In an attempt to promote the modernization of homes and the switch to electric, in the first half of the twentieth century, North Carolina power companies ran advertisements that focused on the housewife and her work in the kitchen. In both the imagery and language of these advertisements, housewives are portrayed as hospitable servants to those within their households. Occasionally the advertisements leave room for activities outside of the home, but they primarily allude to how their products help to alleviate the effort and time spent completing domestic tasks. To showcase the breadth of advertisements produced by these power companies, the ads examined for this article were published in North Carolina newspapers, cookbooks, yearbooks, and city directories between 1915 to 1965.
Some advertisements used a personified lightning bolt, Reddy Kilowatt, as a stand-in for the invisible electrical current powering new kitchen appliances. Created in 1926 (though he didn’t appear in NC until 1935) Reddy was the mascot for power companies across the country during the twentieth century and is a clever advertising ploy that distracts the reader from the reality of the situation. For example, an ad printed in The Tryon Daily Bulletin by Duke Power told readers: “With Reddy’s help she prepared 20 meals a week, tidies 6 rooms daily, keeps clothes clean and in order for 4 people.” Giving this personification of electricity a name and credit attempts to negate the work completed by the housewife; it creates an illusion that she has a second person helping her complete tasks, despite the fact that it is still only her doing the work.
The language used in power company’s ads further serves as a reflection of the attitudes toward domestic life in the first half of the century. Ads often used language such as “my wife,” “she,” “your wife,” etc., never addressing the woman herself, only the man. It wasn’t until World War II, when women took charge of their household while their husbands were at war, that the advertisements began to shift their language, referring to “her money,” which did not free the housewives from their homemaking duties, but gave them some household autonomy. Later ads refer to the housewife’s budget,which was allotted from her husband’s overall household budget.
Positioning women as being a servant was ingrained in society from a young age. One Southern Public Utilities ad printed in 1925 in The Black and Gold, the yearbook of Richard J. Reynolds High School, read “An Electric Range in your home means a Cleaner Kitchen and a Happy Wife.” This language presumed that most male students would shortly thereafter find a wife. Another ad, run by Duke Power in 1947, focused on “the older school girls” not having to “hurry straight home from school to help mother” with household tasks thanks to an electric oven.
Many of these advertisements reference the “drudgery” of the kitchen. Drudgery – “dull, irksome, and fatiguing work” – is the common enemy in ads promoting modern kitchen conveniences; drudgery may mean maintaining fires, washing dishes, or boiling water. These advertisements show housewives either partaking in or being relieved of the drudgery of domestic labor. Some harken back to days of the past while others show modern housewives with big smiles in their electric kitchens because, according to Southern Public Utilities, “it enables you to remain fresh and sweet for the family,” and to Duke Power, access to electricity “add[s] so much to her charm, health and disposition.”
One Duke Power ad implies that if a husband provides his wife with an electric kitchen, she will be happy and healthy, a “Rosy Cheeked Smiling Wife” freed from “kitchen drudgery and worry.” Another boasts a “Recipe for a HEALTHY.. HAPPY WIFE!” In this ad, the recipe is laid out as follows: “Plenty of time for outdoor recreation, for social activities, time to spend with her children and relief from kitchen drudgery and worry!,” all provided by a modern electric range. Even though these advertisements craft a narrative of less time being spent in the kitchen for the wives and mothers to do other things and lead healthier and happier lives, they still position domestic work as the wife or mother’s duty.
In the 1930s Duke Power Company ran a series of ads titled “Lovable wives and livable kitchens.” One installment of this series, printed in the April 15, 1937 edition of The Yadkin Ripple, shows a husband and wife in an embrace in their kitchen. The opening line reads, “Romance lives again for the happy wife who discovers the chance of kitchen drudgery.” There is an implication that if the husband opts to provide his wife with these new kitchen appliances, she will have more time to spend with him romantically, even sexually. The ad goes on to implore the husband to “Give your wife freedom from kitchen toils–help her to keep that youthful sweetness–let romance live again.” It is not hard to read between the lines here and draw the connection that sex may be in the husband’s future should he gift his wife with an electric kitchen.
Beyond the heteronormative household structures reinforced and encouraged by these ads, I feel that it must be acknowledged that in each of these ads where images of people appeared, only conventionally attractive white people were showcased– further demonstrating the world in which they were created. Through the imagery and language used in these advertisements, a recipe was developed, tweaked, and perfected over time. In a sense, these ads, when collected and shown together, create a recipe book focusing on how to be a loving and hospitable housewife. Just as recipes throughout time reflect the modernization of kitchens across America, so do these “recipes” reflect on how to be a good housewife. Morphing from gas to electric, fresh to frozen, the kitchen and ingredients have changed, but the housewife’s duties and ties to the kitchen have remained the same. These recipes for hospitable housewives are not clear cut instructions, but are woven into the bylines and takeaways of each advertisement, reflecting societal norms and further instilling these heteronormative beliefs in the reader.
Simone Gillespie, an early career librarian and archivist, is a two-time graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, receiving her BA in History and English in 2020 and her MS in Library Science in 2024. Her research and archival interests include LGBTQ+ history, Southern foodways, community archives, archival access, Americana, and sports history.
Flipping through recipe cards or a cookbook is not the apolitical exercise some might think. Whether picked by workers earning a fair wage in a safe environment or transported by truck drivers fighting for a better union contract, ingredients politicize meals.
Ingredients contain another critical political dimension. Given food’s ability to gather, meal preparation and consumption are central to grassroots movements. One progressive student organization in the 1960s, the Students for a Democratic Society, devised a meal-time strategy in their “interracial movement of the poor.” From 1964 to 1966, that community organizing campaign established projects in fourteen Northern, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern cities. Full-time staff and summer volunteers organized locals while living in the same derelict housing as their constituents. But they didn’t just live locally: they ate locally too, serving similar dishes to the families who lived in these neighborhoods full-time. Over 500 white middle-class young people circulated and followed what they called “recipes for semi-starvation.” By adhering to welfare recipients’ budgets, they cooked up community and solidarity.
Community organizing and the “recipes for semi-starvation” brought together Americans who lived in two different societies. Many Students for a Democratic Society members grew up in the suburbs with access to pocket money and went on to college classes after finishing high school. Antioch College freshman Christopher Overs felt confident that summer organizing in Cleveland, twenty-five miles from his suburban home, would not jeopardize his fall tuition. Similarly, Elaine Lipshutz, a sophomore at Radcliffe College, could dedicate her school breaks to the Boston project, headquartered a twenty-five-minute walk from campus, rather than waged labor. Relocating these relatively short distances, Overs, Lipshutz, and hundreds of others entered another social world.
A summer organizing in inner cities introduced undergraduates to the estimated forty million impoverished Americans, a demographic hidden from their childhood neighborhoods. Living in derelict housing in Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, Boston, and other cities, they talked with their new neighbors, white and Black families that postwar affluence had left behind. Many were un- or underemployed men and single mothers receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a program referred to as welfare. In discussions of daily struggles, the white students offered possible political solutions and invitations to tenant councils, unemployment unions, and welfare rights meetings.
Voluntarily enduring poverty, progressives built community bonds and signaled their commitment to ending economic injustice partly through food. Both short-term volunteers like Harpur College student Judith Bernstein and full-time staff such as University of Michigan alumnus Carol McEldowney reckoned with the disparity between middle-class and low-income plates. Breakfast sometimes consisted of a single egg or an ounce of corn flakes topped with reconstituted milk. Between community meetings, they stuffed day-old bread with liverwurst and lettuce. After a long day of door-knocking, they often sat down to a dinner of liver and onions, creamed chicken over biscuits, or split pea soup with a salad dressed simply with a mayonnaise and ketchup mixture.[1] Their menus and their tireless efforts persuaded some locals that they were sincere and reliable social justice activists.
Eating what their neighbors could afford, the students came face-to-face with the political implications of welfare. Poor families could rely on the social safety net established by the New Deal and the War on Poverty. As countless learned firsthand, however, financial and material assistance programs afforded a bare minimum, placing countless commodities out of reach. The Cleveland project whittled their daily food allowance to forty-three cents per person, replicating the budget welfare programs provided.[2] Features of middle-class tables, like orange juice, were far too costly. “Don’t buy it unless the group shows signs of scurvy,” project leaders instructed.[3]
Through the Students for a Democratic Society’s organizational and culinary efforts, they established and revived grassroots antipoverty organizations that helped a national movement for economic justice to flourish. Their efforts most fruitful efforts were with single mothers who received welfare. They assisted the Citizens United for Adequate Welfare in Cleveland and Mothers for Adequate Welfare in Boston, organizations that channeled numerous welfare recipient activists into the National Welfare Rights Organization. While organizing at the grassroots, Students for a Democratic Society leaders used cuisine to establish interpersonal and political relationships between the sons and daughters of postwar affluence and less fortunate Americans.
[1] Recipes for Semi-Starvation, n.d., box 29, folder 2, Students for a Democratic Society records, 1958-1970, Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections, Madison, Wisconsin (hereafter SDS records).
[2] Hugh to O and C, July 29, 1964, box 24, folder 5, SDS records.
[3] Recipes for Semi-Starvation, n.d., box 29, folder 1, SDS records.
Kimba Stahler is a Humanities Without Walls Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Institute at Penn State University. She is a historian of US women’s and gender history and social justice movements. She specializes in twentieth century antipoverty and feminist movements. Her research interests include participatory democracy, alliance formation among grassroots activists and organizations, and identity politics.
For Kimba’s dissertation research, she conducted oral histories to uncover how members of the Students for a Democratic Society living in Cleveland constructed that organization’s most successful grassroots organizing campaign during the 1960s. Using those oral histories, she produced a story-telling podcast entitled “Visions of Democracy” that encourages listeners to think about the various forms that democratic participation takes. Her current book project, tentatively titled Rats in Common: The Untold History of Cleveland’s Interracial Welfare Rights Movement, explores how white middle-class political organizers and poor white and Black single mothers forged productive political relationships out of their shared commitment to radical forms of American democracy.
In this episode, Sarah Kernan speaks to Elaine Harrington, Special Collections Librarian at University College Cork about Historical Recipes in the Digital Age. This project was created by a partnership between UCC Special Collections and Digital Learning and relied on the contributions of staff and students to shape and analyze the project. To stay up-to-date with UCC Library Special Collections & Archives, follow @UCCLibrary and @theriversideUCC on Twitter and UniversityCollegeCorkLibrary on Facebook.
Music
Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major
Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0
Historical Recipes in the Digital Age Project Team
Elaine Harrington, Special Collections Librarian (@walkerabroad)
This is Around the Table, a new podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.
Today I’m speaking to Elaine Harrington, Special Collections Librarian at University College Cork. She was part of the team who created Historical Recipes in the Digital Age, a digital project based on manuscript recipes in UCC Library Special Collections. Elaine, thank you so much for joining me today.
Elaine Harrington 00:46
Not at all. Thank you for having me.
Sarah Kernan 00:49
Could you begin by telling us a bit about Historical Recipes in the Digital Age? What exactly is part of this digital project and how is it connected to University College Cork?
Elaine Harrington 01:01
Sure. So Historical Recipes in the Digital Age is a digital publication. You can consider it an exhibition, where apart from the introduction, you can dive right in and maneuver around. That is, it doesn’t necessarily have a linear flow to it. And we look at primary sources of three manuscript recipe books from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. These are Irish recipe books, but written in English as opposed to written in the Irish language. They’re held in Special Collections and here in UCC Library, which is how we have easy access to them. And the excerpts from them form the basis of the Scalar instance which is where we host Historical Recipes of the Digital Age. So, the project is a combination of images of the recipes, textual transcriptions of the recipes, visual visualizations based on those textual transcriptions, and then combinations that are not so readily identifiable if you were looking solely at the paper version. In addition, we’ve included some contextual information about Cork from a postcard collection that’s held in the Archive Service in UCC Library. So it’s a good way to get lots of different parts of our collection into an online digital setting.
Sarah Kernan 02:29
Well, could you speak a bit about how you and anyone else from the project team actually came up with the idea for this project? And could you also tell us more about the project team, too?
Elaine Harrington 02:39
So, when I started thinking about this question initially, I thought about the project team, but I realized that it originated, my interested in recipe books, around 2014, 2015. And this was when the university celebrated the year of the life of George Boole. And George Boole is the person for whom Boolean Algebra is named, which is big in libraries, or if you’ve ever done AND, OR, NOT searching. Um, he was the first professor of mathematics here in the university and he’s someone really important at the heart of the university, and the library that I’m based in is named for him. And as part of the celebrations for his year, they wanted to introduce the contextual information about what had happened in his life, so they included food and Cork. And one of the recipes that they looked at was college pudding, which is a kind of a rice pudding that’s boiled. And it’s not very nice even when you dolly it up with syrup, but it came from one of the recipe books, and that made me think that there’s always a way for food in particular to have interest to pretty much everyone. It’s one of those universals. Then in 2019, there was a student who as part of a work placement for a postgraduate history module, Skills for Medieval Historians, he came and he worked on that same manuscript recipe book.
Elaine Harrington 04:10
His background was a chef so we thought that he would be familiar with some of the food terms, but he had difficulty reading some of the handwriting from the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century recipe books. But he was used to the terms that were used. And from there we moved into thinking how could we use some of the recipe books in different ways. And then the pandemic happened and suddenly we had no more in-person access from March 2020 to July 2020, and then over the next year access was so much more restricted that we had to find ways to bring our collections into a digital environment. Around about the same time, about May 2021, a digital learning specialist was hired in UCC Library, and that’s Stephanie Chen. And over the next year, she and I started collaborating together on a series of projects of which this Historical Recipes in the Digital Age was one. And it was a great way to get our content into a space, but I wasn’t the only one who had to do all parts of the project, and who had made for greater collaboration and interactivity across the different parts of the library service. So we wanted to have both enhancing access to the collections, learning new technologies, but also a really important part within UCC is our connected curriculum, where students are co-creators, co-researchers, and they learn lots of new skills. So for us to have student partners, that was key.
Elaine Harrington 05:45
So the project team was myself, Special Collections librarian; Stephanie Chen, the digital learning specialist; there were two undergraduate students, Cara Long and David Leen, who were studying law and business information systems, who worked on Stephanie on a series of digital projects including this one; a postgraduate student who is working with me on a work placement portfolio module, Kian O’Mahony; and Emma Horgan, one of the Library archivists. And she came in later the project where both she and I started to try our hand at making some of the recipes and it wasn’t always successful. So that’s the project where we came up with the idea and the project team.
Sarah Kernan 06:28
That’s wonderful. I love how diverse the group of people and interests and contributions are from everyone on the team. That’s wonderful, especially the input from students, too.
Elaine Harrington 06:46
Yeah.
Sarah Kernan 06:46
Could you talk a little bit about Scalar, for anyone, in particular, who’s not familiar with that platform. How did you decide to use it, and did you use any other projects as inspiration, whether or not they were born on Scalar or not?
Elaine Harrington 07:05
Sure. So, during the pandemic, I wrote a blog post on WordPress. This is The River-side, which is Special Collections’ and Archives’ main communication tool for longer-form pieces than tweets. So, the post I wrote was on an eighteenth-century Cork library, a charity school, and the library was donated to the university in the early 1990s. I had looked at visualizations limited on what Google could do for me. Between places of publication, who is the donor, the different types of books that were present, overlapping items with other things in the collection, but it was actually really limited between what was the tools available on WordPress, the plugins that were available to me, and then looking at, say, Google Maps as a way of creating some of those visualizations, so I was eager to see what else was out there. In searching for it, I came across Scalar and some other annotation tools like Hypotheses. But again, there was so much going on during the pandemic. It was, it’s too much for one person to do on their own.
Elaine Harrington 08:14
In the summer of ’21, I participated in the American Library Association International Librarians networking program which is the initiative of one of their roundtables, and it allows participants to form a collaborative relationship with someone else for four months at a time, and the intention is that you can continue to network with that person if you so choose. The person I was partnered with was Dr. Win Shih, who is Director of Integrated Library Systems at the University of Southern California, and we were both interested in emerging technologies. So, he was telling me about some of the different technologies being done in the University of Southern California and he mentioned Scalar, and they were actually the ones who created it. I had come across Scalar already, so I was hugely interested and I asked him lots and lots of questions about how he found it. So, he passed me on to the Special Collections team and their actual technology people so that when I suggested to Stephanie that we could use Scalar, not to replace WordPress but to sit alongside it to do things that weren’t possible on the blogging site, we already had an entry in. At the time, I think so many people were pursuing Scalar as an option. So, it was really handy to have had that personal connection.
Elaine Harrington 09:35
I could see from their Special Collections site the things that they had used it for. Alice Online: The Works and World of Lewis Carroll, A History of Photography in USC Libraries Collections, and these were things that we could then explore ourselves and go yes, we like that item, we can see how we can use it for not just the blog post that I had done on the Cork charity school but lots of other things. It was far more interactive than what the WordPress could be. It was also important that the tool was open source and web-based so that we could access this anywhere, and they gave us options about did we want a registration key and it would be hosted on the USC site, or did we want to self-host, the source code is all available on GitHub. Or you could use a different site. They suggested one called Reclaim Hosting and they offer Scalar as an option as an option rather for their hosting packages. But because we were so new to it, we said we would start low-key first and ask them to host it and we would have an access through a password and username, etc. So that’s probably enough for that part.
Sarah Kernan 10:48
Wonderful. Well, you’ve talked a little bit about, in terms of the project team, how staff and students have been involved in the creation of Historical Recipes. Has input into the project been tied to coursework, or has it been totally independent of that? Could you just talk a little bit about how it’s actually integrated into courses and learning?
Elaine Harrington 11:16
So, it actually stands independent of courses and learning. We decided to do the first iteration of it by linking it to Pi Day, which is three point one four so fourteenth of March.
Sarah Kernan 11:31
We are very familiar at the Recipes Project with it!
Elaine Harrington 11:33
And yeah, of course I’m saying it to the wrong people! So, I had seen it come up on Twitter and I thought this is a great combination of mathematics and recipes, plenty of collaboration with different groups who might not think of recipes necessarily. And so we specifically picked, we don’t really have pies in Ireland, so I widened it out to baking in general, and then widened it out again to maybe like syrups or frosting or the like. We took an expansive view of what pie was. So I selected which recipes and which recipe books to use. I showed all the students that were involved in the project all the different recipe books, what they look like, then we, I scanned the items uploaded them to a OneDrive folder that we had access to and they immediately knew that they wanted to work only with the twentieth-century one because that was by far the easiest to read and required the least amount of transcription on their part. So, it already had the list of ingredients. They didn’t have to create that themselves from, oh I see that they mentioned gooseberries here, I should add gooseberries to my ingredients list. So, a lot of the detective work was removed.
Elaine Harrington 12:54
Stephanie liaised with USC, and she set up the UCC instance, and then she worked with the students on figuring out how Scalar worked. Emma came in towards the end of the project when she and I started making the recipes specifically for Pi Day. Only one of the students was involved in doing coursework and that was the student who worked with me while he was on placement, but he also worked on a series of other projects, so this wasn’t the sole focus. Every year UCC Library hires various student workers, whether for invigilation, shelving, data entry, and two of them came on board to work with Stephanie on a range of digital projects which included 3D scanning of objects, creating 360 degree tours based on mapping of historical advertisements in eighteenth-century Cork and newspapers, and creating a coloring book for #ColorOurCollections. Um, they were involved in lots of other projects as well over the course of the eight months, but those were the ones that they also had input from Special Collections on. The intent was to return to the project again this year for Pi Day, but you know the way of it, other projects pop up in the way. But it is a resource we intend to return to, and I never did get back to pushing, transferring the blog post of the eighteenth-century Cork charity school into Scalar, so I have to do that separately.
Sarah Kernan 14:18
Well, this project is different than a site with complete digitized manuscripts or recipes collections, and it’s obviously quite different than looking at the physical objects, the original physical books. Could you talk about the value of working with these kinds of digital images and what skills students developed to work with these recipes. You’ve already mentioned some of the challenges that they encountered in terms of reading the handwriting and transcribing them, coming up with the list of ingredients, for example…
Elaine Harrington 14:51
Yes.
Sarah Kernan 14:52
But what are other skills that they might have acquired during this process?
Elaine Harrington 14:58
So, if I start with how it’s different from the original. So, with the digital projects, we should be mindful of what is omitted. For example, with the recipes in Historical Recipes in the Digital Age, I have scanned around the recipe itself rather than seeing the full page, so we don’t know the person who wrote the recipe did they think, ooh Apple Charlotte, I also want to put in Apple Cake so that the two of those would be side by side. That part of it is now missing from the site itself. All of the recipe books had inserts and those weren’t scanned, but if you were looking for a specific Apple Charlotte recipe, then you would spot it if you were looking at the physical item. And then two of the recipe books have indexes that were created by a series of people over a number of years. We didn’t transfer those over. And there’s also newspaper cuttings on the front of one for everything from tips for burns and skulls, or diphtheria, how to mend broken china, and simple disinfectant. So they’re not recipe books, it’s also folk cures and a whole range of other things. Some of the challenges, I had mentioned the handwriting is the most obvious but I think it’s the food terms, for how much has food changed in the last one hundred years. The students had never heard of dripping, which is a type of fat, and I had to explain that to them. They had never considered that beef tea could be used for colds. Why wouldn’t you have access to all of the different, you know, pharmaceutical pills that we would have now.
Elaine Harrington 16:44
They really didn’t like the handwriting. We keep coming back to it, but it’s something that the history department and UCC have also noted and they’re specifically creating different modules to accustom students to get used to handwriting because we write so much less now. But the students involved were business and law students, so they wouldn’t have those modules in the same way that Arts Humanities students would. So it was really interesting seeing their perspective on that. As part of the summing up of their presence on the projects. We asked them like what could you say that would be useful to other students who might be considering but don’t have a background in Arts and Humanities. So, they said they really liked working on the variety of projects, how they learned new skills which would further assist them post-college. These were undergraduate students. They developed digital fluency and greater experience in different technology types. They became more capable in troubleshooting technical problems whether it was software, or 3D printers, not specifically used on this project but on others, and they became more comfortable with adapting to new types of technologies, and we talked about that as well at the start before we started chatting about this. They enjoyed using Scalar to create an interactive and virtual book to display historical recipes. And they enjoyed deciphering the handwritten recipes, as challenging as it was, and they found it really rewarding then to input them into Scalar.
Elaine Harrington 18:15
They found the process of learning and navigating their way through Scaler more challenging and inconsistent than they thought it would be. They thought that it wasn’t an intuitive tool, which is why the project itself took longer than expected. But they had also used H5P which they preferred. So, the personal preferences really showed up. But they did, they really did like using Scalar in different ways. And I think that’s something that all of us need to be mindful for, because you think that people are these digital natives and I use that with caution. That they are more comfortable with stick them in front of a digital tool they’ve never seen it before and they get going and I think for them as well to know that there is this learning curve is definitely worthwhile in learning at that point.
Sarah Kernan 19:07
Well, you’ve hinted a bit that you’d like to add a bit more to the Scalar site and grow it a little bit. Could you speak to that a bit and could you also talk about how this project may have influenced any other projects that have gone on at UCC?
Elaine Harrington 19:28
So, at the moment we would be aiming to work towards Pi Day 2024. It’s hard to believe it’s coming up so fast. But also to grow it out and I mentioned that there are lots of other different things included in the historical recipe books, so to focus on some of those folklore cures, or to look at things that were unexpected. For example, there’s a recipe for curry powder. Which I wouldn’t have expected in the middle of the nineteenth-century recipe book. But then I must remember that Cork was a port city as part of the British Empire and there are the influences from other parts of the then British Empire and which are brought to bear on that recipe book. How has it influenced other things. We’re exploring other tools such as Transkribus to um, almost shortcut handwriting in a way, but we need a significant body of work for that to be possible. And the Archives Section within the Library are working with the History Department for those history students to learn different ways of looking at letter forms and thinking, okay, so that’s that, this is how I do that. But those are really good for anyone who are in Arts Humanities departments and not anyone else and that’s one of the challenges we find in the Library Association of Ireland where books group, where there isn’t, where books courses taught within many of our universities. How do you bring on the next group of librarians like myself who might not have as much familiarity with handwriting either. I sound like I’m mentioning only handwriting when there were so many other different challenges to focus on. But if you can’t read what the content is about then it’s a really limiting factor. No matter how much people are interested in food, and we’re so much used to the printed word now, that it really is quite the challenge.
Sarah Kernan 21:34
Absolutely, absolutely. If other institutions are considering similar projects in scale or in theme or scope to yours or instructors are considering devising similar digital projects for their courses, what sort of advice would you provide to them?
Elaine Harrington 21:57
Sure. So, new digital tools aren’t always as easy or intuitive no matter our level of familiarity with digital tools, in general. With each new technology, there is a learning curve and time to master that should be factored in. But also consideration of what else you’ve going on either in the students’ lives or in your own life. As I mentioned, Pi Day 2023 didn’t happen this year for that very reason. If you have other resources available like transcriptions of recipes from previous projects then reuse them. There’s no point reinventing the wheel unnecessarily. But as a positive, we reach the highest number of potential users in such a short space of time, we’ve created a variety of different resources as part of the project. So, there’ve been two posters at different international conferences. We have an interactive website so that you can see the Scalar project alongside all the other projects that was created at the same time, there’s been a journal article and four different blog posts associated with recipes and how we use them. So already we have this tremendous body of work where we can really showcase what is possible with what is seemingly such a small activity.
Sarah Kernan 23:20
Final question. Do you have any favorite recipes from the manuscripts in the project and are there any features in the manuscripts that you think are really ripe for scholarly attention?
Elaine Harrington 23:33
So, for Pi Day I chose to make the afternoon teacake recipe in part because I thought it would be easy and fast to make and it was. But also it was easy to follow, unlike the one for lemon filling which went horribly, horribly wrong. It still tasted nice, but I couldn’t use it for what I had intended which was to put between the two afternoon teacakes and kind of create a sandwich. It was far too liquidy for that in the end. And the second question sorry again was…
Sarah Kernan 24:03
Are there any features in the manuscripts that you think are really ripe for scholarly attention?
Elaine Harrington 24:08
Yes, absolutely. So I touched on that earlier, the different combinations of recipes for cures for diphtheria, or mending china, but there’s also one, and I can’t condone it, for using snails to do something else. It’s a very odd little cutting, but we have this large collection in Ireland called the National Folklore Collection. A lot of it is already available online. And I think there are lots of synergies between that collection and some of the folk cures that are present which aren’t typical recipes as we would expect to see them in modern cookbooks but were definitely part and parcel of the tradition of manuscript recipe books. So I think there is something there and also because the National Folklore Collection where a lot of the contributions have been in the Irish language. So for here these recipe books they’re all in English, which is open to far more users than would be otherwise.
Sarah Kernan 25:15
Elaine, thank you again for joining me today to talk about this great project, Historical Recipes in the Digital Age.
Elaine Harrington 25:22
Thank you so much for having me, Sarah. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Sarah Kernan 25:27
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Among the many foods accompanying British colonizers to India, leavened bread was received differently by different communities and religious groups. Many upper-caste Hindus had revulsion not only for the bread but also for the other items coming out of bakeries introduced to the Indian culinary scene by the British. Meanwhile, Dalits –who had been marginalized by the Brahmins first by not being given jobs and second by being denied food eaten by the higher castes— accrued these bakeries as an opportunity to liberate themselves from unpaid, indentured, menial jobs, but also to ensure economic security and dignity. Muslims, a religious minority, also perceived these bakeries as a prospective source of earnings owing to their longstanding and auspicious connections to baking skills, inherited from the Mughals during their rule in past centuries.
The aversion exhibited by upper-caste Hindus was predicated on a set of strong Brahmanical religious beliefs. In Hinduism, food can carry a plethora of diktats. It dictates your job, your social status, whether you are ‘pure’ or ‘polluted’, and whether you are entitled to enter a temple or not. The food one eats becomes the defining factor of one’s caste. One such way that upper-caste Hindus distinguish themselves from the lower ones is by denying the food touched or cooked by the lower castes. A high-caste Hindu can only accept food or drink from a person of a similar rank. If the food is prepared or touched by a lower caste person, it must be rejected.[i] Therefore, to accept bread coming from Dalits’ hands would be polluting and profaning to savarnas (caste Hindus).
However, bhadralok (the educated ‘enlightened’ Bengali middle-class), under the strong influence of Brahmo Samaj [ii], used the consumption of bread as a means to record their resistance against casteism and to defy the taboo about crossing the seas to the West. A sizeable amount of literature—both fictional and autobiographical—written in Bengal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries documents this resistance.
For example, in his 1909 autobiography, Atmacharit (Autobiography), Rajnarayan Basu (1826-1899), a famous Brahmo[iii] leader, narrates how during his college days he often consumed bread and biscuits coming from the hands of Dalits as an emblem of progress and to mobilize resistance against casteism. When he accepted Brahmosim, he consumed bread to record his protest against casteism, because, at that time, Bengal bakeries were operated by Dalits or Muslims. He remembers his Brahmo oath-taking ceremony as:
On the day when I signed the oath (at the beginning of 1846) and received Brahmoism, I was accompanied by a couple of other adults from my village. That day, we celebrated our new religion with bread and sherry. This was to show that we did not believe in distinctions of caste or creed.[iv]
Likewise, Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932), in his autobiography, Sattar Bastar (Seventy Years), tells us how by consuming bread, albeit secretly, he along with his peers broke away from the shackles of casteism:
Though we would come out of the shop after buying flour of one paisa and holding it in our hands to show to the people. We would bring hot bread and biscuits inside our shirt pockets or inside our dhotis, and at the night, after our guardians slept, we would bring these out and have those. In this way, even while staying at Sylhet, my binding considerations of religion and caste were internally totally broken.[v]
In his satirical play, Ekei Ki Bale Sabhyata (That’s What Civilization is all About), Madhusudhan Dutt (1824-1873) dramatizes the response of the middle-class Bengali youth toward the consumption of bread baked by Dalits. In the play, a Vaishnava[vi] man observes some youths to learn their activities. Kali, one of the youths, suggests feeding Vaishnava fowl cutlet with bread so that his life becomes meaningful.[vii] In the nineteenth century, Vaishnavas did not consume any meat or an item prepared by a lower-caste Hindu, so this represented a particularly powerful moment of resistance.
Among critics, the diminishing potential of scriptural reasoning and advancing modernity in colonial Bengal meant that some detractors couched their criticism against the consumption of bread in the language of science. In 1899, Swami Vivekananda, in his essay, The East and the West, strongly opposed the consumption of bread. According to him, flour mixed with yeast became injurious to health, and he approved of the consumption of only toasted bread under special circumstances:
And as for fermented bread, it is also poison, don’t touch it at all. Flour mixed with yeast becomes injurious. Never take any fermented thing; in this respect, the prohibition in our shastras of partaking of any such article of food is a fact of great importance.[viii]
In this way, the consumption of bread was not only about sustenance, but reflected broader debates and relationships between communities and religious groups. People’s varied responses to bread thus suggest the power of food in resisting casteism in Colonial Bengal.
[i] For a detailed study on food and Hinduism see Pamela G. Kittler and Kathryn P. Sucher, Food and Culture. 5th ([Sydney]: Thomson Wadsworth, 2004).
[ii] This community played an important role in the genesis and development of every major religious, social, and political movement in India between 1820 and 1930. It brought about a social reformation by extending full equality to Dalits, women, and laborers, among other marginalized groups. Its members are regarded as the pioneers of liberal political consciousness and Indian nationalism.
[iii] A believer and practitioner of the principles of Brahmo Samaj.