DEVELOPING ENGLISH 118F: FOOD POLITICS & FOOD CULTURES S S. CAILEY HALL (UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA GLOBAL FOOD INITIATIVE FELLOW)

We also wanted to represent a wider geographical and Antonio de INTRODUCTION historical array. Recipes and cookbooks show up in a Pereda's “Still variety of places and forms: on clay tablets in ancient Life with Ebony Chest” As a Global Food Initiative Fellow, I worked with th Allison Carruth, a professor in UCLA’s English Mesopotamia; in the 18 century gastronomic (1652) depicts manual, Suiyuan Shidan, written by Yuan Mei, a Qing department, to build the syllabus for English 118F: various dynasty scholar; and in Arabic manuscripts in medieval colony - Food Politics & Food Cultures: Historical Perspectives, one Baghdad, among many other places. derived of several recently developed courses created by luxury g oods, including a faculty with UCLA’s new food studies minor in mind. Left: Clay tablet of chocolate pot Professor Carruth, whose research focuses on food recipes from (on the left) cultures and environmental movements, is designing Mesopotamia, c. 1750 and a cacao BCE. a class that will bring together cultural, historical, and bean and scientific approaches around four modules: 1) the sugar (center, Below: The Kitab al- right). recipe as form; 2) vegetarianism as a utopian eating tabikh (Book of Dishes), scheme; 3) chocolate, sugar, and colonialism; and 4) compiled by Ibn Sayyar By focusing not just on sugar, but also on chocolate, the the rise of the restaurant and food professionalization. al-Warraq (10th century product of cacao and sugar, the course considers the CE). history of cacao in Mesoamerican culture before, PROJECT GOALS during, and after European imperialism. Professor Carruth had an initial plan for the units – and some of the texts – she wanted to teach, but she was still honing the syllabus and the focus of each unit. I worked on researching and writing annotated primary and secondary bibliographies for each unit. I highlighted potential texts for inclusion on the syllabus, but also included a much wider and richer array of background material. Additionally, I built a digital repository of relevant images, with an At the same time, we wanted to “consider the recipe,” emphasis on the recipe and chocolate units. as Kyla Tompkins puts it in her essay of the same name, as a formal device and as a narrative, one that is UNIT FOCUS: THE RECIPE AS FORM both “embedd[ed] in the temporality of the everyday” The majority of critical literature on the history of (Tompkins 442), and capable of transcending time and Left: The “Princeton vase,” a Maya chocolate drinking cup (c. the cookbook and the recipe focuses on Anglo- place. The recipe can resurrect forgotten peoples and 700), depicting a woman frothing chocolate for drinking histories, as in Toni Tipton-Martin’s The Jemima Code: Right: Detail from Bernardino de Sahagún's 12 book Historia American foodways, especially those of the middle gen eral de las cosas de nuevaEspaña (General history of the things of and upper classes during the last few centuries. In Two Centuries of African-American Cookbooks, a scholarly New Spain). Sahagún, a Franciscan missionary in Mexico, part, this is because these texts are closer to home survey of more than 150 African-American au th o red compiled an ency clopedic work of ethnog raphy about Mexican and easier to read. And we didn’t want to neglect the cookbooks. Beginning with Robert Roberts’s 1827 life, written in both Spanish and Nahuatl (an Aztec language). rise of French cuisine, or the development of The House Servant’s Directory, Tipton-Martin unearths This image is of a woman making drinking chocolate. We s te r n d o m e s ti c i ty. the numerous Left: Portion of the earliest sophisticated – and FUTURE GOALS extant copy (in scroll form) of all too often As the year winds to a close, we are working on honing Le Viander, usually attributed to overlooked – the syllabus and developing assignments for the class that Guillame Tirel, aka Ta i l l e v a n t contributions that will allow them to engage with archival holdings at (although it is unlikely that he was the original author). African-Americans UCLA’s Young Research Library, and the Clark Library. Composed in the second half of have made to the 13th century, this French American LITERATURE CITED recipe collection is considered foodways, one of the earliest European recuperating their Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar “cookbooks.” culinary and in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985. cultural authority. Tipton-Martin, Toni. The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African-American Cookbooks. Austin: University of UNIT FOCUS: CHOCOLATE, SUGAR, AND Texas Press, 2015. COLONIALISM Tompkins, Kyla. “Consider the Recipe.” J19: T he To illustrate the past history and current state of global Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1:2 (Fall food production and consumption, Professor Carruth 2013): 439-445. Right: Cover page from wanted to focus on chocolate, both as an indigenous Hannah Glasse’s The Art product of Mesoamerican cultures, and as a luxury ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS of Cookery (England, item introduced by European colonialism. In Sweetness Thank you to the UC Office of the President, the UC 1747). This best-selling and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Sidney Global Food Initiative, Professor Allison Carruth, and cookbook was aimed at Mintz documents how Europe’s ever-growing desire middle-class women. the UCLA English Department for their generous for sugar fuelled colonialism, slavery, and global trade. funding of – and support for – this project.