valid socio-cultural and historic documents (Folch, Sherman), and indeed the link between literacy levels and the protestant tradition has been expressed through the study of Danish cookbooks (Gold). From Apicius, Taillevent, La Varenne, and Menon to Bradley, Smith, Raffald, Acton, and Beeton, how can both manuscript and printed cookbooks be analysed as historic documents? What is the difference between a manuscript and a printed cookbook? Barbara Ketchum Wheaton, who has been studying cookbooks for over half a century and is honorary curator of the culinary collection in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, has developed a methodology to read historic cookbooks using a structured approach. For a number of years she has been giving seminars to scholars from multidisciplinary fields on how to read historic cookbooks. This paper draws on the author’s experiences attending Wheaton’s seminar in Harvard, and on supervising the use of this methodology at both Masters and Doctoral level (Cashman; Mac Con Iomaire, and Cashman). Manuscripts versus Printed Cookbooks A fundamental difference exists between manuscript and printed cookbooks in their relationship with the public and private domain. Manuscript cookbooks are by their very essence intimate, relatively unedited and written with an eye to private circulation. Culinary manuscripts follow the diurnal and annual tasks of the household. They contain recipes for cures and restoratives, recipes for cleansing products for the house and the body, as well as the expected recipes for cooking and preserving all manners of food. Whether manuscript or printed cookbook, the recipes contained within often act as a reminder of how laborious the production of food could be in the pre-industrialised world (White). Printed cookbooks draw oxygen from the very fact of being public. They assume a “literate population with sufficient discretionary income to invest in texts that commodify knowledge” (Folch). This process of commoditisation brings knowledge from the private to the public sphere. There exists a subset of cookbooks that straddle this divide, for example, Mrs. Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery (1806), which brought to the public domain her distillation of a lifetime of domestic experience. Originally intended for her daughters alone, Rundell’s book was reprinted regularly during the nineteenth century with the last edition printed in 1893, when Mrs. Beeton had been enormously popular for over thirty years (Mac Con Iomaire, and Cashman). Barbara Ketchum Wheaton’s Structured Approach Cookbooks can be rewarding, surprising and illuminating when read carefully with due effort in understanding them as cultural artefacts. However, Wheaton notes that: “One may read a single old cookbook and find it immensely entertaining. One may read two and begin to find intriguing similarities and differences. When the third cookbook is read, one’s mind begins to blur, and one begins to sense the need for some sort of method in approaching these documents” (“Finding”). Following decades of studying cookbooks from both sides of the Atlantic and writing a seminal text on the French at table from 1300-1789 (Wheaton, Savouring the Past), this combined experience negotiating cookbooks as historical documents was codified, and a structured approach gradually articulated and shared within a week long seminar format. In studying any cookbook, regardless of era or country of origin, the text is broken down into five different groupings, to wit: ingredients; equipment or facilities; the meal; the book as a whole; and, finally, the worldview. A particular strength of Wheaton’s seminars is the multidisciplinary nature of the approaches of students who attend, which throws the study of cookbooks open to wide ranging techniques. Students with a purely scientific training unearth interesting patterns by developing databases of the frequency of ingredients or techniques, and cross referencing them with other books from similar or different timelines or geographical regions. Patterns are displayed in graphs or charts. Linguists offer their own unique lens to study cookbooks, whereas anthropologists and historians ask what these objects can tell us about how our ancestors lived and drew meaning from life. This process is continuously refined, and each grouping is discussed below. Ingredients The geographic origins of the ingredients are of interest, as is the seasonality and the cost of the foodstuffs within the scope of each cookbook, as well as the sensory quality both separately and combined within different recipes. In the medieval period, the use of spices and large joints of butchers meat and game were symbols of wealth and status. However, when the discovery of sea routes to the New World and to the Far East made spices more available and affordable to the middle classes, the upper classes spurned them. Evidence from culinary manuscripts in Georgian Ireland, for example, suggests that galangal was more easily available in Dublin during the eighteenth century than in the mid-twentieth century. A new aesthetic, articulated by La Varenne in his Le Cuisinier Francois (1651), heralded that food should taste of itself, and so exotic ingredients such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger were replaced by the local bouquet garni, and stocks and sauces became the foundations of French haute cuisine (Mac Con Iomaire). Some combinations of flavours and ingredients were based on humoral physiology, a long held belief system based on the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, now discredited by modern scientific understanding. The four humors are blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. It was believed that each of these humors would wax and wane in the body, depending on diet and activity. Galen (131-201 AD) believed that warm food produced yellow bile and that cold food produced phlegm. It is difficult to fathom some combinations of ingredients or the manner of service without comprehending the contemporary context within they were consumeSome ingredients found in Roman cookbooks, such as “garum” or “silphium” are no longer available. It is suggested that the nearest substitute for garum also known as “liquamen”—a fermented fish sauce—would be Naam Plaa, or Thai fish sauce (Grainger). Ingredients such as tea and white bread, moved from the prerogative of the wealthy over time to become the staple of the urban poor. These ingredients, therefore, symbolise radically differing contexts during the seventeenth century than in the early twentieth century. Indeed, there are other ingredients such as hominy (dried maize kernel treated with alkali) or grahams (crackers made from graham flour) found in American cookbooks that require translation to the unacquainted non-American reader. There has been a growing number of food encyclopaedias published in recent years that assist scholars in identifying such commodities (Smith, Katz, Davidson). The Cook’s Workplace, Techniques, and Equipment It is important to be aware of the type of kitchen equipment used, the management of heat and cold within the kitchen, and also the gradual spread of the industrial revolution into the domestic sphere. Visits to historic castles such as Hampton Court Palace where nowadays archaeologists re-enact life below stairs in Tudor times give a glimpse as to how difficult and labour intensive food production was. Meat was spit-roasted in front of huge fires by spit boys. Forcemeats and purees were manually pulped using mortar and pestles. Various technological developments including spit-dogs, and mechanised pulleys, replaced the spit boys, the most up to date being the mechanised rotisserie. The technological advancements of two hundred years can be seen in the Royal Pavilion in Brighton where Marie-Antoinin Carême worked for the Prince Regent in 1816 (Brighton Pavilion), but despite the gleaming copper pans and high ceilings for ventilation, the work was still back breaking. Carême died aged forty-nine, “burnt out by the flame of his genius and the fumes of his ovens” (Ackerman 90). Mennell points out that his fame outlived him, resting on his books: Le Pâtissier Royal Parisien (1815); Le Pâtissier Pittoresque (1815); Le Maître d’Hôtel Français (1822); Le Cuisinier Parisien (1828); and, finally, L’Art de la Cuisine Française au Dix-Neuvième Siècle (1833–5), which was finished posthumously by his student Pluméry (All Manners). Mennell suggests that these books embody the first paradigm of professional French cuisine (in Kuhn’s terminology), pointing out that “no previous work had so comprehensively codified the field nor established its dominance as a point of reference for the whole profession in the way that Carême did” (All Manners 149). The most dramatic technological changes came after the industrial revolution. Although there were built up ovens available in bakeries and in large Norman households, the period of general acceptance of new cooking equipment that enclosed fire (such as the Aga stove) is from c.1860 to 1910, with gas ovens following in c.1910 to the 1920s) and Electricity from c.1930. New food processing techniques dates are as follows: canning (1860s), cooling and freezing (1880s), freeze drying (1950s), and motorised delivery vans with cooking (1920s–1950s) (den Hartog). It must also be noted that the supply of fresh food, and fish particularly, radically improved following the birth, and expansion of, the railways. To understand the context of the cookbook, one needs to be aware of the limits of the technology available to the users of those cookbooks. For many lower to middle class families during the twentieth century, the first cookbook they would possess came with their gas or electrical oven. Meals One can follow cooked dishes from the kitchen to the eating place, observing food presentation, carving, sequencing, and serving of the meal and table etiquette. Meal times and structure changed over time. During the Middle Ages, people usually ate two meals a day: a substantial dinner around noon and a light supper in the evening (Adamson). Some of the most important factors to consider are the manner in which meals were served: either à la française or à la russe. One of the main changes that occurred during the nineteenth century was the slow but gradual transfer from service à la française to service à la russe. From medieval times to the middle of the nineteenth century the structure of a formal meal was not by “courses”—as the term is now understood—but by “services”. Each service could comprise of a choice of dishes—both sweet and savoury—from which each guest could select what appealed to him or her most (Davidson). The philosophy behind this form of service was the forementioned humoral physiology— where each diner chose food based on the four humours of blood, yellow bile, black bile, or phlegm. Also known as le grand couvert, the à la française method made it impossible for the diners to eat anything that was beyond arm’s length (Blake, and Crewe). Smooth service, however, was the key to an effective à la russe dinner since servants controlled the flow of food (Eatwell). The taste and temperature of food took centre stage with the à la russe dinner as each course came in sequence. Many historic cookbooks offer table plans illustrating the suggested arrangement of dishes on a table for the à la française style of service. Many of these dishes might be re-used in later meals, and some dishes such as hashes and rissoles often utilised left over components of previous meals. There is a whole genre of cookbooks informing the middle class cooks how to be frugal and also how to emulate haute cuisine using cheaper or ersatz ingredients. The number dining and the manner in which they dined also changed dramatically over time. From medieval to Tudor times, there might be hundreds dining in large banqueting halls. By the Elizabethan age, a small intimate room where master and family dined alone replaced the old dining hall where master, servants, guests, and travellers had previously dined together (Spencer). Dining tables remained portable until the 1780s when tables with removable leaves were devised. By this time, the bread trencher had been replaced by one made of wood, or plate of pewter or precious metal in wealthier houses. Hosts began providing knives and spoons for their guests by the seventeenth century, with forks also appearing but not fully accepted until the eighteenth century (Mason). These silver utensils were usually marked with the owner’s initials to prevent their theft (Flandrin). Cookbooks as Objects and the World of Publishing A thorough examination of the manuscript or printed cookbook can reveal their physical qualities, including indications of post-publication history, the recipes and other matter in them, as well as the language, organization, and other individual qualities. What can the quality of the paper tell us about the book? Is there a frontispiece? Is the book dedicated to an employer or a patron? Does the author note previous employment history in the introduction? In his Court Cookery, Robert Smith, for example, not only mentions a number of his previous employers, but also outlines that he was eight years working with Patrick Lamb in the Court of King William, before revealing that several dishes published in Lamb’s Royal Cookery (1710) “were never made or practis’d (sic) by him and others are extreme defective and imperfect and made up of dishes unknown to him; and several of them more calculated at the purses than the Gôut of the guests”. Both Lamb and Smith worked for the English monarchy, nobility, and gentry, but produced French cuisine. Not all Britons were enamoured with France, however, with, for example Hannah Glasse asserting “if gentlemen will have French cooks, they must pay for French tricks” (4), and “So much is the blind folly of this age, that they would rather be imposed on by a French Booby, than give encouragement to an good English cook” (ctd. in Trubek 60). Spencer contextualises Glasse’s culinary Francophobia, explaining that whilst she was writing the book, the Jacobite army were only a few days march from London, threatening to cut short the Hanoverian lineage. However, Lehmann points out that whilst Glasse was overtly hostile to French cuisine, she simultaneously plagiarised its receipts. Based on this trickling down of French influences, Mennell argues that “there is really no such thing as a pure-bred English cookery book” (All Manners 98), but that within the assimilation and simplification, a recognisable English style was discernable. Mennell also asserts that Glasse and her fellow women writers had an enormous role in the social history of cooking despite their lack of technical originality (“Plagiarism”). It is also important to consider the place of cookbooks within the history of publishing. Albala provides an overview of the immense outpouring of dietary literature from the printing presses from the 1470s. He divides the Renaissance into three periods: Period I Courtly Dietaries (1470–1530)—targeted at the courtiers with advice to those attending banquets with many courses and lots of wine; Period II The Galenic Revival (1530–1570)—with a deeper appreciation, and sometimes adulation, of Galen, and when scholarship took centre stage over practical use. Finally Period III The Breakdown of Orthodoxy (1570–1650)—when, due to the ambiguities and disagreements within and between authoritative texts, authors were freer to pick the ideas that best suited their own. Nutrition guides were consistent bestsellers, and ranged from small handbooks written in the vernacular for lay audiences, to massive Latin tomes intended for practicing physicians. Albala adds that “anyone with an interest in food appears to have felt qualified to pen his own nutritional guide” (1). Would we have heard about Mrs. Beeton if her husband had not been a publisher? How could a twenty-five year old amass such a wealth of experience in household management? What role has plagiarism played in the history of cookbooks? It is interesting to note that a well worn copy of her book (Beeton) was found in the studio of Francis Bacon and it is suggested that he drew inspiration for a number of his paintings from the colour plates of animal carcasses and butcher’s meat (Dawson). Analysing the post-publication usage of cookbooks is valuable to see the most popular recipes, the annotations left by the owner(s) or user(s), and also if any letters, handwritten recipes, or newspaper clippings are stored within the leaves of the cookbook. The Reader, the Cook, the Eater The physical and inner lives and needs and skills of the individuals who used cookbooks and who ate their meals merit consideration. Books by their nature imply literacy. Who is the book’s audience? Is it the cook or is it the lady of the house who will dictate instructions to the cook? Numeracy and measurement is also important. Where clocks or pocket watches were not widely available, authors such as seventeenth century recipe writer Sir Kenelm Digby would time his cooking by the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Literacy amongst protestant women to enable them to read the Bible, also enabled them to read cookbooks (Gold). How did the reader or eater’s religion affect the food practices? Were there fast days? Were there substitute foods for fast days? What about special occasions? Do historic cookbooks only tell us about the food of the middle and upper classes? It is widely accepted today that certain cookbook authors appeal to confident cooks, while others appeal to competent cooks, and others still to more cautious cooks (Bilton). This has always been the case, as has the differentiation between the cookbook aimed at the professional cook rather than the amateur. Historically, male cookbook authors such as Patrick Lamb (1650–1709) and Robert Smith targeted the professional cook market and the nobility and gentry, whereas female authors such as Eliza Acton (1799–1859) and Isabella Beeton (1836–1865) often targeted the middle class market that aspired to emulate their superiors’ fashions in food and dining. How about Tavern or Restaurant cooks? When did they start to put pen to paper, and did what they wrote reflect the food they produced in public eateries? Conclusions This paper has offered an overview of Barbara Ketchum Wheaton’s methodology for reading historic cookbooks using a structured approach. It has highlighted some of the questions scholars and researchers might ask when faced with an old cookbook, regardless of era or geographical location. By systematically examining the book under the headings of ingredients; the cook’s workplace, techniques and equipment; the meals; cookbooks as objects and the world of publishing; and reader, cook and eater, the scholar can perform magic and extract much more from the cookbook than seems to be there on first appearance. References Ackerman, Roy. The Chef's Apprentice. London: Headline, 1988. Adamson, Melitta Weiss. Food in Medieval Times. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood P, 2004. Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Ed. Darra Goldstein. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Beeton, Isabella. Beeton's Book of Household Management. London: S. Beeton, 1861. 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Dawson, Barbara. “Francis Bacon and the Art of Food.” The Irish Times 6 April 2013. den Hartog, Adel P. “Technological Innovations and Eating out as a Mass Phenomenon in Europe: A Preamble.” Eating out in Europe: Picnics, Gourmet Dining and Snacks since the Late Eighteenth Century. Eds. Mark Jacobs and Peter Scholliers. Oxford: Berg, 2003. 263–80. Eatwell, Ann. “Á La Française to À La Russe, 1680-1930.” Elegant Eating: Four Hundred Years of Dining in Style. Eds. Philippa Glanville and Hilary Young. London: V&A, 2002. 48–52. Flandrin, Jean-Louis. “Distinction through Taste.” Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. A History of Private Lives: Volume III : Passions of the Renaissance. Ed. Roger Chartier. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap P of Harvard U, 1989. 265–307. Folch, Christine. “Fine Dining: Race in Pre-revolution Cuban Cookbooks.” Latin American Research Review 43.2 (2008): 205–23. Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy; Which Far Exceeds Anything of the Kind Ever Published. 4th Ed. London: The Author, 1745. Gold, Carol. Danish Cookbooks: Domesticity and National Identity, 1616-1901. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2007. Grainger, Sally. Cooking Apicius: Roman Recipes for Today. Totnes, Devon: Prospect, 2006. Hampton Court Palace. “The Tudor Kitchens.” 12 Jun 2013 ‹http://www.hrp.org.uk/HamptonCourtPalace/stories/thetudorkitchens› Katz, Solomon H. Ed. Encyclopedia of Food and Culture (3 Vols). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003. Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962. Lamb, Patrick. Royal Cookery:Or. The Complete Court-Cook. London: Abel Roper, 1710. Lehmann, Gilly. “English Cookery Books in the 18th Century.” The Oxford Companion to Food. Ed. Alan Davidson. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1999. 277–9. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. “The Changing Geography and Fortunes of Dublin’s Haute Cuisine Restaurants 1958–2008.” Food, Culture & Society 14.4 (2011): 525–45. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín, and Dorothy Cashman. “Irish Culinary Manuscripts and Printed Cookbooks: A Discussion.” Petit Propos Culinaires 94 (2011): 81–101. Mason, Laura. Food Culture in Great Britain. Ed. Ken Albala. Westport CT.: Greenwood P, 2004. Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1996. ---. “Plagiarism and Originality: Diffusionism in the Study of the History of Cookery.” Petits Propos Culinaires 68 (2001): 29–38. Sherman, Sandra. “‘The Whole Art and Mystery of Cooking’: What Cookbooks Taught Readers in the Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth Century Life 28.1 (2004): 115–35. Smith, Andrew F. Ed. The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. New York: Oxford U P, 2007. Spencer, Colin. British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History. London: Grub Street, 2004. Tierney, Mark. Europe and the World 1300-1763. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1970. Trubek, Amy B. Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Wheaton, Barbara. “Finding Real Life in Cookbooks: The Adventures of a Culinary Historian”. 2006. Humanities Research Group Working Paper. 9 Sep. 2009 ‹http://www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/HRG/article/view/22/27›. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savouring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300-1789. London: Chatto & Windus, 1983. White, Eileen, ed. The English Cookery Book: Historical Essays. Proceedings of the 16th Leeds Symposium on Food History 2001. Devon: Prospect, 2001.

Students are taught the study mnemonic PVT TIM HiLL to memorize nineindispensable amino acids (IAA); Phenylalanine, Valine, Threonine, Tryptophan,Isoleucine, Methionine, Histidine, Leucine, and Lysine.&nbsp; The Food and Animal Organization (FAO)recommended IAA be treated as individual nutrients on food labels because‘crude protein’ alone does not indicate protein quality.&nbsp; Protein quality, determined by digestible IAAscore (DIAAS) is calculated for three life stages; birth to 6 months; 6 monthsto 3 years, and 3 years and older.&nbsp; Foodspossessing DIAAS greater than 100 are “excellent” protein quality, DIAASbetween 75 and 99 are ‘good’, while foods with DIAAS &lt; 75 cannot make aprotein claim.&nbsp; Processing, heating,and(or) grinding can decrease or improve plant and animal IAA digestibility.For children six months to three years, ground pork, smoked-cooked bacon,cooked pork leg, cured ham, cooked pork loin, salami, beef/pork bologna, beefjerky, and medium and medium rare beef ribeye steaks can be described‘excellent’.&nbsp; Cooked ground beef can beclassified as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ depending on the study, while theImpossible and Beyond meat-alternative burgers and well-done ribeye can beclassified as ‘good’ sources of IAA for young children.&nbsp; For persons &gt; 3 years, all meat categoriesbut cooked ground beef can be classified ‘excellent’ sources of IAA.&nbsp; For meat alternatives, Impossible Burger®could be classified as ‘excellent’ but Beyond Burger® could only claim to be‘good’.&nbsp; Protein quality claims forindividual food ingredients can be diminished when consumed with a lowerprotein quality item such as a wheat flour bun.&nbsp;To provide meals that are adequate in all IAA, the protein quality ineach food item must be determined.&nbsp; Mixedmeals must be adjusted for protein quality by combining low quality proteins(present in cereals and grains) with higher quality proteins (present in foodsof animal origin).

ObjectivesThe objective of this study was to determine if an increased brine temperature could impact smokehouse yield, sensory characteristics, and color scores of bacon.Materials and MethodsFresh pork bellies (n = 30) were randomly assigned to one of three brine temperatures: –1°C (COLD), 10°C (MED), and 21°C (WARM). Bellies were injected using a multi-needle injector at 13% of the green weight containing a 1.5% salt inclusion level. All bellies were heat treated in a smokehouse to 50°C. Bellies were chilled for 24 h to an internal temperature of 4°C. After chilling, weights were measured to calculate smokehouse yield. Bellies were tempered to –4°C, sliced 4 mm in thickness, and vacuum packaged into 0.22 kg packages. Samples from each treatment were placed under UV lighting to mimic a retail setting. Trained sensory and color panels were conducted on d 1, 7, 14, 21, 28, and 35. Panelists evaluated sliced bacon packages for cured color intensity, cured color characterization, cured color fading, and off odor. Samples were cooked in a convection oven for 15 min at 177°C and were evaluated for saltiness, oxidized flavor, and flavor intensity. Data were analyzed using the MIXED models procedure of SAS. Least-squares means were computed for each dependent variable, and statistically separated by a pair-wise t-test with predetermined α = 0.05.ResultsGreen weight pump percentage, smokehouse weight percentage, and chilled weight percentage for all treatments were similar (P > 0.05). Trained sensory panel results revealed no significant differences (P > 0.05) for salt flavor between treatments on d 1, 28, and 35. The MED brine was more acceptable than the COLD and WARM brines for salt flavor on d 7 and 14 (P < 0.05). Oxidized flavor on d 1, 7, 14, 21, and 28 were similar for all treatments (P > 0.05), but by d 35 the COLD treatment had significantly less oxidized flavor than the MED and WARM treatments. No significant differences (P > 0.05) were found for flavor intensity between treatments for each day. No differences (P > 0.05) were found between treatments on d 1, 7, or 14 for cured color intensity and characterization. However, on d 21 and 35 the MED brine temperature had the most intense cured color (P < 0.05). On d 35, cured color characterization for the MED brine revealed a darker cured color (P < 0.05) compared to the COLD treatment but was similar to the WARM treatment. Cured color fading showed no differences (P > 0.05) between treatments on d 1, 7, 14, 21, and 28. On d 35 the COLD brine exhibited significantly (P < 0.05) higher levels of cured color fading compared to both the MED and WARM brines. No significant differences were found between treatments for all days for off odor (P > 0.05); however, d 35 was significantly higher than all other days within treatments (P < 0.05).ConclusionProcessing yields were not significantly affected by brine temperature. Salt flavor and flavor intensity were not affected by brine temperature. In conclusion, cured meat color and oxidized flavor can be affected by brine temperature.

Background: Evidence from prospective cohort studies indicates that consumption of processed meats is associated with higher incidence of CHD. Processed meats are high in saturated fatty acids, cholesterol, and preservatives including sodium that may unfavorably influence blood pressure (BP), but evidence is limited. We therefore investigated associations with BP of unprocessed and processed meat consumption, including types of processed meats. Methods: We used cross-sectional data from the INTERMAP Study on 4,680 men and women aged 40-59 years from Japan, China, UK, and US. During four visits, eight BPs and four 24-hr dietary recalls were collected. Processed meats included preserved meats; fresh processed meats (ready-made, salted, and/or spiced, no curing), bacon, ham (cured and cooked), cold cuts and sausages, and canned meat products. Country-specific linear regression coefficients were estimated and pooled, weighted by inverse of their variance. Adjustments were made for demographic (age, gender, sample), lifestyle (total energy, alcohol, smoking, education, supplement use, adherence to special diet, low-fat dairy, fruit, vegetables, fiber-rich grain products, fish and shellfish), and clinical confounders (history of cardiovascular diseases or diabetes, family history of hypertension, use of anti-hypertensive, cardiovascular, or diabetes medication, BMI). The influence of adjustment for urinary sodium, total cholesterol, and total saturated fatty acids was additionally investigated. Results: Average daily unprocessed/processed meat consumption (g/1000 kcal) was 41/10 in Asian participants and 82/47 in Western participants. In Western participants, processed meats comprised fresh processed meat (36%), cold cuts and sausages (34%), ham (16%), and bacon (7%). Meat consumption was not associated with BP in Asian participants. After adjustment for demographic and lifestyle factors, significant associations with systolic BP were observed per each 50 g/1000 kcal higher intake of unprocessed (+1.19 mm Hg, P=0.02) and processed (+2.00 mm Hg, P=0.01) meat consumption in Western participants. However, these associations attenuated and did not remain significant after adjustment for BMI. We further examined types of processed meat in Western participants. Consumption of cold cuts and sausages higher by 12,5 g/1000 kcal was associated with a systolic BP difference of +0.72 mm Hg (P=0.02). Consumption of ham higher by 12,5 g/1000 kcal was associated with a systolic BP difference of -0.92 mm Hg (P=0.03). These associations prevailed after adjustment for urinary sodium excretion, intakes of saturated fatty acids, and total cholesterol. Conclusion: Unprocessed and processed meat consumption was not associated with BP, however, some types of processed meat may influence BP in opposite directions.

Introduction The recipe is more than just a list of ingredients and the instructions on how to prepare a particular dish. Recipes also are, as Janet Floyd and Laurel Foster argue, a form of narrative that tells a myriad of stories, “of family sagas and community, of historical and cultural moments and also of personal histories and narratives of self” (Floyd and Forster 2). Among the most intimate and personal sources of recipes are manuscript cookbooks. These typically contained original handwritten recipes created by the author as well as those shared by family and friends; some recipes were copied from published cookbooks or clipped out of newspapers and magazines. However, these books are more than a mere collection of recipes and domestic instructions, they also paint a unique and vivid picture of the life of their authors. These manuscript cookbooks were a common sight in many Australian colonial kitchens, yet they are a rarely examined and rich archival source that provides a valuable insight into foodways, material culture, and the lives and social relationships of the women who created them. This article will examine the manuscript cookbook created by Phillis Clark in the Darling Downs during the 1860s. Through a close examination of Clark’s manuscript cookbook, this article will explore colonial domestic habits and the cultural context in which they were formed. It will also highlight the historical value of manuscript cookbooks as social texts that chronicle daily life, both inside and outside the kitchen, in colonial Australia. A Colonial Woman Phillis Clark was born in Tasmania in 1836. She was the daughter of Charles Seal, the pioneer of the whaling industry in that state. In 1858 she married Charles George Clark, the eldest son of a well-known Tasmanian family. Both the Seal and Clark families were at the centre of social and political life in Tasmania. In 1861, the couple moved to Talgai, twenty two kilometres north-west of Warwick in the Darling Downs region of Queensland. Here, Charles Clark established himself as a storekeeper and became a partner in the Ellinthorp Steam Flour Mills, the first successful flour mill in Queensland (Waterson 3). He also represented Warwick in the Queensland Legislative assembly between 1871 and 1873. Clark’s brother, George Clark, also settled in the area together with his wife and family. In 1868, both families set up home in adjoining properties known as East Talgai and West Talgai. This joint property, with its well manicured gardens, English trees, and fruit orchard, has been described as a small oasis “in an empty, brown and dusty summer landscape” (Waterson, Squatter 19). The Manuscript Sometime during this period Clark began to compile her very own manuscript cookbook. The front of Clark’s manuscript is dated 1866, yet there is ample evidence to suggest that she began work on this manuscript some years earlier. Clark was scrupulous in acknowledging the sources of her recipes, a habit common to many manuscript cookbook authors (Newlyn 35). She also initialled her own creations, firstly with P.S., for her maiden name Phillis Seal, and later P.S.C. for Phillis Seal Clark, her married name. By 1866 Clarke had been married for eight years so it can be assumed that she commenced her manuscript some time before 1858. A number of the recipes that appear in the manuscript appear to be credited to people living in Tasmania. Furthermore, a number of the newspaper clippings found in her manuscript can be dated to before 1866, including one for 1861. The manuscript itself is a hard bound and lined notebook, sturdy enough to withstand the rigours of daily use in the kitchen. The majority of recipes are handwritten but there are also a number of recipes clipped from newspapers interspaced within the manuscript. The handwritten recipes are in a neat copperplate style and all appear to be written in the same hand. The recipes are not found in distinct sections, although there are some small clusters of particular types of recipes, highlighting the fact that they were added to the manuscript over a period of time. At the front of the manuscript there is a detailed index noting the page number on which each recipe is to be found. The recipes themselves follow the standard conventions of the period. The Sources The sources from which Clark gathered some of the recipes in her manuscript indicate the variety of texts that were available to her. There are a number of newspaper clippings pasted in the pages of her manuscript for a range of both recipes for foods as well as the so-called domestic remedies (medicines) and receipts for household products. Amongst the food recipes there are to be found instructions in the making of cream cheese in the Irish manner and a recipe for stewed shoulder of mutton as well as two different methods for preparing kangaroo. While it is impossible to fully know what newspapers all these clippings have been taken from, at least one of them came from the Darling Downs Gazette and General Advertiser and it is likely that some of them might also have come from a number of the local Warwick papers (one which was founded by her brother-in-law George Clark) that were in publication during Clark’s residence in the area. Clark also utilised a number of published cookbooks as sources for some of the recipes in her own manuscripts. Like most Australians until the last few decades of the nineteenth century, Clark would have mainly resorted to the British cookbooks that were available. The two most commonly acknowledged cookbooks in her manuscript were Enquire Within Upon Everything and Eliza Acton’s. Enquire Within Upon Everything was an immensely popular general household guide amassing eighty-nine editions in a little over forty years in print. It contained information on a plethora of subjects (over three thousand individual entries) including such topics as etiquette, first aid, domestic hints, and recipes. It first appeared on the British market in 1856, under the editorship of Robert Kemp Philp, and became available in Australia in the same year. Booksellers in the Darling Downs advertised copies of the book for the price of three shillings and six pence. Eliza Acton, for her part, was one of Britain’s leading cookbook authors. Her books were widely available throughout the colonies with copies advertised for sale by J. Walch and Sons booksellers in Hobart (‘Advertising’ 1). Extracts from her cookbook Modern Cookery for Private Families began to appear in Australian newspapers only months after it first was published in Britain in 1845 (‘Bullion’ 4). Although Modern Cookery did not provide any recipes directly catering for Australian conditions, its simple and straightforward approach to cookery made it an invaluable resource in the colonial kitchen. Such was the popularity and reputation of Acton’s work that in the preface to Australia’s first cookbook, The English and Australian Cookery Book, the author, Tasmanian born Edward Abbott, stated that he hoped that his cook book would posses “all the advantages of Mrs. Acton’s work” (Abbott vi). The range of printed sources contained within Clark’s manuscript indicate that women in colonial households were far from isolated from the culinary trends occurring in other parts of Australia and the wider British empire. The Recipes Like many Australian women of her class and generation, Phillis Clark reproduced the predominant British food culture in her kitchen. The great majority of recipes contained in her manuscript are for typically English dishes, particularly those for sweet dishes such as biscuits, cakes, and puddings. Plum pudding, trifle, and custard pudding are all featured in her book. As well, many of the savoury dishes such as curry, roast beef, and Yorkshire pudding similarly reflect the British palate. In There is No Taste like Home: The Food of Empire, Adele Wessell argues that the maintenance of British food habits in Australia was a device to reaffirm “cultural and historical bonds and sustain a shared sense of British identity” (811). However, as in many other rural kitchens, native ingredients also found a place. Her manuscript included a number of recipes for the preparation of kangaroo and detailed instructions for the butchering of the animal. Clark’s recipe for “Jugged Hare or Kangaroo” bares a close resemblance to the one that appears in Edward Abbott’s cookbook. Clark’s father and Abbott were from the same, small social milieu in colonial Hobart and were both active in the same political causes. This raises the intriguing possibility that Phillis also knew Abbott and came into contact with some of his culinary ideas. Australians consumed all manners of native ingredients, not only as a matter of necessity but also as a matter of choice. The inclusion of freshly killed native game in Clark’s kitchen would have served to alleviate the monotony of the salted beef and mutton that were common staples during this period. The distinct Australian flavour that began to appear in manuscript cookbooks like Clark’s would later be replicated in their printed counterparts. Australian cookbooks published in the last decades of the nineteenth century demonstrate the importance of native ingredients in colonial kitchens (Singley 37). The Darling Downs region had been a popular destination for German migrants from the 1850s and Clark’s manuscript contained a number of recipes for German dishes. This included one for the traditional German Christmas cake Lebkuchen as well as for various German puddings and biscuits. Clark also included an elaborate recipe for making ham or bacon in the traditional Westphalian fashion. This was a laborious process that involved vigorously rubbing salt, sugar, and beer into the leg of ham every day for a fortnight after which it is then hung to dry for a couple of days and then smoked. Katie Hume, a fellow Darling Downs resident and a close friend of the extended Clark family described feeling like a “gute verstandige Hausfrau” (a good sensible housewife) after salting 112 pounds of pork she had purchased from a neighbour (152). While, unlike their counterparts in the Barossa valley in South Australia, the Germans who lived in the Darling Downs area did not leave a significant mark on the local culinary landscape, the inclusion of German recipes in Clark’s manuscript indicates that there was not only some cross-cultural transmission of culinary knowledge, but also some willingness to go beyond traditional British fare. Many, more mundane recipes also populate Clark’s manuscript. “Toad in a Hole”, “Mutton Pie” and “Stewed Sirloin” all merit an entry. Yet, even with such simple dishes, Clark demonstrated a keen eye for detail. This is attested by her method for the preparation of a simple dish of roasted pumpkin: “Cut into slices 1 inch thick and about 5 inches long, have ready a baking dish with boiling fat—lay the slices in it so that the fat will cover them and bake for 20 minutes (by fat I mean good dripping) Half an hour will not bake them too much. They ought to be brown” (Clark 13). Whilst Clark’s manuscript is not indicative of the foodways of all classes across Queensland society, it does provide some insight as to what was consumed at the table of a well-heeled rural household. As the wife of a prominent businessman and a local dignitary, Phillis Clark would have also undoubtedly been called upon to play the role of hostess and to entertain her husband’s commercial and political acquaintances. Her manuscript also reflects the overwhelmingly British nature of colonial Australian foodways despite the intrusion of some foreign dishes. As Anne Murcott argues, the preparation and consumption of food provides a way through which individuals can express the more abstract significance of cultural values and social systems (204). The Clark household also showed some interest in producing a broad range of products in the home. There are, for example, a number of recipes for beverages including those for non-alcoholic ginger beers and flavoured cordials. They were also far from abstemious, with recipes for wine, mead, and ale included in the manuscript. This last recipe was given to her by her brother Alfred who, according to Clark, “understands brewing and therefore I think it can be depended upon” (Clark 43). Clark also bottled her own fruit, made a wide range of jams, including grape and mock melon, as well as making her own butter, confectionery, and vinegar. The production of goods like these within the home indicates the level of self-reliance in many colonial households, particularly those finding themselves far from the convenience of shops and markets. Many culinary historians argue that there exists a significant time lag between the initial appearance and consumption of a particular dish in a society and its subsequent appearance in the pages of a cookbook. This time lag can be between forty and 150 years long (Mennell 44; Mason 23). However, manuscript cookbooks reflect the immediacy of eating practices. The very personal nature of manuscript cookbooks would suggest that the recipes included within their pages were ones that the author intended to use in her own kitchen. Moreover, from the reciprocal nature of recipe sharing that is evident from these types of cookbooks it can be concluded that the recipes in Clark’s manuscript were ones that, at least in her own social milieu, were in common usage. In her manuscript Clark clearly noted those recipes which she especially liked or otherwise found useful. Many recipes throughout the manuscript have been marked as “proved” indicating that Clark had used and tested them at some stage. A number of them have also been favourably annotated as being “delicious”, “very nice”, “the best”, and “very good”. Amongst the number of recipes for “Soda Cake” that feature in the manuscript Clarke clearly indicates that “Number 1 is the best”. However, she was not averse to commenting on recipes and altering them to suit her taste. In a recipe for “A nice light Cake”, for example, Clark noted that the addition of a “little peel and currants is an improvement” (89). This form of marginal intrusion was a common practice amongst many women and it can even be seen in the margins of many published cookbooks (Theophano 186). These annotations, according to Sandra Sherman, are not transgressive, since the manuscripts are not authored “by” anyone (Sherman 121). In fact, annotations personalise the recipe and confirm the compiler’s confidence in it (Sherman 121). Not Just Food: ‘Domestic Receipts’ As noted above, Clark’s manuscript contained more than just recipes for food and drink. Many of them are “Domestic Receipts” that reflect the complex nature of running a household in rural Australia. Some of Clark’s domestic receipts are in the form of newspaper clippings and are general instructions for the manufacture of simple household products such as a “ready to use glue” and a home-made tooth powder. Others are handwritten and copied from other domestic advice books or were given to Clark by family and friends. A recipe for manufacturing “blacking for stoves”, essential in the maintenance of cast iron stoves, was, for example, culled from Enquire Within Upon Everything. Here, with some authorial intrusion, Clark includes her own list of measured ingredients to prepare the mixture. An intriguing method for the “artificial preparation of ice” involving the use of ammonium nitrate and bicarbonate of soda was given to Clark by Mrs. McKeachie, the wife of Charles Clark’s business partner. Clark also showed an interest in beekeeping and in raising turkeys, with instructions for both these tasks included in her manuscript. The wide range of miscellaneous receipts featured in Clark’s book highlights the breadth of activities that were carried out in many homes in rural Australia. A hint of Clark’s artistic side is also in evidence, with detailed instructions on how to create delicate fern impressions on paper also included in her book. As with many other women in colonial Australia, Clark was expected to take on the role of caregiver when members of her family fell ill or were injured. Her manuscript included a number of recipes for “domestic remedies”, another common trope in books of this kind as well as in their printed counterparts. These remedies included recipes for a cough mixture composed of linseed, liquorice, and water and a liniment to treat rheumatism which was made by mixing rape seed oil and turpentine with a hefty dose of laudanum. Clark used olive oil in a number of medical recipes to treat burns and scalds. As well, treatments for diphtheria, cholera, and diarrhoea feature prominently in her manuscript. The Darling Downs had been subject to a number of outbreaks of dysentery and cholera during Clark’s residency in the area (Waterson, Squatter 71). For “a pain in the chest” Clark recommended the following: “a piece of brown paper spread with tallow and placed on the chest” (69).The inclusion of these domestic remedies and Clark’s obvious concerns for her family’s health is particularly poignant given her personal history. Her family was plagued by misfortune and illness and she lost three of her ten children in a six-year period including two within just months of each other. Clark herself would die during childbirth in 1874. Sharing and Caring The word “recipe” has its origins in the Latin recipere meaning to “receive”. In order to receive there has to be, by implication, someone doing the giving. A recipe signifies an exchange and a connection between individuals. The sharing of recipes was a common activity for many women in nineteenth century Australia. Wilhelmina Rawson, Queensland’s first published cookbook author, was keenly aware of the manner in which women shared recipes and culinary knowledge. This act of reciprocity, she argued, not only helped to ease the isolation of bush living but also allowed each individual to be “benefited by the cleverness of the whole number” (14). For many, food often has a deeply private and personal component, being prepared and consumed within the realm of the home. However, food is also a communal experience and is openly shared through rituals, feasts, the contexts in which it is bought and sold, and, most importantly, reciprocal exchange. In her manuscript, Clark acknowledged a number of different individuals as the source for the recipes she included within its pages. The convention of acknowledging the sources of recipes in manuscript cookbooks functions as a way to assert the recipe’s authority and to ensure that they are proven (Sherman 122). This act of acknowledgement also locates Clark within a social network of women who not only shared recipes but also, one can imagine, many of the vicissitudes of domestic life in a remote rural setting. In her study of women’s manuscript cookbooks, entitled Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote, Janet Theophano describes these texts as “the maps of the social and cultural life they inhabited” (13). This circulation of recipes allowed women to share their knowledge, skills, and creativity. Those who received and used these recipes not only engaged in a conversation with the writer of these recipes but also formed a connection with a broader community that allowed them to learn more about themselves and the world. Conclusion The manuscript cookbook created by Phillis Clark is a fascinating prism through which to explore domestic life in colonial Australia. The recipes contained in Clark’s manuscript reflect the eating habits of her own family and those of a particular social class in Queensland. They not only demonstrate the tenacity of British foodways in Australia but also show the degree of culinary adventurism that existed in some homes. The personal, almost autobiographical nature of manuscript cookbooks also provides an intimate view in the life of its creator. In the splattered pages of Phillis Clark’s book we can read the many travails, joys, and tragedies of her life. References Abbott, Edward. The English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many, as Well as for the Upper Ten Thousand. London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1864. ‘Advertising’. Launceston Examiner 9 Mar. 1858: 1. ‘Boullion, The Common Soup of France’. The Sydney Morning Herald 22 Aug. 1845: 4. Clark, Phillis. “Manuscript Cookbook”. 1863 Floyd, Janet, and Laurel Forster. “The Recipe in Its Cultural Content.” The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions. Ed. Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate. 2003. Hume, Anna Kate. Katie Hume on the Darling Downs, a Colonial Marriage: Letters of a Colonial Lady, 1866-1871. Ed. Nancy Bonnin. Toowoomba: DDIP, 1985. Mason, Laura. Food Culture in Great Britain. Greenwood, 2004. Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford, UK: B. Blackwell, 1985. Murcott, Anne. “The Cultural Significance of Food and Eating”. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society 41.02 (1982): 203–10. Newlyn, Andrea K. “Redefining ‘Rudimentary’ Narrative: Women’s Nineteenth Century Manuscript Cookbooks”. The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions. Ed. Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2003. Rawson, Wilhelmina. Australian Enquiry Book of Household and General Information: A Practical Guide for the Cottage, Villa and Bush Home. Melbourne: Pater and Knapton, 1894. Sherman, S. “‘The Whole Art and Mystery of Cooking’: What Cookbooks Taught Readers in the Eighteenth Century”. Eighteenth-Century Life 28.1 (2004): 115–35. Singley, Blake. “‘Hardly Anything Fit for Man to Eat’: Food and Colonialism in Australia.” History Australia 9.3 (2012): 27–42. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York, N.Y: Palgrave, 2002. Waterson, D. B. “A Darling Downs Quartet”. Queensland Heritage 1.7 (1967): 3–14. Waterson, D. B. Squatter, Selector and Storekeeper: A History of the Darling Downs, 1859-93. Sydney: Sydney UP, 1968. Wessell, Adele. “There’s No Taste Like Home: The Food of Empire”. Exploring the British World: Identity, Cultural Production, Institutions. Ed. Kate Darian-Smith and Patricia Grimshaw. Melbourne: RMIT, 2004.

In Ireland today, we eat more pigmeat per capita, approximately 32.4 kilograms, than any other meat, yet you very seldom if ever see a pig (C.S.O.). Fat and flavour are two words that are synonymous with pig meat, yet scientists have spent the last thirty years cross breeding to produce leaner, low-fat pigs. Today’s pig professionals prefer to use the term “pig finishing” as opposed to the more traditional “pig fattening” (Tuite). The pig evokes many themes in relation to cuisine. Charles Lamb (1775-1834), in his essay Dissertation upon Roast Pig, cites Confucius in attributing the accidental discovery of the art of roasting to the humble pig. The pig has been singled out by many cultures as a food to be avoided or even abhorred, and Harris (1997) illustrates the environmental effect this avoidance can have by contrasting the landscape of Christian Albania with that of Muslim Albania.This paper will focus on the pig in Irish cuisine and culture from ancient times to the present day. The inspiration for this paper comes from a folklore tale about how Saint Martin created the pig from a piece of fat. The story is one of a number recorded by Seán Ó Conaill, the famous Kerry storyteller and goes as follows:From St Martin’s fat they were made. He was travelling around, and one night he came to a house and yard. At that time there were only cattle; there were no pigs or piglets. He asked the man of the house if there was anything to eat the chaff and the grain. The man replied there were only the cattle. St Martin said it was a great pity to have that much chaff going to waste. At night when they were going to bed, he handed a piece of fat to the servant-girl and told her to put it under a tub, and not to look at it at all until he would give her the word next day. The girl did so, but she kept a bit of the fat and put it under a keeler to find out what it would be.When St Martin rose next day he asked her to go and lift up the tub. She lifted it up, and there under it were a sow and twelve piglets. It was a great wonder to them, as they had never before seen pig or piglet.The girl then went to the keeler and lifted it, and it was full of mice and rats! As soon as the keeler was lifted, they went running about the house searching for any hole that they could go into. When St Martin saw them, he pulled off one of his mittens and threw it at them and made a cat with that throw. And that is why the cat ever since goes after mice and rats (Ó Conaill).The place of the pig has long been established in Irish literature, and longer still in Irish topography. The word torc, a boar, like the word muc, a pig, is a common element of placenames, from Kanturk (boar’s head) in West Cork to Ros Muc (headland of pigs) in West Galway. The Irish pig had its place in literature well established long before George Orwell’s English pig, Major, headed the dictatorship in Animal Farm. It was a wild boar that killed the hero Diarmaid in the Fenian tale The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne, on top of Ben Bulben in County Sligo (Mac Con Iomaire). In Ancient and Medieval Ireland, wild boars were hunted with great fervour, and the prime cuts were reserved for the warrior classes, and certain other individuals. At a feast, a leg of pork was traditionally reserved for a king, a haunch for a queen, and a boar’s head for a charioteer. The champion warrior was given the best portion of meat (Curath Mhir or Champions’ Share), and fights often took place to decide who should receive it. Gantz (1981) describes how in the ninth century tale The story of Mac Dathó’s Pig, Cet mac Matach, got supremacy over the men of Ireland: “Moreover he flaunted his valour on high above the valour of the host, and took a knife in his hand and sat down beside the pig. “Let someone be found now among the men of Ireland”, said he, “to endure battle with me, or leave the pig for me to divide!”It did not take long before the wild pigs were domesticated. Whereas cattle might be kept for milk and sheep for wool, the only reason for pig rearing was as a source of food. Until the late medieval period, the “domesticated” pigs were fattened on woodland mast, the fruit of the beech, oak, chestnut and whitethorn, giving their flesh a delicious flavour. So important was this resource that it is acknowledged by an entry in the Annals of Clonmacnoise for the year 1038: “There was such an abundance of ackornes this yeare that it fattened the pigges [runts] of pigges” (Sexton 45). In another mythological tale, two pig keepers, one called ‘friuch’ after the boars bristle (pig keeper to the king of Munster) and the other called ‘rucht’ after its grunt (pig keeper to the king of Connacht), were such good friends that the one from the north would bring his pigs south when there was a mast of oak and beech nuts in Munster. If the mast fell in Connacht, the pig-keeper from the south would travel northward. Competitive jealousy sparked by troublemakers led to the pig keepers casting spells on each other’s herds to the effect that no matter what mast they ate they would not grow fat. Both pig keepers were practised in the pagan arts and could form themselves into any shape, and having been dismissed by their kings for the leanness of their pig herds due to the spells, they eventually formed themselves into the two famous bulls that feature in the Irish Epic The Táin (Kinsella).In the witty and satirical twelfth century text, The Vision of Mac Conglinne (Aisling Mhic Conglinne), many references are made to the various types of pig meat. Bacon, hams, sausages and puddings are often mentioned, and the gate to the fortress in the visionary land of plenty is described thus: “there was a gate of tallow to it, whereon was a bolt of sausage” (Jackson).Although pigs were always popular in Ireland, the emergence of the potato resulted in an increase in both human and pig populations. The Irish were the first Europeans to seriously consider the potato as a staple food. By 1663 it was widely accepted in Ireland as an important food plant and by 1770 it was known as the Irish Potato (Mac Con Iomaire and Gallagher). The potato transformed Ireland from an under populated island of one million in the 1590s to 8.2 million in 1840, making it the most densely populated country in Europe. Two centuries of genetic evolution resulted in potato yields growing from two tons per acre in 1670 to ten tons per acre in 1800. A constant supply of potato, which was not seen as a commercial crop, ensured that even the smallest holding could keep a few pigs on a potato-rich diet. Pat Tuite, an expert on pigs with Teagasc, the Irish Agricultural and Food Development Authority, reminded me that the potatoes were cooked for the pigs and that they also enjoyed whey, the by product of both butter and cheese making (Tuite). The agronomist, Arthur Young, while travelling through Ireland, commented in 1770 that in the town of Mitchelstown in County Cork “there seemed to be more pigs than human beings”. So plentiful were pigs at this time that on the eve of the Great Famine in 1841 the pig population was calculated to be 1,412,813 (Sexton 46). Some of the pigs were kept for home consumption but the rest were a valuable source of income and were shown great respect as the gentleman who paid the rent. Until the early twentieth century most Irish rural households kept some pigs.Pork was popular and was the main meat eaten at all feasts in the main houses; indeed a feast was considered incomplete without a whole roasted pig. In the poorer holdings, fresh pork was highly prized, as it was only available when a pig of their own was killed. Most of the pig was salted, placed in the brine barrel for a period or placed up the chimney for smoking.Certain superstitions were observed concerning the time of killing. Pigs were traditionally killed only in months that contained the letter “r”, since the heat of the summer months caused the meat to turn foul. In some counties it was believed that pigs should be killed under the full moon (Mahon 58). The main breed of pig from the medieval period was the Razor Back or Greyhound Pig, which was very efficient in converting organic waste into meat (Fitzgerald). The killing of the pig was an important ritual and a social occasion in rural Ireland, for it meant full and plenty for all. Neighbours, who came to help, brought a handful of salt for the curing, and when the work was done each would get a share of the puddings and the fresh pork. There were a number of days where it was traditional to kill a pig, the Michaelmas feast (29 September), Saint Martins Day (11 November) and St Patrick’s Day (17 March). Olive Sharkey gives a vivid description of the killing of the barrow pig in rural Ireland during the 1930s. A barrow pig is a male pig castrated before puberty:The local slaughterer (búistéir) a man experienced in the rustic art of pig killing, was approached to do the job, though some farmers killed their own pigs. When the búistéirarrived the whole family gathered round to watch the killing. His first job was to plunge the knife in the pig’s heart via the throat, using a special knife. The screeching during this performance was something awful, but the animal died instantly once the heart had been reached, usually to a round of applause from the onlookers. The animal was then draped across a pig-gib, a sort of bench, and had the fine hairs on its body scraped off. To make this a simple job the animal was immersed in hot water a number of times until the bristles were softened and easy to remove. If a few bristles were accidentally missed the bacon was known as ‘hairy bacon’!During the killing of the pig it was imperative to draw a good flow of blood to ensure good quality meat. This blood was collected in a bucket for the making of puddings. The carcass would then be hung from a hook in the shed with a basin under its head to catch the drip, and a potato was often placed in the pig’s mouth to aid the dripping process. After a few days the carcass would be dissected. Sharkey recalls that her father maintained that each pound weight in the pig’s head corresponded to a stone weight in the body. The body was washed and then each piece that was to be preserved was carefully salted and placed neatly in a barrel and hermetically sealed. It was customary in parts of the midlands to add brown sugar to the barrel at this stage, while in other areas juniper berries were placed in the fire when hanging the hams and flitches (sides of bacon), wrapped in brown paper, in the chimney for smoking (Sharkey 166). While the killing was predominantly men’s work, it was the women who took most responsibility for the curing and smoking. Puddings have always been popular in Irish cuisine. The pig’s intestines were washed well and soaked in a stream, and a mixture of onions, lard, spices, oatmeal and flour were mixed with the blood and the mixture was stuffed into the casing and boiled for about an hour, cooled and the puddings were divided amongst the neighbours.The pig was so palatable that the famous gastronomic writer Grimod de la Reyniere once claimed that the only piece you couldn’t eat was the “oink”. Sharkey remembers her father remarking that had they been able to catch the squeak they would have made tin whistles out of it! No part went to waste; the blood and offal were used, the trotters were known as crubeens (from crúb, hoof), and were boiled and eaten with cabbage. In Galway the knee joint was popular and known as the glúiníns (from glún, knee). The head was roasted whole or often boiled and pressed and prepared as Brawn. The chitterlings (small intestines) were meticulously prepared by continuous washing in cool water and the picking out of undigested food and faeces. Chitterlings were once a popular bar food in Dublin. Pig hair was used for paintbrushes and the bladder was occasionally inflated, using a goose quill, to be used as a football by the children. Meindertsma (2007) provides a pictorial review of the vast array of products derived from a single pig. These range from ammunition and porcelain to chewing gum.From around the mid-eighteenth century, commercial salting of pork and bacon grew rapidly in Ireland. 1820 saw Henry Denny begin operation in Waterford where he both developed and patented several production techniques for bacon. Bacon curing became a very important industry in Munster culminating in the setting up of four large factories. Irish bacon was the brand leader and the Irish companies exported their expertise. Denny set up a plant in Denmark in 1894 and introduced the Irish techniques to the Danish industry, while O’Mara’s set up bacon curing facilities in Russia in 1891 (Cowan and Sexton). Ireland developed an extensive export trade in bacon to England, and hams were delivered to markets in Paris, India, North and South America. The “sandwich method” of curing, or “dry cure”, was used up until 1862 when the method of injecting strong brine into the meat by means of a pickling pump was adopted by Irish bacon-curers. 1887 saw the formation of the Bacon Curers’ Pig Improvement Association and they managed to introduce a new breed, the Large White Ulster into most regions by the turn of the century. This breed was suitable for the production of “Wiltshire” bacon. Cork, Waterford Dublin and Belfast were important centres for bacon but it was Limerick that dominated the industry and a Department of Agriculture document from 1902 suggests that the famous “Limerick cure” may have originated by chance:1880 […] Limerick producers were short of money […] they produced what was considered meat in a half-cured condition. The unintentional cure proved extremely popular and others followed suit. By the turn of the century the mild cure procedure was brought to such perfection that meat could [… be] sent to tropical climates for consumption within a reasonable time (Cowan and Sexton).Failure to modernise led to the decline of bacon production in Limerick in the 1960s and all four factories closed down. The Irish pig market was protected prior to joining the European Union. There were no imports, and exports were subsidised by the Pigs and Bacon Commission. The Department of Agriculture started pig testing in the early 1960s and imported breeds from the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. The two main breeds were Large White and Landrace. Most farms kept pigs before joining the EU but after 1972, farmers were encouraged to rationalise and specialise. Grants were made available for facilities that would keep 3,000 pigs and these grants kick started the development of large units.Pig keeping and production were not only rural occupations; Irish towns and cities also had their fair share. Pigs could easily be kept on swill from hotels, restaurants, not to mention the by-product and leftovers of the brewing and baking industries. Ed Hick, a fourth generation pork butcher from south County Dublin, recalls buying pigs from a local coal man and bus driver and other locals for whom it was a tradition to keep pigs on the side. They would keep some six or eight pigs at a time and feed them on swill collected locally. Legislation concerning the feeding of swill introduced in 1985 (S.I.153) and an amendment in 1987 (S.I.133) required all swill to be heat-treated and resulted in most small operators going out of business. Other EU directives led to the shutting down of thousands of slaughterhouses across Europe. Small producers like Hick who slaughtered at most 25 pigs a week in their family slaughterhouse, states that it was not any one rule but a series of them that forced them to close. It was not uncommon for three inspectors, a veterinarian, a meat inspector and a hygiene inspector, to supervise himself and his brother at work. Ed Hick describes the situation thus; “if we had taken them on in a game of football, we would have lost! We were seen as a huge waste of veterinary time and manpower”.Sausages and rashers have long been popular in Dublin and are the main ingredients in the city’s most famous dish “Dublin Coddle.” Coddle is similar to an Irish stew except that it uses pork rashers and sausage instead of lamb. It was, traditionally, a Saturday night dish when the men came home from the public houses. Terry Fagan has a book on Dublin Folklore called Monto: Murder, Madams and Black Coddle. The black coddle resulted from soot falling down the chimney into the cauldron. James Joyce describes Denny’s sausages with relish in Ulysses, and like many other Irish emigrants, he would welcome visitors from home only if they brought Irish sausages and Irish whiskey with them. Even today, every family has its favourite brand of sausages: Byrne’s, Olhausens, Granby’s, Hafner’s, Denny’s Gold Medal, Kearns and Superquinn are among the most popular. Ironically the same James Joyce, who put Dublin pork kidneys on the world table in Ulysses, was later to call his native Ireland “the old sow that eats her own farrow” (184-5).The last thirty years have seen a concerted effort to breed pigs that have less fat content and leaner meat. There are no pure breeds of Landrace or Large White in production today for they have been crossbred for litter size, fat content and leanness (Tuite). Many experts feel that they have become too lean, to the detriment of flavour and that the meat can tend to split when cooked. Pig production is now a complicated science and tighter margins have led to only large-scale operations being financially viable (Whittemore). The average size of herd has grown from 29 animals in 1973, to 846 animals in 1997, and the highest numbers are found in counties Cork and Cavan (Lafferty et al.). The main players in today’s pig production/processing are the large Irish Agribusiness Multinationals Glanbia, Kerry Foods and Dairygold. Tuite (2002) expressed worries among the industry that there may be no pig production in Ireland in twenty years time, with production moving to Eastern Europe where feed and labour are cheaper. When it comes to traceability, in the light of the Foot and Mouth, BSE and Dioxin scares, many feel that things were much better in the old days, when butchers like Ed Hick slaughtered animals that were reared locally and then sold them back to local consumers. Hick has recently killed pigs for friends who have begun keeping them for home consumption. This slaughtering remains legal as long as the meat is not offered for sale.Although bacon and cabbage, and the full Irish breakfast with rashers, sausages and puddings, are considered to be some of Ireland’s most well known traditional dishes, there has been a growth in modern interpretations of traditional pork and bacon dishes in the repertoires of the seemingly ever growing number of talented Irish chefs. Michael Clifford popularised Clonakilty Black Pudding as a starter in his Cork restaurant Clifford’s in the late 1980s, and its use has become widespread since, as a starter or main course often partnered with either caramelised apples or red onion marmalade. Crubeens (pigs trotters) have been modernised “a la Pierre Kaufman” by a number of Irish chefs, who bone them out and stuff them with sweetbreads. Kevin Thornton, the first Irish chef to be awarded two Michelin stars, has roasted suckling pig as one of his signature dishes. Richard Corrigan is keeping the Irish flag flying in London in his Michelin starred Soho restaurant, Lindsay House, where traditional pork and bacon dishes from his childhood are creatively re-interpreted with simplicity and taste.Pork, ham and bacon are, without doubt, the most traditional of all Irish foods, featuring in the diet since prehistoric times. Although these meats remain the most consumed per capita in post “Celtic Tiger” Ireland, there are a number of threats facing the country’s pig industry. Large-scale indoor production necessitates the use of antibiotics. European legislation and economic factors have contributed in the demise of the traditional art of pork butchery. Scientific advancements have resulted in leaner low-fat pigs, many argue, to the detriment of flavour. Alas, all is not lost. There is a growth in consumer demand for quality local food, and some producers like J. Hick & Sons, and Prue & David Rudd and Family are leading the way. The Rudds process and distribute branded antibiotic-free pig related products with the mission of “re-inventing the tastes of bygone days with the quality of modern day standards”. Few could argue with the late Irish writer John B. Keane (72): “When this kind of bacon is boiling with its old colleague, white cabbage, there is a gurgle from the pot that would tear the heart out of any hungry man”.ReferencesCowan, Cathal and Regina Sexton. Ireland's Traditional Foods: An Exploration of Irish Local & Typical Foods & Drinks. Dublin: Teagasc, 1997.C.S.O. Central Statistics Office. Figures on per capita meat consumption for 2009, 2010. Ireland. http://www.cso.ie.Fitzgerald, Oisin. "The Irish 'Greyhound' Pig: an extinct indigenous breed of Pig." History Ireland13.4 (2005): 20-23.Gantz, Jeffrey Early Irish Myths and Sagas. New York: Penguin, 1981.Harris, Marvin. "The Abominable Pig." Food and Culture: A Reader. Eds. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York: Routledge, 1997. 67-79.Hick, Edward. Personal Communication with master butcher Ed Hick. 15 Apr. 2002.Hick, Edward. Personal Communication concerning pig killing. 5 Sep. 2010.Jackson, K. H. Ed. Aislinge Meic Con Glinne, Dublin: Institute of Advanced Studies, 1990.Joyce, James. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London: Granada, 1977.Keane, John B. Strong Tea. Cork: Mercier Press, 1963.Kinsella, Thomas. The Táin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.Lafferty, S., Commins, P. and Walsh, J. A. Irish Agriculture in Transition: A Census Atlas of Agriculture in the Republic of Ireland. Dublin: Teagasc, 1999.Mac Con Iomaire, Liam. Ireland of the Proverb. Dublin: Town House, 1988.Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín and Pádraic Óg Gallagher. "The Potato in Irish Cuisine and Culture."Journal of Culinary Science and Technology 7.2-3 (2009): 1-16.Mahon, Bríd. Land of Milk and Honey: The Story of Traditional Irish Food and Drink. Cork:Mercier, 1998.Meindertsma, Christien. PIG 05049 2007. 10 Aug. 2010 http://www.christienmeindertsma.com.Ó Conaill, Seán. Seán Ó Conaill's Book. Bailie Átha Cliath: Bhéaloideas Éireann, 1981.Sexton, Regina. A Little History of Irish Food. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1998.Sharkey, Olive. Old Days Old Ways: An Illustrated Folk History of Ireland. Dublin: The O'Brien Press, 1985.S.I. 153, 1985 (Irish Legislation) http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1985/en/si/0153.htmlS.I. 133, 1987 (Irish Legislation) http://www.irishstatuebook.ie/1987/en/si/0133.htmlTuite, Pat. Personal Communication with Pat Tuite, Chief Pig Advisor, Teagasc. 3 May 2002.Whittemore, Colin T. and Ilias Kyriazakis. Whitmore's Science and Practice of Pig Production 3rdEdition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.

Autumn is not only a gloriously colourful time of the year, it is a time when a plethora of children’s book related events and awards take place. Just see what is happening in the next few months:IBBY: “Silent Books: Final Destination Lampedusa” travelling exhibit In response to the international refugee crisis that began last year, the Italian arm of the International Board on Books for Young People has launched a travelling picture-book exhibit to support the first children’s library on the island of Lampedusa, Italy where many African and Middle Eastern refugees are landing. After stops in Italy, Mexico, and Austria, the exhibit is currently touring Canada. It premiered in Edmonton at the Stanley A. Milner Library in August. Next are three Vancouver locations: UBC Irving Barber Learning Centre (Oct. 1 to 23), Vancouver Public Library central branch (Oct. 8 to 18), and the Italian Cultural Centre (Oct. 10 to 22). Then the North York Central Library in Toronto from Nov. 2 to Dec 11. Recognizing Lampedusa island’s cultural diversity, the exhibit comprises exclusively wordless picture books from 23 countries, including three from Canada:“Hocus Pocus” by Sylvie Desrosiers & Rémy Simard’s (Kids Can Press), “Ben’s Big Dig” by Daniel Wakeman and Dirk van Stralen’s(Orca Book Publishers)“Ben’s Bunny Trouble” also by Wakeman and van Stralen (Orca Book Publishers). Other books are drawn from an honour list selected by a jury of experts from the 2015 Bologna Children’s Book Fair including Ajubel’s “Robinson Crusoe” (Spain), Ara Jo’s “The Rocket Boy”(Korea), and Madalena Matoso’s “Todos Fazemos Tudo” (Switzerland), among others. The full catalogue can be viewed online.TD Canadian Children’s Book Week.Next year’s TD Canadian Children’s Book Week will take place from May 7-14, 2016. Thirty Canadian children’s authors, illustrators and storytellers will be touring across Canada visiting schools, libraries, bookstores and community centres. Visit the TD Book Week site (www.bookweek.ca) to find out who will be touring in your area and the types of readings and workshops they will be giving. If your school or library is interested in hosting a Book Week visitor, you can apply online starting in mid-October.Shakespeare Selfie CBC Books will once again be running the Shakespeare Selfie writing challenge in April 2016. Shakespeare took selfies all the time but instead of a camera, he used a quill. And instead of calling them "selfies," they were called "soliloquies."The challenge: Write a modern-day soliloquy or monologue by a Shakespearean character based on a prominent news, pop culture or current affairs event from the last year (April 2015-April 2016). It can be in iambic pentameter or modern syntax with a word count from 200 to 400 words. There are two age categories: Grades 7-9 and 10-12. Details at: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/10/the-2016-shakespeare-selfie-writing-challenge-for-students.html Awards:The winners of this year’s Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, celebrating Jewish literature and culture in Canada, have been announced. Amongst the nine awards is one for Youth Literature which was awarded to Suri Rosen for “Playing with Matches” (ECW Press). See all the award winners here: http://www.cjlawards.ca/.The Canadian Children's Book Centre administers several awards including the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, the Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction. This year’s winners will be announced on November 18, 2015. http://www.bookcentre.ca/awardThe Fitzhenry Family Foundation has revealed the winners of its Lane Anderson Awards for the best Canadian science books published in the previous year. Selections are made based on a title’s pertinence to science in today’s world and the author’s ability to relate scientific issues to everyday life. Prolific Halifax kids’ science writer L.E. Carmichael was awarded the YA prize for “Fuzzy Forensics: DNA Fingerprinting Gets Wild” (Ashby-BP Publishing), about using forensic science to fight crimes against animals. Uxbridge, Ontario–based environmental journalist Stephen Leahy received the adult prize for “Your Water Footprint” (Firefly Books), which examines human usage of the valuable natural resource. http://laneandersonaward.ca/The Edmonton Public Library has named Sigmund Brouwer (author and Rock & Roll Literacy Show host) as the winner (by public vote) of Alberta Reader’s Choice Award. Sigmund’s “Thief of Glory” (WaterBrook Press) is about a young boy trying to take care of his family in the aftermath of the 1942 Japanese Imperialist invasion of the Southeast Pacific. The prize awards $10,000 to an Alberta-based author of a work of excellent fiction or narrative non-fiction. http://www.epl.ca/alberta-readers-choiceHarperCollins Canada, the Cooke Agency, and the University of British Columbia have announced the shortlist of the annual HarperCollins Publishers/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction awarded to students and alumni of UBC’s creative writing program, and offers the winner literary representation by the Cooke Agency and a publishing contract with HarperCollins Canada.“Between the Wind and Us” by Iranian-Canadian writer Nazanine Hozar, the story of a young abandoned girl set during the political unrest of 1953–1979 Iran.“Learning to Breathe” by B.C.-based Janice Lynn Mather, a young adult novel about a Caribbean teenager’s struggle to establish herself in a new city and home life.“At The Top of the Wall, Alight” by Sudbury, Ontario, author Natalie Morrill, which follows a Viennese Jew separated from his family during the Second World War. An early version of this novel was previously nominated for the award.Novelist and University of Guelph writing professor, Thomas King, and L.A.-based author, graphic novelist, and musician, Cecil Castellucci, have been named winners of this year’s Sunburst Awards for excellence in Canadian literature of the fantastic. Castellucci won in the YA category for “Tin Star” (Roaring Brook/Raincoast), the first novel in a planned series about a teenager who struggles to survive parent-less in a space station where she is the only human, and which played scene to a brutal assault that haunts her memory. King won in the adult category for his novel “The Back of the Turtle” (HarperCollins Canada), for which he also received a Copper Cylinder Award from the Sunburst Society last week. The book follows a First Nations scientist who finds himself torn after he’s sent to clean up the ecological mess his company has left on the reserve his family grew up on.Be sure to save October 28th on your calendar for the GG book awards announcement. Of course, “GG” stands for Governor-General. The short lists can be viewed here:http://ggbooks.ca/books/. There are categories in both English and French for both children’s text and illustration books.Online ResourcesPodcast: Yegs and Bacon: Episode 22: the full audio from our recent Indigenous Representation in Popular Culture panel. In the audio, you’ll be hearing from (in order of first vocal appearance) Brandon, who introduces the panelists, James Leask, Richard Van Camp, Kelly Mellings, and Patti Laboucane-Benson. Recorded on Monday, September 28th, 2015. http://variantedmonton.com/category/yegs-and-bacon/European Picture Book Collection: The EPBC was designed to help pupils to find out more about their European neighbours through reading the visual narratives of carefully chosen picture books. Here you can find out about how the project began, the theoretical papers that have been presented on European children's literature, and how the materials were initially used in schools. http://www.ncrcl.ac.uk/epbc/EN/index.aspMore next time around,Yours in stories, Gail de VosGail de Vos is an adjunct professor who teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, young adult literature, and comic books & graphic novels at the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta. She is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. Gail is also a professional storyteller who has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.

At a time when almost every human transgression, illness, profession and other personal aspect of life has been chronicled in autobiographical writing (Rak)—in 1998 Zinsser called ours “the age of memoir” (3)—writing about fat is one of the most recent subjects to be addressed in this way. This article surveys a range of contemporary autobiographical texts that are titled with, or revolve around, that powerful and most evocative word, “fat”. Following a number of cultural studies of fat in society (Critser; Gilman, Fat Boys; Fat: A Cultural History; Stearns), this discussion views fat in socio-cultural terms, following Lupton in understanding fat as both “a cultural artefact: a bodily substance or body shape that is given meaning by complex and shifting systems of ideas, practices, emotions, material objects and interpersonal relationships” (i). Using a case study approach (Gerring; Verschuren), this examination focuses on a range of texts from autobiographical cookbooks and memoirs to novel-length graphic works in order to develop a preliminary taxonomy of these works. In this way, a small sample of work, each of which (described below) explores an aspect (or aspects) of the form is, following Merriam, useful as it allows a richer picture of an under-examined phenomenon to be constructed, and offers “a means of investigating complex social units consisting of multiple variables of potential importance in understanding the phenomenon” (Merriam 50). Although the sample size does not offer generalisable results, the case study method is especially suitable in this context, where the aim is to open up discussion of this form of writing for future research for, as Merriam states, “much can be learned from […] an encounter with the case through the researcher’s narrative description” and “what we learn in a particular case can be transferred to similar situations” (51). Pro-Fat Autobiographical WritingAlongside the many hundreds of reduced, low- and no-fat cookbooks and weight loss guides currently in print that offer recipes, meal plans, ingredient replacements and strategies to reduce fat in the diet, there are a handful that promote the consumption of fats, and these all have an autobiographical component. The publication of Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes in 2008 by Ten Speed Press—publisher of Mollie Katzen’s groundbreaking and influential vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook in 1974 and an imprint now known for its quality cookbooks (Thelin)—unequivocably addressed that line in the sand often drawn between fat and all things healthy. The four chapter titles of this cookbook— “Butter,” subtitled “Worth It,” “Pork Fat: The King,” “Poultry Fat: Versatile and Good For You,” and, “Beef and Lamb Fats: Overlooked But Tasty”—neatly summarise McLagan’s organising argument: that animal fats not only add an unreplaceable and delicious flavour to foods but are fundamental to our health. Fat polarised readers and critics; it was positively reviewed in prominent publications (Morris; Bhide) and won influential food writing awards, including 2009 James Beard Awards for Single Subject Cookbook and Cookbook of the Year but, due to its rejection of low-fat diets and the research underpinning them, was soon also vehemently criticised, to the point where the book was often described in the media as “controversial” (see Smith). McLagan’s text, while including historical, scientific and gastronomic data and detail, is also an outspokenly personal treatise, chronicling her sensual and emotional responses to this ingredient. “I love fat,” she begins, continuing, “Whether it’s a slice of foie gras terrine, its layer of yellow fat melting at the edges […] hot bacon fat […] wilting a plate of pungent greens into submission […] or a piece of crunchy pork crackling […] I love the way it feels in my mouth, and I love its many tastes” (1). Her text is, indeed, memoir as gastronomy / gastronomy as memoir, and this cookbook, therefore, an example of the “memoir with recipes” subgenre (Brien et al.). It appears to be this aspect – her highly personal and, therein, persuasive (Weitin) plea for the value of fats – that galvanised critics and readers.Molly Chester and Sandy Schrecengost’s Back to Butter: A Traditional Foods Cookbook – Nourishing Recipes Inspired by Our Ancestors begins with its authors’ memoirs (illness, undertaking culinary school training, buying and running a farm) to lend weight to their argument to utilise fats widely in cookery. Its first chapter, “Fats and Oils,” features the familiar butter, which it describes as “the friendly fat” (22), then moves to the more reviled pork lard “Grandma’s superfood” (22) and, nowadays quite rarely described as an ingredient, beef tallow. Grit Magazine’s Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother’s Secret Ingredient utilises the rhetoric that fat, and in this case, lard, is a traditional and therefore foundational ingredient in good cookery. This text draws on its publisher’s, Grit Magazine (published since 1882 in various formats), long history of including auto/biographical “inspirational stories” (Teller) to lend persuasive power to its argument. One of the most polarising of fats in health and current media discourse is butter, as was seen recently in debate over what was seen as its excessive use in the MasterChef Australia television series (see, Heart Foundation; Phillipov). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that butter is the single fat inspiring the most autobiographical writing in this mode. Rosie Daykin’s Butter Baked Goods: Nostalgic Recipes from a Little Neighborhood Bakery is, for example, typical of a small number of cookbooks that extend the link between baking and nostalgia to argue that butter is the superlative ingredient for baking. There are also entire cookbooks dedicated to making flavoured butters (Vaserfirer) and a number that offer guides to making butter and other (fat-based) dairy products at home (Farrell-Kingsley; Hill; Linford).Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef is typical among chef’s memoirs in using butter prominently although rare in mentioning fat in its title. In this text and other such memoirs, butter is often used as shorthand for describing a food that is rich but also wholesomely delicious. Hamilton relates childhood memories of “all butter shortcakes” (10), and her mother and sister “cutting butter into flour and sugar” for scones (15), radishes eaten with butter (21), sautéing sage in butter to dress homemade ravoli (253), and eggs fried in browned butter (245). Some of Hamilton’s most telling references to butter present it as an staple, natural food as, for instance, when she describes “sliced bread with butter and granulated sugar” (37) as one of her family’s favourite desserts, and lists butter among the everyday foodstuffs that taste superior when stored at room temperature instead of refrigerated—thereby moving butter from taboo (Gwynne describes a similar process of the normalisation of sexual “perversion” in erotic memoir).Like this text, memoirs that could be described as arguing “for” fat as a substance are largely by chefs or other food writers who extol, like McLagan and Hamilton, the value of fat as both food and flavouring, and propose that it has a key role in both ordinary/family and gourmet cookery. In this context, despite plant-based fats such as coconut oil being much lauded in nutritional and other health-related discourse, the fat written about in these texts is usually animal-based. An exception to this is olive oil, although this is never described in the book’s title as a “fat” (see, for instance, Drinkwater’s series of memoirs about life on an olive farm in France) and is, therefore, out of the scope of this discussion.Memoirs of Being FatThe majority of the other memoirs with the word “fat” in their titles are about being fat. Narratives on this topic, and their authors’ feelings about this, began to be published as a sub-set of autobiographical memoir in the 2000s. The first decade of the new millennium saw a number of such memoirs by female writers including Judith Moore’s Fat Girl (published in 2005), Jen Lancaster’s Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist’s Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer, and Stephanie Klein’s Moose: A Memoir (both published in 2008) and Jennifer Joyne’s Designated Fat Girl in 2010. These were followed into the new decade by texts such as Celia Rivenbark’s bestselling 2011 You Don’t Sweat Much for a Fat Girl, and all attracted significant mainstream readerships. Journalist Vicki Allan pulled no punches when she labelled these works the “fat memoir” and, although Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s influential categorisation of 60 genres of life writing does not include this description, they do recognise eating disorder and weight-loss narratives. Some scholarly interest followed (Linder; Halloran), with Mitchell linking this production to feminism’s promotion of the power of the micro-narrative and the recognition that the autobiographical narrative was “a way of situating the self politically” (65).aken together, these memoirs all identify “excess” weight, although the response to this differs. They can be grouped as: narratives of losing weight (see Kuffel; Alley; and many others), struggling to lose weight (most of these books), and/or deciding not to try to lose weight (the smallest number of works overall). Some of these texts display a deeply troubled relationship with food—Moore’s Fat Girl, for instance, could also be characterised as an eating disorder memoir (Brien), detailing her addiction to eating and her extremely poor body image as well as her mother’s unrelenting pressure to lose weight. Elena Levy-Navarro describes the tone of these narratives as “compelled confession” (340), mobilising both the conventional understanding of confession of the narrator “speaking directly and colloquially” to the reader of their sins, failures or foibles (Gill 7), and what she reads as an element of societal coercion in their production. Some of these texts do focus on confessing what can be read as disgusting and wretched behavior (gorging and vomiting, for instance)—Halloran’s “gustatory abject” (27)—which is a feature of the contemporary conceptualisation of confession after Rousseau (Brooks). This is certainly a prominent aspect of current memoir writing that is, simultaneously, condemned by critics (see, for example, Jordan) and popular with readers (O’Neill). Read in this way, the majority of memoirs about being fat are about being miserable until a slimming regime of some kind has been undertaken and successful. Some of these texts are, indeed, triumphal in tone. Lisa Delaney’s Secrets of a Former Fat Girl is, for instance, clear in the message of its subtitle, How to Lose Two, Four (or More!) Dress Sizes—And Find Yourself Along the Way, that she was “lost” until she became slim. Linden has argued that “female memoir writers frequently describe their fat bodies as diseased and contaminated” (219) and “powerless” (226). Many of these confessional memoirs are moving narratives of shame and self loathing where the memoirist’s sense of self, character, and identity remain somewhat confused and unresolved, whether they lose weight or not, and despite attestations to the contrary.A sub-set of these memoirs of weight loss are by male authors. While having aspects in common with those by female writers, these can be identified as a sub-set of these memoirs for two reasons. One is the tone of their narratives, which is largely humourous and often ribaldly comic. There is also a sense of the heroic in these works, with male memoirsts frequently mobilising images of battles and adversity. Texts that can be categorised in this way include Toshio Okada’s Sayonara Mr. Fatty: A Geek’s Diet Memoir, Gregg McBride and Joy Bauer’s bestselling Weightless: My Life as a Fat Man and How I Escaped, Fred Anderson’s From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man. As can be seen in their titles, these texts also promise to relate the stratgies, regimes, plans, and secrets that others can follow to, similarly, lose weight. Allen Zadoff’s title makes this explicit: Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat to Thin. Many of these male memoirists are prompted by a health-related crisis, diagnosis, or realisation. Male body image—a relatively recent topic of enquiry in the eating disorder, psychology, and fashion literature (see, for instance, Bradley et al.)—is also often a surprising motif in these texts, and a theme in common with weight loss memoirs by female authors. Edward Ugel, for instance, opens his memoir, I’m with Fatty: Losing Fifty Pounds in Fifty Miserable Weeks, with “I’m haunted by mirrors … the last thing I want to do is see myself in a mirror or a photograph” (1).Ugel, as that prominent “miserable” in his subtitle suggests, provides a subtle but revealing variation on this theme of successful weight loss. Ugel (as are all these male memoirists) succeeds in the quest be sets out on but, apparently, despondent almost every moment. While the overall tone of his writing is light and humorous, he laments every missed meal, snack, and mouthful of food he foregoes, explaining that he loves eating, “Food makes me happy … I live to eat. I love to eat at restaurants. I love to cook. I love the social component of eating … I can’t be happy without being a social eater” (3). Like many of these books by male authors, Ugel’s descriptions of the food he loves are mouthwatering—and most especially when describing what he identifies as the fattening foods he loves: Reuben sandwiches dripping with juicy grease, crispy deep friend Chinese snacks, buttery Danish pastries and creamy, rich ice cream. This believable sense of regret is not, however, restricted to male authors. It is also apparent in how Jen Lancaster begins her memoir: “I’m standing in the kitchen folding a softened stick of butter, a cup of warmed sour cream, and a mound of fresh-shaved Parmesan into my world-famous mashed potatoes […] There’s a maple-glazed pot roast browning nicely in the oven and white-chocolate-chip macadamia cookies cooling on a rack farther down the counter. I’ve already sautéed the almonds and am waiting for the green beans to blanch so I can toss the whole lot with yet more butter before serving the meal” (5). In the above memoirs, both male and female writers recount similar (and expected) strategies: diets, fasts and other weight loss regimes and interventions (calorie counting, colonics, and gastric-banding and -bypass surgery for instance, recur); consulting dieting/health magazines for information and strategies; keeping a food journal; employing expert help in the form of nutritionists, dieticians, and personal trainers; and, joining health clubs/gyms, and taking up various sports.Alongside these works sit a small number of texts that can be characterised as “non-weight loss memoirs.” These can be read as part of the emerging, and burgeoning, academic field of Fat Studies, which gathers together an extensive literature critical of, and oppositional to, dominant discourses about obesity (Cooper; Rothblum and Solovay; Tomrley and Naylor), and which include works that focus on information backed up with memoir such as self-described “fat activist” (Wann, website) Marilyn Wann’s Fat! So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologise, which—when published in 1998—followed a print ’zine and a website of the same title. Although certainly in the minority in terms of numbers, these narratives have been very popular with readers and are growing as a sub-genre, with well-known actress Camryn Manheim’s New York Times-bestselling memoir, Wake Up, I'm Fat! (published in 1999) a good example. This memoir chronicles Manheim’s journey from the overweight and teased teenager who finds it a struggle to find friends (a common trope in many weight loss memoirs) to an extremely successful actress.Like most other types of memoir, there are also niche sub-genres of the “fat memoir.” Cheryl Peck’s Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs recounts a series of stories about her life in the American Midwest as a lesbian “woman of size” (xiv) and could thus be described as a memoir on the subjects of – and is, indeed, catalogued in the Library of Congress as: “Overweight women,” “Lesbians,” and “Three Rivers (Mich[igan]) – Social life and customs”.Carol Lay’s graphic memoir, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude, has a simple diet message – she lost weight by counting calories and exercising every day – and makes a dual claim for value of being based on both her own story and a range of data and tools including: “the latest research on obesity […] psychological tips, nutrition basics, and many useful tools like simplified calorie charts, sample recipes, and menu plans” (qtd. in Lorah). The Big Skinny could, therefore, be characterised with the weight loss memoirs above as a self-help book, but Lay herself describes choosing the graphic form in order to increase its narrative power: to “wrap much of the information in stories […] combining illustrations and story for a double dose of retention in the brain” (qtd. in Lorah). Like many of these books that can fit into multiple categories, she notes that “booksellers don’t know where to file the book – in graphic novels, memoirs, or in the diet section” (qtd. in O’Shea).Jude Milner’s Fat Free: The Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Woman! is another example of how a single memoir (graphic, in this case) can be a hybrid of the categories herein discussed, indicating how difficult it is to neatly categorise human experience. Recounting the author’s numerous struggles with her weight and journey to self-acceptance, Milner at first feels guilty and undertakes a series of diets and regimes, before becoming a “Fat Is Beautiful” activist and, finally, undergoing gastric bypass surgery. Here the narrative trajectory is of empowerment rather than physical transformation, as a thinner (although, importantly, not thin) Milner “exudes confidence and radiates strength” (Story). ConclusionWhile the above has identified a number of ways of attempting to classify autobiographical writing about fat/s, its ultimate aim is, after G. Thomas Couser’s work in relation to other sub-genres of memoir, an attempt to open up life writing for further discussion, rather than set in placed fixed and inflexible categories. Constructing such a preliminary taxonomy aspires to encourage more nuanced discussion of how writers, publishers, critics and readers understand “fat” conceptually as well as more practically and personally. 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Introduction With a deluge of mouthwatering pre-publicity, the opening of The Spotted Pig, the USA’s first self-identified British-styled gastropub, in Manhattan in February 2004 was much anticipated. The late Australian chef, food writer and restauranteur Mietta O’Donnell has noted how “taking over a building or business which has a long established reputation can be a mixed blessing” because of the way that memories “can enrich the experience of being in a place or they can just make people nostalgic”. Bistro Le Zoo, the previous eatery on the site, had been very popular when it opened almost a decade earlier, and its closure was mourned by some diners (Young; Kaminsky “Feeding Time”; Steinhauer & McGinty). This regret did not, however, appear to affect The Spotted Pig’s success. As esteemed New York Times reviewer Frank Bruni noted in his 2006 review: “Almost immediately after it opened […] the throngs started to descend, and they have never stopped”. The following year, The Spotted Pig was awarded a Michelin star—the first year that Michelin ranked New York—and has kept this star in the subsequent annual rankings. Writing Restaurant Biography Detailed studies have been published of almost every type of contemporary organisation including public institutions such as schools, hospitals, museums and universities, as well as non-profit organisations such as charities and professional associations. These are often written to mark a major milestone, or some significant change, development or the demise of the organisation under consideration (Brien). Detailed studies have also recently been published of businesses as diverse as general stores (Woody), art galleries (Fossi), fashion labels (Koda et al.), record stores (Southern & Branson), airlines (Byrnes; Jones), confectionary companies (Chinn) and builders (Garden). In terms of attracting mainstream readerships, however, few such studies seem able to capture popular reader interest as those about eating establishments including restaurants and cafés. This form of restaurant life history is, moreover, not restricted to ‘quality’ establishments. Fast food restaurant chains have attracted their share of studies (see, for example Love; Jakle & Sculle), ranging from business-economic analyses (Liu), socio-cultural political analyses (Watson), and memoirs (Kroc & Anderson), to criticism around their conduct and effects (Striffler). Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is the most well-known published critique of the fast food industry and its effects with, famously, the Rolling Stone article on which it was based generating more reader mail than any other piece run in the 1990s. The book itself (researched narrative creative nonfiction), moreover, made a fascinating transition to the screen, transformed into a fictionalised drama (co-written by Schlosser) that narrates the content of the book from the point of view of a series of fictional/composite characters involved in the industry, rather than in a documentary format. Akin to the range of studies of fast food restaurants, there are also a variety of studies of eateries in US motels, caravan parks, diners and service station restaurants (see, for example, Baeder). Although there has been little study of this sub-genre of food and drink publishing, their popularity can be explained, at least in part, because such volumes cater to the significant readership for writing about food related topics of all kinds, with food writing recently identified as mainstream literary fare in the USA and UK (Hughes) and an entire “publishing subculture” in Australia (Dunstan & Chaitman). Although no exact tally exists, an informed estimate by the founder of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards and president of the Paris Cookbook Fair, Edouard Cointreau, has more than 26,000 volumes on food and wine related topics currently published around the world annually (ctd. in Andriani “Gourmand Awards”). The readership for publications about restaurants can also perhaps be attributed to the wide range of information that can be included a single study. My study of a selection of these texts from the UK, USA and Australia indicates that this can include narratives of place and architecture dealing with the restaurant’s location, locale and design; narratives of directly food-related subject matter such as menus, recipes and dining trends; and narratives of people, in the stories of its proprietors, staff and patrons. Detailed studies of contemporary individual establishments commonly take the form of authorised narratives either written by the owners, chefs or other staff with the help of a food journalist, historian or other professional writer, or produced largely by that writer with the assistance of the premise’s staff. These studies are often extensively illustrated with photographs and, sometimes, drawings or reproductions of other artworks, and almost always include recipes. Two examples of these from my own collection include a centennial history of a famous New Orleans eatery that survived Hurricane Katrina, Galatoire’s Cookbook. Written by employees—the chief operating officer/general manager (Melvin Rodrigue) and publicist (Jyl Benson)—this incorporates reminiscences from both other staff and patrons. The second is another study of a New Orleans’ restaurant, this one by the late broadcaster and celebrity local historian Mel Leavitt. The Court of Two Sisters Cookbook: With a History of the French Quarter and the Restaurant, compiled with the assistance of the Two Sisters’ proprietor, Joseph Fein Joseph III, was first published in 1992 and has been so enduringly popular that it is in its eighth printing. These texts, in common with many others of this type, trace a triumph-over-adversity company history that incorporates a series of mildly scintillating anecdotes, lists of famous chefs and diners, and signature recipes. Although obviously focused on an external readership, they can also be characterised as an instance of what David M. Boje calls an organisation’s “story performance” (106) as the process of creating these narratives mobilises an organisation’s (in these cases, a commercial enterprise’s) internal information processing and narrative building activities. Studies of contemporary restaurants are much more rarely written without any involvement from the eatery’s personnel. When these are, the results tend to have much in common with more critical studies such as Fast Food Nation, as well as so-called architectural ‘building biographies’ which attempt to narrate the historical and social forces that “explain the shapes and uses” (Ellis, Chao & Parrish 70) of the physical structures we create. Examples of this would include Harding’s study of the importance of the Boeuf sur le Toit in Parisian life in the 1920s and Middlebrook’s social history of London’s Strand Corner House. Such work agrees with Kopytoff’s assertion—following Appadurai’s proposal that objects possess their own ‘biographies’ which need to be researched and expressed—that such inquiry can reveal not only information about the objects under consideration, but also about readers as we examine our “cultural […] aesthetic, historical, and even political” responses to these narratives (67). The life story of a restaurant will necessarily be entangled with those of the figures who have been involved in its establishment and development, as well as the narratives they create around the business. This following brief study of The Spotted Pig, however, written without the assistance of the establishment’s personnel, aims to outline a life story for this eatery in order to reflect upon the pig’s place in contemporary dining practice in New York as raw foodstuff, fashionable comestible, product, brand, symbol and marketing tool, as well as, at times, purely as an animal identity. The Spotted Pig Widely profiled before it even opened, The Spotted Pig is reportedly one of the city’s “most popular” restaurants (Michelin 349). It is profiled in all the city guidebooks I could locate in print and online, featuring in some of these as a key stop on recommended itineraries (see, for instance, Otis 39). A number of these proclaim it to be the USA’s first ‘gastropub’—the term first used in 1991 in the UK to describe a casual hotel/bar with good food and reasonable prices (Farley). The Spotted Pig is thus styled on a shabby-chic version of a traditional British hotel, featuring a cluttered-but-well arranged use of pig-themed objects and illustrations that is described by latest Michelin Green Guide of New York City as “a country-cute décor that still manages to be hip” (Michelin 349). From the three-dimensional carved pig hanging above the entrance in a homage to the shingles of traditional British hotels, to the use of its image on the menu, website and souvenir tee-shirts, the pig as motif proceeds its use as a foodstuff menu item. So much so, that the restaurant is often (affectionately) referred to by patrons and reviewers simply as ‘The Pig’. The restaurant has become so well known in New York in the relatively brief time it has been operating that it has not only featured in a number of novels and memoirs, but, moreover, little or no explanation has been deemed necessary as the signifier of “The Spotted Pig” appears to convey everything that needs to be said about an eatery of quality and fashion. In the thriller Lethal Experiment: A Donovan Creed Novel, when John Locke’s hero has to leave the restaurant and becomes involved in a series of dangerous escapades, he wants nothing more but to get back to his dinner (107, 115). The restaurant is also mentioned a number of times in Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle in relation to a (fictional) new movie of the same name. The joke in the book is that the character doesn’t know of the restaurant (26). In David Goodwillie’s American Subversive, the story of a journalist-turned-blogger and a homegrown terrorist set in New York, the narrator refers to “Scarlett Johansson, for instance, and the hostess at the Spotted Pig” (203-4) as the epitome of attractiveness. The Spotted Pig is also mentioned in Suzanne Guillette’s memoir, Much to Your Chagrin, when the narrator is on a dinner date but fears running into her ex-boyfriend: ‘Jack lives somewhere in this vicinity […] Vaguely, you recall him telling you he was not too far from the Spotted Pig on Greenwich—now, was it Greenwich Avenue or Greenwich Street?’ (361). The author presumes readers know the right answer in order to build tension in this scene. Although this success is usually credited to the joint efforts of backer, music executive turned restaurateur Ken Friedman, his partner, well-known chef, restaurateur, author and television personality Mario Batali, and their UK-born and trained chef, April Bloomfield (see, for instance, Batali), a significant part has been built on Bloomfield’s pork cookery. The very idea of a “spotted pig” itself raises a central tenet of Bloomfield’s pork/food philosophy which is sustainable and organic. That is, not the mass produced, industrially farmed pig which produces a leaner meat, but the fatty, tastier varieties of pig such as the heritage six-spotted Berkshire which is “darker, more heavily marbled with fat, juicier and richer-tasting than most pork” (Fabricant). Bloomfield has, indeed, made pig’s ears—long a Chinese restaurant staple in the city and a key ingredient of Southern US soul food as well as some traditional Japanese and Spanish dishes—fashionable fare in the city, and her current incarnation, a crispy pig’s ear salad with lemon caper dressing (TSP 2010) is much acclaimed by reviewers. This approach to ingredients—using the ‘whole beast’, local whenever possible, and the concentration on pork—has been underlined and enhanced by a continuing relationship with UK chef Fergus Henderson. In his series of London restaurants under the banner of “St. John”, Henderson is famed for the approach to pork cookery outlined in his two books Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking, published in 1999 (re-published both in the UK and the US as The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating), and Beyond Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking: Part II (coauthored with Justin Piers Gellatly in 2007). Henderson has indeed been identified as starting a trend in dining and food publishing, focusing on sustainably using as food the entirety of any animal killed for this purpose, but which mostly focuses on using all parts of pigs. In publishing, this includes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book, Peter Kaminsky’s Pig Perfect, subtitled Encounters with Some Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them, John Barlow’s Everything but the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain and Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes (2008). In restaurants, it certainly includes The Spotted Pig. So pervasive has embrace of whole beast pork consumption been in New York that, by 2007, Bruni could write that these are: “porky times, fatty times, which is to say very good times indeed. Any new logo for the city could justifiably place the Big Apple in the mouth of a spit-roasted pig” (Bruni). This demand set the stage perfectly for, in October 2007, Henderson to travel to New York to cook pork-rich menus at The Spotted Pig in tandem with Bloomfield (Royer). He followed this again in 2008 and, by 2009, this annual event had become known as “FergusStock” and was covered by local as well as UK media, and a range of US food weblogs. By 2009, it had grown to become a dinner at the Spotted Pig with half the dishes on the menu by Henderson and half by Bloomfield, and a dinner the next night at David Chang’s acclaimed Michelin-starred Momofuku Noodle Bar, which is famed for its Cantonese-style steamed pork belly buns. A third dinner (and then breakfast/brunch) followed at Friedman/Bloomfield’s Breslin Bar and Dining Room (discussed below) (Rose). The Spotted Pig dinners have become famed for Henderson’s pig’s head and pork trotter dishes with the chef himself recognising that although his wasn’t “the most obvious food to cook for America”, it was the case that “at St John, if a couple share a pig’s head, they tend to be American” (qtd. in Rose). In 2009, the pigs’ head were presented in pies which Henderson has described as “puff pastry casing, with layers of chopped, cooked pig’s head and potato, so all the lovely, bubbly pig’s head juices go into the potato” (qtd. in Rose). Bloomfield was aged only 28 when, in 2003, with a recommendation from Jamie Oliver, she interviewed for, and won, the position of executive chef of The Spotted Pig (Fabricant; Q&A). Following this introduction to the US, her reputation as a chef has grown based on the strength of her pork expertise. Among a host of awards, she was named one of US Food & Wine magazine’s ten annual Best New Chefs in 2007. In 2009, she was a featured solo session titled “Pig, Pig, Pig” at the fourth Annual International Chefs Congress, a prestigious New York City based event where “the world’s most influential and innovative chefs, pastry chefs, mixologists, and sommeliers present the latest techniques and culinary concepts to their peers” (Starchefs.com). Bloomfield demonstrated breaking down a whole suckling St. Canut milk raised piglet, after which she butterflied, rolled and slow-poached the belly, and fried the ears. As well as such demonstrations of expertise, she is also often called upon to provide expert comment on pork-related news stories, with The Spotted Pig regularly the subject of that food news. For example, when a rare, heritage Hungarian pig was profiled as a “new” New York pork source in 2009, this story arose because Bloomfield had served a Mangalitsa/Berkshire crossbreed pig belly and trotter dish with Agen prunes (Sanders) at The Spotted Pig. Bloomfield was quoted as the authority on the breed’s flavour and heritage authenticity: “it took me back to my grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, windows steaming from the roasting pork in the oven […] This pork has that same authentic taste” (qtd. in Sanders). Bloomfield has also used this expert profile to support a series of pork-related causes. These include the Thanksgiving Farm in the Catskill area, which produces free range pork for its resident special needs children and adults, and helps them gain meaningful work-related skills in working with these pigs. Bloomfield not only cooks for the project’s fundraisers, but also purchases any excess pigs for The Spotted Pig (Estrine 103). This strong focus on pork is not, however, exclusive. The Spotted Pig is also one of a number of American restaurants involved in the Meatless Monday campaign, whereby at least one vegetarian option is included on menus in order to draw attention to the benefits of a plant-based diet. When, in 2008, Bloomfield beat the Iron Chef in the sixth season of the US version of the eponymous television program, the central ingredient was nothing to do with pork—it was olives. Diversifying from this focus on ‘pig’ can, however, be dangerous. Friedman and Bloomfield’s next enterprise after The Spotted Pig was The John Dory seafood restaurant at the corner of 10th Avenue and 16th Street. This opened in November 2008 to reviews that its food was “uncomplicated and nearly perfect” (Andrews 22), won Bloomfield Time Out New York’s 2009 “Best New Hand at Seafood” award, but was not a success. The John Dory was a more formal, but smaller, restaurant that was more expensive at a time when the financial crisis was just biting, and was closed the following August. Friedman blamed the layout, size and neighbourhood (Stein) and its reservation system, which limited walk-in diners (ctd. in Vallis), but did not mention its non-pork, seafood orientation. When, almost immediately, another Friedman/Bloomfield project was announced, the Breslin Bar & Dining Room (which opened in October 2009 in the Ace Hotel at 20 West 29th Street and Broadway), the enterprise was closely modeled on the The Spotted Pig. In preparation, its senior management—Bloomfield, Friedman and sous-chefs, Nate Smith and Peter Cho (who was to become the Breslin’s head chef)—undertook a tasting tour of the UK that included Henderson’s St. John Bread & Wine Bar (Leventhal). Following this, the Breslin’s menu highlighted a series of pork dishes such as terrines, sausages, ham and potted styles (Rosenberg & McCarthy), with even Bloomfield’s pork scratchings (crispy pork rinds) bar snacks garnering glowing reviews (see, for example, Severson; Ghorbani). Reviewers, moreover, waxed lyrically about the menu’s pig-based dishes, the New York Times reviewer identifying this focus as catering to New York diners’ “fetish for pork fat” (Sifton). This representative review details not only “an entree of gently smoked pork belly that’s been roasted to tender goo, for instance, over a drift of buttery mashed potatoes, with cabbage and bacon on the side” but also a pig’s foot “in gravy made of reduced braising liquid, thick with pillowy shallots and green flecks of deconstructed brussels sprouts” (Sifton). Sifton concluded with the proclamation that this style of pork was “very good: meat that is fat; fat that is meat”. Concluding remarks Bloomfield has listed Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie as among her favourite food books. Publishers Weekly reviewer called Ruhlman “a food poet, and the pig is his muse” (Q&A). In August 2009, it was reported that Bloomfield had always wanted to write a cookbook (Marx) and, in July 2010, HarperCollins imprint Ecco publisher and foodbook editor Dan Halpern announced that he was planning a book with her, tentatively titled, A Girl and Her Pig (Andriani “Ecco Expands”). 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Abstract The Society gratefully acknowledges the time and effort of the following individuals who served as reviewers of abstracts for this meeting: ASH ABSTRACTS COORDINATING REVIEWERS Blanche P. Alter Stephen M. Ansell Ralph B. Arlinghaus Scott Armstrong Asad Bashey Philip Bierman Neil Blumberg Chiara Bonini Dominique Bonnet Jacqueline Boultwood Rena Buckstein John C. Byrd Marc Carrier Lucio H. Castilla Selina Chen-Kiang Nicholas Chiorazzi Jorge Cortes-Franco Claire E. Dearden Mary C. Dinauer Harry Paul Erba Carolyn A. Felix Pierre Fenaux Debra L. Friedman Irene M. Ghobrial Jason R. Gotlib Brandon Hayes-Lattin Cheryl A. Hillery Achille Iolascon Jean-Pierre J. Issa Sundar Jagannath Diane F. Jelinek H. Phillip Koeffler John Koreth Robert J. Kreitman Robert B. Levy David Lillicrap Richard Lottenberg John D. McMannis Mark D. Minden Charles G. Mullighan Arnon Nagler Peter J. Newman Robert Z. Orlowski Antonio Palumbo Julie A. Panepinto Warren S. Pear Sibrand Poppema Barbara Pro Ching-Hon Pui A. Koneti Rao Aaron P. Rapoport Pieter H. Reitsma Douglas D. Ross J. Eric Russell Barbara Savoldo Kirk R. Schultz Radek C. Skoda Marilyn L. Slovak Susan Smyth Hugo ten Cate Herve Tilly John M. Timmerman Ivo Touw Amy J. Wagers Russell E. Ware Catherine J. Wu Virginia M. Zaleskas ASH ABSTRACTS REVIEWERS Camille Abboud Omar Abdel-Wahab Jeremy Abramson Suneet Agarwal Sikander Ailawadhi Onder Alpdogan Andrew Aprikyan Mary Armanios Aneel Ashrani Norio Asou Aglaia Athanassiadou Eyal Attar Mohammad Azam Maria Baer Jorg Baesecke Sarah Ball Karen Ballen Frederic Baron Shannon Bates Minoo Battiwalla Marie Bene Charles Bennett James Berenson Steven Bernstein Francesco Bertoni Monica Bessler Wolfgang Bethge Kapil Bhalla Deepa Bhojwani James Bieker Bruce R. Blazar Annemarie Block David Bodine Catherine Bollard Antonio Bonati Eric Bouhassira Benjamin Braun Christopher Bredeson Patrick Brown Ross Brown Jan Burger Dario Campana Jose Cancelas Paul Carpenter Andrew Carroll James Casella Rebecca Chan Roy Chemaly Benny Chen Jerry Cheng Linzhao Cheng Bruce Cheson Mark Chiang Athar Chishti Hearn Cho Magdalena Chrzanowska-Wodnicka Richard E. Clark Joseph Connors Kenneth Cooke Miguel Cruz Adam Cuker Sandeep Dave Janice Davis Sproul Lucia De Franceschi Philip De Groot Rodney DeKoter Richard Delarue Stephen Devereux Steven Devine Paola Jorge Di Don Diamond Meletios Dimopoulos John DiPersio Angela Dispenzieri Benjamin Djulbegovic Jing-fei Dong James Downing William Drobyski Rafael Duarte Charles Dumontet Kieron Dunleavy Brian Durie Dimitar Efremov Elizabeth Eklund Jonas Emsley Patricia Ernst Andrew Evens Chris Fegan Andrew Feldman Giuliana Ferrari Willem Fibbe Adele Fielding Thoas Fioretos Robert Flaumenhaft Rafael Fonseca James Foran Joseph Frank Janet Franklin Paul Frenette Alan Friedman Terry Fry Saghi Gaffari Naomi Galili Patrick Gallagher Anne Galy David Garcia Randy Gascoyne Cristina Gasparetto Norbert Gattermann Tobias Gedde-Dahl Alan Gewirtz Francis Giles Robert Godal Lucy Godley Ivana Gojo Norbert Gorin Andre Goy Eric Grabowski Steven Grant Timothy Graubert Elizabeth Griffiths H. Leighton Grimes Claudia Haferlach Corinne Haioun Parameswaran Hari Christine Harrison Robert Hasserjian Nyla Heerema Shelly Heimfeld Roland Herzog Elizabeth Hexner Teru Hideshima William H. Hildebrand Gerhard Hildebrandt Devendra Hiwase Karin Hoffmeister Donna Hogge Scott Howard Brian Huntly Hiroto Inaba Baba Inusa Shai Izraeli Suresh Jhanwar Amy Johnson Craig Jordan Joseph Jurcic Nina Kadan-Lottick Lawrence Kaplan Jonathan Kaufman Neil Kay Michelle Kelliher Craig Kessler H. Jean Khoury Allison King Joseph Kiss Issay Kitabayashi Robert Klaassen Christoph Klein Yoshihisa Kodera Alexander Kohlmann Barbara Konkle Michael Kovacs Robert Kralovics Amrita Krishnan Nicolaus Kroger Ashish Kumar Ralf Küppers Jeffery Kutok Ann LaCasce Raymond Lai David Lane Peter Lane Richard Larson Michelle Le Beau Gregoire Le Gal Ollivier Legrand Suzanne Lentzsch John Leonard John Levine Ross Levine Linheng Li Renhao Li Zhenyu Li Wendy Lim Charles Linker Jeffrey Lipton Per Ljungman John Lollar Philip Low David Lucas Selina Luger Leo Luznik Gary Lyman Jaroslaw Maciejewski Elizabeth MacIntyre Nigel Mackman Luca Malcovati Guido Marcucci Tomer Mark Susan Maroney Giovanni Martinelli Peter Maslak Alan Mast Grant McArthur Philip McCarthy Michael McDevitt Peter McLaughlin Bruno Medeiros Jules P.P. Meijerink Junia Melo Thomas Mercher Bradley Messmer Marco Mielcarek Ken Mills Shin Mineishi Arturo Molina Silvia Montoto Marie Joelle Mozziconacci Auayporn Nademanee Vesna Najfeld Eneida Nemecek Ellis Neufeld Peter Newburger Heyu Ni Charlotte Marie Niemeyer Yago Nieto Anne Novak Paul O\'Donnell Vivian Oehler Fritz Offner Johannes Oldenburg Rebecca Olin Richard J. O'Reilly Thomas Ortel Keiya Ozawa Rose Ann Padua Sung-Yun Pai James Palis Derwood Pamphilon Animesh Pardanani Farzana Pashankar Andrea Pellagatti Catherine Pellat-Deceunynck Louis Pelus Chris Pepper Melanie Percy Andrew Perkins Luke Peterson Andrew Pettitt Javier Pinilla-Ibarz Kimmo Porkka David Porter Amy Powers Claude Preudhomme Frederick Racke Margaret Ragni Thomas Raife Alessandro Rambaldi Mariusz Ratajczak Pavan Reddy Mary Relling Tannishtha Reya Lisa Rimsza Stefano Rivella Isabelle Riviere Pamela Robey Gail Roboz Aldo Roccaro Maria Alma Rodriguez Frank Rosenbauer Laura Rosinol Alan Rosmarin Giuseppe Saglio Jonathan Said Valeria Santini Ravindra Sarode Yogenthiran Saunthararajah Bipin Savani Alan Schechter Charles Schiffer Robert Schlossman Laurie Sehn Rita Selby Orhan Sezer Sadhna Shankar John Shaughnessy Jordan Shavit Kevin Sheehan Shalini Shenoy Colin Sieff Paul Simmons Seema Singhal Sonali Smith Gerard Socie Pieter Sonneveld Simona Soverini David Spaner Steven Spitalnik Kostas Stamatopoulos David Steensma Richard Stone Toshio Suda Perumal Thiagarajan Courtney Thornburg Rodger Tiedemann David Traver Guido Tricot Darrell Triulzi Suzanne Trudel Christel Van Geet Karin Vanderkerken David Varon Amit Verma Srdan Verstovsek Ravi Vij Dan Vogl Loren Walensky Edmund Waller George Weiner Daniel Weisdorf Karl Welte Peter Westervelt Adrian Wiestner P.W. Wijermans John Wingard Anne Woolfrey Mingjiang Xu Qing Yi Anas Younes Ryan Zarychanski Arthur Zelent Clive Zent Dong-Er Zhang Xianzheng Zhou James Zimring

Introduction In October of 2004, La Presse asked its Quebecois reading audience a very simple question: “What is your favourite cookbook and why?” As Marie Marquis reports in her essay “The Cookbooks Quebecers Prefer: More Than Just Recipes,” “two weeks later, 363 e-mail responses had been received” (214). From the answers, it was clear that despite the increase in television cooking shows, Internet cooking sites, and YouTube how-to videos, cookbooks were not only still being used, but that people had strong allegiances to their favourite ones. Marquis’s essay provides concrete evidence that cookbooks are not meaningless objects. Rather, her use of relevant quotations from the survey proves that they are associated with strong memories and have been used to create bonds between individuals and across generations. Moreover, these quotations reveal that individuals use cookbooks to construct personal narratives that they share with others. In her philosophical analysis of foodmaking as a thoughtful practice, Lisa Heldke helps move the discussion of cooking and, consequently of cookbooks, forward by explaining that the age-old dichotomy between theory and practice merges in food preparation (206). Foodmaking, she explains through her example of kneading bread, requires both a theoretical understanding of what makes bread rise and a practical knowledge of the skill required to achieve the desired results. Much as Susan Leonardi argues that recipes need “a recommendation, a context, a point, a reason-to-be” (340), Heldke advocates in “Recipes for Theory Making” that recipes offer us ideas that we need to either accept or refuse. These ideas include, but are not limited to, what makes a good meal, what it means to eat healthy, what it means to be Italian or vegan. Cookbooks can take many forms. As the cover art from academic documents on the nature, role, and value of cooking and cookbooks clearly demonstrates, a “cookbook” may be an ornate box filled with recipe cards (Floyd and Forster) or may be a bunch of random pieces of paper organised by dividers and held together by a piece of elastic (Tye). The Internet has created many new options for recipe collecting and sharing. Websites such as Allrecipes.com and Cooks.com are open access forums where people can easily upload, download, and bookmark favourite foods. Yet, Laura Shapiro argues in Something from the Oven that the mere presence of a cookbook in one’s home does not mean it is actually used. While “popular cookbooks tell us a great deal about the culinary climate of a given period [...] what they can’t convey is a sense of the day-to-day cookery as it [is] genuinely experienced in the kitchens of real life” (xxi). The same conclusion can be applied to recipe websites. Personalised and family cookbooks are much different and much more telling documents than either unpersonalised printed books or Internet options. Family cookbooks can also take any shape or form but I define them as compilations that have been created by a single person or a small group of individuals as she/he/they evolve over time. They can be handwritten or typed and inserted into either an existing cookbook, scrapbooked, or bound in some other way. The Internet may also help here as bookmaking sites such as Blurb.com allow people to make, and even sell, their own printed books. These can be personalised with pictures and scrapbook-like embellishments. The recipes in these personal collections are influenced by contact with other people as well as printed and online publications. Also impacting these works are individual realities such as gender, race, class, and work. Unfortunately, these documents have not been the focus of much academic attention as food scholars generally analyse the texts within them rather than their practical and actual use. In order to properly understand the value and role of personal and family cookbooks in our daily lives, we must move away from generalisations to specific case studies. Only by looking at people in relationship with them, who are actually using and compiling their own recipe collections or opting instead to turn to either printed books or their computers, can we see the importance and value of family cookbooks. In order to address this methodological problem, this essay analyses a number of cookbook-related experiences that I have witnessed and/or been a part of in my own home. By moving away from the theoretical and focusing on the practical, I aim to advance Heldke’s argument that recipe reading, like foodmaking, is a thoughtful practice with important lessons. Learning to Cook and Learning to Live: What Cookbooks Teach Us Once upon a time, a mother and her two, beautiful daughters decided to make chocolate chip cookies. They took out all the bowls and utensils and ingredients they needed. The mother then plopped the two girls down among all of the paraphernalia on the counter. First, they beat the butter using their super cool Kitchen Aid mixer. Then they beat in the sugar. Carefully, they cracked and beat in the eggs. Then they dumped in the flour. They dumped in the baking powder. They dumped in the vanilla. And they dumped in the chocolate chips. Together, they rolled the cookies, placed them on a baking sheet, pat them down with a fork, and placed them in a hot oven. The house smelled amazing! The mother and her daughters were looking forward to eating the cookies when, all of a sudden, a great big dog showed up at the door. The mother ran outside to shoo the dog home yelling, “Go home, now! Go away!” By the time she got back, the cookies had started to burn and the house stank! The mother and her two daughters took all the cookie-making stuff back out. They threw out the ruined cookies. And they restarted. They beat the butter using their super cool Kitchen Aid mixer. Then they beat in the sugar. Carefully, they cracked and beat in the eggs. Then they dumped in the flour. They dumped in the baking powder. They dumped in the vanilla. And they dumped in the chocolate chips. Together, they rolled the cookies, placed them on a baking sheet, pat them down with a fork, and placed them in a hot oven. This story that my oldest daughter and I invented together goes on to have the cookies ruined by a chatty neighbour before finally finding fruition in a batch of successfully baked cookies. This is a story that we tell together as we get her ready for bed. One person is always the narrator who lists the steps while the other makes the sound effects of the beating mixer and the dumping ingredients. Together, we act out the story by rolling the cookies, patting them, and waving our hands in front of our faces when the burnt cookies have stunk up the house. While she takes great pleasure in its narrative, I take greater pleasure in the fact that, at three years of age, she has a rudimentary understanding of how a basic recipe works. In fact, only a few months ago I observed this mixture of knowledge and skill merge when I had to leave her on the counter while I cleaned up a mess on the floor. By the time I got back to her, she had finished mixing the dry ingredients in with the wet ones. I watched her from across the kitchen as she turned off the Kitchen Aid mixer, slowly spooned the flour mixture into the bowl, and turned the machine back on. She watched the batter mix until the flour had been absorbed and then repeated the process. While I am very thankful that she did not try to add the vanilla or the chocolate chips, this experience essentially proves that one can learn through simple observation and repetition. It is true that she did not have a cookbook in front of her, that she did not know the precise measurements of the ingredients being put into the bowl, and that at her age she would not have been able to make this recipe without my help. However, this examples proves Heldke’s argument that foodmaking is a thoughtful process as it is as much about instinct as it is about following a recipe. Once she is able to read, my daughter will be able to use the instincts that she has developed in her illiterate years to help her better understand written recipes. What is also important to note about this scenario is that I did have a recipe and that I was essentially the one in charge. My culinary instincts are good. I have been baking and cooking since I was a child and it is very much a part of my life. We rarely buy cookies or cakes from the store because we make them from scratch. Yet, I am a working mother who does not spend her days in the kitchen. Thus, my instincts need prompting and guidance from written instructions. Significantly, the handwritten recipe I was using that day comes from the personal cookbook that has been evolving since I left home. In their recent works Eat My Words and Baking as Biography, Janet Theophano and Diane Tye analyse homemade, hand-crafted, and personal cookbooks to show that these texts are the means through which we can understand individuals at a given time and in a given place. Theophano, for example, analyses old cookbooks to understand the impact of social networking in identity making. By looking at the types of recipes and number of people who have written themselves into these women’s books, she shows that cookbook creation has always been a social activity that reveals personal and social identity. In a slightly different way, Tye uses her own mother’s recipes to better understand a person she can no longer talk to. Through recipes, she is able to recreate her deceased mother’s life and thus connect with her on a personal and emotional level. Although academics have traditionally ignored cookbooks as being mundane and unprofessional, the work of these recent critics illustrates the extent to which cookbooks provide an important way of understanding society and people’s places within it. While this essay cannot begin to analyse the large content of my cookbook, this one scenario echoes these recent scholarly claims that personal cookbooks are a significant addition to the academic world and must be read thoughtfully, as Heldke argues, for both the recipes’s theory and for the practical applications and stories embedded within them. In this particular example, Karena and I were making a chocolate a chip cake—a recipe that has been passed down from my Oma. It is a complicated recipe because it requires a weight scale rather than measuring cups and because instructions such as “add enough milk to make a soft dough” are far from precise. The recipe is not just a meaningless entry I found in a random book or on a random website but rather a multilayered narrative and an expression of my personal heritage. As Theophano and Tye have argued, recipes are a way to connect with family, friends, and specific groups of people either still living or long gone. Recipes are a way to create and relive memories. While I am lucky that my Oma is still very much alive, I imagine that I will someday use this recipe as a way to reconnect with her. When I serve this cake to my family members, we will surely be reminded of her. We will wonder where this recipe came from, how it is different from other chocolate chip cake recipes, and where she learned to make it. In fact, the recipe already varies considerably between homes. My Oma makes hers in a round pan, my mother in a loaf pan, and I in cupcake moulds. Each person has a different reason for her choice of presentation that is intrinsic to her reality and communicates a specific part of her identity. Thus by sharing this recipe with my daughter, I am not only ensuring that my memories are being passed on but I am also programming into her characteristics and values such as critical thinking, the worthiness of homemade food, and the importance of family time. Karena does not yet have her own cookbook but her preferences mean that some of the recipes in my collection are made more often than others. My cookbook continues to change and grow as I am currently prioritising foods I know my kids will eat. I am also shopping and surfing for children’s recipe books and websites in order to find kid-friendly meals we can make together. In her analysis of children and adolescent cookbooks published between the 1910s and 1950s, Sherrie Inness demonstrates that cookbooks have not only taught children how to cook, but also how to act. Through the titles and instructions (generally aimed at girls), the recipe choices (fluffy deserts for girls and meat dishes for boys), and the illustrations (of girls cooking and boys eating), these cookbooks have been a medium through which society has taught its youth about their future, gendered roles. Much research by critics such as Laura Shapiro, Sonia Cancian, and Inness, to name but a few, has documented this gendered division of labour in the home. However, the literature does not always reflect reality. As this next example demonstrates, men do cook and they also influence family cookbook creation. A while back, my husband spent quite a bit of time browsing through the World Wide Web to find a good recipe for a venison marinade. As an avid “barbecuer,” he has tried and tested a number of marinades and rubs over the years. Thus he knew what he was looking for in a good recipe. He found one, made it, and it was a hit! Just recently, he tried to find that recipe again. Rather than this being a simple process, after all he knew exactly which recipe he was looking for, it took quite a bit of searching before he found it. This time, he was sure to write it down to avoid having to repeat the frustrating experience. Ironically, when I went to put the written recipe into my personal cookbook, I found that he had, in fact, already copied it out. These two handwritten copies of the same recipe are but one place where my husband “speaks out” from, and claims a place within, what I had always considered “my” cookbook. His taste preferences and preferred cooking style is very different from my own—I would never have considered a venison marinade worth finding never mind copying out. By reading his and my recipes together, one can see an alternative to assumed gender roles in our kitchen. This cookbook proves a practice opposite from the conclusion that women cook to serve men which Inness and others have theorised from the cookbooks they have analysed and forces food and gender critics to reconsider stereotypical dichotomies. Another important example is a recipe that has not actually been written down and inserted into my cookbook but it is one my husband and I both take turns making. Years ago, we had found an excellent bacon-cheese dip online that we never managed to find again. Since then, we have been forced to adlib the recipe and it has, in my opinion, never been as good. Both these Internet-recipe examples illustrate the negative drawbacks to using the Internet to find, and store, recipes. Unfortunately, the Internet is not a book. It changes. Links are sometimes broken. Searches do not always yield the same results. Even with recipe-storing sites such as Allrecipes.com and Cooks.com, one must take the time to impute the information and there is no guarantee that the technology will work. While authors such as Anderson and Wagner bemoan that traditional cookbooks only give one version of most recipes, there are so many recipes online that it is sometimes overwhelming and difficult to make a choice. An amateur cook may find comfort in the illustrations and specific instruction, yet one still needs to either have an instinct for what makes a good recipe or needs to be willing to spend time trying them out. Of course the same can be said of regular cookbooks. Having printed texts in one’s home requires the patience to go through them and still requires a sense of suitability and manageability. In both cases, neither an abundance nor a lack of choice can guarantee results. It is true that both the Internet and printed cookbooks such as The Better Homes and Gardens provide numerous, step-by-step instructions and illustrations to help people learn to make food from scratch. Other encyclopedic volumes such as The Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking, like YouTube, videos break recipes down into simple steps and include visual tools to help a nervous cook. Yet there is a big difference between the theory and the practice. What in theory may appear simple still necessitates practice. A botched recipe can be the result of using different brands of ingredients, tools, or environmental conditions. Only practice can teach people how to make a recipe successfully. Furthermore, it is difficult to create an online cookbook that rivals the malleability of the personal cookbooks. It is true that recipe websites such as Cooks.com and Allrecipes.com do allow a person to store favourite recipes found on their websites. However, unless the submitter takes the time to personalise the content, recipes can lose their ties to their origins. Bookmaking sites such as Blurb.com are attractive options that do allow for personalisation. In her essay “Aunty Sylvie’s Sponge Foodmaking, Cookbooks and Nostalgia,” Sian Supski uses her aunt’s Blurb family cookbook to argue that the marvel of the Internet has ensured that important family food memories will be preserved; yet once printed, even these treasures risk becoming static documents. As Supski goes on to admit, she is a nervous cook and one can conclude that even this though this recipe collection is very special, it will never become personal because she will not add to it or modify the content. As the examples in Theophano's and Tye’s works demonstrate, the personal touches, the added comments, and the handwritten alterations on the actual recipes give people authority, autonomy, and independence. Hardcopies of recipes indicate through their tattered, dog-eared, and stained pages which recipes have been tried and have been considered to be worth keeping. While Internet sites frequently allow people to comment on recipes and so allow cooks to filter their options, commenting is not a requirement and the suggestions left by others do not necessarily reflect personal preferences. Although they do continue a social, recipe-networking trend that Theophano argues has always existed in relation to cookbook creation and personal foodways, once online, their anonymity and lack of personal connection strips them of their true potential. This is also true of printed cookbooks. Even those compiled by celebrity chefs such as Rachel Ray and Jamie Oliver cannot guarantee success as individuals still need to try them. These examples of recipe reading and recipe collecting advance Heldke’s argument that theory and practice blend in this activity. Recipes are not static. They change depending on who makes them, where they come from, and on the conditions under which they are executed. As critics, we need to recognise this blending of theory and practice and read recipe collections with this reality in mind. Conclusion Despite the growing number of blogs and recipe websites now available to the average cook, personal cookbooks are still a more useful and telling way to communicate information about ourselves and our foodways. As this reflection on actual experiences clearly demonstrates, personal cookbooks teach us about more than just food. They allow us to connect to the past in order to better understand who we are today in ways that the Internet and modern technology cannot. Just as cooking combines theory and practice, reading personal and family cookbooks allows critics to see how theories about foodmaking and gender play out in actual kitchens by actual people. The nuanced merging of voices within them illustrates that individuals alter over time as they come into contact with others. While printed cookbooks and online recipe sites do provide their own narrative possibilities, the stories that can be read in personal and family cookbooks prove that reading them is a thoughtful practice worthy of academic attention. References All Recipes.com Canada. 2013. 24 Apr. 2013. ‹http://allrecipes.com›. Anderson, L. V. “Cookbooks Are Headed for Extinction—and That’s OK.” Slate.com 18 Jun. 2012. 24 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/the_future_of_cookbooks_they_ll_go_extinct_and_that_s_ok_.html›. Blurb.ca. 2013. 27 May 2013. ‹http://blurb.ca›. Cancian, Sonia. "'Tutti a Tavola!' Feeding the Family in Two Generations of Italian Immigrant Households in Montreal." Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Ed. Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, Marlene Epp. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 209–21. Cooks.com Recipe Search. 2013. 24 Apr. 2013. ‹http://www.cooks.com›. Darling, Jennifer Dorland. Ed. The Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. Des Moines: Meredith, 1996. Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking. North Vancouver: Whitecap, 2003. Floyd, Janet, and Laurel Forster. The Recipe Reader. Ed. Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010. Heldke, Lisa."Foodmaking as a Thoughtful Practice." Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food. Ed Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke. Indiana UP, 1992. 203–29. ---. “Recipe for Theory Making.” Hypatia 3.2 (1988): 15–29. Inness, Sherrie. Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture. U of Iowa P, 2001. Leonardi, Susan. “Recipes for Reading: Pasta Salad, Lobster à la Riseholme, Key Lime Pie,” PMLA 104.3 (1989): 340–47. Marquis, Marie. "The Cookbooks Quebecers Prefer: More Than Just Recipes." What's to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History. Ed. Nathalie Cooke. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009. 213–27. Shapiro, Laura. Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. New York: Viking, 2004. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. Palgrave MacMillan: New York, 2002. Tye, Diane. Baking As Biography. Canada: McGill-Queen UP, 2010. Wagner, Vivian. “Cookbooks of the Future: Bye, Bye, Index Cards.” E-Commerce Times. Ecommercetimes.com. 20 Nov. 2011. 16 April 2013. ‹http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/73842.html›.

India has one of the world’s highest proportions of plant-based consumers relative to its total population (Sawe). However, the view that India is a predominantly vegetarian nation is likely inaccurate, as recent findings from the 2014 Indian Census indicate that only three in ten Indians self-identity as vegetarian (Census of India). Other studies similarly estimate the prevalence of vegetarianism to range from about 25% (Mintel Global) to about 40% (Euromonitor International; Statista, “Share”), and many Indians are shifting from strict plant-based diets to more flexible versions of plant-based eating (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). When it comes to meat eating, poultry is the most widely consumed (USDA Foreign Agricultural Service; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Some claim that the changing consumer landscape is also eroding traditional taboos associated with beef and buffalo meat consumption (Kala; Bansal), with many tending to underreport their meat consumption due to religious and cultural stigmas (Bansal).This change in food choices is driven by several factors, such as increasing urbanisation (Devi et al.), rising disposable incomes (Devi et al.; Rukhmini), globalisation, and cross-cultural influences (Majumdar; Sinha). Today, the urban middle-class is one of India’s fastest growing consumer segments (Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania), and the rise in the consumption of animal products is primarily occurring in urban India (National Sample Survey Office), making this an important market to investigate.From a global perspective, while many Western nations are increasingly adopting plant-based diets (Eswaran), the growth in meat consumption is predicted to mainly come from emerging markets (OECD/FAO) like India. With these points in mind, the purpose of this study was to explore contemporary eating practices in urban India and to understand how social structures, cultures, and traditions influence these practices. The findings indicate that the key reasons why many are transitioning away from plant-based diets are the rise of new and diverse meat-based foods in urban India, emerging tastes for meat-based cuisines, and meat becoming to be viewed as a status symbol. These factors are further elaborated upon in this article.MethodA key question of this research was “What are eating practices like in urban India today?” The question itself is a challenge, given India’s varied cultures and traditions, along with its myriad eating practices. Given this diversity, the study used an exploratory qualitative approach, where the main mode of data gathering was twenty-five unstructured individual face-to-face interviews, each approximately sixty minutes in duration. The discussions were left largely open to allow participants to share their unique eating practices and reflect on how their practices are shaped by other socio-cultural practices. The research used an iterative study design, which entailed cycles of simultaneous data collection, analysis, and subsequent adaptations made to some questions to refine the emerging theory. Within the defined parameters of the research objectives, saturation was adequately reached upon completion of twenty-five interviews.The sample comprised Mumbai residents aged 23 to 45 years, which is fairly representative given about a third of India’s population is aged under 40 (Central Intelligence Agency). Mumbai was selected as it is one of India’s largest cities (Central Intelligence Agency) and is considered the country’s commercial capital (Raghavan) and multicultural hub (Gulliver). The interviews were conducted at a popular restaurant in downtown Mumbai. The interviews were conducted predominantly in English, as it is India’s subsidiary official language (Central Intelligence Agency) and the participants were comfortable conversing in English. The sample included participants from two of India’s largest religions—Hindus (80%) and Muslims (13%) (Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India), and comprised an even split of males and females.The Market Research Society of India has developed a socio-economic classification (SEC) grid that segments urban households into twelve groups (Market Research Society of India). This segmentation is based on two questions: level of education—from illiteracy to a postgraduate degree—and the ownership of eleven items that range from fairly basic (e.g., electricity connection, gas stove) to relatively sophisticated (e.g., refrigerator, personal computer). As previous qualitative work has found that education levels and disposable incomes can significantly impact one’s ability to make informed and deliberate food choices (Khara), and given meat is a relatively expensive commodity in India (Puskar-Pasewicz), the study focused on the most affluent segments—i.e., SEC A1 and some of SEC A2.It is said that researcher values and predispositions are to some extent inseparable from the research process, and therefore that potential researcher bias must be managed by being self-aware, looking for contradictory data, and being open to different interpretations of the data (Ogden). As the interviewer is a vegan of Indian ethnicity, she attempted to manage researcher bias in several ways. Triangulation of data sources (e.g., interviews, observations, product analysis) helped provide a multi-faceted understanding of the topic (Patton). The discussion guide and findings were also discussed with researchers from different cultural and dietary backgrounds. It is also argued that when a researcher shares the same background as the participants—as was the case in this study—participants may remain silent on certain issues, as they may assume the researcher knows the context and nuances in relation to these issues (McGinn). This arose in some instances as some participants said, “it’s standard stuff you know?” The interviewer hence took an “outsider” role, stating “I’ll need to know what standard stuff is”, so as to reduce any expectation that she ought to understand the social norms, conventions, and cultural practices related to the issue (Leckie). This helped yield more elaborate discussions and greater insight into the topic from the participant’s own unique perspective.The Rise of New and Diverse Meat-based Foods in Urban India Since the early 1990s, which marked the beginning of globalisation in India, urban Indian food culture has undergone a significant change as food imports have been liberalised and international food brands have made their way into the domestic market (Vepa). As a result, India’s major urban centres appear to be witnessing a food revolution:Bombay has become so metropolitan, I mean it always was but it’s so much more in terms of food now … and it’s so tempting. (Female, age 32)The changing food culture has also seen an increase in new dishes, such as a lamb burger stuffed with blue cheese, and the desire to try out exotic meats such as octopus, camel, rabbit, and emu. Many participants described themselves as “food obsessed” and living in a “present and continuous state of food”, where “we finish a meal and we’ve already started discussing our next meal”.In comparison, traditional plant-based foods were seen to have not undergone the same transformation and were described as “boring” and “standard” in comparison to the more interesting and diverse meat-based dishes:a standard restaurant menu, you don’t have all the different leafy vegetables…It’s mostly a few paneer and this or that—and upon that they don’t do much justice to the vegetable itself. It’s the same masala which they mix in it so everything tastes the same to me. So that’s a big difference when you consider meats. If I eat chicken in different preparations it has a different taste, if I have fish each has a different taste. (Male, age 29)If I’m going out and I’m spending, then I’m not going to eat the same thing which I eat at home every day which is veg food ... I will always pick the non-vegetarian option. (Male, age 32)Liberalisation and the transformation of the local media landscape also appears to have encouraged a new form of consumerism (Sinha). One participant described how an array of new TV channels and programmes have opened up new horizons for food:The whole visual attraction of food, getting it into your living room or into your bedroom and showing you all this great stuff … [There are now] kiddie birthdays which are MasterChef birthdays. There are MasterChef team building activities … So food is very big and I think media has had a very, very large role to play in that. (Female, age 40+)In a similar vein, digital media has also helped shape the food revolution. India has the world’s second largest number of Internet users (Statista, Internet) and new technology seems to have changed the way urban Indians interact with food:We are using social sites. We see all the cooking tips and all the recipes. I have a wife and she’s like, “Oh, let’s cook it!” (Male, age 25)I see everything on YouTube and food channels and all that. I really like the presentation, how they just a little they cook the chicken breast. (Female, age 42)Smartphones and apps have also made access to new cuisines easier, and some participants have become accustomed to instant gratification, givendelivery boys who can satisfy your craving by delivering it to you … You order food from “Zomato” at twelve o’clock, one o’clock also. And order from “Sigree” in the morning also nowadays … more delivery options are there in India. (Male, age 30)This may also partially explain the growing popularity of fusion foods, which include meat-based variations of traditional plant-based dishes, such as meat-filled dosas and parathas.Emerging Tastes for Meat-based Cuisines Many highlighted the sensory pleasure derived from meat eating itself, focusing on a broad range of sensory qualities:There’s the texture, there’s the smell, there’s aroma, there’s the taste itself … Now imagine if chicken or beef was as soft as paneer, we probably wouldn’t enjoy it as much. There’s a bit of that pull. (Female, age 32)Some discussed adopting a plant-based diet for health-related reasons but also highlighted that the experience, overall, was short of satisfactory:I was doing one week of GM Diet … one day it was full of fruits, then one day it was full of vegetables. And then in the third day, when it was actually the chicken part, frankly speaking even I enjoyed … you just cannot have veggies everyday. (Female, age 35)Only eating veg, I think my whole mouth was, I think gone bad. Because I really wanted to have something … keema [minced meat]. (Female, age 38)Plant-based foods, in comparison to meat-based dishes, were described as “bland”, “boring”, and lacking in the “umami zing”. Even if cooked in the same spices, plant-based foods were still seen to be wanting:you have chicken curry and soya bean curry made from the same masala … but if you replace meat with some other substitutes, you’re gonna be able to tell the difference ... the taste of meat, I feel, is better than the taste of a vegetable. (Male, age 32)The thing is, vegetarian dishes are bland … They don’t get the feeling of the spices in the vegetarian dish ... So when you are eating something juicy, having a bite, it’s a mouthful thing. Vegetarian dishes are not mouthful. (Male, age 25)At the end of a vegetarian meal … I think that maybe [it is] a lack of fullness … I’m eating less because you get bored after a while. (Female, age 32)Tasting the Forbidden FruitIn India, chicken is considered to be widely acceptable, as pork is forbidden to Muslims and beef is prohibited for Hindus (Devi et al.; Jishnu). However, the desire for new flavours seems to be pushing the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable, as highlighted in the discussion below with a 25-year-old male Muslim participant:Participant: When I go out with my friends then I try new things like bacon.Moderator: Bacon?Participant: Yeah... when I went with my colleagues to this restaurant in Bandra—it’s called Saltwater Cafe. And they had this chicken burger with bacon wrapped on it.Moderator: Okay.Participant: And I didn’t know at the time that it’s bacon … They didn’t tell me what we are having … When I had it, I told them that it’s tasting like different, totally different, like I haven’t had this in my life.Moderator: Yeah.Participant: And when they told me that it’s bacon then, I thought, okay fine. Something new I can have. Now I’m old enough to make my own choices.Similarly, several Hindu participants expressed similar sentiments about beef consumption:One of our friends, he used to have beef. He said this tastes better than chicken so I tried it. (Male, age 30)I ended up ordering beef which I actually would never eat ... But then everyone was like, it’s a must try ... So I start off with eating the gravy and then it entices me. That’s when I go and try the meat. (Female, aged 23)Although studies on meat eating in India are limited, it seems that many prefer to consume meats outside the home (Suresh; Devi et al.), away from the watchful eyes of parents, partners and, in some instances, the neighbours:My dad would say if you want to eat beef or anything have it outside but don’t bring it home. (Male, age 29)One of my friends … he keeps secret from his girlfriend … he come with us and eat [meat] and tell us not to tell her. (Male, age 26)People around have a little bit of a different view towards people eating non-veg in that area—so we wouldn’t openly talk about eating non-veg when somebody from the locality is around. (Female, age 32)Further to this point, some discussed a certain thrill that arose from pushing social boundaries by eating these forbidden meats:feel excited ... it gave me confidence also. I didn’t know ... my own decision. Something that is riskier in my life, which I hadn’t done before. (Male, age 25)Meat as a Status SymbolIn urban India, meat is increasingly considered a status symbol (Roy; Esselborn; Goswami). Similarly, several participants highlighted that meat-based dishes tend to be cooked for special occasions:non-vegetarian meals [at home] were perceived as being more elaborate and more lavish probably as compared to vegetarian meals. (Male, age 34)Dal [a lentil dish] is one of the basic things which we don’t make in the house when you have guests, or when you have an occasion … We usually make biryani…gravies of chicken or mutton. (Female, age 38)Success in urban India tends to be measured through one’s engagement with commodities that hold status-enhancing appeal (Mathur), and this also appears to apply to eating practices. Among meat-eating communities, it was found that serving only plant-based foods on special occasions was potentially seen as “low grade” and not quite socially acceptable:It’s just considered not something special. In fact, you would be judged…they would be like, “Oh my God, they only served us vegetables.” (Female, age 32)If you are basically from a Gujarati family, you are helpless. You have to serve that thing [vegetarian food] ... But if you are a non-vegetarian … if you serve them veg, it looks too low grade. (Female, age 38)In fact, among some families, serving “simple vegetarian food” tended to be associated with sombre occasions such as funerals, where one tends to avoid eating certain foods that give rise to desires, such as meat. This is elaborated upon in the below discussion with a Hindu participant (female, aged 40+):Participant: So an aunt of mine passed away a little over a year ago … traditionally we have this 13 day thing where you eat—We call it “Oshoge”… the khaana [food] is supposed to be neutral.Moderator: The khaana is supposed to be vegetarian?Participant: Yeah, it’s not just vegetarian … You’re supposed to have very simple vegetarian food like boiled food or you know dahi [plain yoghurt] and puffed rice … after a day of that, we were all looking at each other and then my cousin said, “Let me teach you how to fillet fish.” Similarly, a Muslim participant mentioned how serving certain dishes—such as dal, a common vegetarian dish—tends to be reserved for funeral occasions and is therefore considered socially unacceptable for other occasions:I’m calling a guest and I make dal chawal [lentils and rice] okay? They will think, arrey yeh kya yeh mayat ka khaana hai kya? [oh what is this, is the food for a corpse or what]? ... I can make it on that particular day when somebody has died in the family ... but then whenever guest is at home, or there is an occasion, we cannot make dal. (Female, age 38)ConclusionUrban India is experiencing a shift in norms around food choices, as meat-based dishes appear to have become symbolic of the broader changing landscape. Meat is not only eaten for its sensory properties but also because of its sociocultural associations. In comparison, many plant-based foods are perceived as relatively bland and uninteresting. This raises the question of how to make plant-based eating more appealing, both in terms of social significance and sensory enjoyment. In view of the attachment to familiar customs against the backdrop of a rapidly changing urban culture (Sinha; Venkatesh), perhaps plant-based foods could be re-introduced to the urban Indian as a blend of Western novelty and traditional familiarity (Majumdar), thereby representing the “the new along with the old” (Sinha 18), and hence enhancing their status. 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IntroductionIn the year 2000, a group of likeminded individuals got together and convened the first annual World Barista Championship in Monte Carlo. With twelve competitors from around the globe, each competitor was judged by seven judges: one head judge who oversaw the process, two technical judges who assessed technical skills, and four sensory judges who evaluated the taste and appearance of the espresso drinks. Competitors had fifteen minutes to serve four espresso coffees, four cappuccino coffees, and four “signature” drinks that they had devised using one shot of espresso and other ingredients of their choice, but no alcohol. The competitors were also assessed on their overall barista skills, their creativity, and their ability to perform under pressure and impress the judges with their knowledge of coffee. This competition has grown to the extent that eleven years later, in 2011, 54 countries held national barista championships with the winner from each country competing for the highly coveted position of World Barista Champion. That year, Alejandro Mendez from El Salvador became the first world champion from a coffee producing nation. Champion baristas are more likely to come from coffee consuming countries than they are from coffee producing countries as countries that produce coffee seldom have a culture of espresso coffee consumption. While Ireland is not a coffee-producing nation, the Irish are the highest per capita consumers of tea in the world (Mac Con Iomaire, “Ireland”). Despite this, in 2008, Stephen Morrissey from Ireland overcame 50 other national champions to become the 2008 World Barista Champion (see, http://vimeo.com/2254130). Another Irish national champion, Colin Harmon, came fourth in this competition in both 2009 and 2010. This paper discusses the history and development of coffee and coffee houses in Dublin from the 17th century, charting how coffee culture in Dublin appeared, evolved, and stagnated before re-emerging at the beginning of the 21st century, with a remarkable win in the World Barista Championships. The historical links between coffeehouses and media—ranging from print media to electronic and social media—are discussed. In this, the coffee house acts as an informal public gathering space, what urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls a “third place,” neither work nor home. These “third places” provide anchors for community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction (Oldenburg). This paper will also show how competition from other “third places” such as clubs, hotels, restaurants, and bars have affected the vibrancy of coffee houses. Early Coffee Houses The first coffee house was established in Constantinople in 1554 (Tannahill 252; Huetz de Lemps 387). The first English coffee houses opened in Oxford in 1650 and in London in 1652. Coffee houses multiplied thereafter but, in 1676, when some London coffee houses became hotbeds for political protest, the city prosecutor decided to close them. The ban was soon lifted and between 1680 and 1730 Londoners discovered the pleasure of drinking coffee (Huetz de Lemps 388), although these coffee houses sold a number of hot drinks including tea and chocolate as well as coffee.The first French coffee houses opened in Marseille in 1671 and in Paris the following year. Coffee houses proliferated during the 18th century: by 1720 there were 380 public cafés in Paris and by the end of the century there were 600 (Huetz de Lemps 387). Café Procope opened in Paris in 1674 and, in the 18th century, became a literary salon with regular patrons: Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Condorcet (Huetz de Lemps 387; Pitte 472). In England, coffee houses developed into exclusive clubs such as Crockford’s and the Reform, whilst elsewhere in Europe they evolved into what we identify as cafés, similar to the tea shops that would open in England in the late 19th century (Tannahill 252-53). Tea quickly displaced coffee in popularity in British coffee houses (Taylor 142). Pettigrew suggests two reasons why Great Britain became a tea-drinking nation while most of the rest of Europe took to coffee (48). The first was the power of the East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600, which controlled the world’s biggest tea monopoly and promoted the beverage enthusiastically. The second was the difficulty England had in securing coffee from the Levant while at war with France at the end of the seventeenth century and again during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13). Tea also became the dominant beverage in Ireland and over a period of time became the staple beverage of the whole country. In 1835, Samuel Bewley and his son Charles dared to break the monopoly of The East India Company by importing over 2,000 chests of tea directly from Canton, China, to Ireland. His family would later become synonymous with the importation of coffee and with opening cafés in Ireland (see, Farmar for full history of the Bewley's and their activities). Ireland remains the highest per-capita consumer of tea in the world. Coffee houses have long been linked with social and political change (Kennedy, Politicks; Pincus). The notion that these new non-alcoholic drinks were responsible for the Enlightenment because people could now gather socially without getting drunk is rejected by Wheaton as frivolous, since there had always been alternatives to strong drink, and European civilisation had achieved much in the previous centuries (91). She comments additionally that cafés, as gathering places for dissenters, took over the role that taverns had long played. Pennell and Vickery support this argument adding that by offering a choice of drinks, and often sweets, at a fixed price and in a more civilized setting than most taverns provided, coffee houses and cafés were part of the rise of the modern restaurant. It is believed that, by 1700, the commercial provision of food and drink constituted the second largest occupational sector in London. Travellers’ accounts are full of descriptions of London taverns, pie shops, coffee, bun and chop houses, breakfast huts, and food hawkers (Pennell; Vickery). Dublin Coffee Houses and Later incarnations The earliest reference to coffee houses in Dublin is to the Cock Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85). Public dining or drinking establishments listed in the 1738 Dublin Directory include taverns, eating houses, chop houses, coffee houses, and one chocolate house in Fownes Court run by Peter Bardin (Hardiman and Kennedy 157). During the second half of the 17th century, Dublin’s merchant classes transferred allegiance from taverns to the newly fashionable coffee houses as places to conduct business. By 1698, the fashion had spread to country towns with coffee houses found in Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Wexford, and Galway, and slightly later in Belfast and Waterford in the 18th century. Maxwell lists some of Dublin’s leading coffee houses and taverns, noting their clientele: There were Lucas’s Coffee House, on Cork Hill (the scene of many duels), frequented by fashionable young men; the Phoenix, in Werburgh Street, where political dinners were held; Dick’s Coffee House, in Skinner’s Row, much patronized by literary men, for it was over a bookseller’s; the Eagle, in Eustace Street, where meetings of the Volunteers were held; the Old Sot’s Hole, near Essex Bridge, famous for its beefsteaks and ale; the Eagle Tavern, on Cork Hill, which was demolished at the same time as Lucas’s to make room for the Royal Exchange; and many others. (76) Many of the early taverns were situated around the Winetavern Street, Cook Street, and Fishamble Street area. (see Fig. 1) Taverns, and later coffee houses, became meeting places for gentlemen and centres for debate and the exchange of ideas. In 1706, Francis Dickson published the Flying Post newspaper at the Four Courts coffee house in Winetavern Street. The Bear Tavern (1725) and the Black Lyon (1735), where a Masonic Lodge assembled every Wednesday, were also located on this street (Gilbert v.1 160). Dick’s Coffee house was established in the late 17th century by bookseller and newspaper proprietor Richard Pue, and remained open until 1780 when the building was demolished. In 1740, Dick’s customers were described thus: Ye citizens, gentlemen, lawyers and squires,who summer and winter surround our great fires,ye quidnuncs! who frequently come into Pue’s,To live upon politicks, coffee, and news. (Gilbert v.1 174) There has long been an association between coffeehouses and publishing books, pamphlets and particularly newspapers. Other Dublin publishers and newspapermen who owned coffee houses included Richard Norris and Thomas Bacon. Until the 1850s, newspapers were burdened with a number of taxes: on the newsprint, a stamp duty, and on each advertisement. By 1865, these taxes had virtually disappeared, resulting in the appearance of 30 new newspapers in Ireland, 24 of them in Dublin. Most people read from copies which were available free of charge in taverns, clubs, and coffee houses (MacGiolla Phadraig). Coffee houses also kept copies of international newspapers. On 4 May 1706, Francis Dickson notes in the Dublin Intelligence that he held the Paris and London Gazettes, Leyden Gazette and Slip, the Paris and Hague Lettres à la Main, Daily Courant, Post-man, Flying Post, Post-script and Manuscripts in his coffeehouse in Winetavern Street (Kennedy, “Dublin”). Henry Berry’s analysis of shop signs in Dublin identifies 24 different coffee houses in Dublin, with the main clusters in Essex Street near the Custom’s House (Cocoa Tree, Bacon’s, Dempster’s, Dublin, Merchant’s, Norris’s, and Walsh’s) Cork Hill (Lucas’s, St Lawrence’s, and Solyman’s) Skinners’ Row (Bow’s’, Darby’s, and Dick’s) Christ Church Yard (Four Courts, and London) College Green (Jack’s, and Parliament) and Crampton Court (Exchange, and Little Dublin). (see Figure 1, below, for these clusters and the locations of other Dublin coffee houses.) The earliest to be referenced is the Cock Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85), with Solyman’s (1691), Bow’s (1692), and Patt’s on High Street (1699), all mentioned in print before the 18th century. The name of one, the Cocoa Tree, suggests that chocolate was also served in this coffee house. More evidence of the variety of beverages sold in coffee houses comes from Gilbert who notes that in 1730, one Dublin poet wrote of George Carterwright’s wife at The Custom House Coffee House on Essex Street: Her coffee’s fresh and fresh her tea,Sweet her cream, ptizan, and whea,her drams, of ev’ry sort, we findboth good and pleasant, in their kind. (v. 2 161) Figure 1: Map of Dublin indicating Coffee House clusters 1 = Sackville St.; 2 = Winetavern St.; 3 = Essex St.; 4 = Cork Hill; 5 = Skinner's Row; 6 = College Green.; 7 = Christ Church Yard; 8 = Crampton Court.; 9 = Cook St.; 10 = High St.; 11 = Eustace St.; 12 = Werburgh St.; 13 = Fishamble St.; 14 = Westmorland St.; 15 = South Great George's St.; 16 = Grafton St.; 17 = Kildare St.; 18 = Dame St.; 19 = Anglesea Row; 20 = Foster Place; 21 = Poolbeg St.; 22 = Fleet St.; 23 = Burgh Quay.A = Cafe de Paris, Lincoln Place; B = Red Bank Restaurant, D'Olier St.; C = Morrison's Hotel, Nassau St.; D = Shelbourne Hotel, St. Stephen's Green; E = Jury's Hotel, Dame St. Some coffee houses transformed into the gentlemen’s clubs that appeared in London, Paris and Dublin in the 17th century. These clubs originally met in coffee houses, then taverns, until later proprietary clubs became fashionable. Dublin anticipated London in club fashions with members of the Kildare Street Club (1782) and the Sackville Street Club (1794) owning the premises of their clubhouse, thus dispensing with the proprietor. The first London club to be owned by the members seems to be Arthur’s, founded in 1811 (McDowell 4) and this practice became widespread throughout the 19th century in both London and Dublin. The origin of one of Dublin’s most famous clubs, Daly’s Club, was a chocolate house opened by Patrick Daly in c.1762–65 in premises at 2–3 Dame Street (Brooke). It prospered sufficiently to commission its own granite-faced building on College Green between Anglesea Street and Foster Place which opened in 1789 (Liddy 51). Daly’s Club, “where half the land of Ireland has changed hands”, was renowned for the gambling that took place there (Montgomery 39). Daly’s sumptuous palace catered very well (and discreetly) for honourable Members of Parliament and rich “bucks” alike (Craig 222). The changing political and social landscape following the Act of Union led to Daly’s slow demise and its eventual closure in 1823 (Liddy 51). Coincidentally, the first Starbucks in Ireland opened in 2005 in the same location. Once gentlemen’s clubs had designated buildings where members could eat, drink, socialise, and stay overnight, taverns and coffee houses faced competition from the best Dublin hotels which also had coffee rooms “in which gentlemen could read papers, write letters, take coffee and wine in the evening—an exiguous substitute for a club” (McDowell 17). There were at least 15 establishments in Dublin city claiming to be hotels by 1789 (Corr 1) and their numbers grew in the 19th century, an expansion which was particularly influenced by the growth of railways. By 1790, Dublin’s public houses (“pubs”) outnumbered its coffee houses with Dublin boasting 1,300 (Rooney 132). Names like the Goose and Gridiron, Harp and Crown, Horseshoe and Magpie, and Hen and Chickens—fashionable during the 17th and 18th centuries in Ireland—hung on decorative signs for those who could not read. Throughout the 20th century, the public house provided the dominant “third place” in Irish society, and the drink of choice for itd predominantly male customers was a frothy pint of Guinness. Newspapers were available in public houses and many newspapermen had their own favourite hostelries such as Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street; The Pearl, and The Palace on Fleet Street; and The White Horse Inn on Burgh Quay. Any coffee served in these establishments prior to the arrival of the new coffee culture in the 21st century was, however, of the powdered instant variety. Hotels / Restaurants with Coffee Rooms From the mid-19th century, the public dining landscape of Dublin changed in line with London and other large cities in the United Kingdom. Restaurants did appear gradually in the United Kingdom and research suggests that one possible reason for this growth from the 1860s onwards was the Refreshment Houses and Wine Licences Act (1860). The object of this act was to “reunite the business of eating and drinking”, thereby encouraging public sobriety (Mac Con Iomaire, “Emergence” v.2 95). Advertisements for Dublin restaurants appeared in The Irish Times from the 1860s. Thom’s Directory includes listings for Dining Rooms from the 1870s and Refreshment Rooms are listed from the 1880s. This pattern continued until 1909, when Thom’s Directory first includes a listing for “Restaurants and Tea Rooms”. Some of the establishments that advertised separate coffee rooms include Dublin’s first French restaurant, the Café de Paris, The Red Bank Restaurant, Morrison’s Hotel, Shelbourne Hotel, and Jury’s Hotel (see Fig. 1). The pattern of separate ladies’ coffee rooms emerged in Dublin and London during the latter half of the 19th century and mixed sex dining only became popular around the last decade of the 19th century, partly infuenced by Cesar Ritz and Auguste Escoffier (Mac Con Iomaire, “Public Dining”). Irish Cafés: From Bewley’s to Starbucks A number of cafés appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, most notably Robert Roberts and Bewley’s, both of which were owned by Quaker families. Ernest Bewley took over the running of the Bewley’s importation business in the 1890s and opened a number of Oriental Cafés; South Great Georges Street (1894), Westmoreland Street (1896), and what became the landmark Bewley’s Oriental Café in Grafton Street (1927). Drawing influence from the grand cafés of Paris and Vienna, oriental tearooms, and Egyptian architecture (inspired by the discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamen’s Tomb), the Grafton Street business brought a touch of the exotic into the newly formed Irish Free State. Bewley’s cafés became the haunt of many of Ireland’s leading literary figures, including Samuel Becket, Sean O’Casey, and James Joyce who mentioned the café in his book, Dubliners. A full history of Bewley’s is available (Farmar). It is important to note, however, that pots of tea were sold in equal measure to mugs of coffee in Bewley’s. The cafés changed over time from waitress- to self-service and a failure to adapt to changing fashions led to the business being sold, with only the flagship café in Grafton Street remaining open in a revised capacity. It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that a new wave of coffee house culture swept Ireland. This was based around speciality coffee beverages such as espressos, cappuccinos, lattés, macchiatos, and frappuccinnos. This new phenomenon coincided with the unprecedented growth in the Irish economy, during which Ireland became known as the “Celtic Tiger” (Murphy 3). One aspect of this period was a building boom and a subsequent growth in apartment living in the Dublin city centre. The American sitcom Friends and its fictional coffee house, “Central Perk,” may also have helped popularise the use of coffee houses as “third spaces” (Oldenberg) among young apartment dwellers in Dublin. This was also the era of the “dotcom boom” when many young entrepreneurs, software designers, webmasters, and stock market investors were using coffee houses as meeting places for business and also as ad hoc office spaces. This trend is very similar to the situation in the 17th and early 18th centuries where coffeehouses became known as sites for business dealings. Various theories explaining the growth of the new café culture have circulated, with reasons ranging from a growth in Eastern European migrants, anti-smoking legislation, returning sophisticated Irish emigrants, and increased affluence (Fenton). Dublin pubs, facing competition from the new coffee culture, began installing espresso coffee machines made by companies such as Gaggia to attract customers more interested in a good latté than a lager and it is within this context that Irish baristas gained such success in the World Barista competition. In 2001 the Georges Street branch of Bewley’s was taken over by a chain called Café, Bar, Deli specialising in serving good food at reasonable prices. Many ex-Bewley’s staff members subsequently opened their own businesses, roasting coffee and running cafés. Irish-owned coffee chains such as Java Republic, Insomnia, and O’Brien’s Sandwich Bars continued to thrive despite the competition from coffee chains Starbucks and Costa Café. Indeed, so successful was the handmade Irish sandwich and coffee business that, before the economic downturn affected its business, Irish franchise O’Brien’s operated in over 18 countries. The Café, Bar, Deli group had also begun to franchise its operations in 2008 when it too became a victim of the global economic downturn. With the growth of the Internet, many newspapers have experienced falling sales of their printed format and rising uptake of their electronic versions. Most Dublin coffee houses today provide wireless Internet connections so their customers can read not only the local newspapers online, but also others from all over the globe, similar to Francis Dickenson’s coffee house in Winetavern Street in the early 18th century. Dublin has become Europe’s Silicon Valley, housing the European headquarters for companies such as Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Paypal, and Facebook. There are currently plans to provide free wireless connectivity throughout Dublin’s city centre in order to promote e-commerce, however, some coffee houses shut off the wireless Internet in their establishments at certain times of the week in order to promote more social interaction to ensure that these “third places” remain “great good places” at the heart of the community (Oldenburg). Conclusion Ireland is not a country that is normally associated with a coffee culture but coffee houses have been part of the fabric of that country since they emerged in Dublin in the 17th century. These Dublin coffee houses prospered in the 18th century, and survived strong competition from clubs and hotels in the 19th century, and from restaurant and public houses into the 20th century. In 2008, when Stephen Morrissey won the coveted title of World Barista Champion, Ireland’s place as a coffee consuming country was re-established. The first decade of the 21st century witnessed a birth of a new espresso coffee culture, which shows no signs of weakening despite Ireland’s economic travails. References Berry, Henry F. “House and Shop Signs in Dublin in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 40.2 (1910): 81–98. Brooke, Raymond Frederick. Daly’s Club and the Kildare Street Club, Dublin. Dublin, 1930. Corr, Frank. Hotels in Ireland. Dublin: Jemma Publications, 1987. Craig, Maurice. Dublin 1660-1860. Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1980. Farmar, Tony. The Legendary, Lofty, Clattering Café. Dublin: A&A Farmar, 1988. Fenton, Ben. “Cafe Culture taking over in Dublin.” The Telegraph 2 Oct. 2006. 29 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1530308/cafe-culture-taking-over-in-Dublin.html›. Gilbert, John T. A History of the City of Dublin (3 vols.). Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978. Girouard, Mark. Victorian Pubs. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1984. 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Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. “The Emergence, Development, and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History.” Ph.D. thesis, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, 2009. 4 Apr. 2012 ‹http://arrow.dit.ie/tourdoc/12›. ----- “Ireland.” Food Cultures of the World Encylopedia. Ed. Ken Albala. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2010. ----- “Public Dining in Dublin: The History and Evolution of Gastronomy and Commercial Dining 1700-1900.” International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 24. Special Issue: The History of the Commercial Hospitality Industry from Classical Antiquity to the 19th Century (2012): forthcoming. MacGiolla Phadraig, Brian. “Dublin: One Hundred Years Ago.” Dublin Historical Record 23.2/3 (1969): 56–71. Maxwell, Constantia. Dublin under the Georges 1714–1830. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1979. McDowell, R. B. Land & Learning: Two Irish Clubs. Dublin: The Lilliput P, 1993. Montgomery, K. L. “Old Dublin Clubs and Coffee-Houses.” New Ireland Review VI (1896): 39–44. Murphy, Antoine E. “The ‘Celtic Tiger’—An Analysis of Ireland’s Economic Growth Performance.” EUI Working Papers, 2000 29 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.eui.eu/RSCAS/WP-Texts/00_16.pdf›. Oldenburg, Ray, ed. Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About The “Great Good Places” At the Heart of Our Communities. New York: Marlowe & Company 2001. Pennell, Sarah. “‘Great Quantities of Gooseberry Pye and Baked Clod of Beef’: Victualling and Eating out in Early Modern London.” Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Eds. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 228–59. Pettigrew, Jane. A Social History of Tea. London: National Trust Enterprises, 2001. Pincus, Steve. “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture.” The Journal of Modern History 67.4 (1995): 807–34. Pitte, Jean-Robert. “The Rise of the Restaurant.” Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 471–80. Rooney, Brendan, ed. A Time and a Place: Two Centuries of Irish Social Life. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2006. Tannahill, Reay. Food in History. St Albans, Herts.: Paladin, 1975. Taylor, Laurence. “Coffee: The Bottomless Cup.” The American Dimension: Cultural Myths and Social Realities. Eds. W. Arens and Susan P. Montague. Port Washington, N.Y.: Alfred Publishing, 1976. 14–48. Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savouring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300-1789. London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth P, 1983. Williams, Anne. “Historical Attitudes to Women Eating in Restaurants.” Public Eating: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1991. Ed. Harlan Walker. Totnes: Prospect Books, 1992. 311–14. World Barista, Championship. “History–World Barista Championship”. 2012. 02 Apr. 2012 ‹http://worldbaristachampionship.com2012›.AcknowledgementA warm thank you to Dr. Kevin Griffin for producing the map of Dublin for this article.

Introduction Animals have a significant presence in human lives, with many human interactions involving animals. This role of animals in social life, however, has largely been ignored and marginalised. In the words of Tovey (197), “to read most sociological texts, one might never know that society is populated by non-human as well as human animals”. Human-animal relations are evident in everyday human uses of animals as companions, pets, meat sources, and entertainment. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does demonstrate how humans create and perpetuate systems of human/animal difference which are, at times, contradictory and ambivalent. There are no consistencies in how humans view and understand animal bodies. These differences matter, as they have serious consequences for how humans view and treat animals. It also has dire consequences for animals. While humans and animals are different species, we still live together, co-evolve, and create shared histories. We are, in the words of Haraway, companion species. This exposes that animals are not just nature, but culture. It is often forgotten that one of the everyday uses of animals is as testing and experimental models in medical and scientific research. Hidden away in laboratories, these animals remain invisible, only to be discovered when the histories of innovations and breakthroughs are unravelled. Animals are veiled behind dissection, vaccinations, pharmaceuticals, insulin injections, deep brain stimulation, and so on. Of interest in this paper is one potential medico-scientific innovation that cannot disguise the animal body as it is central for the success of the technology, xenotransplantation (XTP; animal-to-human transplantation). This refers to “any procedure that involves transplantation, implantation or infusion into a human recipient of cells, tissues or organs from a nonhuman animal source” (Xenotransplantation Working Party 22, original emphasis). While many animals have been used historically in XTP, the choice animal source is currently pigs. In order for xenotransplants to perform the required functions in a human body, the fragments of the pig’s body must remain living. This fuses the living pig part and living human body intimately, where the embodiment and functionality of each relies on the other. Such practices theoretically break down the traditional dualisms between humans/pigs and self/other. However, XTP raises a number of scientific, ethical, and social hurdles that must be addressed. As Bijker, Hughes and Pinch indicate, technical innovations are not simply scientific endeavours but sociocultural issues where usage, design, and content can be contentious. In the case of XTP this relates to, amongst other issues, the explicit physical breakdown of the human/pig divide, yet boundary work still occurs in an attempt to symbolically maintain the divisions between self/other. Drawing on the work of various cultural theorists, this paper presents a sociocultural approach to examine how XTP and the associated manufacturing of pigs, demonstrates the fluidity of science and culture. This is achieved by incorporating theoretical frameworks inspired by Durkheimian thought, such as the sacred and profane, and Douglas’ use of pollution and dirt. This analysis reveals how classificatory systems of culture, such as the sanctity of the body and its boundaries, are powerful obstacles to the cultural acceptance of XTP. The Sacred Body In the work of Durkheim and his Année Sociologique colleagues, the sacred and the profane are distinct classifications attached to material objects. These binary constructs are the basis for religious life, as argued in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. The Durkheimian tradition also argues that these building blocks of religion are apparent in secular cultural life. The world (the profane) drives people to engage with the sacred or those places, objects, and people that are collectively valued with high esteem. In contrast, the profane is marginalised. The narratives/myths which underpin the sacred provide a type of collective fervour that stands in opposition to the mundane flows of the everyday. Through this process, high or low social value is attributed. Durkheim later considered that this duality also existed within the human. Individuals experience a double-being, where the mind (soul) and the body are, repeating Cartesianism, radically different, opposed, and independent substances. The soul holds sacred qualities “that has always been denied the body” (Durkheim, The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions, 150-1), which renders the body profane and the soul divine. In the contemporary West, however, there has been a significant shift away from the soul and towards the body. Turner argues that we have become a “somatic society”, where increasingly this once profane site has become a cultural obsession. The body has become a site of performance and consumption, where the self is realised and practiced. This has lead to intense rituals, such as disciplining the body through fitness training (Sassatelli) to personal grooming practices (Goffman), that seek to separate the body from polluting or profane influences. The body is no longer approached as sinful and demeaning to the soul. It has become culturally conceived as collectively sacred. At the same time, certain attributes of the body can and do signify disgust or profane qualities. As Kendall and Michael have argued, the body is a site of order and disorder. While our best efforts are implemented to ensure that the body’s biological, social, and cultural features remain ordered, the natural processes of excretion, decay, disease, and other undesirable disorders, consistently impinge on and challenge the sacred body. Significant effort ensures, as Goffman argues, that these undesirable attributes are hidden or removed from public view through secular rituals of purification. We can relate this to the prominent use in the West of anti-ageing products to the compulsion to institutionalise the ill, diseased, and elderly. Douglas follows this Durkheimian inspired tradition, utilising concepts such as purity, pollution, and danger. These are theoretically similar to the sacred/profane distinction, which we believe lends significant insight into the dialectic of human/animal bodies in XTP. To illustrate this further, we will briefly touch upon her contribution to cultural theory that serves as the basis for our arguments here. Purity, Danger and XTP: Being ‘Out of Order’ In her significant work, Purity and Danger, Douglas exposes the deeply embedded systems of classification that underpin social life. To exemplify this, she examines ‘dirt’ and questions why we feel it necessary to clean. Her answer is that dirt reflects a “systematic ordering and classification of matter”, that is “matter out of place” (35). In other words, our social lives are ordered according to those ‘matters’ classified as belonging or coherent in the flows of everyday life. Dirt transcends this ‘ordering’ and creates disorder. This then requires action on behalf of the individual to ‘reorder’ their surrounds through purification rituals. Douglas is able then to extract this theoretical point into various examples, such as the cultural classifications and uses of pigs. Culture categorises animals in relation to how they are to be consumed or enjoyed, as already stated. A range of relatively recent sociological projects, such as Zerubavel’s cognitive sociology program, are revealing how the animal world is culturally determined. For instance, Zerubavel demonstrates that repulsion towards certain foods, especially animal, may cause physical distress to the individual. This is not linked to our gastronomies, but sociocultural perceptions embedded in our individual minds (cf. Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’). This is also demonstrated by how classificatory systems deny the human consumption of certain animals. For instance, the taboo on consuming pork for Israelites rests for Douglas on the inability for the pig to be classified as a normal farm animal because it has cloven hooves and does not chew cud. Through this cultural perception, the pig is defined as pollution, impinging on the sanctity of the soul and sitting uncomfortably in collective thought. It resides on the margins and threatens our social order. In other words, what is safe and what is dangerous are differentiated culturally. What a pig represents in one culture can differ dramatically from the next. In the world of XTP, similar impressions remain embedded in the cognitive processes of individuals, thus creating conflict between cultural norms and values, and that of science (cf. Alexander and Smith). A further important point needs to be considered before discussing XTP explicitly. As suggested earlier, Douglas argues that some of the most dangerous cultural artefacts/objects to our sense of order are those which impinge on the pure through their unclassifiable nature. However, partial objects from these polluted things can also cause distress. Contemporary examples are bodily fluids, excretions, and other naturally occurring by-products of the body. These are generally held as disgusting within cultural contexts once removed from the body. Douglas explains this through their symbolic connection to a ‘human’ identity. She writes that these mundane objects remain “dangerous; their half identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by their presence” (160). Fluids, such as mucus, when found in the home or other ‘ordered’ situations are considered most disgusting not because of the substance itself, but because it remains connected to the embodiment and identity of the other. Until that substance is cleansed from view, or reordered, it impinges on order in the most dangerous ways because of its ‘half identity’. It is still connected to its host. From this perspective, we can begin to envisage why the consumption of animals is closely governed by specific classificatory systems. The presentation of whole animals cooked, with head and limbs attached, may invoke disgust through the inability to completely remove the animal’s identity. Whole ducks, fish, or pigs presented at the dinner table, with their eyes gazing at the diners, can cause significant distress. The identity of the animal is reaffirmed and a reaction of disgust can occur. The reappropriation of animals as cuts of meat and meat-based products, can strip away the identity of the animal by dividing it into parts. This reordering makes it appropriate and pure for human consumption. By carving the body of an animal into pieces, it becomes a product that is removed from the living being. This is extended through ‘meat discourses’; the pig becomes pork, ham and bacon, and an anaemic calf becomes veal. It is meat; just another object in the cultural universe. In viewing XTP as a cultural artefact, these significantly stringent classifications of the pure and polluting remain deeply embedded and potent. Pig organs such as the heart remain, despite any cleansing processes undertaken by science and unlike the reappropriation of animals for consumption, linked to the pig’s embodiment. The removal of this body part does not remove it from the pig’s identity. It remains connected, clinging to its ‘half identity’. Furthermore, unlike the meat industry or various other medico-scientific uses of animals, it is vital that the pig’s body parts remain living. Xenotransplants would not function without, for example, the pig’s heart continuing to beat, pumping blood around the new human body it inhabits. This creates cultural barriers that go beyond the ordered animal products that currently exist, which serves to threaten the acceptance and successful appropriation of XTP amongst society. There is then a culturally perceived taboo on combining the self and other in XTP. Pig bodies must somehow be ‘cleansed’ by science, although, as we alluded to previously, this is not necessarily successful. These rituals of purification by science are undertaken for scientific and cultural reasons. For example, Cook outlines that scientists working in XTP go to great lengths to justify why the polluting other, the pig, can and should be used as the source animal. This involves a complex narration on the differences and similarities between humans and animals. Significantly, XTP relies on and perpetuates the differential cultural worth that is placed on human life (high value) and animal life (low value), in order to justify XTP procedures. However, pig parts need to become worthy of being harvested for human bodies, meaning that pigs must be elevated from their lowly status to that worthy of being human. This leads science to engage in, according to Cook, a complex interweaving of desirable-similarity, desirable-dissimilarity, undesirable-similarity, and undesirable-dissimilarity, to establish continuities and disparities between pig and human bodies. This functions not only for the purposes of science, but to culturally justify the practices and artefacts of XTP. While XTP involves intimately mixing humans and pigs, these “science stories” (Cook) additionally work to maintain species divides. Simultaneously, these processes operate to justify that it is appropriate for humans to embody pigs. Hence, science attempts to mould the social into desirable ways of thinking about XTP, thus supporting it and the science behind it. This includes the experimental and therapeutic sacrifice of pigs. At the same time, science cannot avoid that the practice and delivery of XTP involves the culturally pure/sacred human body coming into conflict with the polluted/dangerous ‘other’, pig part/s. The genetic engineering of pigs to express select human complementary regulatory proteins, which inhibit self-damage when the immune system reacts to the presence of a foreign body such as a transplanted organ, somewhat disintegrates the human/animal divide within the pig body itself. It is becoming human. However, science still faces a significant hurdle. Namely, “How can we physically mix (natural-technical discourse) if we’re so different (social-moral discourse)?” (Brown 333). Pig parts in human bodies, and pigs genetically engineered to be more ‘human like’, still involve pig parts being out of place and therefore disgusting. Despite the rituals employed by science to draw similarities between humans and pigs (and genetically engineered pigs), there remain cultural classification systems that compromise the normalisation of XTP. Hence, crossing the species divide in XTP is scientifically unproblematic (though getting XTP to work is another matter), but the fusing of human and pig bodies may still be culturally dangerous. In other words, cultural classifications may render pigs as incompatible with humans, despite any social constructions attempted by science. The body expresses these social values. In XTP, porcine genetics cannot be physically separated from their social and genetic being. Incorporating this with the human can cause disgust, even amongst those who have received xenotransplants: “I wonder how much from an animal can be introduced into my body before my humanity vanishes” (porcine cellular xenotransplant recipient qtd. in Lundin 150). While science may reduce the body to mechanistic functioning and seek to objectify it, the body, be it human or pig, possesses material-semiotic importance. The heart is not simply a pump; it is symbolically powerful. A xenotransplanted pig heart challenges the sanctity of the human body and how the human body and its parts are culturally constructed. However, the potentiality of XTP to save a life may trump any individual concerns, even if an individual may reject it culturally (Lundin). There still remains another dilemma that cannot be subsumed by such negotiations—the potentiality of cross-species viral infections (zoonosis) that could result from the embodied fusion of living pig parts and living human bodies. While a detailed examination of this is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting that the social fears of zoonosis, such as avian influenza (bird flu) and swine influenza, have resulted in increased international collaborative efforts to study and halt the global spread of contagion. While there are a number of differences between these zoonotic infections and any unforeseen zoonotic consequences of XTP, what is of significance is the boundary pollution. That is, all forms of animal-to-human zoonosis involve a violation of the sacred human body by the dirty and profane other. For example, the recent outbreaks of swine influenza involved disparate species coming into contact with each other through disgusting body products, namely contaminated droplets emitted by infected individuals sneezing or coughing. The physical bodies of humans and animals, however, still remain differentiated even if zoonosis symbolically challenges such classifications. XTP, on the other hand, is an intimate physical and symbolic fusion of these bodies. The human and the animal can no longer be separated as independent beings. Thus, the potential of pollution from XTP moves beyond the fear of the symbolically disgusting pig body and the symbolism of particular body parts, to include what the pig parts may actually physically carry with them. As a result, the cultural dangers of transplanted pig parts and their potential violations are not just symbolic, but also materially ‘real’. Conclusion By categorising animals as a lower species, humans enable their exploitation and use in a multitude of ways. This process of cultural classification in the contemporary West means that we attribute a sacred, high value to human bodies, and a low, profane quality to animal bodies. While the scientific intermingling of human and pig bodies in XTP could be seen to present a cultural challenge to these species dualisms, it does not overcome such cultural classifications. That is, the interests and social constructions of pigs by science cannot overpower or suppress the sociocultural. The removal of pig parts from the pig’s body does not eliminate its ‘half identity’. It is still a living product from an animal’s body. Unlike other pig products, life cannot be removed from the pig parts for XTP, as this is the vital function required for xenotransplants to (potentially) work. A heart needs to beat. Any purification rituals undertaken by science, such as using pigs genetically engineered with human proteins, cannot overcome this cultural construction. While it may be argued that XTP will become culturally acceptable with time, this disrespects how social knowledges are as equally important as the scientific. This further disavows that cultural concerns over mixing pig and human bodies are as viable as scientific constructions. This is perhaps most potently highlighted by zoonosis. Thus, the pigs used in XTP have cultural-technical bodies that are materially and symbolically significant, which science cannot purge. References Alexander, J. C. and P. Smith. “Social Science and Salvation: Risk Society as Mythical Discourse.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 25 (1996): 251-262. Bijker, W.E., T.P. Hughes and T. Pinch. Eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Bourdieu, P. Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge, 1986. Brown, N. “Xenotransplantation: Normalizing Disgust”. Science as Culture 8 (1999): 327-55. Cook, P.S. “Science Stories: Selecting the Source Animal for Xenotransplantation.” Social Change in the 21st Century 2006 Conference Proceedings. Eds. C. Hopkinson and C. Hall. Centre for Social Change Research, School of Humanities and Human Services, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 2006. 6 Aug. 2010. Douglas, M. Purity and Danger, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1976[1966]. Durkheim, E. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, New York: The Free Press, 1995[1912]. Durkheim, E. “The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions.” Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society: Selected Works. Ed. R. Bellah. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973[1914]. Goffman, E. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Haraway, D. J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Kendall, G. and M. Michael “Order and Disorder: Time, Technology and the Self.” Culture Machine, Interzone, Nov. 2001. 6 Aug. 2010 .Lundin, S. “Understanding Cultural Perspectives on Clinical Xenotransplantation.” Graft 4.2 (1999): 150-153. Sassatelli, R. “The Commercialization of DIscipline: Keep-fit Culture and its Values.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 5.3 (2000): 396-411. Tovey, H. “Theorising Nature and Society in Sociology: The Invisibility of Animals.” Sociologia Ruralis 43.3 (2003): 196-215. Turner, B.S. The body and society: explorations in social theory. Second Ed. London: Sage, 1996. Xenotransplantation Working Party. Animal-to-Human Transplantation Research: How Should Australian Proceed? 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During World War II, the Soviet Union’s food supply was in a state of crisis. Hitler’s army had occupied the agricultural heartlands of Ukraine and Southern Russia in 1941 and, as a result, agricultural production for the entire nation had plummeted. Soldiers in Red Army, who easily ate the best rations in the country, subsisted on a daily allowance of just under a kilogram of bread, supplemented with meat, tea, sugar and butter when and if these items were available. The hunger of the Red Army and its effect on the morale and strength of Europe’s eastern warfront were causes for concern for the Soviet government and its European and American allies. The one country with a food surplus decided to do something to help, and in 1942 the United States agreed to send thousands of pounds of meat, cheese and butter overseas to help feed the Red Army. After receiving several shipments of the all-American spiced canned meat SPAM, the Red Army’s quartermaster put in a request for a more familiar canned pork product, Russian tushonka. Pound for pound, America sent more pigs overseas than soldiers during World War II, in part because pork was in oversupply in the America of the early 1940s. Shipping meat to hungry soldiers and civilians in war torn countries was a practical way to build business for the U.S. meat industry, which had been in decline throughout the 1930s. As per a Soviet-supplied recipe, the first cans of Lend-Lease tushonka were made in the heart of the American Midwest, at meatpacking plants in Iowa and Ohio (Stettinus 6-7). Government contracts in the meat packing industry helped fuel economic recovery, and meatpackers were in a position to take special request orders like the one for tushonka that came through the lines. Unlike SPAM, which was something of a novelty item during the war, tushonka was a food with a past. The original recipe was based on a recipe for preserved meat that had been a traditional product of the Ural Mountains, preserved in jars with salt and fat rather than by pressure and heat. Thus tushonka was requested—and was mass-produced—not simply as a convenience but also as a traditional and familiar food—a taste of home cooking that soldiers could carry with them into the field. Nikita Khrushchev later claimed that the arrival of tushonka was instrumental in helping the Red Army push back against the Nazi invasion (178). Unlike SPAM and other wartime rations, tushonka did not fade away after the war. Instead, it was distributed to the Soviet civilian population, appearing in charity donations and on the shelves of state shops. Often it was the only meat product available on a regular basis. Salty, fatty, and slightly grey-toned, tushonka was an unlikely hero of the postwar-era, but during this period tushonka rose from obscurity to become an emblem of socialist modernity. Because it was shelf stable and could be made from a variety of different cuts of meat, it proved an ideal product for the socialist production lines where supplies and the pace of production were infinitely variable. Unusual in a socialist system of supply, this product shaped production and distribution lines, and even influenced the layout of meatpacking factories and the genetic stocks of the animals that were to be eaten. Tushonka’s initial ubiquity in the postwar Soviet Union had little to do with the USSR’s own hog industry. Pig populations as well as their processing facilities had been decimated in the war, and pigs that did survive the Axis invasion had been evacuated East with human populations. Instead, the early presence of tushonka in the pig-scarce postwar Soviet Union had everything to do with Harry Truman’s unexpected September 1945 decision to end all “economically useful” Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union (Martel). By the end of September, canned meat was practically the only product still being shipped as part of Lend-Lease (NARA RG 59). Although the United Nations was supposed to distribute these supplies to needy civilians free of cost, travelers to the Soviet Union in 1946 spotted cans of American tushonka for sale in state shops (Skeoch 231). After American tushonka “donations” disappeared from store shelves, the Soviet Union’s meat syndicates decided to continue producing the product. Between its first appearance during the war in 1943, and the 1957 announcement by Nikita Khrushchev that Soviet policy would restructure all state animal farms to support the mass production of one or several processed meat products, tushonka helped to drive the evolution of the Soviet Union’s meat packing industry. Its popularity with both planners and the public gave it the power to reach into food commodity chains. It is this backward reach and the longer-term impacts of these policies that make tushonka an unusual byproduct of the Cold War era. State planners loved tushonka: it was cheap to make, the logistics of preparing it were not complicated, it was easy to transport, and most importantly, it served as tangible evidence that the state was accomplishing a long-standing goal to get more meat to its citizenry and improving the diet of the average Soviet worker. Tushonka became a highly visible product in the Soviet Union’s much vaunted push to establish a modern food regime intended to rival that of the United States. Because it was shelf-stable, wartime tushonka had served as a practical food for soldiers, but after the war tushonka became an ideal food for workers who had neither the time nor the space to prepare a home-cooked meal with fresh meat. The Soviet state started to produce its own tushonka because it was such an excellent fit for the needs and abilities of the Soviet state—consumer demand was rarely considered by planners in this era. Not only did tushonka fit the look and taste of a modern processed meat product (that is, it was standard in texture and flavor from can to can, and was an obviously industrially processed product), it was also an excellent way to make the most of the predominant kind of meat the Soviet Union had the in the 1950s: small scraps low-grade pork and beef, trimmings leftover from butchering practices that focused on harvesting as much animal fat, rather than muscle, from the carcass in question. Just like tushonka, pork sausages and frozen pelmeny, a meat-filled pasta dumpling, also became winning postwar foods thanks to a happy synergy of increased animal production, better butchering and new food processing machines. As postwar pigs recovered their populations, the Soviet processed meat industry followed suit. One official source listed twenty-six different kinds of meat products being issued in 1964, although not all of these were pork (Danilov). An instructional manual distributed by the meat and milk syndicate demonstrated how meat shops should wrap and display sausages, and listed 24 different kinds of sausages that all needed a special style of tying up. Because of packaging shortages, the string that bound the sausage was wrapped in a different way for every type of sausage, and shop assistants were expected to be able to identify sausages based on the pattern of their binding. Pelmeny were produced at every meat factory that processed pork. These were “made from start to finish in a special, automated machine, human hands do not touch them. Which makes them a higher quality and better (prevoskhodnogo) product” (Book of Healthy and Delicious Food). These were foods that became possible to produce economically because of a co-occurring increase in pigs, the new standardized practice of equipping meatpacking plants with large-capacity grinders, and freezers or coolers and the enforcement of a system of grading meat. As the state began to rebuild Soviet agriculture from its near-collapse during the war, the Soviet Union looked to the United States for inspiration. Surprisingly, Soviet planners found some of the United States’ more outdated techniques to be quite valuable for new Soviet hog operations. The most striking of these was the adoption of competing phenotypes in the Soviet hog industry. Most major swine varieties had been developed and described in the 19th century in Germany and Great Britain. Breeds had a tendency to split into two phenotypically distinct groups, and in early 20th Century American pig farms, there was strong disagreement as to which style of pig was better suited to industrial conditions of production. Some pigs were “hot-blooded” (in other words, fast maturing and prolific reproducers) while others were a slower “big type” pig (a self-explanatory descriptor). Breeds rarely excelled at both traits and it was a matter of opinion whether speed or size was the most desirable trait to augment. The over-emphasis of either set of qualities damaged survival rates. At their largest, big type pigs resembled small hippopotamuses, and sows were so corpulent they unwittingly crushed their tiny piglets. But the sleeker hot-blooded pigs had a similarly lethal relationship with their young. Sows often produced litters of upwards of a dozen piglets and the stress of tending such a large brood led overwhelmed sows to devour their own offspring (Long). American pig breeders had been forced to navigate between these two undesirable extremes, but by the 1930s, big type pigs were fading in popularity mainly because butter and newly developed plant oils were replacing lard as the cooking fat of preference in American kitchens. The remarkable propensity of the big type to pack on pounds of extra fat was more of a liability than a benefit in this period, as the price that lard and salt pork plummeted in this decade. By the time U.S. meat packers were shipping cans of tushonka to their Soviet allies across the seas, US hog operations had already developed a strong preference for hot-blooded breeds and research had shifted to building and maintaining lean muscle on these swiftly maturing animals. When Soviet industrial planners hoping to learn how to make more tushonka entered the scene however, their interpretation of american efficiency was hardly predictable: scientifically nourished big type pigs may have been advantageous to the United States at midcentury, but the Soviet Union’s farms and hungry citizens had a very different list of needs and wants. At midcentury, Soviet pigs were still handicapped by old-fashioned variables such as cold weather, long winters, poor farm organisation and impoverished feed regimens. The look of the average Soviet hog operation was hardly industrial. In 1955 the typical Soviet pig was petite, shaggy, and slow to reproduce. In the absence of robust dairy or vegetable oil industries, Soviet pigs had always been valued for their fat rather than their meat, and tushonka had been a byproduct of an industry focused mainly on supplying the country with fat and lard. Until the mid 1950s, the most valuable pig on many Soviet state and collective farms was the nondescript but very rotund “lard and bacon” pig, an inefficient eater that could take upwards of two years to reach full maturity. In searching for a way to serve up more tushonka, Soviet planners became aware that their entire industry needed to be revamped. When the Soviet Union looked to the United States, planners were inspired by the earlier competition between hot-blooded and big type pigs, which Soviet planners thought, ambitiously, they could combine into one splendid pig. The Soviet Union imported new pigs from Poland, Lithuania, East Germany and Denmark, trying valiantly to create hybrid pigs that would exhibit both hot blood and big type. Soviet planners were especially interested in inspiring the Poland-China, an especially rotund specimen, to speed up its life cycle during them mid 1950s. Hybrdizing and cross breeding a Soviet super-pig, no matter how closely laid out on paper, was probably always a socialist pipe dream. However, when the Soviets decided to try to outbreed American hog breeders, they created an infrastructure for pigs and pig breeding that had a dramatic positive impact of hog populations across the country, and the 1950s were marked by a large increase in the number of pigs in the Soviet union, as well as dramatic increases in the numbers of purebred and scientific hybrids the country developed, all in the name of tushonka. It was not just the genetic stock that received a makeover in the postwar drive to can more tushonka; a revolution in the barnyard also took place and in less than 10 years, pigs were living in new housing stock and eating new feed sources. The most obvious postwar change was in farm layout and the use of building space. In the early 1950s, many collective farms had been consolidated. In 1940 there were a quarter of a million kolkhozii, by 1951 fewer than half that many remained (NARA RG166). Farm consolidation movements most often combined two, three or four collective farms into one economic unit, thus scaling up the average size and productivity of each collective farm and simplifying their administration. While there were originally ambitious plans to re-center farms around new “agro-city” bases with new, modern farm buildings, these projects were ultimately abandoned. Instead, existing buildings were repurposed and the several clusters of farm buildings that had once been the heart of separate villages acquired different uses. For animals this meant new barns and new daily routines. Barns were redesigned and compartmentalized around ideas of gender and age segregation—weaned baby pigs in one area, farrowing sows in another—as well as maximising growth and health. Pigs spent less outside time and more time at the trough. Pigs that were wanted for different purposes (breeding, meat and lard) were kept in different areas, isolated from each other to minimize the spread of disease as well as improve the efficiency of production. Much like postwar housing for humans, the new and improved pig barn was a crowded and often chaotic place where the electricity, heat and water functioned only sporadically. New barns were supposed to be mechanised. In some places, mechanisation had helped speed things along, but as one American official viewing a new mechanised pig farm in 1955 noted, “it did not appear to be a highly efficient organisation. The mechanised or automated operations, such as the preparation of hog feed, were eclipsed by the amount of hand labor which both preceded and followed the mechanised portion” (NARA RG166 1961). The American official estimated that by mechanizing, Soviet farms had actually increased the amount of human labor needed for farming operations. The other major environmental change took place away from the barnyard, in new crops the Soviet Union began to grow for fodder. The heart and soul of this project was establishing field corn as a major new fodder crop. Originally intended as a feed for cows that would replace hay, corn quickly became the feed of choice for raising pigs. After a visit by a United States delegation to Iowa and other U.S. farms over the summer of 1955, corn became the centerpiece of Khrushchev’s efforts to raise meat and milk productivity. These efforts were what earned Khrushchev his nickname of kukuruznik, or “corn fanatic.” Since so little of the Soviet Union looks or feels much like the plains and hills of Iowa, adopting corn might seem quixotic, but raising corn was a potentially practical move for a cold country. Unlike the other major fodder crops of turnips and potatoes, corn could be harvested early, while still green but already possessing a high level of protein. Corn provided a “gap month” of green feed during July and August, when grazing animals had eaten the first spring green growth but these same plants had not recovered their biomass. What corn remained in the fields in late summer was harvested and made into silage, and corn made the best silage that had been historically available in the Soviet Union. The high protein content of even silage made from green mass and unripe corn ears prevented them from losing weight in the winter. Thus the desire to put more meat on Soviet tables—a desire first prompted by American food donations of surplus pork from Iowa farmers adapting to agro-industrial reordering in their own country—pushed back into the commodity supply network of the Soviet Union. World War II rations that were well adapted to the uncertainty and poor infrastructure not just of war but also of peacetime were a source of inspiration for Soviet planners striving to improve the diets of citizens. To do this, they purchased and bred more and better animals, inventing breeds and paying attention, for the first time, to the efficiency and speed with which these animals were ready to become meat. Reinventing Soviet pigs pushed even back farther, and inspired agricultural economists and state planners to embrace new farm organizational structures. Pigs meant for the tushonka can spent more time inside eating, and led their lives in a rigid compartmentalization that mimicked emerging trends in human urban society. Beyond the barnyard, a new concern with feed-to weight conversions led agriculturalists to seek new crops; crops like corn that were costly to grow but were a perfect food for a pig destined for a tushonka tin. Thus in Soviet industrialization, pigs evolved. No longer simply recyclers of human waste, socialist pigs were consumers in their own right, their newly crafted genetic compositions demanded ever more technical feed sources in order to maximize their own productivity. Food is transformative, and in this case study the prosaic substance of canned meat proved to be unusually transformative for the history of the Soviet Union. In its early history it kept soldiers alive long enough to win an important war, later the requirements for its manufacture re-prioritized muscle tissue over fat tissue in the disassembly of carcasses. This transformative influence reached backwards into the supply lines and farms of the Soviet Union, revolutionizing the scale and goals of farming and meat packing for the Soviet food industry, as well as the relationship between the pig and the consumer. References Bentley, Amy. Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity. Where: University of Illinois Press, 1998. The Book of Healthy and Delicious Food, Kniga O Vkusnoi I Zdorovoi Pishche. Moscow: AMN Izd., 1952. 161. Danilov, M. M. Tovaravedenie Prodovol’stvennykh Tovarov: Miaso I Miasnye Tovarye. Moscow: Iz. Ekonomika, 1964. Khrushchev, Nikita. Khrushchev Remembers. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1970. 178. Long, James. The Book of the Pig. London: Upcott Gill, 1886. 102. Lush, Jay & A.L. Anderson, “A Genetic History of Poland-China Swine: I—Early Breed History: The ‘Hot Blood’ versus the ‘Big Type’” Journal of Heredity 30.4 (1939): 149-56. Martel, Leon. Lend-Lease, Loans, and the Coming of the Cold War: A Study of the Implementation of Foreign Policy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1979. 35. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 59, General Records of the Department of State. Office of Soviet Union affairs, Box 6. “Records relating to Lend Lease with the USSR 1941-1952”. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative reports 1940-1954. USSR Cotton-USSR Foreign trade. Box 64, Folder “farm management”. Report written by David V Kelly, 6 Apr. 1951. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative Reports 1955-1961. Folder: “Agriculture” “Visits to Soviet agricultural installations,” 15 Nov. 1961. Skeoch, L.A. Food Prices and Ration Scale in the Ukraine, 1946 The Review of Economics and Statistics 35.3 (Aug. 1953), 229-35. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Fond R-7021. The Report of Extraordinary Special State Commission on Wartime Losses Resulting from the German-Fascist Occupation cites the following losses in the German takeover. 1948. Stettinus, Edward R. Jr. Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory. Penguin Books, 1944.

Sometimes ... we don’t want to feel like a post-modern, post-feminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake (Nigella Lawson, How to be a Domestic Goddess vii). IntroductionFor today’s female readers, the idea of trailing “nutmeggy fumes” of home-baked pie through their kitchens could be as much a source of gender-stereotyping outrage as one of desire or longing. Regardless of personal response, there seems little doubt that the image Lawson’s words create prevails even in the 21st century: an apron-clad, kitchen-bound woman, cooking for others as an expression of love and communication. This is particularly true of contemporary cookbooks written by and aimed at women. Two examples are Sophie Dahl’s Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights (2010) and Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess (2000). This paper explores how Dahl and Lawson use three narrative strategies—sequence, description and voice—to frame their recipes; it also analyses how these narrative strategies encourage readers to embrace traditional constructs of domestic femininity, albeit in a contemporary and celebratory light. The authors’ use of these strategies also makes their cookbooks more than simply instruction manuals—instead, they become engaging and pleasurable texts that use memoir, humour and nostalgia to convey their recipes and create distinct authorial personas and cultural ideas about food and femininity. While primary purpose of cookbooks is to instruct, what makes them distinctive—and, arguably, so popular—is their mix of pleasure and utility. The stories they tell, both cultural and personal, are what make us continue to buy and read them, despite bookshelves that may already bend beneath the weight of three hundred different versions of chicken risotto and chocolate cake; as Anne Bower notes, many women read cookbooks for escapism and enjoyment. This concept of escapism and enjoyment is closely tied to the role of narrative. Cognitive narratology, a more recent strand of narrative theory, emphasises what readers bring to a text, and how narrative allows readers to frame and understand texts and the world around them. Therefore, cookbooks that situate their recipes among personal anecdotes and familiar cultural ideals or myths—such as the woman in the kitchen—appeal to our experiences and emotions. Cookbooks thus become engaging and resonant on personal and sociocultural levels: Gvion argues that cookbooks are “social texts” (54), which seems appropriate when considering the meanings we ascribe to food—it remains a fundamental part of our culture and identity (Lupton). Certain cookbooks—those that emphasise the social and emotional aspects of what we consume—can be regarded as a reflection of how we attach meanings to foods in particular contexts (Mintz). The books discussed in this paper combine the societal and personal aspects of this process: their authors blend familiar cultural tropes with their own engaging autobiographical anecdotes using sequence, description and voice. Narrative theory has traditionally been applied to fiction, and cookbooks obviously lack fictional elements such as plot and character. However, cognitivist narratology, which directs its focus to humans’ cognitive understanding and perception of various actions and events (Fludernik, Histories), makes it applicable to a range of texts. Cookbooks’ use of sequence, description, and voice create “storyworlds” for readers, which “can be viewed as [a] global mental representation enabling interpreters to draw inferences about items and occurrences either explicitly or implicitly included in a narrative” (Herman 9). Cookbook authors use memories, anecdotes and imagery to conjure scenes to which readers can aspire or relate, perhaps prompting responses similar to those experienced when reading fiction.Prince characterises narrative as a “representation of events in a time sequence” (82). The sequence of information and anecdotes in a cookbook—its introduction, chapter structure and recipe structure—positions readers to read and interpret the text in a particular way; it is both part of how the texts authors construct a sense of self and of how they encourage readers to construct their own meanings in response. Dahl, for example, arranges her recipes according to season, since she places great importance on seasonal eating. Description is the cornerstone of any successful cookbook, since it becomes impossible to successfully replicate a dish if you cannot make sense of the instructions. However, in a narrative sense, description operates as part of a narrator’s “rhetorical strategy” (Bal 36); it helps construct their narrative persona and enables them to reinforce the associations between food, culture and identity in evocative language. Voice is the final piece of the narrative puzzle. These cookbooks are all “narrated” by their authors, who offer selected anecdotes and stories to support their authorial intentions and position readers to interpret their texts in a particular way. Feminist narratologist Susan Lanser regards voice as the “intersection of social identity and textual form” (14), a definition that recognises the broader social and cultural significance of cookbooks. Since they tend to be narrated “directly” from author to readers, authorial voice serves not only to engage readers, but also to establish authors’ culinary authority. The two cookbooks analysed here are written by—and, arguably, primarily aimed at—women, and this paper contends that their authors use narrative to reclaim a powerful sense of feminine ownership. While they are just two of many contemporary cookbooks that arguably strive to achieve similar ends (Tessa Kiros’s 2010 Apples for Jam, and Monica Trapaga’s 2010 She’s Leaving Home, are two recent Australian examples), Dahl’s and Lawson’s texts are apt case studies: both are commercially successful and their authors occupy a significant space in the public imagination, particularly where women’s identity is concerned. Dahl is a former plus-size model who lost weight “rather publicly” (Dahl xi) and whose book charts the evolution of her complex relationship with food; Lawson’s books and cooking programs have seen her variously characterised as “prefeminist housewife … antifeminist Stepford wife … the saviour of downshifting middle-class career women and as both the negative and positive product of postfeminism” (Hollows 180). Dahl and Lawson narrate the knowledge and skill of their recipes in a context of experiences and memories related to their lives as mothers and/or partners and food professionals, which underscores the weight of their kitchen authority as women while still maintaining that rather mythic connection between the feminine and domestic. Sequence The introductory pages and internal structure of each book reflects both its author’s intentions, and the persona they construct within the text that speaks directly to readers. It also foregrounds the link between women and food. The link between this domesticity and feminine identity is explicit in both texts. Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights is a food memoir as well as a cookbook, and Dahl’s use of narrative sequence makes this clear: in her introduction, she reveals that “the second word I ever spoke was ‘crunch,’ muddled baby-speak for fudge” (viii). Interspersed between the book’s four sections (Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer) are essays that chart Dahl’s evolving relationship with food and cooking, framed particularly in terms of her female identity: they detail her progression from a plump-cheeked teenager unhappy about carrying a few extra pounds to a woman at ease with her body and appetite who cannot “get away from the siren call of the kitchen” (15). Dahl often introduces her recipes with reference to their personal significance, particularly in relation to cooking as an act of love or communication—“Musician’s Breakfast,” for example, is so named because it is a favourite of her boyfriend, jazz musician Jamie Cullum (152). Lawson’s book is ostensibly more practical—her chapters are arranged according to types of dish, such cakes or biscuits. She also explicitly summons the familiar vision of the woman at home in the kitchen. Although she draws on the clichéd image of the domestic goddess, her preface seems aimed at making female readers feel at ease. For example, she writes that she does not want her audience to think of baking as a “land you do not inhabit” or to “confine you to kitchen quarters” (vii); rather, her aim is to make them “feel” (vii) like a domestic goddess rather than be one, an act that might be interpreted as an attempt to put a more contemporary spin on a dated archetype.Nonetheless, throughout Lawson’s book, the prose that introduces her recipes draws on those associations between baking and homely comfort: cake-baking “implies effort and domestic prowess,” (2) but is easy in practice, and baking loaf cakes makes one feel “humble and worthy and brimming with good things” (5). Again, Lawson’s own experience—particularly as a busy mother and career woman—shapes the introductory words for each recipe and establishes a sense of her authorial persona in relation to broader social constructs of food and the feminine. Description Vivid, evocative descriptions of food and food-related memories and experiences are an integral part of what makes these texts narratively engaging, and how they continue to enforce and idealise that connection between the feminine and the domestic. Both authors frequently describe food in terms that create concepts of cosy domesticity: Lawson describes baking as a metaphor for “familial warmth” (vii), and for Dahl, roast chicken “is Sunday ... there’s something about that smell wafting through the house” (53). A distinct sense of nostalgia is at play here; as Linda Hutcheon observes, one can “look and reject” or “look and linger longingly” (online), and this apparent yearning to return to simpler times summons a “mythical past of comfort and stability” (Duruz 57), seemingly embodied in images of wholesome foods cooked for us by mothers or wives. This idea of food as emotionally nourishing is frequently related in terms of the author’s duties as domestic providers and as women who occasionally—and by choice—inhabit traditional female roles. However, Lawson and Dahl reveal the tensions between past and present: while they embrace the pleasures of old-fashioned domesticity, they do not—and cannot—wholly recreate it. Instead, they must balance it with other priorities, making space for a more liberated and contemporary female home cook who can choose to occupy a place at the stove. Of course, the title of Lawson’s book—and the wording of its preface, quoted at the start of this paper—refers explicitly to the old-fashioned idea of the domestic goddess. But Lawson aims to update or demystify the concept for today’s busy women: she expresses the view that many have become “alienated” from the domestic sphere, but that “it can actually make us feel better to claim back some of that space, make it comforting rather than frightening” (vii). While she summons very traditional images—for example, “a pie is just what we all know should be emanating from the kitchen of a domestic goddess” (81)—she also puts a new spin on them, perhaps in an attempt to make them seem less patronising or intimidating while still enforcing how satisfying it can be to feel like a domestic goddess without slaving in the kitchen. She frequently emphasises the simplicity of her recipes and describes food in terms of the pleasure it brings the cook as well as those for whom she is cooking: while baking bread brings “crucial satisfaction, that warm feeling of homespun achievement,” she also notes that “my way of baking bread is designed to fit more easily into the sort of lives we lead” (291). As Hollows notes, the “Nigella cooking philosophy” is that “cooking should be pleasurable and should start from the desire to eat” (182), a concept far removed from the traditional construct of women as “providers of food for others” who have difficulty “experiencing food as pleasurable themselves, particularly in a domestic context” (184). Dahl also emphasises pleasure, ease and practicality, and describes food in terms of its nostalgic and emotional associations, particularly in relation to her female relatives. As a child, Dahl attended boarding school, and on the last night of her holidays—before she returned to terrible school food, with its “gristly stew, grey Scotch eggs and collapsed beetroot” (7)—her mother would cook her a special dinner, and she remembers feasting on “roast chicken wrapped in bacon with tarragon creeping wistfully over its breast, potatoes golden and gloriously crispy on the outside and flaking softly from within” (7). Although Dahl’s mother taught her the importance of “cooking for your man,” this very old-fashioned idea is presented in a tongue-in-cheek way, with the caveat, “woe betide any man who doesn’t appreciate it” (73). Again, the act of cooking is described as something that brings intense domestic satisfaction, and represents a conscious choice to relive the past in a contemporary, and perhaps slightly ironic (albeit still enjoyable), context: making tawny granola “makes one feel very fifties housewife, because as it bakes the house is bathed in a warm cinnamon-y glow” (25). Such descriptions of food and cooking are both evocative and romantic, even while they emphasise convenience and practicality. This perhaps reflects the realities of modern life for busy modern women juggling work and family commitments; it emphasises that tension between the ideal of the past and the reality of the present. While Lawson and Dahl still idealise the correlation between women, food and the domestic, drawing on familiar and perhaps comforting associations, they nonetheless manage to make their cookbooks both narratively engaging and culturally revealing: as Susan Leonardi points out, recipes are an exchange between reader and writer, and they require “a recommendation, a context ... a reason to be” (340). Descriptions of memories, emotions and sensations in relation to cooking and women’s identity help to create a particular narrative “storyworld” (Herman 9) or familiar context; the authors here describe experiences that are likely to resonate with female readers to enforce that connection between women and their kitchens. Since they draw so heavily on their authors’ lives, these cookbooks are almost forms of life narrative; by drawing on their own recollections to appeal to readers and share recipes, their narrators are “performing several rhetorical acts, justifying their own perceptions, conveying cultural information” (Smith and Watson 10). This is a fundamental aspect of narrative voice: who “speaks” in the text (Genette 185). Voice Both authors use their identity as women and home cooks to enforce the feminine/domestic connection and relate to their audience. They each create a distinct narrating voice or authorial persona that speaks directly to readers and aims to win their trust and sympathy. Lawson positions herself as a busy mother and wife; Dahl focuses on her evolving relationship with food, particularly in the context of her former career as a plus-size model and her subsequent weight loss. Both women share cooking anecdotes, and often, significantly, their kitchen failures—Dahl’s recipe for asparagus soup reveals that one of her attempts at trialling the recipe resulted in soup spurting from her blender, “covering me, the walls and floor in a thick slick of green” (168). Both women write as passionate home cooks: what seems most important is a love of food and what it represents, the joy of cooking as much as the culinary skill it may require. Lanser writes that “the authority of a given voice or text is produced from a conjunction of social and rhetorical properties” (6), and both Dahl’s and Lawson’s authority comes from their domestic experience and their roles as women who cook for themselves and for the pleasure it brings them as much as for their families. Although they advocate this sense of enjoyment over duty, there remains in each text a distinctly romantic idea of what it means to cook; specifically, to be a female home cook. This is most explicit in how Dahl and Lawson narrate their texts, particularly in terms of the confidences they share. Both confess their shortcomings in relaxed and informal tones: Lawson writes about an occasion when she found herself in “dire straits” when trying to make marzipan (6), and confesses to being a “negligent mother” because all she does with her children is cook with them (209); Dahl says that she “would plant tarragon in my garden in London, but the neighbour’s cat is partial to peeing on every herb I have” (58). Both imbue their actual recipes, as well as the prose that surrounds them, with a very personal tone, offering tips and advice drawn from their own experience: Dahl advises readers to “go by instinct and taste, adding or taking away as you want” (52) and Lawson suggests leaving “a decent amount of uncooked cake batter in the bowl for scraping-out purposes” (183). Conclusion Pasupathi’s work on constructing identity in storytelling, and how recounting stories becomes a way of establishing a sense of self, is particularly relevant here; a similar concept is evident in cookbooks. Lawson and Dahl choose familiar life stories and situations that readers, (particularly female), might recognise and engage with. As Fludernik observes, narrators are integral to narrative texts, since they help to establish narrative meaning and interest (An Introduction to Narratology). The narrating voices of Dahl’s and Lawson’s cookbooks foreground their identity as women and home cooks to highlight experiences and issues relevant to women. All three of the narrative strategies discussed in this paper contribute to this. Both texts do, to a degree, enforce cultural stereotypes—most obviously, the idea of a woman’s kitchen as a kind of natural habitat—but they also emphasise the pleasures of cooking. Despite the clichéd imagery and heavy nostalgia, Dahl’s and Lawson’s appropriation of the domestic goddess image exposes and reconfigures the contradictions between the idealised past and more liberated present; offering female readers and cooks “beguiling possibilities … for re-enactment” (Duruz 57). Lawson and Dahl’s use of narrative strategies not only makes their texts more engaging to read, but reflects the social and cultural relevance of cookbooks, and how they can embody and reshape our engrained values and ideas. In their own way, they seek to affirm the female domestic experience and position it as something celebratory rather than oppressive. Perhaps no one puts it so aptly as Lawson: “I know the idea of being in the kitchen faffing around with bottles and jars and hot pans might seem confining to many, but honestly, I have found it liberating. The sense of connectedness you get, with your kitchen, your home, your food, is the very opposite of constraint” (334). 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