All posts by Amanda Herbert

A ‘recipe’ for chocolate on a 19th-century cup

Porcelain chocolate cup, saucer and lid set created in Paris for the Ottoman market and marked in red overglaze, 19th century, Oriental Museum, Durham University. Image courtesy of the author.

By Frederick Fossey-Warren

This porcelain hot chocolate cup from the early 19th century seems decidedly Ottoman. Gilded with gold and over-glazed with an intricate red pattern, the cup is designed to follow the “Egyptian style” that proved immensely popular with colonial Ottoman officials at the turn of the century. In fact the cup is so extravagant that it’s possible it was never actually intended for use, but purchased as a display piece, a succinct symbol of both status and wealth, by a member of the Ottoman elite.

Given its appearance, one could reasonably expect to trace the cup’s origins to a Turkish city such as Istanbul or Ankara. Upon closer inspection, however, the presence of different languages written onto the cup complicate its provenance. While the cup was bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, its origins lie elsewhere. In fact, the cup was constructed in none other than…Paris? So, how did we get here?

After its arrival in the so-called “Old World” in the early 16th century, chocolate slowly but surely became a new court favourite across Europe and, by the end of the 17th century, had become a mainstay in aristocratic circles. It wasn’t long before chocolate began to spread into Asia and Africa, truly becoming one of the world’s first global commodities. As in Europe, given its scarcity and price, in the Ottoman Empire chocolate was initially largely restricted to the nobility, as much a status symbol as a foodstuff.

Initially enjoyed primarily as a drink, chocolate was seen as not only a nourishing treat, but a superfood, a sobering source of energy able to cure or prevent most common ailments. Many saw potential in its import as a commodity, and through its arrival it often contributed to the development of industry and revenue. Given its initial scarcity – chocolate had to be harvested in the Americas, loaded onto ships, and sailed across the Atlantic in a journey that routinely lasted three months – chocolate stayed in high demand, and markets soon opened not just for cacao, but for chocolate ‘accessories.’ These included such objects as chocolatera for dissolving together chocolate paste and sugar, molinillo for frothing hot chocolate, and, of course, cups for drinking, which brings us back to our porcelain cup.

When people consider the movement of luxury goods in the long nineteenth century, it is often taken for granted or assumed that goods primarily moved out of the peripheries of Africa, Asia and the Americas, and into the imperial core of Western Europe. This cup, however, challenges this understanding. From the date and manufacturers mark on the underside of the object, we can tell that this cup, saucer and lid collection was constructed in Paris in 1809. Given its design, it was likely always intended for sale within the Ottoman market.

In the early 19th century, the Ottoman Empire remained a powerful and, importantly, wealthy force in Eastern Europe, and an attractive market for many across Europe. When, in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire expanded to encompass much of the Middle East and North Africa, the tastes of Ottoman elites changed, adopting the styles and fashions of many of their newly incorporated colonial subjects. This chocolate cup was ingeniously crafted to capitalise on these trends, part of an aesthetic and cultural movement that historian Ussama Makdisi has called ‘Ottoman Orientalism’.

Inscription detail. Porcelain chocolate cup, saucer and lid set created in Paris for the Ottoman market and marked in red overglaze, 19th century, Oriental Museum, Durham University. Image courtesy of the author.

So what were the design features that made this chocolate cup an example of ‘Ottoman Orientalism’? The underside of the saucer features a series of seemingly random Chinese characters. In relation to the cup’s purpose, these four characters, 李唐宋官, roughly translate to ‘Li Tang, Song dynasty official’. While there was a Li Tang in the Song dynasty, and in fact he was an accomplished landscape painter, he had nonetheless died almost seven hundred years prior to the time of this cup’s creation, and almost six hundred years before chocolate’s arrival in China. So why were these Chinese characters included? Simple: to make the cup seem more appealing to prospective buyers, and hence more likely to sell. The inclusion of these Chinese characters, presumably merely copied wholesale from another source, both fed into the intended exoticism of the piece, and attempted capitalise on a long existing market for Chinese porcelain in the Ottoman Empire.

The story of this cup does not, however, merely end with its creation and sale. Just as with the saucer, on the underside of the cup is another short sentence, this time, however, in Urdu. Unlike the Chinese characters, this writing was added after the cup was purchased and offers us a perplexingly poetic phase. The cryptic writing roughly translates to ‘That same diminished consciousness; This same deep target’ and is attributed to one Jannatī, likely a pen-name, meaning ‘the heavenly’. Whoever this Jannatī was, they clearly had some affection for the cup; not only did they write an inscription on its underside, but there is evidence of attempts at restoration, with the gold on the lid having been re-gilded.

Inscription detail. Porcelain chocolate cup, saucer and lid set created in Paris for the Ottoman market and marked in red overglaze, 19th century, Oriental Museum, Durham University. Image courtesy of the author.

When taken together, the elaborate and varied inscriptions on this cup act, in some sense, as a recipe. If a recipe is a set of instructions allowing you to, hopefully, produce something far greater than the sum of its parts, then, for a historian, the cup’s inscriptions act as an invaluable recipe in allowing us to gain a far deeper understanding not only commerce in the early 19th century, but also of chocolate, and its role as one of the world’s first truly global commodities. From South America to France, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire and even China, this porcelain cup combines facets of many different cultures and civilisations in both its purpose and construction. While both the maker of this cup and its first owners are by now long dead, this object they left behind lives on, and continues to tell us much about the world in which they lived.

Frederick Fossey-Warren is a scholar interested in the role of race and ethnicity in modern East African politics. He participated in Durham’s Undergraduate Research Internship (UGRI) programme to conduct research on chocolate in the Durham University collections. He currently studying towards a Master’s in History at Durham.

August Break

"Rest, Rest, I Have No Thought But Rest". Cartoon by Edith Mahier. Illustration in "Jambalaya" Tulane University yearbook, New Orleans, 1916.
“Rest, Rest, I Have No Thought But Rest”. Cartoon by Edith Mahier. Illustration in “Jambalaya” Tulane University yearbook, New Orleans, 1916.

 

Dear RP community members,

We have, once again, reached our annual break. While we’re away, we’ll be spending some quality time with these RP posts:

Jacqueline Soule’s Mesquite Atole – Kúi Wihog

Betsy Golden Kellem’s The Circus Origins of Pink Lemonade

Sharifa Lookman’s Experiencing Historical Techniques through the Color Black at the ROOHTS Summer School

Sally Osborn’s Eighteenth-Century DIY

Elizabeth Hunter’s ‘Dwale’: A Medieval Sleeping Drug in a Seventeenth-Century Receipt Book

When we return, we’ll have exciting news about new directions for the RP. Until then, all best wishes for rest and rejuvenation!

RP Editorial Team

New Work Forum: Continuing the Conversation About Hunger in Violent Appetites

By Carla Cevasco

Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast, by Carla Cevasco. Image courtesy of the author.
Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast, by Carla Cevasco. Image courtesy of Amanda E. Herbert.

Long before Violent Appetites was a book, it existed in conversation with classmates and colleagues, conference audiences, the other scholars I read and cited, and with readers at The Recipes Project. So it is a joy to return to the conversation here with such a brilliant and generous group of scholars. I am deeply thankful to Peggy Brunache, Eleanor Barnett, Juneisy Hawkins, and Kate Mulry for sharing their thoughts on my book and its place in the field of food history, and to Amanda Herbert for proposing the New Work Forum series. I will conclude the series with a few reflections on each of the essays and how my thoughts on hunger are continuing to evolve in conversation with these authors.

Penobscot people, Berry box/container. Collected by Dr. Frank G. Speck (Frank Gouldsmith Speck/F.G. Speck/FGS), Non-Indian, 1881-1950. Media/Materials- Birchbark, Folded, stitched. Place- Old Town; Penobscot County; Maine; USA. Catalog Number2/8170, National Museum of the American Indian. Image courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian. https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/objects/NMAI_30154
Penobscot people, Berry box/container. Collected by Dr. Frank G. Speck (Frank Gouldsmith Speck/F.G. Speck/FGS), Non-Indian, 1881-1950. Media/Materials- Birchbark, Folded, stitched. Place- Old Town; Penobscot County; Maine; USA. Catalog Number2/8170, National Museum of the American Indian. Image courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian. https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/objects/NMAI_30154

Brunache’s contribution, drawing on her scholarship about foodways, drawing on her scholarship about foodways, identity, and resistance, centers on how Indigenous peoples have “performed culinary resistance through a politics of food and stood culturally resilient against colonial manipulation and assimilation.”

One of the most striking aspects of completing Violent Appetites in the first year of the covid-19 pandemic was seeing how Indigenous food sovereignty movements across the continent have mobilized in response to the crisis. These movements attest to the power of Native traditional hunger knowledges, which have endured hundreds of years of colonial invasion and stand ready against the crises of the present moment.

One of my hopes is that the concept of hunger knowledges as I’ve developed it will be useful to scholars looking at many different contexts; people have always worked to overcome hunger, and these traditions are vital in confronting hunger in our own time.

Copper-deficient & copper-replete fleeces, Royal Veterinary College. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.
Copper-deficient & copper-replete fleeces, Royal Veterinary College. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

Barnett brings her expertise as a historian of early modern religion as a historian of early modern religion and food to her examination of how “food has long been tied to spiritual beliefs regarding divine intercession,” and analyzes “the centrality of food in the expression and formation of different” Indigenous and colonial “religious identities” in early America.

When I first started writing the book, I did not anticipate how crucial religion would turn out to be, from the theological debates over cannibalism among Protestants and Catholics in early modern Europe, to the southern New England Indigenous Christians whose practices of fasting and repentance mirrored Reform Protestant rituals but were rooted deeply in Native traditions of communal mourning. I especially appreciated Barnett’s description of these beliefs and practices as “spiritual foodways,” a phrase which elegantly encapsulates what it took me many words to discuss.

Beluga whale skull. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.
Beluga whale skull. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.

Hawkins, who specializes in food economies, provisioning, and Anglo-Spanish relations in the colonial American southeast, begins her essay by noting that the field of Food Studies has only recently begun to wrestle with hunger rather than plenty: “What happened when people did not have food? What happened when communities were confronted with the possibility of starvation? This field, which as far as I know has not been officially named, can be understood as Hunger Studies.”

Hunger Studies does exist, but as an applied field that seeks solutions to the problem of hunger in our current moment. It is not a neat parallel to the field of Food Studies, which asks both “what is food?” and “what does it mean?” I believe that soon Hunger Studies will be asking similar questions, as an increasing number of historians including myself, Rachel Herrmann, James Vernon, Nicholas Crawford, and Tom Scott-Smith, among others, have turned to understanding the changing meanings of hunger in different places and times.

And, following on the work of archival theorists like Marisa Fuentes, it is becoming clear that hunger, like many forms of historical inequity, has profound effects on the production of the historical record, as Hawkins explains at the conclusion of her piece.

Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.
Lightning-blasted tree. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.

Finally, Mulry, whose work examines the relationships between environment, health, and the body in the Anglo-Atlantic world, draws out the connections between hunger, colonialism, and imperial demography in her essay: “As imperial authorities sought to increase their own numbers while violently displacing Native peoples, they sought more food. The English and French invaders understood food as an instrument to achieve social and political control,” while Native peoples used food to resist imperial incursion.

As Mulry reminds us, feeding the populace has always been a political project, and hunger is far more often politically imposed than completely inevitable.

I’ve worked on Violent Appetites for the better part of a decade and it’s surreal to finally have the completed book in my hands. I am grateful to everyone at The Recipes Project for using this forum to welcome the book, and look forward to continuing the conversation.

The book may be done, but I will never be finished thinking and talking about food and hunger. More than 38 million people in the United States, including 12 million children, are food insecure as of 2020, with even more going hungry during the pandemic. Hunger is concentrated disproportionately in communities of color. While these numbers are horrifying, beyond the statistics lie many hunger knowledges, the resourceful, ingenious ways that food insecure people survive day by day. In seeking solutions to the problem of hunger, it is crucial not to disregard the strategies that people are already using and have been using for generations. Hunger knowledges deserve to be celebrated as legacies of resilience that can also inform the future of how we fight food scarcity.

New Work Forum: On Food and Populations in Cevasco’s Violent Appetites

Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.
Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.

By Kate Luce Mulry

A well-fed and numerous colonial populace enhanced imperialists’ military power and colonizers’ claims to sovereignty over the homelands of Indigenous peoples in northeastern North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not only did colonizers aim to remove Native communities and replace them with their own, but they also sought to increase their populations to fend off the incursions of rival empires. They required numbers to “invade a continent” (21). Without food they would be unable to feed the armies and navies that maintained and violently extended European empires. Imperial authorities also sought “stable populations of colonizers and colonized labor” (173); more colonists would oversee the labor of Native and enslaved people they required to cultivate colonial commodities. As Carla Cevasco reveals, “an abundant food supply would be key to this effort to maintain and control populations” (174). Colonizers fantasized about which populations would eat and which populations would starve.

Cevasco’s innovative book reinterprets the histories of settler colonial projects in northeastern North America by centering hunger and ideas about hunger in her analysis. Instead of a land of plenty, she introduces readers to hungry colonists and anxious imperialists. In the northeast, numerous people with vastly different experiences with and cultural understandings of hunger and food came together. While acknowledging the violence, disruption, and displacement of Native peoples that were features of European imperialism in North America, Cevasco also emphasizes how their ability to sustain communities and survive hunger demonstrates critical forms of resistance and resilience. Colonizers, including the English and French, arrived with fewer resources for surviving food insecurity whereas Indigenous peoples possessed a broader range of survival strategies. By highlighting the knowledge that enabled Native peoples to survive the food scarcity that accompanied colonial incursions, Cevasco reveals stories of Indigenous resistance to European imperialism, including fighting “hunger with ethics of reciprocity” (172).

Colonizers often claimed that the health of their bodies and their growing colonial populations offered symbolic evidence of their suitability to North American environments. At the same time, they asserted that hungry or ill Indigenous bodies were not suited to their homelands. Colonists regularly denigrated Native peoples and claimed they were “incapable of properly feeding themselves” (4). This was one of many rhetorical strategies designed to justify their imperial projects. But if colonists claimed their own bodies were better suited to Native homelands, their rhetoric masked the reality of the colonizers’ own hunger. What did it mean if the colonists were constantly hungry and required the assistance of Indigenous peoples to survive in North America? How could they maintain a pretense of imperial power when they struggled to survive and experienced constant waves of food vulnerability? Moreover, as Cevasco reveals, this period of food precarity lasted far longer than most historians have recognized and anxieties about and memories of their vulnerability to hunger continued to shape colonizers’ actions “long after the reality of it” (13).

Preventing hunger was important to colonial and Indigenous peoples alike, in part because they understood the potential connection between food scarcity and social and political instability. For example, British authorities recognized that hunger often led to resistance among borderland soldiers, whereas “feeding people was a primary means of controlling them” (170). As imperial authorities sought to increase their own numbers while violently displacing Native peoples, they sought more food. The English and French invaders understood food an instrument to achieve social and political control. While colonizers sought to deploy hunger as a weapon, Native peoples responded with a range of resources and knowledge about food in their homelands to combat and survive periods of scarcity.

But colonists’ concerns about food were not limited to quantities of food. They were also deeply concerned about food quality, and particularly desired familiar foods. In other words, defining hunger was also about defining what constituted food. Indigenous people had “hunger knowledges” (8) – defined by Cevasco as the many “ways that people respond to and survive hunger” (8) – that allowed them to be more flexible about what to eat and how to eat a range of foods. Colonists, on the other hand, had fewer defenses against hunger and were less familiar with the variety of foods that might be foraged and consumed for survival. According to Cevasco, “Ignorance about North American landscapes, about wild food provision, and about how to eat a diverse diet more generally, placed the invaders at a tremendous disadvantage to Indigenous hunger knowledges” (90). Moreover, colonizers feared their health, appearances, and identities might be transformed by eating unfamiliar or taboo foods, which put any imperial project at risk. A rhetoric of disgust served colonizers’ purposes. Criticizing to the so-called savagery of Native diets became another strategy by colonists to justify their colonization. Leveling claims about widespread cannibalism was one such rhetorical maneuver to reinforce colonizers’ narratives about Native communities’ savage or animal-like appetites as opposed to their own civilized appetites. However, time and again, colonizers’ own “hunger profoundly challenged colonists’ narratives of their superiority over Native peoples” (91). Imperial authorities sought to enhance colonial populations and imperial stability by securing food, but Violent Appetites reveals the persistence of colonists’ hunger and anxieties about food scarcity.

Kate Luce Mulry is a historian of medicine, the body, and the environment in the early modern Atlantic world. She is an associate professor of history at California State University, Bakersfield, and is the author of An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic (New York University Press, 2021).