Vol. 23 (2020): Cromohs
Mobilizing Otherness/Alterity Across Time and Space

Remarks on Foreignness in Eighteenth-Century German Cookbooks

David Do Paço
Sciences Po
Cover image Cromohs 23, 2020, background: Jan Gossaert, Portrait of a Merchant, ca. 1530, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, National Gallery of Art. Open access image

Published 2021-03-24

Keywords

  • Holy Roman Empire,
  • Food history,
  • Intellectual history,
  • Circulation,
  • cookbooks,
  • Foreignness,
  • Foreigners,
  • integration,
  • early modern europe
  • ...More
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Abstract

This article analyses how food, recipes, and techniques and manners introduced as foreign were integrated in eighteenth-century German cookbooks. Doing so it intends to transfer a methodology recently developed in social history to history of food in order to get a better understanding of how eighteenth-century European societies defined foreignness. It claims that cookbooks should be considered as topographies of the table and presents the Holy Roman Empire as a particularly rich field of study for history of circulation in the early modern world.