Foreign Kitchens, Foreign Lands: Middle Eastern Foodsheds for American Consumers

ABSTRACT

How have cookbooks shaped popular understandings of place, especially when they describe culinary traditions rooted in foreign landscapes? This paper examines depictions of Middle Eastern landscapes and cultures that appeared in widely marketed cookbooks by Middle Eastern women sold to mainstream American readers between the 1960s and 1970s. I analyze these cookbook representations of imaginary foodsheds, rooted in the mid-twentieth century context of modern industrial food production and Pax Americana geopolitics. I demonstrate that these foodsheds served as discursive tools for cookbook authors to perform a kind of gastro-environmental identity for readers interested in these unfamiliar cuisines. Authors contextualized their recipes in landscapes, histories, and communities to build cultural bridges between themselves and their American readers. They depicted Middle Eastern foodsheds as nested both in contemporary geographies and in long-term historical timeframes. These cookbooks can serve as remarkably revealing sources for exploring how Middle Eastern identities came to be understood in mid-twentieth century mainstream American households.

KEYWORDS:

• Food history
• culinary history
• Middle Eastern cookery and cuisines
• ethnic cuisines
• Middle Eastern cookbooks

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the University of Manitoba and the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair in the Modern History of the Middle East and North Africa for their generous funding in support of this work. For invaluable discussions and comments about this research, I am indebted to many friends and colleagues, including Kathryn Boschman, Tina Chen, Roisin Cossar, William Cronon, Sarah Elvins, Anny Gaul, Akram Khater, Heidi Marx, Gary Nabhan, Allison Penner, Jeffrey Pilcher, Greg Smith, Amy Trubek, and anonymous peer reviewers.

Notes

1. Eren, The Art of Turkish Cooking, Introduction.

2. Significant inspiration comes from Arjun Appadurai’s landmark essay on cookbooks as historical and anthropological sources: Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine”; as well as from more recent work on cookbook history, notably Elias, Food on the Page; and Notaker, A History of Cookbooks. The main cookbooks considered here are: Eren, Turkish Cooking; Roden, A Book of Middle Eastern Food; Uvezian, The Cuisine of Armenia; Ramazani, Persian Cooking; Mazda, In a Persian Kitchen; Hekmat, The Art of Persian Cooking; Corey, The Art of Syrian Cooking; and Baboian, The Art of Armenian Cooking.

3. On industrial modernity and food: Belasco, Appetite for Change; and Vileisis, Kitchen Literacy. On Pax Americana geopolitics: Nye, “Changing Nature of World Power,” 186.

4. Initially coined in the 1920s by geographer Walter Hedden, the term helped pose valuable questions about food distribution systems. Hedden, How Great Cities Are Fed; Kloppenburg et al, “Coming in to the Foodshed;” Horst and Gaolach, “Potential of Local Food Systems;” and Ackerman-Leist, Rebuilding the Foodshed.

5. On cultural representations of Arabs or the Middle East in the United States, see McAlister, Epic Encounters; Nance, Arabian Nights; and Jarmakani, Arab Womanhood. On self-orientalism related to cuisine, see two excellent pieces by Jabber Stiffler, “Consuming Orientalism” and “Serving Arabness.”

6. On Mediterranean geographies see Kashdan, “Anglophone Cookbooks.” My focus here is on the “decoding” phase of Stuart’s Hall’s construction of media production and consumption. Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” ch.6.

7. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 8–29; Jabber Stiffler, “‘Serving Arabness’,” 63–67.

8. For a nuanced examination of the challenges Arab Muslims face in depicting themselves in the United States see Howell, “Cultural Interventions.”

9. I have omitted cookbooks by authors from outside the Middle East; I have also omitted cookbooks on Israeli and Palestinian cuisines, owing to the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which are beyond the scope of this study. On the example of Ottolenghi, for instance, see Kashdan, “Jerusalem in London.”

10. Mazda, Persian Kitchen, 15.

11. Roden, Middle Eastern Food, 6.

12. Said, Orientalism, ch.2. Krishnendu Ray compellingly outlines the philosophical and theoretical difficulties for the western academy in studying immigrant cuisines: Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur, xi-xxi. Note also the relatively marginal consideration of food in standard postcolonial readers such as Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, eds., The Post-colonial Studies Reader. For examples of humanities scholars using the concept of imagined geographies: Kashdan, “Anglophone Cookbooks”; Pfoh, “Geografías imaginadas;” and Clowes, Russia on the Edge.

13. Scholarship on the French term “terroir” and its symbolism is helpful in parsing the symbolisms of soil, climate and environment relative to identity. See Trubek, The Taste of Place; Guy, “Imperial Feedback”; Trubek, Guy and Bowen, “Terroir.”

14. Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Bergholz, “Thinking the Nation.”

15. On food historiography, see Pilcher, “The Embodied Imagination”; and Grew, “Food and Global History.” On transnational commodity chains, see the essential work of Mintz, Sweetness and Power; and John Soluri, Banana Cultures. On the history of food and environment, see Mink, “it begins in the belly”; Ott, Pumpkin; and Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk.

16. Hekmat, Persian Cooking, 30.

17. Corey, Syrian Cooking, 24–25.

18. Eren, Turkish Cooking, 12, 33; Hekmat, Persian Cooking, 55, 177; Corey, Syrian Cooking, 24–25; and Baboian, Armenian Cooking, 86.

19. Roden, Middle Eastern Food, 173.

20. Eren, Turkish Cooking, 93–94; Roden, Middle Eastern Food, 198–99; and Mazda, Persian Kitchen, 95.

21. On the relationship between eating, rituals, and modernity, see Appadurai, Modernity at Large, ch.4.

22. Baboian, Armenian Cooking, 86; Corey, Syrian Cooking, 25, 74–75; Eren, Turkish Cooking, 33; Roden, Middle Eastern Food, 283; Mazda, Persian Kitchen, 34, 86–87, 99–100; and Ramazani, Persian Cooking, xviii-xix.

23. Mazda, Persian Kitchen, 94–95, 119.

24. Hekmat, Persian Cooking, 37.

25. Vileisis, Kitchen Literacy, ch.6 and 7.

26. Guy, “Imperial Feedback,” 149–50; and Trubeck, Taste of Place.

27. Eren, Turkish Cooking, 14, 75–76, 229; Roden, Middle Eastern Food, 155–56; Mazda, Persian Kitchen, 41, 64; and Ramazani, Persian Cooking, 6, 183.

28. Eren, Turkish Cooking, 14.

29. Uvezian, Cuisine of Armenia, 359.

30. Roden, Middle Eastern Food, 283.

31. See, for instance, Irma Rombauer’s description of how to cook dried beans in The Joy of Cooking. Cookbooks specializing in regional American cuisines did not necessarily conform to these national norms.

32. See Belasco, Appetite for Change, or Vileisis, Kitchen Literacy; as well as Betty Freidan’s influential feminist work from this era, The Feminine Mystique.

33. Friedan, Feminine Mystique, 17–18; see also Jean Said Makdisi’s eloquent articulation of the same phenomenon from the perspective of an Arab immigrant to the United States in Teta, Mother, and Me, 118.

34. Ramazani, Persian Cooking, 213 (on baking bread); Hekmat, Persian Cooking, (on outdoor picnics); Eren, Turkish Cooking, 14 (on open-air cafes); and Corey, Syrian Cooking, (on domestic courtyards).

35. Roden, Middle Eastern Food; Ramazani, Persian Cooking, 200–1; Hekmat, Persian Cooking, 114–5; Eren, Turkish Cooking, 109; and Baboian, Armenian Cooking, 178.

36. Hekmat, Persian Cooking, 34–35; and Ramazani, Persian Cooking, 244, 45.

37. Roden, Middle Eastern Food, 28; Baboian, Armenian Cooking, 178; and Mazda, Persian Kitchen, 146–7.

38. Roden, Middle Eastern Food, 48.

39. These authors generally avoided the highly feminized and seductive imagery described in Jarmakani, Arab Womanhood, while still making use of the tropes of timelessness discussed in McAlister, Epic Encounters.

40. Roden, Middle Eastern Food, 2.

41. McAlister, Epic Encounters; Nance, Arabian Nights.

42. Elias, Food on the Page, ch.4.

43. Luce, “The American Century”; and Harvey, The New Imperialism, 50–51. See also Elias, Food on the Page, 127–31.

44. Nickles, Middle Eastern Cooking, 23, 32.

45. Ibid., 32.

46. Such imagery also fits with the food-related tropes described in Stiffler, “Consuming Orientalism,” and Stiffler, “Serving Arabness”.

47. Stiffler, “Consuming Orientalism,” 111–38.

48. Hekmat, Persian Cooking, 28; Baboian, Armenian Cooking, 33; and Corey, Syrian Cooking, 20.

49. Hekmat, Persian Cooking, 11; Mazda, Persian Kitchen, 105–6; and Ramazani, Persian Cooking, xviii, xix.

50. Eren, Turkish Cooking, 11, 14–15, 75–76.

51. Uvezian, Cuisine of Armenia, x.

52. Robson, “Memorialization and Assimilation.”

53. Roden, Middle Eastern Food, 7, 155–6.

54. Mazda, Persian Kitchen, 97; and Corey, Syrian Cooking, 19, 25.

55. Uvezian, Cuisine of Armenia, x; Hekmat, Persian Cooking, 53–54; Eren, Turkish Cooking, 15; Corey, Syrian Cooking,107; and Ramazani, Persian Cooking, xviii-xix.

56. Roden, Middle Eastern Food, 111–2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer M. Dueck

Jennifer M. Dueck holds The Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Modern History of the Middle East & North Africa at the University of Manitoba. Her research deals with the 20th century cultural and political histories of the Middle East in transnational contexts, including themes of youth, cuisine, imperialism, and migration. Dueck is the author of The Claims of Culture at Empire’s End: Syria and Lebanon under French Rule published by Oxford University Press (2010). She is currently working on a history of the globalization of Middle Eastern cuisines in the twentieth century.