26 May 2022 - 27 May 2022 All day SG1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Rd, Cambridge

Description

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Convenors

Melissa Calaresu
Marta Manzanares Mileo

Summary

In a global context of exchange of ideas, people and commodities, women played a crucial role in the multilateral ways of assimilation and adaptation of new food commodities and tastes across the early modern world. The relation between gender and food has been mainly categorised as masculine/public/skilled and feminine/domestic/unskilled, but little attention is given to the wide range of food-related labour performed by women inside and outside the household, such aspreserving, brewing, baking and cheese-making.

This interdisciplinary conference brings into dialogue diverse geographies, disciplines and approaches to reflect on the gender dimension of food and cooking in the crucial period of the early globalisation. We will look closely at the ‘making process’, as a highly gendered and embodied experience and as a form of production and transmission of ideas, skills and identities. Building on recent scholarship on ‘making and knowing’, we consider ‘making food’ as a framework to build cross-cultural stories of food and gender and, thereby, contribute to the growing field of food studies.

The conference brings together international scholars from history, anthropology, archaeology, material culture and gender studies to further develop interdisciplinary approaches and experimental methodologies for the study of food in the past.

Supported by:

CRASSH Grey Logo  Faculty of History Logo

 

 

Logo of EU flag and Marie Curie

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement 891543


If you have any specific accessibility needs for this event please get in touch. We will do our best to accommodate any requests. Conference assistance: events@crassh.cam.ac.uk

Programme

Thursday 26 May
9.00-9.15

Registration

9.15 - 9.30

Welcome and opening

9.30 - 11.00

Session 1: Practice

Chair: Mary Laven, University of Cambridge

‘Pileuses and the productive household economy in early modern Senegambia’
Bronwen Everill
University of Cambridge

‘Native American women’s shipboard food diplomacy in colonial Georgia’
Rachel B. Herrmann
Cardiff University

‘‘Chercher la femme’: imagining women’s place in Arab cuisine practices’
Limor Yungman
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Discussion (30 minutes)

11.00 - 11.30

Break

11.30 - 13.00

Session 2: Reconstruction

Chair: Melissa Calaresu, University of Cambridge

‘Brewing sixteenth-century beer: lessons in experimental archaeology and interdisciplinarity’
Susan Flavin and Charlie Taverner
Trinity College Dublin

‘Cheese, knowledge and authority: reconstructing work practices of women on early modern Dutch dairy farms’
MaroesjkaVerhagen and Danielle van den Heuvel
Universiteit van Amsterdam

‘More than kitchenware: culinary material culture, colonial foodways and native women in the 17th– and 18th-century Mariana Islands’
Verónica Peña Filiu
Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Discussion (30 minutes)

13.00 - 14.30
Lunch at Selwyn College
Friday 27 May
9.00 - 10.30

Session 3: Religion

Chair: Christopher Kissane

‘The culinary devotion of Sor Marianita de San José: writing and cooking in eighteenth-century Mexico’
Daniela Gutiérrez
University of Chicago

‘Paste makers and breakers: women as timekeepers, mountain killers, and seed-dough crafters in early-modern Mesoamerica’
Joshua Fitzgerald
University of Cambridge

‘Do not whip dough as the nuns do’: baking and embodied skills in early modern Spain’
Marta Manzanares Mileo
University of Cambridge

Discussion (30 minutes)

10.30 - 11.00

Break

11.00 - 12.30

Session 4: Inside and outside

Chair: Danielle van den Heuvel, University of Ansterdam

‘Lifting the lid on pastry and its meanings in the early modern English kitchen’
Sara Pennell
University of Greenwich

‘From field to fritter: trajectories of food production and processing in 18th-century Naples’
Melissa Calaresu
University of Cambridge

‘The Matter of fish: street food and seafood in 18th-century Venice’
Solène Rivoal
Université Fédérale de Toulouse

Discussion (30 minutes)

12.30 - 13.00

Closing Remarks

Biographies

Melissa Calaresu
University of Cambridge

Melissa is an early modern cultural historian and the Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. She has written on the Grand Tour, autobiography, urban space, ice cream, and food-hawking in early modern Italy, with a particular focus on eighteenth-century Naples. Her co-edited books include New Approaches to Naples c.1500–c.1800: The Power of Place (2013) with Helen Hills and Food Hawkers: Selling in the Streets from Antiquity to the Present Day (2016) with Danielle van den Heuvel. She was the co-curator of two successful Fitzwilliam Museum exhibitions in Cambridge – Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment in 2015 and Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800 in 2019-20. She is currently writing a cultural history of the city of Naples through the household accounts of the Welsh artist Thomas Jones (1742-1803). She is also co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Global Food History.

 

Ellie Doney
Slade School of Fine Arts/UCL

Ellie is an artist and materials enthusiast, doing practice research into how cooking and eating together creates embodied knowledge and empathy, connecting us to materials and ecosystems. She is currently a doctoral student at the Slade School of Fine Art, and Institute of Making, UCL.

 

Bronwen Everill
University of Cambridge

Bronwen Everill is a lecturer and fellow in history at Gonville & Caius College. She is the author of Not Made By Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition.

 

Adrienne Eiser Treeby
Crown & Queue Meats

Adrienne is the Founder and Managing Director of Crown & Queue Meats, a South London microbusiness focused on resurrecting historical and traditional British cured sausage recipes using regeneratively-farmed high-welfare animals. She is currently (and always!) working to reclaim our lost culinary heritage while changing the narrative about animal agriculture and eating meat.

 

Josh Fitzgerald
University of Cambridge

Josh is an ethnohistorian of the History of Education, learning sciences, and material culture studies relating to Nahuas of Central Mexico, before and after the advent of Christianity by Europeans in the sixteenth century. In 2019, received earned a PhD from the University of Oregon (UO) Department of History alongside a Museum Studies certification with the UO College of Design. From 2019-2020, he interned with the Getty Research Institute’s Florentine Codex Initiative, contributing as a text-encoder, content specialist, and education programme officer. Starting 2020, at Churchill College, he has been the Rubinoff Junior Research Fellow in “art as a source of knowledge,” writing, researching and supervising students on Mesoamerican and Indigenous-Colonial (Nahua-Christian) primary sources. Josh is affiliated with the Department of History, History of Art, Archaeology and the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, and as well as a content specialist for the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s forthcoming Colours (2022) exhibition. His research is supported by international organizations, including the UK Latin American History group, Jeffery Rubinoff Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Global Oregon Initiative, Julie and Rocky Dixon Foundation, and the US Department of Education. His current publications examine Nahua art and architecture, ritual spaces and place-identity formations, and ethnolinguistic phenomena of the early modern period, and his findings highlight the perseverance of Mesoamerican modes of learning and local history.

 

Susan Flavin
Trinity College Dublin

Susan is an Associate Professor in History at Trinity College Dublin. She is the principal investigator on FoodCult, a five-year interdisciplinary project examining food, culture and identity in early modern Ireland, funded by the European Research Council. Broadly interested in consumption and material culture, she is the author of Consumption and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Ireland: Saffron, Stockings and Silk (Boydell, 2014).

 

Daniela Gutiérrez Flores
University of Chicago

Daniela is a PhD candidate in the Romance Languages Department at the University of Chicago. Her research examines the evolving attitudes towards cooking labor in the early modern Spanish Atlantic. Through an interdisciplinary approach that combines food studies, social history, and literary analysis, she argues that cooking was a transformative practice through which individuals challenged social constraints, engaged with lettered culture, and shaped new social identities and communities, giving new meaning to the kitchen trade. Daniela’s research has been supported by the Tinker Foundation, the Culinary Historians of New York Association, and the Mellon Foundation.

 

Rachel Herrmann
Cardiff University

Rachel is a Senior Lecturer in Modern American History at Cardiff University. She has written a monograph, No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution, and edited a collection, To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic. Her articles have appeared in the William and Mary QuarterlyDiplomatic HistorySlavery & Abolition, and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. She is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Global Food History.

 

Marta Manzanares Mileo
University of Cambridge

Marta is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Faculty of History (Cambridge) with a research project examining the gender dimension of the production of sweets in early modern Spain. She received her PhD in 2018 from the University of Barcelona, with a dissertation on the confectionery trade in early modern Barcelona, recently published as a monograph. Her research interests include the cultural and social history of food, history of women and gender as well as material culture in global and local contexts.

 

Verónica Peña Filiu
Universitat Pompeu Fabra/Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Verónica is a historian interested in the role of food in early modern cross-cultural encounters and the configuration of new foodways in colonial situations, with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific region. She has been a doctoral fellow at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and the Leibniz-Institute of European History in Mainz. After receiving a PhD in History from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2020), she was awarded a short-term fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library. In January 2022, Verónica joined the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, with a Margarita Salas Postdoctoral Fellowship.

 

Sara Pennell
Associate Professor
University of Greenwich School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Dr Pennell is currently trying to work on a biography of Hannah Wolley, the late seventeenth-century domestic writer and businesswoman; and co-writing a book on secondhand cultures in England, 1600-1900 — if she only had the time!

 

Solène Rivoal
Federal University of Toulouse

Solène is a Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Early Modern History at the Federal University of Toulouse (INUC Albi – UMR 3156 Framespa). In her PhD, she analysed how the city of Venice managed to provide its inhabitants with seafood, and how these activities were constantly negotiated between Venetian’s authorities, the fishermen, and the consumers. This work on fish markets in Early modern Venice is currently in press and will be published by the École française of Rome. She is pursuing her work on fishermen’s agency in the use of the maritime resources and their interactions with local and central authorities in early modern Europe. She wrote several articles on this area, among them, the last one “Enclosure within a Closed Sea? The Fisheries against the Commons in the Republic of Venice” (JHES, 2021).

 

Charlie Taverner
Trinity College, Dublin

Charlie is a postdoctoral researcher on the FoodCult project, based at Trinity College Dublin, with a particular focus on household accounts. A social historian of food and cities, his first book, Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London will be published with OUP in winter 2022/23. He has also published on oysters, urban markets, and immigrant food practices, and is writing a long-term history of beef in Britain.

 

Danielle van den Heuvel
University of Ansterdam

Danielle is an Associate Professor in Early Modern History at the University of Amsterdam and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Urban History. She has published widely on theposition of women in the Dutch Republic and on the history of food selling. Currently she is the Principal Investigator on the project “The Freedom of the Streets. Gender and Urban Space in Eurasia (1600-1850)” funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

 

Maroesjka Verhagen
University of Amsterdam

Maroesjka is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, where she works on her project, ‘Feeding the City: A Bird’s-Eye View of Amsterdam’s Food Supply from its Hinterlands, c.1550-1800’, funded by the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies. In her research, she sets out to explore how early modern domestic food supply functioned by putting centre stage the everyday practices of people producing, selling, and preparing food.

 

Limor Yungman
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Limor is a social and cultural historian specializing in the culinary history of the premodern Islamic world. She is a fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She examines culinary practices and discourse in the Middle East. Her post-doctoral project deals with the formation and diffusion of the Arab cuisine through a codicological and prosopographical analysis of Arabic culinary manuscripts. Her dissertation, titled “Cookbooks in the Medieval Middle East (10th-16th centuries)” written at Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales‏ ‏(Paris 2020) focused on the cookery book as a social and cultural object from the Abbasid period until the Mamluk sultanate and is in publication process. She published articles on the Mamluk taste and the court cook, and two more will be published later this year, one on the earliest alcohol recipes in Arabic and the other on recipe-poetry.

 

Abstracts

Melissa Calaresu 

‘From field to fritter: trajectories of food production and processing in 18th-century Naples’

As one of the most populous and densely-populated capital cities in eighteenth-century Europe, Naples was necessarily provisioned by a complex network of food producers and makers from the surrounding hinterland as well as within the city walls. Like other European cities, essential foodstuffs such as oil and grain were regulated by a municipal system which assured fair prices and a regular supply. Archival evidence of this regulation dominates urban histories of provisioning. Yet, other kinds of evidence suggest a wider variety of foodstuffs, including wild foods and processed foods, some of which escaped regulation, and all of which were consumed by its population of close to 500,000 inhabitants. Street-vending licences show the extent to which the trajectories of food production and processing stretched from the fields and gardens on the edges of the city and the small coastal ports around the bay of Naples to the streets of the city. There, mostly male food vendors hawked their goods, sometimes frying foods such as fritters, in the open air directly on the street. While evidence of female food-hawkers having licences remains scant, their presence can be found elsewhere, for instance, processing fresh cheeses in households known to consumers in the neighbourhood. This paper will examine the archival and visual sources of production and processing of a variety of foodstuffs, taking a material culture approach to questions such as seasonality and preservation and storage.

Elie Doney  and Adrienne Eiser Treeby
‘Bags O’ Mystery’

A hands-on exploration of the sausage as metaphorical and practical tool for embodied thinking about gender and the food-making process, taking Ursula Le Guin’s essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ as a starting point. All making materials will be inedible but there will be a selection of meat and non-meat charcuterie to taste.

Bronwen Everill
‘Pileuses and the productive household economy in early modern Senegambia’

Pileuses de mil are ubiquitous in early modern representations of Senegambia. Grinding millet was an important daily task for the household economy, around which family structures and ideas about labor relations were oriented. This paper will explore the role of the pileuses in the millet economy of Senegambia, the household economy of the port cities on its coast, and the gendered ideas of moral economy that clashed in these hybrid European-African cities.

Joshua Fitzgerald
‘Paste makers and breakers: women as timekeepers, mountain killers, and seed-dough crafters in early-modern Mesoamerica’

Amaranth plants, their seeds and the dough paste made from the seeds were key ingredients to making of histories in ancient Mexico, and this paper explores the role Indigenous women played in the shaping of seed-dough culture in the Early Modern Period. An edible paste, seed-dough (or tzoalli/tzohualli in Nahuatl) was used by Nahuas across central Mexico, especially in the Mexica capital city of Tenochtitlan (commonly the “Aztecs”). Nahuas featured it in several annual events in the Aztec calendar, and both men and women laboured to grow amaranth crops. But Religious Studies and food-art discourses have only just scratched the surface of seed-dough artwork (i.e. Graulich and Olivier 2006; Brylak 2013; Mazzetto, 2017; Hamann, 2019). We know even less about the relationship between Nahua women and amaranth seed-dough culture. My paper studies the history of tzoalli, from ancient murals and archaeological findings to ethnographic materials from the Spanish Colonial era, to track references to women as producers in both Nahuatl and Spanish texts and key visual representations. I seek to highlight indigenous perspectives on the topic and reveal ways that women devised designs of handmade sculptures, figurines, and other perishable objects. Amaranth plants, seeds, and dough were crafted into the shapes of mountains, supernatural creatures, and human or zoomorphic figures, and I add nuance to how foodstuff reliquaries related to regional and local knowledge preservation. I employ critical visual and ethnolinguistic studies to shed light on amaranth paste as a key aspect to alliance building, the commemoration of conquests, and/or the dissolution of unity. I argue that women were central actors in producing, revering, and slaughtering dough objects, especially tzoalli mountains twice a year, signifying an important role for community women in the telling of local military histories and archiving community lineage.

Susan Flavin and Charlie Taverner
‘Brewing sixteenth-century beer: lessons in experimental archaeology and  interdisciplinarity’

Across early modern Europe, beer was integral to social life and a vital source of nutrition, but up to now we have had little sense of what that beer was like, how strong it really was, and how much energy it provided. As part of the FoodCult project, a team of researchers and historical demonstrators sought to answer these questions by brewing a beer from 1574, based on detailed evidence from Dublin Castle. The experiment took place in September 2021 at the Weald and Downland Museum in West Sussex and the finished beer was analysed by brewing scientists, microbiologists, and archaeologists. This paper will briefly introduce the experiment and its findings, before reflecting on the advantages and challenges of carrying out this style of research. Reconstructing historical foodstuffs is a worthwhile academic enterprise that requires deep attention to detail as well as considered compromise. Collaborating with non-traditional scholars and colleagues in other disciplines presents challenges in constructing research, analysis and communication, but opens unexpected avenues for exploration.

Daniela Gutiérrez Flores
‘The culinary devotion of Sor Marianita de San José: writing and cooking in eighteenth-century Mexico’

This paper focuses on the virtually known manuscript by Sor Mariana de San Joseph, a low-born white-veiled nun who cooked at the convent of Saint Rose of Lima, in 18th Puebla, New Spain. It examines Mariana’s representations of daily cooking and kitchen visions in light of Dominican female religious literature, as well as in relation to the internal politics of the convent. I argue that Mariana’s cooking must be understood as a particular mode of engagement with religious written culture, and thus a practice that endowed those with little social leverage with reputation and authority.  This paper reveals the relation between manual and intellectual work within female networks of knowledge transmission and the role of food preparation in the everyday life of the convent.

Rachel B. Herrmann
‘Native American Women’s Shipboard Food Diplomacy in Colonial Georgia’

This essay arises from a new project on water, hunger, and borders in the early modern Atlantic, which is interested in the watery and terrestrial spaces in North America where Spanish, British, and American officials contested power with Native Americans. This paper explores the shipboard exchange of foodstuffs between English colonists of the Georgia colony and Native Americans. In most accounts, the Yamacraw mico (or chief) Tomochici is cast as the leading diplomat with colonists. This paper, however, explores the actions of Tomochici’s wife, Senauki, who was the one responsible for presenting the English with religiously symbolic gifts of “milk” and honey, who invited non-Native missionaries to their Yamacraw town, and who raised the matter of the education of Native children. It is interested in the specific meanings of the commodities exchanged, as well as in the power dynamics at play between English colonists, Spanish officials to the south, and a Native American tribe formed during the ethnogenesis that followed the Yamasee war.

Marta Manzanares Mileo
‘Do not whip dough as the nuns do’: baking and embodied skills in early modern Spain’

Historical sources and historiography have pervasively represented nuns as industrious producers of sweets across the early modern Catholic world. Despite their well-known reputation, contemporary male cook authors questioned their culinary abilities. This paper reflects on the gender dimension of the production of sweets in early modern Spain at the time when food professionals asserted their authority based on discourses on gender and skill. In particular, it focuses on the material and performative aspects of making melindros (sponge biscuits) to explore the ways in which certain culinary skills and food trades were gendered in the period. Finally, this paper looks at the entrepreneurial activities of nuns into the confectionery trade, highlighting their active participation in local food economies.

Verónica Peña Filiu
‘More than kitchenware: culinary material culture, colonial foodways and native women in the 17th– and 18th– century Mariana Islands’

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, food became a critical dimension of the Spanish exploration and colonization of the Pacific. In the Mariana Islands (Western Pacific), the Spaniards’ arrival resulted in the introduction of a new cuisine, which merged elements from the Iberian, American, and Filipino traditions. Colonists and, in particular, Jesuit missionaries considered the reproduction of this colonial cuisine to be essential in the Christianisation of the native population, the CHamoru, whose eating habits were deemed inappropriate for “civilised life”.

This paper explores the adoption and rejection of new culinary material culture, eating styles, and ingredients by the native inhabitants of the Mariana Islands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It does so by focusing on Chamoru women, who played a central role as food producers and cooks. By paying attention to the power relations that structured life in the colonial society, the paper suggests that both the persistence of traditional feminine socialization practices and the new labour system facilitated the survival of pre-colonial cooking techniques and eating habits during the 18th century. The continuity of traditional culinary knowledge in the Mariana Islands demonstrates that colonial empires were neither omnipotent nor static but subject to deviations and contestation. Moreover, the fragility of the imperial project provided opportunities for the indigenous population to maintain their traditional food practices.

Sara Pennell
‘Lifting the lid on pastry and its meanings in the early modern English kitchen’

The ephemerality of food processing and preparation in the early modern kitchen and its ancillary food spaces, often means we overlook the resonances of particular foodwork and its products. More recently, attention to the language of manuscript recipe texts, to the descriptors in directions, the choice of utensils described therein and the specifics of cooking and serving forth, has given substance to dishes and their meanings to those who wrote about them, aspired to prepare them and sometimes actually did, with varying results.

In this presentation, I want to address the meanings and materiality of one such preparation – pastry – in the early modern English kitchen, and how it shaped gendered understandings of ‘cookery’ itself in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Pastrymaking as process and performance provides a strand of enquiry that links together post-Civil War nostalgia, interhousehold hospitality, commercial culinary innovation and professional identities, gendered experiences of education in and beyond the home, and changing technological and spatial requirements in and beyond the early modern kitchen.  Anybody who has made their own pastry will know it is a fickle entity: mastering, or indeed mistressing it in the early modern period was a great deal more than just a leisurely genteel accomplishment: it was a serious business.

Solène Rivoal
‘The matter of fish. Street food and seafood in 18th popular Venice.’

In recent years, some scholars have demonstrated that the place of seafood has to be re-evaluated within the context of early modern societies. In fact, until recently, this type of food was perceived as a dish not much appreciated, in some cases linked to deprivation or, in others, reserved for the wealthiest tables. On the contrary, in early modern Venice, fish was present in all meals, and particularly consumed by the poorest.

How did popular inhabitants of Venice consume this food that is omnipresent in their diet? In what form? Where did they transform, prepare, and cook it? Using normative and judicial archives as well as iconographic representations from the 18th century, this paper aims to show the importance of fresh and transformed fish in popular Venetian consumption.

Maroesjka Verhagen and Danielle van den Heuvel
‘Cheese, knowledge and authority: reconstructing work practices of women on early modern Dutch dairy farms’

The iconic Dutch cheese is inextricably linked to the success and wonder of the Dutch Republic. Economic historians have shown how dairy farms played a crucial role in the context of the Republic’s increasing agricultural specialisation, and concomitant urbanization and growth of overseas trade. It has also been argued that the ubiquity of cheesemaking left its mark on the exceptional culture of cleanliness in the province of Holland. The significance of cheese and cheesemaking in the culture and society of the Northern Netherlands is thus widely accepted. Strikingly, despite their crucial role in the production of cheese, the (largely) female producers, and their knowledge, skills, and responsibilities, have mostly stayed out of sight. They are overshadowed by idyllic imagery of smiling milkmaids, and of cheese itself, displayed on the famous seventeenth-century market scenes and still lifes in museum collections. This greatly limits our understanding of early modern cheese production practices, but crucially also of women’s claims of authority and expertise within the omnipresent dairy farms. Through performing several reconstruction experiments based on the instructions, we are drawn into the farm, hands in curd, to discover tacit knowledge that brings the ephemeral practices of early modern cheesemaking to light. By combining an analysis of prescriptive texts, imagery and reconstruction, this paper bridges the gap between the urban praise of cheese and the idea of a picturesque outdoors by showcasing not only the daily realities but also the crucial role of women within the early modern Dutch dairy farm.

Limor Yungman
‘Chercher la femme’: imagining women’s place in Arab cuisine practices’

Women in premodern Islamic world were either slaves, freed slaves, or Muslim noblewomen. This paper examines gender role and men-women power relations through the lenses of the most cliché place perceived in patriarchal societies as women’s “natural habitat,” the kitchen. It aims to explore the ways in which the sources depict and imagine females in the kitchen. As a masculine public sphere, men mostly worked either in palace kitchens or prepared street food in the marketplace, rendering women’s role in food preparation redundant. But an attentive reading of the Arabic sources shows that one needs to seek these women in order to find them, in both the real and the imagined worlds. Thus, slave girls were proficient, talented, and demanded court cooks in their own right. Women participated in court practices that went beyond cooking and which bound few earthly pleasures together: food, drinks, music, and dance. Other women worked in the market in food processing professions such as female flour millers and sellers (daqqāqa), female makers of fermented condiments (kammākha), female bakers (khabbāza), and female nougat makers (naṭifānīa). The tight relation between women and food is demonstrated through a lexicographical analysis of recipe names which had gender connotations, like the use of a suffix in the feminine form, or sweetmeats’ metaphoric names taken from erotic semantics, such as “aṣābiʿ Zaynab,” meaning “Zaynab’s fingers” for a sweetmeat of cannoli fingers filled with almonds, pistachios, and perfumed with rosewater, fried and dipped in sugar syrup or honey. This paper shows that women were an integral part of cuisine practices, revolving around food consumption as a total-sensual experience.

 

 

 

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