A Taste of the Past: Teaching Spain’s Culinary and Cultural History

Abstract

This article argues for the place of a food studies course in a language major, highlighting the benefits of such a course not only to the students’ cultural understandings, but more broadly. A highly interdisciplinary area, the study of national cuisines and cookery books offers students insight into a wide range of issues, from historical events, nationalisms, and independence movements to gender relations and social movements. Focusing on the course “Cooking up the Nation”, offered at the University of Melbourne as a cultural elective to students in the Spanish and Latin American Studies program, this article also shows how research methods can be incorporated into the classroom. In particular, this course requires students to choose a recipe and cook from historic gastronomic texts, providing an experiential learning opportunity that sheds new light on the theoretical and historical perspectives studied.

Keywords:

• Culinary history
• national identity
• pedagogy

Notes

¹ Albala, “Culinary History,” 115.

² Ibid.

³ Deutsch and Miller, “Teaching with Food,” 191.

⁴ Valenze, “The Cultural History of Food,” 101.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Bender, et al., “Eating in Class”, 204.

⁷ Albala, “Culinary History,” 114.

⁸ Freadman, “The Place of Memory Studies”, 280.

⁹ Albala, “Culinary History,” 115.

¹⁰ Paz Moreno, De la página al plato, 13.

¹¹ Driver, “Cookbooks as Primary Sources”, 258.

¹² Elias, “Freak Food: Counterculture Cookbooks”.

¹³ Albala, “Culinary History,” 120.

¹⁴ Freadman, “The Place of Memory Studies,” 279.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Avakian and Haber, From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies, 2.