The Cosmopolitan Cookbook

Abstract

Victorian cookbook authors employed a variety of strategies to sell foreign foods and foreign recipes to their middle class English readers. Some authors added exotic ingredients to familiar recipes in order to increase the variety and healthfulness of their readers' diet, while others relied on supposedly authentic foreign recipes that readers could use as a means to social distinction. Two conflicting forces shaped reactions to foreign cuisine. Victorian cookbook readers might wish to experience travel vicariously or to relive travel through the taste and smell of foods from distant lands that they perceived as authentic. The opposing cultural response was the desire to domesticate or master the world by adopting new ingredients into more traditional foodways, or transforming foreign cuisine by incorporating familiar ingredients into exotic recipes. Although both responses can be found throughout the century, the use of foreign cuisine as a means of social distinction increased in the 1890s.

Keywords:

• cookbooks
• English food
• food history
• Victorian history
• social distinction
• Anglo-Indian food

Additional information

Notes on contributors

April Bullock

April Bullock is an associate professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at California State University, Fullerton. Her research interests include the history of food in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England, gender studies, and the history of Bohemianism in Victorian London. She is currently working on a book about English cooks and cookbooks. When not teaching, serving on far too many committees or hiking in the desert, she gardens and cooks. Department of Liberal Studies, California State University, Fullerton, PO Box 6850, Fullerton, CA 92834, USA ([email protected]).