"For me, the interesting thing is to use the past to inspire the present. ... There is really nothing new under the sun. If you look hard enough, you will always find a similar idea that has been ‘forgotten.’" Janet Clarkson
This is a website review kind of post, with the website in question being The Old Foodie, whose last home page is shown here. I say last because it is dated May 2017 so is no longer active. I've come across it quite often when I have been looking at various historical things, so I added it to my list of websites to look at in more detail.
And as usual this has led me to places I was not originally intending to go. However, I should probably start with the little bit that I could find about the author of this blog - a lady named Janet Clarkson who hails from our own Brisbane. There is also a Facebook page with very little on it and a Pinterest page, which I'm pretty sure is more recent, and seems to imply that these days she is more interested in jungle paintings, art and crochet. But then I don't know how Pinterest works, so these things may be attached to a different person with the same name. Because the few words on the Pinterest page do talk about her interest in the history of food and don't mention crochet, knitting or art.
She has, however written books - these are two of them and there is also one on soup and one which is called Food History Almanac, although they were all written some time ago. However, maybe she concentrates on that these days. I also found that she is: "a general practitioner and lecturer at the School of Medicine at the University of Queensland, Australia." and a Linkedin entry has her listed at the University of Queensland, so maybe she has just returned to medicine. Although the LInkedin entry does seem to emphasise the food writing.
It's a bit of a mystery. Did she die? Because those books were published long ago now. If she was really into writing you would think that she would still be doing it in some way.
Enough about Janet Clarkson herself, other than to add that for the years that she wrote that blog - from 2005-2017 - she made a subtitle vow - "A food history story and recipe every weekday of the year." and stuck to it. That's a lot of writing - and research. In fact this is one of the things that is most daunting about her blog is it not? The format and presentation may well be oldy-worldy but it's also not very attractive. It doesn't draw you in, although if you do actually read it it's written in a very readable, often amusing way. But too many words, packed close together. Very old-fashioned - a kind of early Wordpress/PC computer style.
So I was therefore somewhat taken aback, and leaping to her (and others') defence when I came across an article on a website called Commonplace - undated and unnamed, which as you will see is a bit ironic - criticising all the food history blogs out there:
"Unfortunately, when it comes to food studies and food history, blogs leave much to be desired. Most food blogs eschew serious scholarship in favor of interesting trivia and historic ephemera, treating readers to mini-essays on the origins of American staple food items. The entries are often quite informative, but they do not follow any kind of academic standards, making them useless to students and researchers. In the many food blogs that exist, such as “American Food,” “Slow Food USA,” “Heart to Hearth Cookery,” or “Food—History,” one is hard pressed to find a single footnote, bibliography, or even a link to the sources used to craft each entry." Commonplace
He - somehow I think this is a 'he' which perhaps shows an innate sexism - concludes that 'true' researchers will have to stick to actual archives. Which, it seems to me is what Janet Clarkson does, because she always quotes the source - with some precision - of the recipe or menu in question. If you're an academic writing a thesis or a learned book on the topic, then surely you go back to the originals, or at the very least the digitised originals (if available) online? Blogs are not meant to be learned theses. In this instance they are meant to illustrate and inform us about some aspect of food history. And there are heaps of different aspects. Mind you I think students and researchers often find a lot of use in all sorts of sources. Historic ephemera can be found in many Archves.
One of the points that Janet Clarkson makes about researching the history of food is that:
"To cook historic food faithfully requires an historic kitchen. Old methods are just as important to the final outcome as the recipe ingredients and instructions themselves. One of the problems (challenges) in cooking old recipes is that instructions in old books are very vague – quantities, times, temperatures, etc., are rarely mentioned, partly because kitchens did not have clocks, thermometers, scales, etc., – cookery methods were dependent on the experience of the cook."
And so:
"because of the very sketchy instructions in most old books, a lot of guesswork is always involved in trying them out today. We can never be completely sure we have made a dish in the same way as it would have been when the particular cookbook was written."
Which our Commonplace author looks down his pompous and patronising nose at:
"here the visitor finds a list of recipes from colonial sources adapted to modern measurements and ingredients. While cooking eighteenth-century food can be fun and interesting for the home cook, the researcher of America’s foodways will find little of value in recipes that are designed for today’s kitchen." Commonplace
'Little of value'. What does that mean? It is entirely possible in fact to reproduce a recipe using the methods and ingredients of the time the recipe was written. People have researched this stuff, and they reproduce it - with photographs on their blogs as well as in university departments and research institutes. And surely an experienced cook would be able to arrive at the right quantities of the ingredients after a bit of experimentation. Indeed some modern recipes are less than precise - a handful of this, a pinch of that, the juice of a lemon, a bunch of a herb ... There is lots of value in working it all out and also lots of value in understanding at least in part what people ate back then. And as Janet Clarkson says in her book on pie:
“Surely we should try to save something that, when done well, is not only a supreme example of the art of cooking, but a dish that encapsulates humankind's entire culinary history?"
During my now years of writing this blog I have encountered a few blogs that concentrate on the history of food, and there are many of them out there, in spite of the Commonplace guy saying he couldn't find any. So either he was writing back in the very early days of the internet, or he was a very poor researcher. Or, I suppose, a snob who regarded what we regard as food history blogs, as not worth looking at.
So I decided to check out a few - focussing on suggestions from Feedly and Feedspot which had 'best of' lists. Top of the list seemed to be British Food: a History which is where Neil Buttery of Neil Cooks Grigson now does his thing, on a much larger and more professional website, which includes a podcast series. There are still entertaining articles about traditional British food, complete I might say with footnotes, bibliographies and links. I have used it every now and then myself. Recent posts have been on Bakewell tart and Irish Coffee.
Then there is Cooking in the Archives, where - coincidence, coincidence, you will find a recipe for French Tosts from an 18th century cookbook by Mistress Anna Campbell - Her Paistrie Book, published in 1707 in Scotland:
"Cutt prettie thick tosts of whyt bread, tost them befor the fyre broun, steep them in sweett Cream, or whyte wine, sugar, and orange Juice, soak them on Coalls in a clean dish between two dishes"
Which the author then translates and cooks, explaining along the way how it has been updated from the methods that would have been used back then, and including links to the archive where the book resides and to other similar books.
Some people take the authenticity aspect of it all very seriously and an example of this is The Historic Foodie - An enjoyable ramble through the world of Historic Foods and Cooking to include Gardening History, Poultry History, Dress, and All Manner of Material Culture. It's a business really with demonstrations and classes and sales of various goods, with the emphasis on recreating everything to do with growing, preparing and cooking food as it was back then. But the posts contain a lot of information, facts and figures. Very American though.
In similar fashion there is Heart to Hearth Cookery, although this one seems to have very little information at all, just an original recipe and a picture. I was not impressed.
Restaurant-ing Through History is a rather more specific idea however, with the author in her About section saying:
"Restaurants are deeply revealing of our culture’s humanity (and lack thereof). How did they justify turning away people with the wrong color of skin? They are businesses, yes, but they can’t let business motives crowd out all sense of hospitality."
I suspect our Commonplace critic would find it superficial. It stands somewhere in the middle of ultra-researched, and very superficial I guess. But it is only focussed on America, so not as interesting to the rest of the world.
There are, as I said, lots of other food history sites. It's interesting isn't it how people get interested in this kind of thing, with what can only be described as fervour - almost obsession? And there are so many different aspects to the history of food as well. Why indeed do we look to the past? We should, of course, be looking to the past to teach us how to do things better today but alas I suspect that most of us learn nothing from history. We make the same mistakes over and over again. And there is an argument that says we should just be concentrating on the here and now, and how that here and now can be improved upon, or simply enjoyed.
However, we do, I think want to know where we came from in the broadest sense and different people take that statement to mean a huge variety of different things. These old foodies chose to look at the history of food - and every aspect of that from the clothes that the cooks were wearing to the way they farmed - or hunted - to the food they ate. As Janet Clarkson says in her book on Pie:
“We are social animals, and we don't usually find and eat food alone, so we associate it at an emotional level with people, events and circumstances. Eventually a food becomes embedded with meaning, allowing anthropologists to ask questions like: 'Do pies mean anything?”
My Commonplace critic was a snobby misery. If you want people to learn anything at all then you have to capture their interest, and you are not going to do that with footnotes and bibliographies.
“It could be argued that there is an element of entertainment in every pie, as every pie is inherently a surprise by virtue of its crust.” Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History
So make the crust beautiful and enticing and people will break into it and discover the treasures within. A metaphor of course.
The Old Foodie is a worthy site, and if you can get over the poor presentation and actually read it, it's a really good try. Useful to me now and then anyway, even if it is discontinued.
POSTSCRIPT
Well here's last night's dinner of stuffed zucchini. Terrible photograph and as you can see some of the liquid oozed out and then burnt on the bottom. My zucchina was not the long green type but the rather more bulbous yellow one. (I only had one, and have just discovered that the singular is zucchina - plural zucchine. Zucchini is an Americanisation. Well you learn something every day.) It was also on the cusp of disintegration and I had to cut out a couple of decaying bits. However it stood up to the treatment pretty well. I halved the ingredients, which might account for the oozing, because the filling was a bit sloppy due to the presence of the one egg. You can't really have half an egg.
The verdict - tasty but not super, super, super - maybe 3 stars. However, I think if it had indeed been the long green ones it might have been better - a bit less zucchina dominated. Worth trying again with them.
YEARS GONE BY
February 13
2023 - Baking sole with Jamie
2021 - Jam
2020 - Nothing
2018 - The unloved swede
2017 - A word from Nigel Slater
I would have said 3.5 stars. Very tasty but not very high fashion presentation!