Domesticating imperialism: Curry and cookbooks in Victorian England

Frontiers

Volumn 16, Issue 2-3, 1996, Pages 51-68

  Zlotnick, Susan ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0039564757     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3346803     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: In Praise of the Women of Victorian India (London: Century, 1976), 1.
2. For example, see the essays in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel's Western Women and Imperialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). In particular, Barbara Ramusack's piece, "Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies, British Women Activists in India, 1865-1945," details the different positions taken up by Victorian women in India.
3. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of the Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of British India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 76.
4. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of the Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of British India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 76.
5. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 35.
6. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992), 12.
7. Modern Domestic Cookery (London, 1851), 311.
8. Nupur Chaudhuri, "Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain," in Chaudhuri and Strobel, Western Women and Imperialism, 232.
9. Because cookbooks provide, as Anne Goldman contends, "an apt metaphor for the reproduction of culture" (172), literary critics have begun to show an interest in them as cultural documents. In addition to Goldman's study of Mexican food and culture in New Mexico, "'I Yam What I Yam': Cooking, Culture and Colonialism," in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992),
10. see Susan Leonardi's "Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie," which first appeared in PMLA but has been reprinted
11. in Mary Anne Schofield's anthology, Cooking by the Book (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1989).
12. John Ruskin, "Of Queens' Gardens," in Strong-Minded Women and Other Lost Voices from Nineteenth-Century England, ed. Janet Murray (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 38.
13. Burton, Burdens of History, 51.
14. For the connection between the middle classes and domesticity, see Leonore David-off and Catherine Hall's Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Classes: 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For that between the middle classes and imperialism, see John Mackenzie's Propaganda and Imperialism: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
15. For the connection between the middle classes and domesticity, see Leonore David-off and Catherine Hall's Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Classes: 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For that between the middle classes and imperialism, see John Mackenzie's Propaganda and Imperialism: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
16. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Family Monitor and Domestic Guide (New York, 1844), 5.
17. Jane Mackay and Pat Thane, "The Englishwoman," in Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880-1920, ed. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 191.
18. Edward Bulwer Lytton, England and Englishness (London, 1833), 34-35.
19. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2-3. In this regard, Young's argument, that Englishness only exists in opposition to what is not English, echoes Linda Colley's important work on the evolution of Britishness out of Englishness, Scottishness, Welshness, and Irishness (as well as more local loyalties) in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In "Britishness and Otherness: An Argument," she notes that "what most enabled Great Britain to emerge as an artificial nation, and to be superimposed onto older alignments and loyalties, was a series of massive wars between 1689 and 1815 that allowed its diverse inhabitants to focus on what they had in common, rather than on what divided them, and that forged an overseas empire from which all parts of Britain could secure real as well as psychic profits." Journal of British Studies 31 (1992): 316.
20. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2-3. In this regard, Young's argument, that Englishness only exists in opposition to what is not English, echoes Linda Colley's important work on the evolution of Britishness out of Englishness, Scottishness, Welshness, and Irishness (as well as more local loyalties) in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In "Britishness and Otherness: An Argument," she notes that "what most enabled Great Britain to emerge as an artificial nation, and to be superimposed onto older alignments and loyalties, was a series of massive wars between 1689 and 1815 that allowed its diverse inhabitants to focus on what they had in common, rather than on what divided them, and that forged an overseas empire from which all parts of Britain could secure real as well as psychic profits." Journal of British Studies 31 (1992): 316.
21. Uma Narayan's "Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity and Indian Food" points out that "British curry powder is really a 'fabricated' entity, the logic of colonial commerce imposing a term that signified a particular type of dish onto a specific mixture of spices, that then became a fixed and familiar product," Social Identities 1 (1995): 65. It goes on to read curry powder as a metaphor for the way India as a fabricated political entity was incorporated into the British Empire.
22. Of course, in the words of Edward Said, "the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other," Culture and Imperialism (New York: Routledge, 1993), 70-71. The relationship between the British novel and imperialism has been traced out in a series of recent critical works in addition to Said's Culture and Imperialism, including Suvendrini Perera's Reaches of Empire: The English Novel From Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), and Firdous Azim's The Colonial Rise of the Novel (New York: Routledge, 1993).
23. Of course, in the words of Edward Said, "the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other," Culture and Imperialism (New York: Routledge, 1993), 70-71. The relationship between the British novel and imperialism has been traced out in a series of recent critical works in addition to Said's Culture and Imperialism, including Suvendrini Perera's Reaches of Empire: The English Novel From Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), and Firdous Azim's The Colonial Rise of the Novel (New York: Routledge, 1993).
24. Of course, in the words of Edward Said, "the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other," Culture and Imperialism (New York: Routledge, 1993), 70-71. The relationship between the British novel and imperialism has been traced out in a series of recent critical works in addition to Said's Culture and Imperialism, including Suvendrini Perera's Reaches of Empire: The English Novel From Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), and Firdous Azim's The Colonial Rise of the Novel (New York: Routledge, 1993).
25. Of course, in the words of Edward Said, "the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other," Culture and Imperialism (New York: Routledge, 1993), 70-71. The relationship between the British novel and imperialism has been traced out in a series of recent critical works in addition to Said's Culture and Imperialism, including Suvendrini Perera's Reaches of Empire: The English Novel From Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), and Firdous Azim's The Colonial Rise of the Novel (New York: Routledge, 1993).
26. William Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 29. All future references will be cited in text.
27. Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 17-18.
28. Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 185-186.
29. Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 5.
30. Stephen Arata, "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization," Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 623.
31. Young argues that the conjunction of the 1857 Mutiny, the American Civil War and the Jamaican Insurrection at Morant Bay in 1865 "altered the popular perceptions of race and racial difference and formed the basis of widespread acceptance of the new, and remarkably up-front, claims of a permanent racial superiority" (92).
32. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 90-91.
33. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), xiii-xiv.
34. For a post-colonial critique of the Anglicists' impact on Indian education policy, particularly through the introduction of English literary studies into India, see Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)
35. Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Minute on Indian Education," in Selected Writings, ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 249. Homi Bhabha's "Of Mimicry and Men: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in his Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), offers an intriguing discussion of colonial "mimic men," whom he traces back to Macaulay and then forward to Kipling, Forster, Orwell, and Naipul.
36. Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Minute on Indian Education," in Selected Writings, ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 249. Homi Bhabha's "Of Mimicry and Men: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in his Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), offers an intriguing discussion of colonial "mimic men," whom he traces back to Macaulay and then forward to Kipling, Forster, Orwell, and Naipul.
37. Cynthia Eagle Russett points out in Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) that nineteenth-century enthnology, a "kind of progenitor of anthropology more interested in cultural than biological diversity," considered races to be "not the cause but the result of cultural and environmental diversity, and their inferior status could in principle be remedied" (25). In other words, a cultural hierarchy predominated until it was superceded after mid-century by the racially determined hierarchies emerging from the new fields of evolutionary biology and anthropology. It is clearly ethnological thinking, which emphasized the primacy of cultural differences over racial ones, that underpinned utilitarian reformist principles.
38. Queen Victoria, "Letter to Lady Canning," in Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals, ed. Christopher Hibbert (New York: Penguin, 1985), 137.
39. Thomas Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: 1857-1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 290.
40. Queen Victoria, "Letter to Lady Canning," 138.
41. Florence White, ed., Good Things in England, A Book for Everyday Use, Containing Traditional and Regional Recipes Suited to Modern Tastes, Contributed by English Men and Women Between 1399 and 1932 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), 178. For more on Florence White, an early twentieth-century food folklorist intent on preserving the vanishing "English" cookery tradition, and the importance of Good Things in England as a part of that preservation movement, see Chapter 8 of Stephen Mennel's All Manner of Foods: Eating and Taste in England from the Middle Ages to the Present (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985).
42. Florence White, ed., Good Things in England, A Book for Everyday Use, Containing Traditional and Regional Recipes Suited to Modern Tastes, Contributed by English Men and Women Between 1399 and 1932 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), 178. For more on Florence White, an early twentieth-century food folklorist intent on preserving the vanishing "English" cookery tradition, and the importance of Good Things in England as a part of that preservation movement, see Chapter 8 of Stephen Mennel's All Manner of Foods: Eating and Taste in England from the Middle Ages to the Present (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985).
43. Raymond Sokolow, Why We Eat What We Eat: How the Encounter Between the New World and the Old Changed the Way Everyone in the Planet Eats (New York, Summit Books, 1991), 96.
44. White, Good Things in England, 178.
45. Chaudhuri,"Shawls, Jewelry, Curry and Rice," 238.
46. Stephen Mennel observes that by the nineteenth century "French cookery captured the social commanding heights in England more decisively than it had in the previous century, and national differences in cuisine became entangled with class differences in Britain" (200). This resulted in what he labels the "decapitation" of English cookery, whereby professional cookery was largely done in the French style, leaving English cookery no "elite models of its own to copy, and this probably contributed to the mediocrity which both contemporary and subsequent observers remarked on in English cookery in the Victorian era" (206).
47. Modern Domestic Cookery, 311.
48. Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery in all its Branches (London, 1845), xii.
49. Jean Anthelme Brillat Savarin, Physiology of Taste, or Meditation on Transcendental Cookery (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), xxxiii.
50. Isabella Beeton, Book of Household Management (London, 1859), 4.
51. Charles Pierce, The Household Manager and The Art of Cookery (London, 1857), 15-17.
52. Jessie Conrad, A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House (New York: Doubleday, 1923), v.
53. Conrad, A Handbook of Cookery, vi-vii.
54. While the cuisine he offered the upper classes remained resolutely French, Charles Elmé Francatelli, the chief cook to Queen Victoria, included several curry recipes in his A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes (London, 1861). A Plain Cookery Book also instructs its readers on the proper method for cooking a rabbit, if it so happens that "considerate gentlefolks who possess game preserves" may give them one (46).
55. 26quot;Curry," in The Humorous Poetry of the English Language, ed. James Parton (New York, 1857), 474-475. I would like to thank Lee Ericson for bringing this poem to my attention.
56. Mackenzie, Propaganda and Imperialism, 254.
57. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 166.
58. Curries, and How to Prepare Them (London: J. Edmunds, 1903), vii-x.