"[W]e Find Nowadays Perpetual Disenchantment on the Score of Cookery": Victorian Food Writing and Anachronistic Nationalism

Abstract

Abstract:In this paper, I examine early culinary journalism describing French home cookery in British periodicals from 1840–1901. I argue for the symbolic importance of food, and specifically food-related journalism, in the imaginative project of nation building. Such writing provides a largely unexamined record of domestic anxieties about progress during a tumultuous and modernizing period in British history. This body of early food writing uses purportedly genuine—yet deliberately anachronistic—accounts of pre-industrial French cooking to argue for a similar reformation of British domestic habits. These periodical pieces often seek to construct new and exclusive iterations of middle-class identity by creating romantic images of countrified French kitchens that the British middle classes might emulate. French domestic cookery and its apparently unchanged, traditional methods of food preparation serves as an alternate model of domestic improvement for an alarmingly modern Britain—a model based not in industrial futurity but in domestic anachronism.