Food Culture in Colonial Asia

Patrimoni di origine protetta. Le procedure di Food Labelling nelle istituzioni internazionali all’incrocio tra nazionale, globale e locale

“…Il rischio è quello di sottovalutare il carattere ibrido, contaminato, delle identità europee, legato a una lunga storia di scambi, a livello tanto inter-europeo quanto globale. Esempi significativi in questo senso sono rappresentati dal sistema di scambio medievale [Montanari 1988;1993], dallo «scambio colombiano» [Crosby 1972], dalla circolazione di culture alimentari in contesti imperiali [Laudan 2013;Leong-Salobir 2011]. In questo quadro, il patrimonio vivo, «costantemente ricreato» che l'UNESCO mira a tutelare dal rischio di «congelamento» viene sottoposto a una duplice minaccia, per un verso, quella di un irrigidimento dell'heritage in un passato a-storico, per un altro, quella di un eccessivo ancoraggio delle culture e delle pratiche alimentari a una collocazione geografica concepita come chiusa verso l'esterno e quindi aliena a fenomeni di connessione, circolazione e scambio.…”

Eating the Asian Other? Pedagogies of Food Multiculturalism in Australia

“…and "Australianess"' and 'the need to reincorporate "mainstream" identities and experiences into images, discourses, and the meanings of ethnicity ' (2005: 57 Our method has been termed culinary biography interviewing (Duruz 2010;2011).…”

“Cookie” and “Jungle Boy”: A Historical Sketch of the Different Cooks for Different Folks in British Colonial Southeast Asia, ca. 1850–1960

“…3 In British North Borneo "jungle boys" were part of the coterie of "boys" in the colonial household and performed general tasks when their employer was not traveling. The work of the "boys" became important when they became their masters' guides and cooks when the colonials traveled to rural areas on reconnaissance trips or on administration business.…”

“…These publications reiterate the prevailing view on tensions between European employers and their domestic servants, and paradoxically the colonizers' utter dependence on them. 4 There were hundreds of Anglo-Indian cookbooks to which the memsahib in South Asia could refer, but those written for Malaya, the Borneo states and Singapore numbered only a handful. The colonial housewife in South East Asia could find that Anglo-Indian cookbooks and household manuals were not entirely relevant where servants were concerned.…”

“…Further, while South Asian cookbooks did not feature many recipes for pork and beef as the cooks were either Muslim or Hindu, there was no restriction on the kinds of foods servants in South East Asia, the majority of whom were Chinese, were asked to cook. 5 The Malayan Cookery Book of 1930 professes to provide "a serious attempt to aid the [European] housewives of Malaya [in] the art of cooking … [providing them with] a representative list of the recipes handed from generation to generation of Malayan [European] housewives … There are first the dishes known to many generations of Indians." 6 Just as fiction, diaries and biographies do not totally mirror lived events but provide complementary evidence, these genres, when examined together, add nuances and significance to the historian's understanding of the master-servant relationship.…”