How Do We Define a National Cuisine?
The notes on the second half of our current book club selection, ‘Between Two Waters’—plus news!
HOUSEKEEPING: You can enter to win an annual subscription to this newsletter (and many others) by participating in Now Serving’s fundraiser to restore cookbook collections lost to the L.A. fires. Indie bookstores are a passion of mine and my book collection is my pride and joy, so it was a no-brainer to participate. Check out all the possible prizes and enter at their site. It runs through the 22nd.
On Sunday, May 18, we’ll have the Salon plus Book Club discussion with chef and author Pam Brunton. Find the free access code in the header or at this page.
On Monday, May 19, I’ll be in virtual conversation with Jill Damatac about her memoir Dirty Kitchen via Archestratus, the great indie bookstore and grocer in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Entry alone is $5.
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“Food is able to activate emotions and does not require much mediation,” writes Fabio Parasecoli in Gastronativism, “everybody experiences it, everybody is an expert.” This came to mind while reading the last three chapters of Pam Brunton’s Between Two Waters, a book that I think can be summed up as complicating notions of a “national cuisine” through its examination of what is “normal” and “modern” in Scottish food. Is everybody an expert? And if they are, in which definition of “normal” or “national”? As Brunton writes on page 200:
History, personal and national, writes my menus. I’m Scottish and the foods that build my identity in the kitchen are recognisably Scottish too. I’m living in modernity. And I’m a cook. But this skeleton identity is shared by many, many people in the country today. We’re not all unified in our notions of what it means to cook normal, modern, Scottish food. It’s the features of my own personal landscape, as well as our shared national, global and familial landscapes, that contour the food on the Inver plates.
Her book also brought to mind Anya von Bremzen’s National Dish (her Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking will be our June–July book club read). Von Bremzen writes:
“Most of us take a view of nations as organic communities that have shared blood ties, race, language, culture, and diet since time immemorial. Among social scientists, however, this ‘primordialism’ doesn’t hold water. Scholars from the influential mid-1980s ‘modernist’ school (Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson) have persuasively argued that nations and nationalism are historically recent phenomena, dating roughly to the late Enlightenment—and to the French Revolution in particular, which supplied the model for our contemporary concept of the nation, as France’s absolutist monarchy of divergent peoples and customs and dialects was transformed into a sovereign entity of common laws, a unified language, and a written constitution, ruled in the name of equal citizens under that grand idealist banner: Liberté, égalité, fraternité!”
And so national cuisines, too, are neither organic nor static. What is organic, or could be conceived of as such, is the food the land gives with ease, which tends to shape notions of national cuisine—or does it? As Brunton puts it, a lot of the issues that have emerged in terms of Scotland’s national “normal” diet is that it’s not built upon what the land gives, but on what the terms of capitalism and empire dictate. It’s extremely useful to be reading about this from the perspective of someone in Scotland, in the Global North, because so often these kinds of “issues” are discussed with a paternalistic gaze southward. Here, a Scot examines Scotland. The internal gaze can bring forth a stronger critique.