Remarks on Foreignness in Eighteenth-Century German Cookbooks

Abstract

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