Remarks on Foreignness in Eighteenth-Century German Cookbooks

Social history has recently rediscussed the notion of foreignness in early modern times. In particular, Simona Cerutti has introduced the idea that the foreigner was not so much ‘the one who comes from elsewhere’ as the one who did not belong enough to a specific social group in a given moment and territory. According to Cerutti, the foreigner was the one who had no access to property, no civic rights or no family bonds where he or she operated, and on which he or she could rely. Cerutti then moved the focus away from studying people coming from elsewhere to a ‘state of foreignness’ (condition d’extranéité) that was specific of socially – but not necessary economically – unempowered people (personnes misérables). She shifted the attention from the normative framework to instead study practices. If we are to transfer this methodology from social history to the history of food, it invites us to consider as foreign what was not usually available in a market, not usually used in a cuisine, or not usually present around a table. This leads us to question our present obsessions regarding the origin of a product, its name, and the ways of cooking it according to an alleged tradition and identity. Such criteria were not necessarily relevant in eighteenthcentury Europe where the terroir did not exist as such, where authenticity was not yet a concern, and where identity and belonging were defined differently, or not exclusively, from a national perspective. The narrative conveyed by cookbooks allows us to examine the categories their authors created and adjusted according to the

practices they observed, regarding food, recipes and cooking techniques and methods assumed to come from elsewhere, but not necessarily from abroad. This requires us to constantly adapt our scale of analysis according to the culinary territory that the specific author was reporting on. 4 Cookbooks appeared in the fifteenth century in the Holy Roman Empire and they contributed to the emergence of national cuisines. According to Philippe Meyzie, the 'dual dynamics of codification and representation participated very strongly in the construction of national cuisines and in their distinction one from the other.' 5 Accordingly, the different and diverse cuisines of the Holy Roman Empire can be seen as a European laboratory in which to analyse this evolution. The German cookbooks offered an array of food, recipes, techniques and methods that combined different criteria and participated in identifying elements referring to foreign countries within the eighteenth-century gastronomic narratives developed in the German-speaking world. They referred to an 'elsewhere,' both outside and inside the Holy Roman Empire. The cuisine from Bohemia could be as foreign for a Saxon cook in Hanover as a Spanish soup might be in Nuremberg. Cookbooks could also be socio-economic in the context of the affirmation of a bourgeois cuisine that intended to strongly distinguish itself from that of the court. 6 We should also keep in mind that the reference to a foreign food, recipe, technique or method could be part of the narrative of a meal. It did not necessarily indicate a foreign origin. It could be a way of introducing a new dish or making fun of a culture from which it was claimed to be borrowed. In this respect, the political, religious and even linguistic diversity of the Holy Roman Empire constitutes a privileged field of research for analysing how references to foreign elements were introduced in the titles of cookbooks, their introductions, the naming and the content of the recipes, and the numerous comments inserted by the authors. The present article shows that there was no German national cuisine by the end of the eighteenth century. It also explores the vibrant circulation of food, recipes, techniques and methods within the German-speaking world and between the German-speaking world and the rest of Europe, the Ottoman Empire included. As Claire Gantet and Christine Lebeau recently stated: 'From Hamburg to Trieste, from Antwerp to Vienna, imperial institutions structured the political and 4 BRUNO LAURIOUX, 'Kochbücher vom Ende des Mittelalters,' in Mahl und Repräsentation. Der Kult ums Essen, ed. Lothar Kolmer and Christian Rohr (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2000), 157-66 and 'L'histoire de la cuisine: problèmes, sources et méthodes,' in Alimentazione e nutrizione, secc. XIII-XIII, ed. Simonetta Cavaciocchi (Prato: Mondadori Education, 1997), 463-87. 5  social space, permeated practices and even consciences and formed the society of the Empire, a set of solidarities, hierarchy and common norms. ' 7 In spite of the diversity of these references, a cookbook cannot be defined as cosmopolitan or syncretic because it incorporated food coming from a foreign province, country or culture. References to food from elsewhere were constitutive of a particular cultural narrative and so I look at them first and foremost as the result of the food culture that enunciated them, of which the cookbook was the medium. As Georg Simmel stated, 'the stranger is yet an organic member of the group.' 8 The foreign origin of a food, recipe or technique highlighted or claimed by German cookbooks was often only a piece of a narrative that was intended to satisfy the expectations of a targeted readership. In other words, could these aspects in eighteenth-century German cookbooks be deemed foreign if we consider that every recipe introduced was already part of the culture that the book referred to? A comparison of cookbooks printed in German in the Holy Roman Empire allows us to identify dissonances and therefore particular ways in which food, recipes, techniques and methods that could be described as French, Swedish, Hungarian, Spanish or Polish, but also Austrian, Bavarian, Bohemian or Saxon, could belong to the different cuisines cooked in the German-speaking world. In a sense, cookbooks are similar sources to the topographies or city directories that developed in the eighteenth century too. They too focused on practices and tried to explain the evolution of the world they witnessed to their readers, by offering new categories to understand a new and rapidly changing world. 9 The following remarks are based on 31 cookbooks published in German in the Holy Roman Empire during the eighteenth century. They first stress the coexistence of two gastronomic models that emphasised two parallel German scholarly worlds at the beginning of the eighteenth century. However, this division tended to fade away from the 1730s with the triumph of a sort of food statistics promoted by publishers from the southern states of the Holy Roman Empire, and the progressive disappearance of cumulative knowledge. Moreover, references to foreign countries and cultures in cookbooks, recipes, techniques and methods emphasised the different interfaces between the Holy Roman Empire and England, France, Hungary, Poland and Sweden. These influences led to regional specificities and thus, in the narrative, they gradually characterised the foreign cuisines found within the ancient Reich. Finally, the question of whether or not to mention the origin of food products leads to a reevaluation of the importance of the availability of food on a specific market, and not the place where food was produced, in defining it as foreign or not.

Foreignness in Cumulative and Analytic Food Knowledge
In contrast to the historians of the eighteenth century, who often analysed foreigners in the same city nation by nation, topographers never presented foreigners as separate categories within the societies they described. They forged categories that were relevant to the society as a whole. Cookbook authors were the topographers and statisticians of the dining table. They took a similar approach. Indeed, the history of cookbooks is part of the history of science 10 and it participated in the emergence of modern statistics that occurred in the Holy Roman Empire during the eighteenth century. As can be seen from German booksellers' catalogues, cookbooks were considered at the crossroads between medicine, economy and science.
In the eighteenth century, German cookbooks belonged to different disciplines. Bread), in its original French version. 14 In 1780, the new edition of the Allgemeines Verzeichniß modified its nomenclature with an alphabetical index that did not offer double categorisation and classified Neubauer under 'the fine arts and sciences'. 15 A cookbook was therefore above all practical. For example, the Allgemeines Verzeichniß of 1777 introduced Neubauer's Neuer Kochbuch as 'among the most essential, as far as it can be judged useful and good by a layman in the field of cooking. Man seems to be elevated in the kitchen and is educated by the experience of the cook. However, it regretted that 'like most cookbooks, the Bavarian German cooking language makes it difficult to understand in many German provinces.' 16 This Bavarian language, which made the language of the book difficult to understand to its Saxon reviewer, underlined a tension between the elaborate German network of book distribution and the limits of its reception due to German linguistic diversity.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the Holy Roman Empire food was divided by two models of knowledge organisation. In the North, Maria Anna Schellhammer's Der wohl-unterwiesenen Köchin (The Well-Educated Cook), published in Braunschweig in 1700, Gottlieb Corvinus's Frauenzimmer-Lexicon (Lexicon of Chambermaids), published in Leipzig in 1715, and Paul Jacob Marperger's Vollständiges Küch-und-Keller Dictionarium (Dictionary of Kitchens and Cellars), published in Hamburg in 1716, had an alphabetical structure that organised the recipes they introduced. They differed radically from Conrad Hagger's Neues Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch (New Salzburg Cookbook), published in Augsburg in 1718. 17 The latter, which consisted of eight books in four volumes, was always intended to be a comprehensive collection of knowledge, but it also introduced a thematic index that became common in the southern part of the Holy Roman Empire from the 1730s onwards. In 1733, Johann Albrecht Grunauer wrote 37 chapters, each corresponding to a type of dish or food, ranging from soups to jellies, veal, duck and fish dishes. Devoted to the latter, chapter 22 was further subdivided into types of fish from eel to crayfish, carp and pike. 18 In 1740, the anonymous Nutzliches Koch-Buch (Useful Cookbook), published in Vienna, simplified the classification to six sections, which were taken from the Bewehrtes Kochbuch (Proven Cookbook) of 1748. These sections corresponded to the order of the dishes and services and no longer to the nature of the main ingredient to be cooked. Knowledge was no longer merely accumulated. It reflected a social practice and it was classified and organised in order to produce a norm. The size of the books was also reduced in order to make them more practical.
This analytic model progressively became the basis of the cookbook. Only the registers that completed the books retained an alphabetical classification, with the exception of the Vollständiges Koch-Buch (Complete Cookbook), published in Ulm but edited 'at the request of the Stettin (Szczesin, today in Poland) Bookstore Commission' in Western Pomerania. 20 The Schwedisches Koch-und Haushaltungs-Buch (Book of Swedish Cookery and Household) by Christina Warg, published in Greifswald in 1772, and the Nieder-Sächsisches Koch-Buch (Lower Saxon Cookbook) by Marcus Looft, published in Lübeck in 1783, testified to the adoption of the statistical model. 21 As the author of the Allgemeines Verzeichniß mentioned, for example, Neubauer's 1776 book offered a list of menu types. In Die Geschäfte des Hauswesens The Business of the Household, published in 1803 in Stendal, the table of contents substituted the index. It organised the book thematically and the recipes were classified by the type of dish, numbered and paginated. In the appendix it also listed different ways of adapting the recipes for people in poor health. 22 Ignaz Gartler's Wienerisches bewährtes Kochbuch (Viennese Real Cookbook), published in 1787, appears to be the most elaborate of the period. Not only did it bring together the contributions of the previous books, such as the classification of dishes by course, their numbering, the index and the register explaining the specific vocabulary, but it also brought innovation, in particular thanks to its appendices. They listed the rules for using and organising a kitchen, the availability of food according to the seasons, the art of setting the table according to the dishes, and the art of setting the dishes and plates according to the food and especially the specific cuts of meat. They also provided menus for fat and lean days, based on the different possibilities to combine products, dishes and the number of guests. Finally, table plans for lunch and dinner and the number of guests were inserted and developed during the successive editions of the book in 1793, 1831 and 1838, on which Barbara Hikmann also collaborated. 23 Gartler's cookbook perfectly embodied the scientific approach of cookbook authors comparable to that of topographers and statisticians. In 1780, the structure of Der kaiserlich-königliche Residenzstadt Wien Kommerzialschema (Commercial Directory of the Imperial and Royal Court-City of Vienna) clearly echoed that of cookbooks. In the first part, Christian Löper first provided an alphabetical classification of the city's craftsmen and merchants by section, in the same way as cookbooks classified the dishes by course. This was followed by an alphabetical index of the persons mentioned, which mirrored the index of dishes at the end of the cookbooks, and then a topography of the city by district and by economic function, prefiguring the appendices, which provided information on the availability of products by season, and the arrangement of Ignaz Gartler's dishes. 24 Gartler's cookbook can also be compared to two of its exact contemporary topographies, Wiens gegenwährtiger Zustand (Present State of the City of Vienna) by the Linz professor of statistics, Ignaz De Luca, published the same year in Vienna, and the first edition of Skizze von Wien (Sketch of Vienna) by the secretary and librarian of the Chancellery of State, Johann Pezzl. 25 As rich as it was in its descriptions, the structure of De Luca's book, which followed an alphabetical order, appeared much less elaborate than that of Gartler's book. It clearly referred to a kind of knowledge designed in the dictionaries and lexicons of the beginning of the century. As for Skizze von Wien, which uses an analytical and non-alphabetical structure, the absence of an index, at least in the first edition, seemed to rule out a non-linear first reading. In Vienna, cookbooks were the embodiment of modern statistics.

Which German Cuisine in which Germany?
Just like topographies, cookbooks accounted for the presence of foreign elements in the society they described and analysed. However, the definition of what was foreign was first a question of scale. Indeed, if the publishers reflected a book geography dominated by major publishing centres such as Leipzig and Vienna, there was still a great range of places that in some way corresponded to cookbooks focusing on local cuisine ( fig. 1). What was designated as foreign could paradoxically belong to the Holy Roman Empire. Moreover, what was foreign never belonged to a section specifically created for this category. Food, recipes, techniques and methods referring to elsewhere were always integrated into the different categories of the different cuisines that a cookbook proposed to introduce.
Indeed, before the end of the eighteenth century none of the cookbooks claimed to be about German cuisine. They targeted other types of geographical areas within the Holy Roman Empire: an administrative circle (Kreis), a state or a city. Moreover, this division did not necessarily correspond to the political divisions of the ancient Reich.  The cookbooks referred to the geography of the various economic areas that made up the Holy Roman Empire. What was foreign to the Holy Roman Empire depended on the specific context of enunciation and could not be understood on the scale of the Holy Roman Empire or the German-speaking area. Cookbooks could also be introduced as foreign and could reflect a certain circulation of tastes. 27  the 'grande cuisine.' 29 The influence of Anglophilia over the German Enlightenment (Aufklärung) -and not only in the Protestant states 30 -and a familiarity developed with the extra-Germanic, Hanseatic or Mediterranean world, encouraged the modification of the different cuisines in the Holy Roman Empire. Finally, Western Pomerania, of which Greifswald was a part, was a vassal territory of the Swedish crown, and reflected the cultural influence of a Scandinavian elite, without necessarily inducing the exact transfer of this model.
The ancient Reich's cuisine was also characterised by the vitality of its geographical margins. In 1790, a Pariser Kochbuch (Parisian Cookbook), published in Trieste -an Adriatic city-port of the Holy Roman Empire in Inner Austria, today in Italy -was listed in the catalogue of the bookseller Anton Löwe in Pressburg (Baratislava, today in Slovakia), thus in the kingdom of Hungary, outside the Holy Roman Empire, but within the Habsburg composite monarchy. Nevertheless, in Pressburg, at Löwe's bookshop, the Pariser Kochbuch also belonged to a series of cookbooks from throughout the Holy Roman Empire, printed in Braunschweig, Cologne, Trieste or Stralsund, as transcribed here: Pressburg relayed knowledge produced within the Holy Roman Empire and made it available to a German-speaking city. To a certain extent, it belonged to the German world even though it was not a city of the Holy Roman Empire. Similarly, in 1786 the Unterricht für ein junges Frauenzimmer (Lesson for a Young Housewife) by Johanna Katharina 29 See for example: CHARLOTTE BELLAMY, "Les professionnels de bouche français dans la Suède gustavienne (1750-1820)" (PhD dissertation, European University Institute, 2020). 30

Morgenstern-Schulze, first printed in Magdeburg in 1782 and then in Leipzig and
Frankfurt-am-Oder in 1785, was republished in Danzig (Gdansk). A free city of Poland, Danzig also remained linked to the Empire through the Hanseatic trading networks. 32 We should also note the role of publishing houses in Strasbourg -part of France since 1680and the publication of Das allerneuste Pariser Kochbuch (The All-New Parisian Cookbook) by Amadeus König in 1752, which was mentioned in Einleitung in die Oekonomische und physikalische Bücherkunde (Introduction to Economics and Physics for Book Buyers) by Johann Traugott Müller, published in Leipzig in 1780. 33 Moreover, the German 'elsewhere' could be internal to the Holy Roman Empire, as Maria Anna Neudecker's Die Bayer'sche Köchin in Böhmen (The Bavarian Cook in Bohemia), printed in the small but wealthy spa town of Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary, today in the Czech Republic) 34 in 1805, expressed very clearly. The author wrote: I am indebted to Bavaria -my homeland -for having taught me the first principles of art, and I believe that my many years of experience in the greatest houses of Bohemia and Austria have together led me to the point where I have acquired the means to embark on this venture. 35 Then she added further on: I wanted this book to be of public utility throughout Germany and to make it suitable for everyone, so I have also included the national names of the most common dishes in Bavaria, Austria and Bohemia in the High German language, or I have indicated the meaning of these provincial expressions in the explanations I have written especially for this purpose. 36 Neudecker's introduction was set in the context of the separation of the Habsburg hereditary lands -forming the Austrian Empire from 1804 onwards -from the rest of the German political area, with Francis II relinquishing his title of Roman Emperor in 1805 under the Treaty of Pressburg. Nevertheless, by explicitly targeting her readership through the choice of language, unlike Neubauer, Neudecker clearly affirmed the existence of a diverse German community. Her pan-Germanism readily acknowledged that her 'homeland' and the existence of German nations, whose vocabulary she combined, were foreign to each other while belonging to the same world. The success of the book and its subsequent reprints in Salzburg in 1826, then in Munich from 1846 to 1863, were clearly part of the promotion of a classic 'Greater Germany' model against Bismarck's 'Little German' idea. 37

Culture in Practice
Looking at the cookbooks in more detail, it becomes even more difficult to define a foreign element. From Nuremberg in 1733, Grunauer delivered the recipe for his 'Nudel oder Macaronen-Suppen,' 'Macaronen' being printed in Latin and not in Gothic as was the case at that time for all foreign words in a German text. 38 The first page of his book already set the tone by multiplying the borrowed words: 'fricassée,' 'boeuf à la mode,' 'Gallery' or 'Gelée' also printed in italics ( fig. 2). While this was common in German printing, as the century progressed cookbooks avoided, though did not totally prohibit, the common use of both Gothic and Italic characters. This somehow reflected the affirmation of a bourgeois cuisine, which did not necessarily need to emphasise foreign ingredients, recipes or techniques and did not use non-German vocabulary as a sign of social distinction.
More generally, what was introduced as coming from elsewhere was above all the way of preparing the dishes, which therefore presupposed the acquisition of a cooking technique that the author did not consider obvious to his readers. In 1716, the Vollständiges Küch-und-Keller Dictionarium, published in Hamburg by the trade advisor to the courts of Poland and Saxony Paul Jacob Marperger, described several ways of preparing a pike. First, Marperger mentioned the possibility of serving it poached in a 'Polish broth' made from eggs, water and onions. Then followed the possibility of cooking it in 'Hungarian style' with a broth made of wine and eggs or water, to which onions, pepper and saffron and bread were added. 39 His group of recipes, however, was not a European tour of pike cooking. So-called Polish and Hungarian broths were only added to the recipes for pike in red broth, for buttered pike or for pike in white broth. In 1700, in Der wohl-unterwiesenen Köchin, published in Braunschweig (Brunswick), Maria Sophia Schellhammer already specified 'the Swedish way,' for example, of preparing almond bread in a variety of ways that had no particular national equivalent. 40 The reference to elsewhere was common and artificial. It did not necessarily indicate a cultural transfer. On the contrary, it claimed this way as proper to the culinary culture described by the book.
As for Grunauer, in 1733, he identified recipes as foreign and not as variations in the ways in which German dishes were prepared. Listed among the soups is Porro soup, also called 'Spanish broth,' between veal soup and celery soup. 41 In 1740, the Nutzliches Koch-Buch, from Steyr in Lower Austria -primarily aimed at a Viennese readership, which is why it was published in a small format -described the recipes for 'Bohemian Soup,' 'French strudel,' 'Bavarian sprout noodles,' 'pike in Polish soup,' 'English roast,' 'Bohemian roast [beef] lung,' 'Pomeranian cake,' 'Spanish cake' and 'French cake.' 42 38 GRUNAUER, Das vollständige und vermehrte auf die neueste Art eingerichtete 6. 39 MARPERGER,[15][16][17][18][19][20] GRUNAUER, Das vollständige und vermehrte auf die neueste Art eingerichtete 12,20,35,[44][45][100][101]104,146,160,  In its way of categorising the foreign cuisine, the Nutzliches Koch-Buch erased the scales of foreignness, referring to an elsewhere equivalent to non-German as opposed to German dishes, while affirming that these recipes belonged to one same cuisine, namely the one practised and performed in the main aristocratic houses of the Archduchy of Austria. One of the possible outcomes of highlighting local dishes was undoubtedly embodied in Neubauer's 1776 bourgeois cuisine, which removed both foreign methods and foreign dishes from the book. The Neues Kochbuch was, like the Nutzliches Koch-Buch, smaller, less exhaustive and clearly focused on a common practice. 43 Vienna, however, was not a special city. Although very rich, the Hanoverian cookbook by Meyfeld and Enner also testified to this trend. Only the 'Polish sauce' resisted Germanisation and of course one or two English references that make sense in this context. 44 At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, there were two cookbook models that differed in the naming of the dishes: one Germanised, the other emphasising a foreign origin. Looft's Nieder-Sächsisches Koch-Buch continued to make English and Spanish dishes fashionable, especially when it came to pies and tarts, and it still evoked Austrian or English pasta and the Italian and French ways of cooking veal. 45 In 1805, Die Bayer'sche Köchin in Böhmen shamelessly included typical dishes of foreign cuisine, especially French, because they were so familiar to the noble houses where its author served. 46 However, the Germanisation of the foreign cuisine was sometimes transparent. Without mentioning the 'breaded veal cutlet with parmesan' from the Nutzliches Koch-Buch of 1740, the Hannoverisches Kochbuch of 1792 hardly concealed the French influence on its cuisine when it discussed 'Orangensauce,' 'Sauce poivrade zu Grillade' or 'Boeuf à la Mode.' 47 The familiarity of German cuisine with these dishes had led to their assimilation, to the point of removing their foreign connotations. Against all this evolution, the Allerneuestes Oesterreichisches Kochbuch (All-New Austrian Cookbook), published in Graz in 1791, borrowed a number of French words printed in Latin, not Gothic characters, with an enriched vocabulary. Its cover states that the book 'includes German explanations of French words and methods.' It was also the first to evoke a 'German sauce' and to clearly differentiate an Austrian cuisine from that of the rest of Holy Roman Empire. Nevertheless, the author -probably Christian Friedrich Trötscher -is not to be credited with aiming at nationalism. In the introduction he specified that his book was Austrian because the instructions were 'adapted to Austrian weights and measures.' 48 This made it possible to reproduce foreign recipes in Austria, which constituted the first step in their assimilation. Its approach was the opposite of Die Bayer'sche Köchin in Böhmen, which aimed to spread its knowledge throughout the 43 NEUBAUER, Neues Kochbuch. 44 From 1714, the UK and the Electorate of Hannover were gathered under the authority of Georges I. Meyfeld and Enner,Hannoverisches Kochbuch,21. 45 LOOFT,328,329,332,334,409,410,411,and 412. 46 One can also mention 'la face de veau à la française,' 'Boeuf à la mode' (sic) or 'soupe française' in NEUDECKER, Die Bayer'sche Köchin in Böhmen, 4, 42 and 223. 47 Nutzliches Koch-Buch, 1740, 232-33 and MEYFELD and ENNER, Hannoverisches Kochbuch, 22, 26 and 54. 48  entire German-speaking world, even if they both led to the same result: the circulation of recipes within the same German-speaking world.
The actual naming of the dishes was of course misleading. For example, there was no indication that the 'Polish sauce' found throughout the century in almost all German cookbooks really referred to something Polish in the mind of the cook or the consumer. We could also question what Poland it referred to. Polish actually meant 'from Lorraine.' Pike in Polish sauce was one of the classics of the table of the Duke of Lorraine and former King of Poland Stanislas Leszczynski in Lunéville today in France, whose cook provided the recipe. The Poland imagined in Lorraine here was only one of the variants of the sauce which I have shown already existed in 1716 in Marperger's cookbook. 49 Gartler's Wienerisches bewährtes Kochbuch of 1787, in contrast to Neubauer, readily recognised hypothetical foreign recipes in its cuisine. 50 The supply networks of Vienna at that time were quite well known and it is easy to identify the origin of certain products such as speck from the Alpine valleys, truffles from Lombardy which were prepared in stews, or game from Bohemia, in particular pheasant which was cooked stewed or grilled and exported to Istanbul for the pleasure of the members of the Habsburg diplomatic corps. 51 However, at no time was the origin of these products highlighted in the cookbooks. For example, chocolate, which, from soup to cake, was represented in six dishes in Gartler's book, was never given as exotic. 52 The origin of the food referred to the market where it could be found, and not to the place where it was produced. It was its availability on the market that made chocolate an indigenous food in Vienna's cuisine.
Your Excellency will be able to indicate to me the fish and shellfish from the Black Sea which She will want to bite into in Vienna ... gudgeons and Stockfisches excluded, the species of which has been completely lacking here for twenty-five years; it has been transplanted, it is said, to Austria, the store is in the Graben at the fischen Apotecken on the second floor. 53 The relocation of stud farming and stockfisch production to Austria was nothing more than a simple mercantile logic aimed at freeing the Habsburg monarchy from its dependence on Ottoman imports of foodstuffs and textiles. 54 The identity of the products was not an object of attention.

Conclusion
The techniques, methods, dishes and food introduced as coming from elsewhere, or imitating what was done elsewhere, were therefore not foreign elements as long as they were included in the cookbooks. They must be considered as a type of practice belonging to a larger set reified by cuisine statistics. Likewise, the origin of the food did not matter, and authenticity was not the concern of societies in the eighteenthcentury Holy Roman Empire. The availability of the product and the recurrence of its use defined its belonging to a particular cuisine. The problem with importing was one of economic dependency and not of denaturing the product. Moreover, German cuisines were often foreign to each other despite the circulation of certain dishes and models. At the beginning of the century, these cuisines were foreign first of all in the way the books introduced and organised them. If the cumulative knowledge of the northern German area gave way to practical and statistical knowledge promoted by the southern publishers -and in this respect the impact of the Viennese publishing industry must be kept in mind -this did not imply a homogenisation of the vocabulary or recipe content. If here and there, for commercial purposes, the name of a product was translated so that it could be understood from one state of the Holy Roman Empire to another, Neudecker's pan-German cooking perspective was late in coming and it did not so much aim to homogenise the dishes as to make recipes from Austria, Bavaria and Bohemia available throughout the German-speaking world, despite the strong linguistic diversity. German cookbooks were not cosmopolitan either, in that they did not echo a social blending process -whether it exists or not -but presented themselves as tools analysing a practice and disseminating a know-how. In this sense, they are not so much a subject for the history of literature, to which they are sometimes reduced, as for the history of science, or even urban history.
Defining what was foreign not as what came from elsewhere but as what was not present in a given society also invites historians to review their criteria of analysis. In early modern Europe, language, religion and citizenship did not make an individual a foreigner. Foreigners were those who did not fit into the categories of a normative discourse which aimed to account for the evolution of a society. The definition therefore depended primarily on the normative systems through which the notion of foreigner was approached. Thus, while the normative system of cookbook authors belonged to an emerging statistical science, this did not apply to them all. Nevertheless, these authors offer historians an interpretation of society based on the practices they selected, described, classified and interpreted. Their normative system was not that of the state, which is what most of the studies on the history of circulation in early modern Europe rely on. It is an invitation to see the world in a way more similar to a cookbook author than a state.