Eating Out in Europe: Picnics, Gourmet Dining and Snacks since the Late Eighteenth Century 9781350044838, 9781859736531

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List of Tables 3.1 3.2 13.1 16.1 16.2 17.1 17.2 17.3

18.1 19.1 19.2

19.3 21.1 21.2 21.3 21.4 21.5 21.6

The use of wheaten bread as harvest and ordinary food Size and cost of wheaten loaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Members of the Société de secours mutuels des cuisiniers de Paris Consumption expenditure in restaurants, cafés and hotels in the European Union Conceptual framework of technological innovations for eating out as a mass phenomenon The rise of the German catering trade in comparison with population growth, 1895–1907 Division of labour: functions of a restaurant around 1900 The physiological value of a normal midday meal in a restaurant compared with other forms of eating out in Berlin in 1908 Population aged 16–64 defined as obese in England, 1980–98 The number of food outlets, 1951–81 The frequency of take-away meals from Chinese restaurants or snack bars, or of eating at snack bars, by households in 1979/80 Eating out in the Netherlands, 1979/80 Ingredients of midday meals in the canteen of Funke & Hueck, March 1858 Times for work and times for breaks at Siemens and Halske, Berlin, Charlottenburg workshop, 1847–1900 The frequency and use of different canteens, 1890–1913 Average prices for lunch in 205 canteens of different industries Meal types offered in German canteens during the nineteenth century Menu plan for the Menage of the cast iron works of Friedrich Krupp, Essen, 1883

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42 44 217 264 265 284 285

290 311 320

328 328 353 355 357 359 360 360

List of Tables 21.7 21.8

21.9

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Menu plan for the Menage of the cast iron works of Friedrich Krupp, Essen, 1914 The consumption of single foodstuffs according to the menu plans of the cast iron works of Friedrich Krupp, Essen, 1883–1902 The consumption of single foodstuffs according to the consumption statistics of the cast iron works of Friedrich Krupp, Essen, 1901–10 Menu in the ‘homes for the better-off’ at the cast iron works of Friedrich Krupp, Essen, 13–20 October 1894

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361

361

362 363

List of Figures 1.1 Théo Humblet, Marchand de pommes frites et cinq consommateurs, 1950s 5.1 Opening page of the ‘Menu for the banquet of the noble guild assembly [of the Red Lion]’ 7.1 Number of guests in the spa district of Meran, 1883–1913 7.2 Population of the town of Meran 7.3 Employment of the resident population of the district of Meran in 1910 7.4 The entrance to the Forsterbräu from Habsburg Street, 1905 7.5 The annual production of the Forsterbräu 7.6 The development of the single breweries’ beer houses and depots in Meran 8.1 Garden of the Restaurant Götz 8.2 Menu card of the Hotel Meran, Marburg 9.1 Picnic food on black-and-white photograph 10. 1 Valentin de Zubiaurre, The Village Feast 12.1 Honoré Daumier, ‘Garçon! . . . voilà!’, 1839 12.2 Édouard Manet, Le café, 1869 16.1 The electrically lighted winter garden of the Hotel Krasnapolsky, Amsterdam, 1886 19.1 Private final consumption expenditure, 1925–85 19.2 The automatiek, 1960s 21.1 The Speisetransportwagen, 1890 21.2 Subsidy per portion and number of sold portions in the cast iron works of Friedrich Krupp, Essen, 1900–14 22.1 Menu des élémentaires (‘primary school menu’) Bordeaux, April 2002

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12 77 108 109 109 112 113 115 126 130 149 172 206 207 268 319 321 356 358 383

Preface and Acknowledgements Since its founding in 1989, the International Commission for Research into European Food History (ICREFH) has organized biennial colloquia.* The seventh colloquium was held at the castle of Alden Biesen, Belgium, in October 2001. It addressed the history of eating and drinking out since the late eighteenth century, and it brought together historians, sociologists, economists, geographers, ethnologists and anthropologists from all over Europe. According to a now well-established tradition, a book ensues from each colloquium. Although the books are based on the papers read and discussed at the colloquia, they are far more than mere proceedings: they are the result of a careful process of selection, criticism and revision. In this whole process, many people took a very active part. In the scientific field, the members of ICREFH’s Executive Committee should be named: Peter Atkins, Adel den Hartog, Eszter Kisbán and Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg (all helped by Derek Oddy). With their experience they contributed to the selection of the papers for the colloquium, as well as of the chapters for the book. Three brave English native speakers (all ICREFH members) read and corrected the chapters by non-native English speakers: Peter Atkins, Alexander Fenton and Derek Oddy. Frank Winter also read and corrected some texts of non-native English speakers This book would not have been possible without the work and time of all of them. In the field of organization, mention must be made of Hilde Schoefs of the Vlaams Centrum voor Volkscultuur (VCV, the ‘Flemish Centre for Popular Culture’). In the financial field mention must be made of the Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Flemish Fund for Scientific Research), the Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte (Faculty of Arts) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Nationale Loterij (National Lottery), and especially the Vlaams Centrum voor Volkscultuur for subsidizing the colloquium and the book. We also wish to thank Kathleen May, the History and Politics Editor at Berg, for the continuous help she offered. Marc Jacobs, Director VCV Peter Scholliers, President ICREFH Brussels, Autumn 2002 * Information on ICREFH may be found at its website: http://www.vub.ac.be/SGES/ ICREFH.html.

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–1– Vaut ou ne vaut pas le détour Conviviality, Custom(er)s and Public Places of New Taste since the Late Eighteenth Century

Marc Jacobs and Peter Scholliers

This book serves coarse bread eaten during harvesting in 1840, a cordial meal at a Berner inn in 1870, the robust food of a factory’s canteen in 1900, a sophisticated dinner at a three-star restaurant in 1950, as well as a hamburger consumed just outside a school gate in 1990. Each form testifies to distinct worlds with different meanings and aims, prices and services, quality and quantity, prestige and localization, and technological and organizational requirements. The histories of these worlds intertwine. Although there is a wide difference between picnicking, dining out, having an ice-cream and nibbling on a sandwich, and although it is necessary to tell the proper history of each, we think each history can hardly be written without awareness of the history of other forms. Indeed, people could have these four forms of eating out in one day, and, moreover, these forms require certain economic conveniences (such as cooking technology, adequate transportation and appropriate space), as well as certain social conditions (such as spare time, purchasing power, leisure preference and work obligation). They also confront and interfere with each other. For optimal digestion we have ordered the twenty-one chapters of this book in two three-course meals. The first three courses are part of a substantial meal, imbued with traditional elements, partly exploring occasions of eating in the open air or in inns, sprinkled with Alpine, Central European and other beers. The second three-course dinner evokes and explores a world of restaurants in modern Europe. This results in a breath-taking and appetizing panorama of expensive restaurants, canteens and the fast-food industry. In fact, each contribution is a dish on its own. Hence, other combinations are possible and can offer new insights. Several chapters cover both the old and the new, tradition and innovation, stressing collisions,

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Marc Jacobs and Peter Scholliers obstructions, interactions and negotiations. In this introduction we present a vista on this multifaceted menu.

Customs in Common The first part of the book mainly explores the majority of occasions of eating and drinking outside the private home for the very vast majority of the population in Europe between the Middle Ages and World War II, zooming in on the last two centuries. The geographical scope of this historical expedition is very broad. The ingredients of the first three-course meal of this book come not only from England (John Burnett) or Scotland (Alexander Fenton), but from all over the European continent: Belgium and the Netherlands (Marc Jacobs), France (Julia Csergo), Norway (Virginie Amilien), Switzerland (Beat Kümin and Christoph Guggenbühl), Italy (Oliver Haid), Slovenia (Maja Godina-Golija) and Hungary (Eszter Kisbán). The chapters of Part I trace a very slow penetration or adoption of new forms of modern organization of preparing, serving and consuming lunches and dinners outside the house. This canvas leads us to consider the (lack of) confrontation or interaction between the new arrangements for gourmand or hungry customers, on the one hand, and the empire of customary, everyday or ritualized eating out, on the other.

Home-made Take-away for the Road Vaut le détour is the ultimate qualification of star-quality restaurants in French Michelin gourmet cartography. The first section of Part I is about Ne vaut pas le detour. It is about eating and drinking on the road, in the field and in the street. As John Burnett points out, it makes sense to make an analytical distinction between at least two categories of eating in the open air: instances framed by (a) work(ing day) and instances connected to leisure. Not all people working outside their own house can go home or to a caterer to have lunch. In those situations, eating out is a necessity, a matter of common sense and economic or social calculation. One habitual solution was that food was prepared at home and carried to the field or the factory: home-made take-away. In the first part of this book, Alexander Fenton, Eszter Kisbán and John Burnett throw light on groups of common people working and eating in the fields in Scotland, Hungary and England. It is the work situation that generates the eating out as a part of the normal –2–

Vaut ou ne vaut pas le détour path of the everyday. Their ‘menu’ in the field changed slowly and almost invisibly in relation to larger social and economic changes. John Burnett points out that in urban contexts far more alternatives were available: in London in 1860, there were no less than twelve different types of services of selling food for eating in the street, including pea soup, fried fish, baked potatoes and ham sandwiches. In the second part of this book other and more recent indoor solutions to the lunch problem of working people are discussed: ranging from industrial canteens in Germany (Ulrike Thoms) to snacks and fast-food restaurants (Derek Oddy, and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Anneke van Otterloo). Anne Lhuissier outlines several regimes of eating out among (factory) workers in nineteenth-century France, including the eating of home-made sandwiches in pubs and inns or in canteens. Next to what Burnett calls refuelling of the body for continued labour, there is eating out for fun and pleasure. As the urbanization process gained momentum in the nineteenth century, the desire to escape the city in a tamed ‘nature’ became more important. Specific forms of eating in the open air (in the meadows, in the woods or near a panorama) were cultivated in a ‘picnic’. People enjoyed eating together in strange positions (lying or sitting on the grass, using a tablecloth, eating without forks), and having food somewhere else. ‘Else’ is in the open, the end destination of a walk, a food and field pilgrimage, eating for fun, being part of a painted picture of the countryside, where peasants (eating poorly) in the distance could be a component of the romantic decor. Julia Csergo focuses entirely on the picnic, by looking at semantics, rules and rituals. The farmers and harvesters of Scotland, Hungary and England working everyday in the fields do not picnic. This word in this context would be the wrong register. Csergo devotes attention to semantic evolutions of words for eating on grass, a special example of which is the picnic. This is connected to a time out, an extra-ordinary situation of leisure, a ritual of eating together without ‘check please’ – as rite d’intégration. Csergo discovers an underlying arrangement of pooling: participants bringing parts or courses of the meal or pooling money before going out. Picnicking and camping with cooking in the open are connected to paid holidays, and hence to the history of vacation and leisure. Csergo points to the slow development of rituals and accompanying paraphernalia, in particular the picnic basket, filled with romantic connotations. In present-day Belgium, common people taking food along from home to eat in the open air or beach are called, in a denigrating tone, frigoboxtoeristen, i.e. the tourists with portable fridge boxes. Portable fridge boxes are paradigmatic examples of cheap, serial industrial work, made out of plastic, extending the action –3–

Marc Jacobs and Peter Scholliers radius of travellers; making an association with bucolic romanticism unlikely. These people come to consume the landscape or the setting without buying drinks or food on the spot.

Sociability, Models and Multi-layered Morals Picnicking is eating in the open, and thus being seen by others. In interpreting the behaviour of people eating in the open, it is crucial to consider frames of interpretation and connotation, grounds for moral and legal judgements. Places where alcohol was being served, especially, proved prone to moralizing and comments. Results of new research on everyday and festive eating and drinking yield an interesting variation on the debate, launched by Peter Burke in the 1970s, about the growing divergence between elite and popular cultures. Differentiation is a key concept here, next to appropriation and demarcation. In this book Christoph Guggenbühl makes use of emic interpretations of elite groups in Switzerland. He emphasizes that from the end of the eighteenth century a differentiation of catering businesses established itself. Guggenbühl discusses the many functions of inns and shows how they were decanted into moral issues. The moralizing gaze was also present in middle-class observations of the (eating) habits of French labourers in the nineteenth century, as Anne Lhuissier demonstrates. Oliver Haid adds to this debate the case of Meran, where the introduction of a beer culture in a wine region did not pass unnoticed. Beat Kümin discusses gastronomic culture in early modern inns. He questions the sharp cut-off before and after the ‘modern’ restaurant (which is vindicated by many authors, including, in this volume, Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg), with enhanced consumer choice, flexible dining times and menus with different dishes. Sources for early-modern Central Europe, in particular the Swiss republic of Bern and the principality of Bavaria, reveal variety, both in dining options and catering quality, à la carte selection options and table d’hôte menus. The major towns provided exquisite dining contexts. Kümin launches the thesis that what was crucial was not the invention of individualized service, but the creation of establishments exclusively dedicated to customer choice. Restaurants built on earlier practices but wrapped the eating experience in a special context, promoted an environment of leisurely and quality time consuming indulgence and bourgeois ostentation. In contrast to inns, they gradually moved away from the table d’hôte system and the offer of accommodation facilities. Maja Godina-Golija provides a case study of food available in catering establishments in the city and the countryside in Slovenia at the end of the –4–

Vaut ou ne vaut pas le détour nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The distribution of specific institutions of inns and then restaurants gives an insight into the kind of food potentially within reach. It is clear that a wideranging virtual menu of food and dining arrangements was available in Slovenia. Inhabitants and travellers in the region had access to many sorts of dishes, if they had the means.

Time Out: Beneath the Paying Customers, the Customs There is a relation between eating out and having a home. Soup kitchens or charity meals in the open air, in city streets or squares, are not addressed here. People invited to a feast usually do not pay (but bring gifts and invite their hosts on another occasion). This is often embedded in what Pierre Bourdieu called an economy of symbolic goods. Eszter Kisbán emphasizes that in nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Hungary wedding meals were the opposite of everyday meals, having their own rules and norms. Alexander Fenton describes how, in mid-twentieth-century Scotland, employers had to provide meals free of charge to children granted exemption from school attendance for helping in the harvest. In a number of chapters of this book, ‘cash’ is suspended. Food can be carried to the field but it is not paid for there; it is distributed. Paying at the picnic is also not customary, although, as noted above, pooling was organized or people brought their own food. Nevertheless, the carrying has its price: a time investment at home, an effort to keep and store food on the way (and money is more economical, it takes up less space, volume and weight). We may discover a number of occasions of eating and drinking out where the food or drinks are not paid for by the diners themselves. Marc Jacobs explores a tip of the iceberg of eating food for free (but, on a closer look, with social strings attached). Reciprocity and unwritten rules are important topics in the history of semi-public wining and dining. Eating in public is also a way to communicate with other groups or individuals. The concept of the tournée générale, when someone pays for all the clientele at an inn, is not usual in a restaurant. It is possible to invite a whole group to a restaurant, on the occasion of a wedding or a funeral, but at the time a number of the normal rules change (no menu, no open access for outsiders). Rituals involving eating out, or in front of other households, remind us of alternative needs, codes and expectations and bring to mind a broad range of possibilities and repertoires. Symbolic violence often accompanied rites of passage or forms of collective action, resulting in free meals or in conspicuous food consumption. –5–

Marc Jacobs and Peter Scholliers

Nothing New under the Sun? Most chapters of the book show how menus gradually changed over time. Special occasions of eating in public functioned as a serving-hatch for innovations on the menu of everyday life. Kisbán suggests that public occasions of hospitality, traditional feasts and the liminal zone of rites de passages in the country were important for the process of food innovation. Fenton emphasizes that eating out in peripheral areas is not frozen in time. He identifies a process of endogenous development: slowly, almost imperceptibly, but cumulatively, eating habits change. Specific attempts at intervention, central direction, do not necessarily have a lasting effect on eating habits. However, eating landscapes do change. New objects are introduced (picnic baskets, hamburger packs . . .). New settings are created. New dealers operate. New distribution lines are organized. New words are developed. This is far from just a contribution to ‘oral history’: the history of eating out involves all senses, it is a total experience. Seeing the food, seeing the other eaters, the people serving, smelling the food, hearing the food and the other eaters, and the people serving, touching the food . . . Eating out is also about reflecting on the food and the situation. The context evokes (or is the result of) all kinds of strings attached to the food: incentives of perception, being conscious of, or alert to, implication and obligations when eating the food (to pay, to shift to a ritual mode of etiquette, to be polite . . .). This book reopens an old but never concluded debate of the 1980s: a discussion on popular and elite culture about the relations, actions, perceptions and interventions of elite groups seeking distinction and distance, on the one hand, and the vast majority of the population, on the other. Next to Roger Chartier, who discussed the concept of appropriation, E. P. Thompson temporarily closed the debate in his Customs in Common. He pointed to the definition that was propagated by Peter Burke, who approached culture as a system of shared meaning, attitudes and values, and the symbolic forms (performances, artefacts) in which they are embodied. Thompson added an agonistic view to this consensual view: But a culture is also a pool of diverse resources, in which traffic passes between the literate and the oral, the super-ordinate and the subordinate, the village and the metropolis; it is an arena of elements full of conflict, which requires some compelling pressure – as, for example, nationalism or prevalent religious orthodoxy or class consciousness – to take form as ‘system’ [. . .]. The plebeian culture which clothed itself in the rhetoric of ‘custom’ [. . .] was not self-defining or

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Vaut ou ne vaut pas le détour independent of external influences. It had taken form defensively, in opposition to the constraints and controls of the patrician rulers.1

Thompson emphasizes the relations of power, which are masked by the rituals of paternalism and deference. The history of the restaurant in the transition from early-modern to modern society and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is also the history of service. Rituals of deference and service are available in eating out situations, when money is exchanged. E. P. Thompson formulated a programme of research that requires attention today in the study of popular culture, peripheral and/or traditional communities. Needs and expectations should be major themes: The industrial revolution and accompanying demographic revolution were the backgrounds to the greatest transformation in history, in revolutionizing ‘needs’ and in destroying the authority of customary expectations. This is what most marks the ‘pre-industrial’ or the ‘traditional’ from the modern world [. . .] this transformation, this remodelling of ‘need’ and this raising of the threshold of material expectations (along with the devaluation of traditional cultural satisfactions) continues with irreversible pressure today, accelerated everywhere by universally available means of communication.2

This is precisely a central problem in the book we present here, in particular in the contributions by Beat Kümin, Julia Csergo and Stephen Mennell. Tradition and the dissolving or reoriented opposition between popular and elite culture, and the mediation between the two, is very present in the chapter by Virginie Amilien. Taking Norway in the last decade as her case, she investigates the confrontation between a traditional way of eating and thinking about food, on the one hand, and the very (post)modern style of eating in restaurants, on the other. She stresses the still prevalent traditional values of eating (in), observes the clamorous discourse on dining out in restaurants, and opposes both to the marginal success of eating out in restaurants. She emphasizes the fracture with traditional, indoor-eating Norway. In doing so, she accurately embodies the bridge as well as the tensions between Part I and Part II of this book.

New Places, Choices and Tastes One may directly connect today’s elegant brasseries to the taverns of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to the restaurants and grand hotels of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The main feature of –7–

Marc Jacobs and Peter Scholliers the history of this particular type of eating out would then be the democratization of a once rather elitist practice. Eating out in semi-public places, therefore, would testify to a key element of the history of the West during the past three centuries. Yet the difference between eating out in preindustrial, industrial and post-industrial times is not only a mere matter of scale, meaning that more people would be able to visit restaurants more regularly, and spend more money, crucial though this is. It is equally necessary to study the characteristics of eating places in that past and present, as well as how they were perceived, labelled, classified and represented. It then becomes clear that ‘democratization’ does not refer to question of access of the exquisite restaurant to all people, but that democratization of the restaurant involves the search for identification, status, distinction and pleasure for all. In the twenty-first century, there are ‘restaurant’ accommodations for every purse and budget. Nowadays, Europeans are eating out on a larger scale than ever before, but definitely when they do so they purchase prepared food instead of bringing it with them. Norway may be an exception, but in most European countries since 1950, many individuals and households have started to increase their expenditure on ‘eating out’. This growth has been accompanied by the multiplication of culinary columns and tips in the media. Part II deals with this history of numerous innovations related to outdoors eating in Europe since the late eighteenth century and up to today. It focuses on the culinary capital, Paris, and on a number of neighbouring countries in Western Europe, in particular on France (Karin Becker, Alain Drouard, Anne Lhuissier and Isabelle Téchouyeres), on the United Kingdom (Alan Warde and Derek Oddy), on Germany (HansJürgen Teuteberg and Ulrike Thoms) and the Netherlands (Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Anneke van Otterloo). Adel den Hartog discusses technological innovations in an international perspective, while Stephen Mennell touches upon the public sphere of the modern era.

Cookery Writing and Culinary Zeniths The perception, denotation, classification and representation of semi-public eating places may be explained by three intimately related phenomena, namely food, eaters and writers.3 ‘Culinary zeniths’, or places in certain periods that are generally viewed as successful with regard to food (in terms of gastronomy and sales), necessitate innovative supply, high demand and extensive discourse. An example of a successful culinary epoch would be the surrounding of the Parisian Jardin du Palais Royal in

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Vaut ou ne vaut pas le détour the 1800s, with great chefs, affluent eaters and culinary commentators. Another example, suggesting that the gourmet connotation is not required, would be the global burger-culture in the 1990s, with the setting up of thousands of similar restaurants, a desirous public and extensive, albeit often hostile, writing (and action). The role of writing cultivating culinary zeniths has already been assessed,4 but it has primarily been limited to the culinary criticism of professionals like Grimod, Curnonsky or Gault and Millau. ‘Culinary discourse’ is understood here as the bundle of all written accounts dealing with food. The discourse actually contributed to the shaping of a new culture, for which it was a requirement. Such is a central point made by Karin Becker and Alan Warde in this book, and by Stephen Mennell, who attributes to gastronomic writing a cardinal place in the forming of ‘public opinion’. All three authors stress the importance of writing with regard to the construction of gastronomy, gourmets and taste, and they explore further the information provided by culinary discourse. Writers reported on food, prices, dishes and, perhaps above all, on places. Atmospheres were depicted, the clientele was discussed, the service and staff were valued, the decoration was commented on, and the general environment (music, conviviality . . .) was described. Particularly the new-style restaurant (à la carte, lavishly, expensive and elitist) enticed many to write.

Creating Semi-public Places of Endless Choice: Restaurants in All Forms, Dishes of All Tastes Luxury food was, of course, not only prepared in fancy restaurants. Long before and after 1800, the rich and famous used professional cooks. Also, domestic caterers brought and served fine food at home. Against Kümin’s assertion, several authors suggest here and elsewhere that the emergence of the modern restaurant around 1800 marked an important qualitative leap in many respects. First, restaurants were open luxurious places, in principle accessible to everyone (but totally different from the openness of a picnic!). Surely, the salle (or dining room) was a restricted area, only accessible to an elite. Their privacy was brought into the public: the ambiguity between private and public is nicely illustrated by the placing of individual (‘own’) tables in one room (opposed to the ‘collective’ table d’hôte). Hence, our classification of ‘semi-public’ (or ‘semi-private’). In this book, Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg stresses the emergence of the ‘private’ table, while Stephen –9–

Marc Jacobs and Peter Scholliers Mennell addresses the issue of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ of eating. Adel den Hartog, in turn, addresses a crucial condition of the restaurant’s selective accessibility, namely technology. Among other things, he demonstrates the importance of subsequent types of lighting to create special effects, new gimmicks and prolonged opening hours. Second, this ‘private eating in public’ entailed new rules and prescriptions. The eater could be recognized as a gourmet or a connoisseur by other eaters, the staff and – when talked and written about – the wider public, only if certain (invisible, subtle, discrete) rules had been met. Such rules did change over time (again, here was a crucial role for writers in judging and creating ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste, places and manners). Social codes in restaurants were used to exclude and include, but they could also be acquired, interpreted and applied for transgression. In a way, the temperance movement (restriction and self-control) may be seen, mutatis mutandis, as an example of severe but clear rules and prescriptions. Third, a restaurant offered a choice of dishes, thus leaving the decision of what to eat to the individual – a theme addressed by Teuteberg and Warde. The change of the menu card reflected this innovation: before the breakthrough of the restaurant (and still today at weddings or private parties) a menu was mostly a card that informed the eater what he or she would eat, but with the restaurant a menu became a card that informed the eater about the choice and the price.5 It was a key element that allowed the marking of boundaries, the stressing of preferences, the construction of good taste, and distinguished the connoisseur from the parvenu. Fourth, restaurants were enterprises, confronted with market rules of price setting, production cost, sale figures, workforce turnover, productivity and competitiveness. Equally, wage demands, unions, strikes, apprenticeship, working conditions and schooling were part of a restaurant’s daily life. Such matters have hardly been studied, except perhaps for businesses and businessmen if they had names like Escoffier, Bocuse and other stars. Alain Drouard explores the covert world of (French) cooks, stressing their search for status, recognition and professionalism. Elements of coping with this, as well as with competition, were specialization, innovation and increasing of choice, a process that was bound to be incessantly renewed. This creation and retention of a niche in the bourgeois public sphere existed right from the start of the modern restaurant, and perhaps formed the most obvious – and surely the most commented upon – difference with regard to the traditional inn or tavern. Adel den Hartog shows how the use of technological devices contributed to such a creation. Fifth, individual and collective pleasures were also of great importance, with fine food being one element among many to enjoy alongside – 10 –

Vaut ou ne vaut pas le détour conversation, flirting, joking, laughing, et cetera. Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg and Virginie Amilien stress this element of pleasure. The combination of these five features resulted in a semi-public place that soon became the locus of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture in the entire world. The plot between chefs, eaters and writers consisted of a non-stop search for distinction, innovation, novelties, surprise and amazement with new tastes, new dishes, new drinks, new tastes, new experiences, new forms, new chefs, new everything . . . Amilien demonstrates that this plot is still very active nowadays.

Fast, Faster and Fastest Food Accessibility, choice, expanding supply and pleasure are characteristics of fancy and tourist restaurants; it may be argued that the same goes for fast-food restaurants. The accessibility of such restaurants is general, though, in 1970s Europe, for various reasons (such as relatively high prices and a type of eating experience and an image that were culturally unfamiliar) there was some reluctance to enter a Burger King. Today, these places are wide open to a diverse clientele, with particular focus on youngsters. The matter of choice and expanding supply seems more difficult to deal with. Whether a sandwich bar, a fish-and-chip shop or a burger restaurant, the supplied food is very similar in each type of restaurant all over the globe. Nevertheless, choice increases, adapting to custom and taste, with an enlarging supply of cheeseburgers, chicken burgers, nuggets or hulaburgers. Moreover, a local touch is added to the burger culture: in France during the summer of 2001, for example, ‘a regional touch to your hamburger’ was advertised, while sandwiches with daily changing regional sorts of cheese were sold. Such innovations are linked to the ‘Happy Meal’, which intends to make the food in this type of restaurant into a total experience of fun. Sure, this is marketing talk. For many (young) children, however, eating out in a burger restaurant represents their very first ‘restaurant experience’, often during the celebration of a birthday party: a double rite of passage indeed. Quite clearly, eating in a fast-food restaurant may be a very enjoyable event. It remains to be seen whether ‘shortorder cooking’ arrangements provide as much pleasure to those preparing the meals. This kind of eating out provoked the most sturdy reactions related to pureness, authenticity, identity, taste, gourmandise, and so on, brought together in the slow-food movement and erupting sometimes in assaults

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Marc Jacobs and Peter Scholliers on burger restaurants. The intensity of this movement may be linked to globalization processes that conflict with national agriculture, the local restaurant industry and ‘authentic’ taste. Here, globalization and regionalization come together.6 Yet fast-food businesses have long existed and can hardly be viewed as a pure US import.7 John Burnett shows that fish-and-chip shops, charcutiers, tea-shops, friteries, coffee and sandwich bars and food stalls of various sorts were set up in cities and places with crowds long before the coming of the US-style hamburger restaurant. Two chapters address

Figure 1.1 Pommes frites: the cheapest way of eating out, Belgium in the 1950s. Théo Humblet, Marchand de pommes frites et cinq consommateurs. Source: © Prentenkabinet, Royal Library, Brussels

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Vaut ou ne vaut pas le détour the history of the snack restaurant. Derek Oddy surveys the British fastfood industry since the 1880s, linking its development to work, shopping and leisure, and thus underlining once more the mixture between coercion and pleasure. He surveys the development of various forms of eating out in the fast way, seeing a period of transition in the 1970s, and ends up trying to define the fast-food eater in the UK in the 1990s. Anneke van Otterloo and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze discuss the Dutch variant of the snack restaurant, with special emphasis on ‘eating out of the wall’. They detect a clear break around 1960, when the snacking started to reshape the traditional meal pattern. Van Otterloo and Albert de la Bruhèze link these developments to broad social and economic changes, like the increase of purchasing power and leisure time, individualization and technological breakthroughs. They stress the implication of the food system, meaning that consumption of snacks cannot be studied without looking at production and distribution.

Diffusing Public Places of Discipline It would be wrong to conceive the modern history of eating out solely from the angle of fancy and popular restaurants, taverns, snack bars or inns. If it is accepted that ‘innovation’ is an important feature of the modern eating-out industry, then innovative places were also to be found elsewhere. Evidently, the luxury Parisian Café Riche had a totally different aura than a school canteen of the neighbouring arrondissement, but such canteens were also places of innovation with enormous influence. This opens up the wide field of eating (out) in schools, factories, army and police barracks (and indeed aeroplanes). It is a mistake to think of these public-eating places wholly in terms of coercion, control and the sphere of grimy barracks. In many such communities, eating was a cherished moment to which special meaning was attributed. It could be a source of joy when a particular dish was served, a special desert was put on the table, or an extra bottle of beer was allowed. However, discipline was more at stake. In this book Anne Lhuissier uses the investigation of the Le Play group into eating habits of workers in nineteenth-century France, which was conducted with a sheer moralizing end. The workers’ lunch was frugal, prodigal or totally excessive (each time with a plausible reason). Control, however, was complete when workers (or students, policemen . . .) were fed by the institution. Feeding a larger group necessitated financial control, and administrators have long calculated the daily price per person. Efficiency was high

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Marc Jacobs and Peter Scholliers on the agenda. One consequence was that technological devices were first introduced in larger kitchens, a point well made by Adel den Hartog. Second, feeding a larger group necessitated social control involving strict rules, hierarchy and organization. In many schools, for example, food was used as a means to punish or reward. Third, ‘mass feeding’ permitted a contribution to the construction and spreading of ideology. In this book, Isabelle Téchouyeres illustrates this by looking at the ‘republican’ debate on the educational aspect of school meals in the long twentieth century. In doing so, she also demonstrates the importance and interest France (be it teachers, parents, politicians, children . . .) has in taste and gastronomy. This leads to the fourth point: according to the development and perception of nutritional science, administrators of larger kitchens considered the energetic values of food (often linking this to the cost), as well as hygienic rules. Ulrike Thoms considers here industrial canteens in Germany between 1850 and 1950, stressing the influence of nutritionists who promoted ‘rational’ feeding. In particular, she looks at the building of new canteens and kitchens, the technology of this type of food serving, and, again, social and ideological implications. Through the controlling of eaters in public eating and drinking places, many innovations were introduced. In this respect, the distance between the Parisian Café Riche and the army canteen of the adjacent district was not that big. This introduction merely echoes the richness of all chapters of this book. It presents just one plat du jour of a kitchen that in facts serves many appetizing tapas with new approaches, questions and insights. Thus, the history of the cooks, the fast-food bars, the industrial canteens, the tourist restaurants, the writing on taste or the technology of eating out is highlighted. Other aspects, such as demographic pressure, the history of businesses, the influencing of eaters and eating, foreign restaurants or cooking techniques are present in this book and deserve equally to be discussed. We hope that the reader has found a nice carte du jour for many days here.

Notes 1. Thompson, 1991, 6. 2. Thompson, 1991, 14. 3. To us, ‘writing’ implies necessarily its more natural form, i.e. talking. Yet oral comments alone did and do not suffice to shape a culinary – 14 –

Vaut ou ne vaut pas le détour

4. 5. 6. 7.

climax (cf. Goody, 1998, 2). Painters, photographers and film makers may be added to writers, including, therefore, the imagery used in advertising, menu cards, posters, films, and the like. E.g. Pitte, 1991, 181–91; Goody, 1998; and, in particular, Ory, 1998. Spang, 2000, 76–8. Goody, 1998, 166. The US fast-food style did, however, change ‘traditional’ eating on the street in terms of production, preparing, serving, presentation, significance and calories (cf. Fernández-Armesto, 2001, 248).

References Fernández-Armesto, F. (2001), Food: A History, London: Macmillan. Goody, J. (1998), Food and Love. A Cultural History of East and West, London and New York: Verso. Ory, P. (1998), Le discours gastronomique français des origines à nos jours, Paris: Julliard. Pitte, J. R. (1991), Gastronomie française: Histoire et géographie d’une passion, Paris: Fayard. Spang, R. L. (2000), The Invention of the Restaurant. Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, Cambridge, (Mass.): Harvard University Press. Thompson, E. P. (1991), Customs in Common, London: Merlin Press.

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Meals in the Open Air

–2– Eating in the Open Air in England, 1830–1914 John Burnett

‘Eating out’ may be defined as food consumed outside the household, either from necessity or from choice. The term usually evokes images of meals eaten in commercial establishments like hotels and restaurants, or in public institutions such as hospitals or schools, but in England in the nineteenth century certain groups consumed much food outside any formal setting, in the open air. This was literally ‘eating out’, often required by the nature of work but sometimes enjoyed as a leisure activity integral to a holiday, excursion or other outdoor event. Eating in the open therefore occurred within two very different contexts, one associated with the necessity of work, the other with the choice of leisure.

Farm Workers Despite England’s shift to an urban, industrial economy, agricultural labourers remained the largest male occupational group – 965,000 in 1851 and still 871,000 in 1881. Although their average standard of living was among the lowest of any fully employed workers, they ‘ate out’ more than any other since the various farming operations of ploughing, seeding, weeding and harvesting took them into the fields in all but the worst weather. As they were often too far to return home for meals during the day, the food eaten out had to sustain the workers over several meal breaks, since in summer work began at daybreak and continued until dusk. In busy seasons like hay- and corn-harvest a first breakfast was sometimes eaten in the fields before 6 a.m., a second breakfast or ‘eight o’clock’, a ‘bever’ (from the French beivre, a short break with drink) around 10 a.m., the main meal or ‘nuncheon’ at midday, and a second ‘bever’ in the afternoon, before returning home for a cooked supper.1 The food available for all these occasions depended on the labourer’s earnings, the size and ages of

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John Burnett his family, the region of the country, and the economic state of the agricultural industry of which he was an essential, though under-valued, part. In the long depression after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, agricultural wages sank to as little as 4/6d a week in some southern counties, 5/0d–8/0d in others, but up to 12/0d in Lancashire, where industrial employment pushed up the level.2 When William Cobbett toured the countryside in 1830 he was indignant about the conditions of the labourers, many of whom could only exist with the support of poor relief. English peasants, he believed, were ‘the worst-used labouring people upon the face of the earth. Dogs and hogs and horses are treated with more civility, and as for food and lodging, how gladly would the labourers change with them!’3 By 1850 wages had risen a little to an average of 9/ 6d a week, though still only 7–8/- in many southern and eastern counties. Of the Dorset labourer, James Caird wrote: ‘He takes with him to the field a piece of bread and (if he has not a growing family and can afford it) cheese to eat at midday. He returns home to a few potatoes and possibly a little bacon, though only those who are better-off can afford that.’4 At this semi-starvation level there was little more than the cheapest filling foods, bread and potatoes, made more palatable where possible by small amounts of cheese, bacon, butter, tea and sugar. In the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of agricultural prosperity between 1850 and the mid-1870s there were some indications of improvement, though in 1863 Dr Edward Smith calculated the average weekly consumption of English labourers as 11.6 lb of bread, 4.4 lb of potatoes (though much more if they had the use of an allotment), 15.3 oz of meat or bacon and 5.2 oz of total fats. This diet provided 2,760 kilocalories a day, 70 g of protein and 54 g of fat, quite inadequate for a man engaged in heavy manual work. The explanation, as Smith reported, was that the father ‘eats a larger share of the food than other members of the family (including, in the poorer districts, nearly all the meat and bacon)’.5 This meant that the diets of wives and children were very deficient, especially if they too were employed in field labour. One of the most poignant accounts of child exploitation comes from those who worked under the ‘gang system’ in East Anglia, where children from the age of five upwards worked under the control of a ‘gang-master’ in all weathers: one witness reported that at the age of eight she was the oldest in a gang of forty children, and that ‘In all the four years I worked in the fields, I never worked one hour under cover of a barn, and only once did we have a meal in a house.’6 In packing up food for a man, much depended on the skill and ingenuity of the housewife in making a little go a long way and in devising tasty ‘relishes’ to break the monotony of bread. In Harpenden, Hertfordshire, – 22 –

Eating in the Open Air in England in the 1860s, where wages were 11–13/- a week, few cottages had an oven or range and most meals were cooked in a large pot over an open fire: whatever meat was available, flour dumplings, potatoes and greens were all boiled together, though in separate nets which allowed cooking times to be varied. The poorer labourers took with them large ‘doorsteps’ of bread, with cheese, an onion and, if possible, a pint of beer, and thought it ‘a meal fit for a king’, but the better-off also had a dumpling with a filling of meat chopped up small (flank of beef, streaky bacon, pickled pork or liver), potato, onion and parsley, the proportion of meat usually a quarter or less. These were eaten cold or heated over a gypsy fire, or a bloater was wrapped in several layers of newspaper and cooked in the embers.7 The dumpling was the favourite, since it combined sustenance with palatability; it fulfilled a similar role to the pasty of Cornwall and the West Country, which could provide a two-course meal with meat, potato, carrot, onion and herbs at one end, and apple or jam at the other. In the Midlands and North the greater availability of fuel, vegetables and different cereals allowed more cooking of soups, stews, porridge and other oatmeal products, but most of these did not provide portable foods for the field. In Staffordshire in the 1870s little white bread was eaten by labourers: ‘We lived mainly on oatmeal, which was made into flat, sour cakes, like gramophone records . . . Usually enough were made at one baking to last a week or ten days. By that time they would be covered by green, furry mould, which would be scraped off.’8 By the 1880s improvements in the labourer’s standard of living were becoming more evident, due partly to modest wage increases but also to reductions in the prices of bread, sugar, tea and other necessities. Even in the still poor county of Somerset the labourer’s day began with a substantial breakfast of bacon and fried potatoes at home, followed by a ‘ten o’clock’ in the field of bread, cheese and cider, a midday meal of bread, bacon or other cold meat with more cider, and another break at four o’clock for bread and cheese before returning home for a supper of cooked meat or fish, hot vegetables, bread, butter and tea, ‘making a grand total of no insignificant amount, and which only fairly hard work and fresh air enable him to digest’.9 The more frequent mention of meat by this time is significant (usually pork or bacon), particularly where the labourer was able to fatten a pig, even if half had to go to the mealman who supplied some of its food. Edwin Grey described the rituals of eating in the open by Hertfordshire labourers in the 1870s. The food was packed up by the women overnight and carried in a basket made of plaited rush with a flap and two handles, carried over the shoulder by a stout cord. The basket always contained some salt, for which the older men used a bullock’s horn, also a can of cold – 23 –

John Burnett tea and a tin mug for beer. The men sat in a circle under a tree or hedge and made their bread into a thick sandwich with whatever filling had been provided; they then cut pieces from the ‘thumb-bit’ with the pocket-knife which they all carried. In winter they made a fire to heat their cans of tea, and fashioned toasting forks of hazel wood to cook bloaters or other foods. As a somewhat outside observer, Grey wrote: ‘I used often to find these [meals] very cheerful and amusing times, with many a laugh at the jokes bandied about; for one thing, no one apparently suffered with indigestion [. . .] all seemed to have excellent appetites and enjoyed their homely fare to the utmost.’10 No doubt the conviviality of these occasions owed something to the ‘allowance’ of beer or cider that many farmers gave, especially for heavy or tedious work, or to encourage extra effort at harvest-time. This was a long-standing custom, approved by most workers except the small minority who had ‘taken the pledge’ of teetotalism and objected to a perquisite in which they did not share. The quantity and strength of the ‘allowance’ varied considerably: in some areas ‘small beer’ (the second mashing of the malt) was given throughout the year; in others strong beer during particular tasks – in Cambridgeshire at haymaking and harvest a pint at each of the five meal-breaks;11 in Bedfordshire four or five pints during the strenuous work of sheep-shearing.12 In the West of England, cider, home-made on hundreds of farms, took the place of beer, and in the eighteenth century, if contemporary accounts are to be believed, six pints a day and up to twenty-four pints in the harvest-field had been allowed.13 By the later nineteenth century the custom was under attack from temperance reformers and philanthropists who objected to this disguised form of ‘truck’ (part-payment of wages in kind): in north Devon in the 1870s Canon Girdlestone was indignant that labourers’ wages were still only 8/ - or 9/- a week, plus three or four pints of cider a day, ‘very washy and sour . . . valued at 2/- a week and much over-valued’.14 The problem was that the substitution of tea or proprietary temperance drinks like ‘Stokos’ (made from oatmeal and cocoa) was not greatly popular. Beer provided energy – up to 200 kilocalories a pint depending on strength – while both beer and cider were effective thirst-quenchers and helped to moisten dry foods. Some labourers tried to save a little to take home for supper, but few were heavy drinkers, if only because they could not afford to be other. At ‘Lark Rise’ in north Oxfordshire, wives generally allowed their husbands 1/- a week for pocket-money, which went mainly on beer and tobacco. Nearly all the men went to the public house each evening, and made half a pint last for an hour or more; they went for companionship as much as the drink, and argued that it saved keeping up the fire at home since wives and children went to bed early.15 – 24 –

Eating in the Open Air in England

The Urban Working Class From a dietary perspective town life had both advantages and disadvantages, especially for the poorer inhabitants. In London and other large cities most lived in crowded accommodation, often in only one or two rooms in a divided house which lacked adequate kitchens: cooking was limited to what could be done over an open fire, mainly boiling and frying. In northern towns most back-to-back cottages had a cast-iron range, but many women, married as well as single, worked long hours in factories and had little time or energy to develop culinary skills. However, town life had certain advantages over the countryside, especially a great number of small shops where tiny quantities of essentials like bread, cheese, tea and sugar could be bought on a daily, even a meal-by-meal, basis according to resources. Towns also had specialist pork butchers, selling local varieties of pies, sausages and spiced meats such as faggots, haslet and black pudding, which added valued ‘relishes’ to the monotony of bread. As well as fixed shops, most towns also had markets for fruit, vegetables, meat and fish, where on Saturday evenings perishable food was sold off cheaply. With little, if any, opportunity for town dwellers to grow any of their food, urban diet was necessarily more commercialized than the rural, and food choices depended even more on income. In slum areas of towns, a common sight was that of children sitting on the doorstep eating a piece of bread. This was not quite eating ‘out’, but poor children took every opportunity of escaping from overcrowded homes, not only for play but also in the hope of supplementing their rations. The streets offered numerous possibilities of acquiring food, legitimately or illegitimately. Young girls took early morning jobs as ‘stepgirls’ (employed to clean the steps of middle-class houses) before school, earning 2d a day and a breakfast of dripping toast and cocoa.16 As a girl of ten, the future Mrs Layton went to work as a baby-minder to a small shopkeeper, and observed what men bought for their dinners – a pennyworth of bread with two ounces of German sausage, or a pennyworth of bread with a hole made in the middle for a halfpennyworth of treacle.17 At the age of nine, William Luby of Hulme, near Manchester, was selling newspapers and buying his dinner from a street soup-seller for a halfpenny, but he noticed that when the man’s trade was good the soup became very thin.18 Another common sight in poor areas of Victorian towns was of ragged children waiting outside factory gates at the end of the day begging for any left-overs from the men’s midday meal – Monday was reckoned to be best, as some men did not eat so much after Sunday’s eating and drinking. – 25 –

John Burnett Surprisingly, there is little indication from contemporary accounts of how many men brought food from home to eat at work, or of what it consisted, but it would probably be wrong to assume that this was the normal practice which it became later. In poor households little food was left overnight for lack of means and lack of safe storage; also, most men left home very early, before wives were about to pack up food, even if available. Thomas Wright explained that the workman’s morning call came at 5.30 a.m., ‘and if you happen to live at any considerable distance from your place of employment, even earlier than that’; many men therefore stopped on their way at a coffee-stall and had a hot, sweet drink for 1d.19 This could well be the first of several encounters with street-sellers of food and drink during the day. Here was a huge variety of cheap ‘fast foods’ for consumption while standing, walking or sitting in the open air, especially convenient for outdoor workers such as builders, labourers, dockers, carters and cabmen, as well as for the crowds of casuals, itinerants, unemployed and those who had no permanent home. Henry Mayhew estimated that there were 41,000 street-traders in London in 1850, a ratio of 1 to every 63 inhabitants: of these about 30,000 were costermongers selling fruit, vegetables and fish, about 5,000 were dealers in manufactured goods, and the remaining 6,000 sellers of eatables and drinkables to which some preparation had been applied. He believed that the poor preferred to buy from street-sellers: ‘such customers will not be driven to buy at the shops. They can’t be persuaded that they can buy as cheaply at the shops, and besides, they are apt to think that shopkeepers are rich and that street-sellers are poor, and that they may as well encourage the poor.’20 He might have added that many preferred the convenience of ready-to-eat foods, many of them hot and tasty, and costing only ½d. or 1d. But he was probably right in commenting that ‘Men whose lives are alternations of starvation and surfeit love some easily-swallowed and comfortable food better than the most approved substantiality of the dinner-table.’21 The following are examples of the foods sold in the London streets: 1. Hot eels and pea soup (usually combined), circa 500 sellers. Eels were sold by the cupful for ½d, soup also ½d for half a pint. Some boys had up to six cupfuls of eels on a Saturday night, and a gentleman’s servant once had sixteen cupfuls at one standing. 2. Pickled whelks, circa 300 sellers on Saturdays, otherwise circa 150. Sold at from two to eight for 1d depending on size. About half the traders worked the pubs. ‘People drinking there always want something to eat. They buy whelks, not to fill themselves, but for a relish.’

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Eating in the Open Air in England 3. Fried fish. circa 350 sellers of fried plaice, sole, ‘dabs’, haddock, whiting and flounders. They bought at Billingsgate or cheap leftovers from fishmongers. Most fried their own; they lived in poor courts and alleys: a dealer told Mayhew that a gin-drinking neighbourhood was best, as ‘people hasn’t their smell so correct there’. The fried fish was sold by itinerants carrying trays holding from two- to five-dozen pieces. Much was sold in pubs, with a slice of bread for 1d. 4. Sheep’s trotters, circa 300 sellers, mainly stationary at street corners. The feet of 20,000 sheep were consumed weekly, sold at ½d each or 1d for fine, large ones. 5. Baked potatoes, circa 300 sellers in winter. They were baked at a baker’s and kept hot in specially designed cans with charcoal burners – some were highly polished, brass-mounted and decorated, costing 50/- or more. It usually cost ½d for a large potato, served with butter and salt. A seller at Smithfield market sold 1,000 in a day. 6. Ham sandwiches, circa 70 men and boys: sold for ½d and 1d, often outside theatres. 7. Pie-men, circa 80. They sold meat, fish and fruit pies for 1d. Trade had declined because of competition from pie-shops. 8. Boiled puddings (meat or currants) and plum ‘duff.’ Round puddings ½d; slices of ‘duff’ cut from a roly-poly 1d. Customers mainly children. 9. Cakes, tarts, gingerbread, circa 300 sellers. The pastries were all made by about twelve Jewish pastrycooks, who sold wholesale at 4d a dozen; the street-traders sold at ½d each. 10. Muffins and crumpets, circa 500 in winter. The muffin-man was also a great convenience to ladies who did not have a servant, as he came round at about tea-time. Muffins ½d, crumpets 4 for 1d. 11. Ice-cream, circa 20 sellers in summer. The street trade was only introduced in 1850. Ices were wholesaled by a man who owned a Master’s Freezing Apparatus and retailed from a jar, which was set in a ‘cooler’ of cold water. They were sold in a cup or glass with a spoon for 1d. The best customers were servant-girls and children. At first, customers did not know how to eat them – a seller: ‘I don’t think they’ll ever take greatly on in the streets, but there’s no saying. Lord! How I’ve seen the people splutter when they’ve tasted them for the first time.’ 12. Coffee-stall keepers, circa 300, mostly women. Grew greatly after 1842 when the coffee duty was lowered, and also since chicory was much used as a cheap adulterant. Sold at 1d a mug or ½d per half – 27 –

John Burnett mug. Many stall keepers also sold ham sandwiches, boiled eggs, cake and bread-and-butter. Some appeared as early as 3 or 4 a.m. for men on their way to work; others only began at around midnight, ‘for the accommodation of “night walkers”, “fast gentlemen” and “loose girls”’.22 Most of the street-traders’ customers were children and young people, open-air and casual workers, and those whose business took them into the streets either legitimately (e.g. servant-girls on errands) or illegitimately (e.g. the thieves, pick-pockets and prostitutes whom Mayhew described). Men with regular work were in a different position. By mid-century a lunch break was becoming usual, as working hours lengthened and travelling time from the expanding suburbs increased the time away from home. A hierarchy of eating places existed ranging from cheap cookshops and ‘ordinaries’ to taverns, chop-houses, dining-rooms, gentlemen’s clubs and, from the 1860s in London, Continental-type cafés and restaurants.23 This was ‘eating out’, though not, of course, eating in the open air, but there were numbers of commercial establishments with fixed premises which sold food for consumption outside as well as inside. Pie-shops and cookshops sold a variety of pies with savoury or sweet fillings, also buns, fancy breads and confectionery, and Mayhew believed that these shops were now competing very successfully with the street-sellers. Oysterhouses sold shellfish to customers standing at the bars of open-fronted shops: oysters were very popular for a snack – Mayhew calculated that 125 million were sold in London each year – but the time had passed when Sam Weller could remark that ‘poverty and oysters always seems to go together’ (Pickwick Papers, 1837) because at an average price of 4 for 1d they were no longer so cheap as formerly. Another possibility for ‘takeaway’ food was the sandwich. These were mostly sold at coffee-houses like Garraway’s, the Jamaica, Evett’s Ham Shop and many others around the City; they were busiest at midday, when ‘large trays of ham, beef and tongue, cut in a most substantial manner, are ranged on the bar’.24 These were perfectly respectable establishments, catering for a higher social level than the temperance coffee houses for manual workers,25 which also provided simple food; it is not possible to know how much food either type of coffee-house sold for consumption off the premises. For a cheap meal which could be eaten in the shop, in the street or taken home, a new institution appeared in the 1860s, destined to make an important contribution to working-class diet: this was the fish-and-chip shop. Fish, especially herrings, either fresh or cured, had long been a staple of the poor and, as previously noted, there was already in 1850 a – 28 –

Eating in the Open Air in England considerable street-trade in selling fried plaice, sole, haddock and whiting, much of it hawked around the public houses; a fried fish ‘warehouse’ is mentioned in Oliver Twist (serialized 1837–9). The famous chef of the Reform Club, Alexis Soyer, gave a recipe for fried potatoes in his Shilling Cookery for the People (1855), but here the potatoes were to be ‘cut into very thin slices, almost like shavings’,26 i.e. into scallops. Precisely when and where the modern-shaped chip was sold with accompanying fried fish is disputed between Lancashire, where Mr Lees of Moseley added them to his pea soup and pig’s trotter business in the late 1860s, and London, where Mr Malin claimed to have opened the first shop in Old Ford Road in 1868.27 However, the rapid growth of the trade was made possible by greatly increased supplies of white fish with the development of steam trawlers and ice packing, and of railways which could now supply inland towns with fish cheaply and in good condition. It is estimated that by the beginning of the twentieth century 20–25 per cent of all white fish catches and 10 per cent of the total potato crop went to the fish-and-chip trade,28 but in areas of heavy consumption such as northern industrial towns the proportions would have been considerably higher. At ½d for a portion of chips and 1d–2d for fish, this was a cheap and nutritious meal, particularly convenient where many married women were employed. Some shops had a few tables and chairs for consumption on the premises, but most sales were for taking out to eat in the street or at home. Although fish-and-chips became an integral part of proletarian diet, embedded in the cultural fabric of the working class almost as deeply as the public house, it did not achieve a fully respectable image. Cheap ‘fast’ food, eaten publicly from a newspaper packet with the fingers, offended propriety: it was too suggestive of hunger and the inability of a housewife to provide a ‘proper’ meal. As Robert Roberts noted in Edwardian Salford, ‘Good artisan families avoided bringing them home: a mother would have been insulted’29 (of course, it would not have prevented their children from surreptitiously buying a pennyworth).

Open-air Eating for Pleasure So far we have considered eating in the open which was mainly integral to work: while it may be assumed that ‘al fresco’ meals gave some satisfaction to hungry consumers, they were intended primarily as refuelling of the body for continued labour. But despite the vagaries of the English climate, eating in the open has for centuries been a recreational activity of all social classes, whether in domestic gardens, parks and other public places, or in commercial establishments where the provision of food and – 29 –

John Burnett drink was ancillary to wider entertainment. An example of this was the pleasure or tea gardens, which became popular in the eighteenth century and often continued throughout the nineteenth. Most large towns had gardens where music, dancing and entertainment accompanied tea and light refreshments: London’s most fashionable garden, Ranelagh, charged 2/6d entrance fee, but Vauxhall, Cuper’s (‘Cupid’s’) and others were cheaper and had more democratic clienteles. They provided lawns and walks, flowers and shrubberies, fountains and statuary, dancing platforms and stages for musical and theatrical performances, often ending with elaborate firework displays. Usually situated in suburban or semi-rural areas or on the banks of rivers, they provided valued ‘lungs’ for overcrowded towns and cities; visitors brought their own food and drink or bought refreshments served in booths or supper ‘boxes’. In the nineteenth century many were attached to inns and taverns, where stronger drinks than tea were available, and people like Charles Dickens enjoyed bibulous summer evenings at Jack Straw’s Castle and the Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath.30 While many of the older gardens disappeared between the 1840s and the 1860s as their land became more profitable for building (Vauxhall Gardens closed in 1859), others, like Cremorne, survived with a more plebeian character and, as Warwick Wroth believed, followed a Continental model as cafés or beer-gardens: ‘they were frequented (if invidious distinctions must be made) by the lower middle classes and the “lower orders”’.31 But George Sims records a rather different scene at Cremorne in the 1870s, where it was ‘quite the thing’ to stay until 4 a.m., and where the habitués included ‘the fair and frail, the gallant and the gay, light-hearted youth and wicked old age, frolicking Bohemia and wildoats-sowing Belgravia . . .’32 The enjoyment of longer periods of leisure required time, money and opportunity, and from mid-century onwards these became increasingly available to broader sections of the population. As the practice of the Saturday half-day spread, and four days of holiday were, in effect, instituted by the Bank Holidays Act, 1871, leisure became recognized as acceptable, even desirable, for an urban, industrial society. Even before that, many workers had taken matters into their own hands by observing ‘Saint Monday’ as an unauthorized holiday, and until the end of the century absence from work on Mondays was still common among coalminers, skilled workers and others. For some men this was merely the opportunity to recover from a weekend’s heavy drinking, but for others it was a family outing to parks and open spaces, to pleasure gardens, or even further afield to coastal resorts, made possible by railways and steamboats. Thomas Wright noted in 1867 that many companies ran excursion trips on – 30 –

Eating in the Open Air in England Mondays, when wives took the remains of the Sunday joint for sandwiches and brought packets of tea to have a kettle boiled for 2d.33 Whether in the countryside, on board a steamer to Margate or Ramsgate, or on the sands at Brighton or Blackpool, food and drink were necessary parts of the enjoyment of an excursion, the appetites sharpened by fresh air and unfamiliar surroundings. Many employers also recognized the value of a day’s outing for their workers as ‘rational recreation’ and a token of their paternal concern. Employer-sponsored outings usually took the form of a day at the seaside or some beauty spot, transport provided by specially chartered trains when numbers were very large; the workers and their families were regaled with cold roast beef, pies (in 1882 a firm in Melton Mowbray advertised ‘Provisions for Treats’, including the famous local pork pies), cakes, pastries, ginger beer and tea, consumed outdoors or, if wet, in large marquees.34 Open-air feeding of large numbers of children was particularly convenient for the organizers of charitable events. Sunday School treats, with the promise of a day out and a substantial meal, were an important inducement to regular attendance, but a charitable enterprise on a much larger scale was the Fresh Air Fund, established in 1892 by the publisher C. Arthur Pearson to provide a day’s holiday for deprived children from the city slums. By 1909 more than two million children had been taken to the coasts or countryside, enjoying ‘fine feasts for all on meat-pies and bread and butter and buns and oranges – a day that is as a glimpse of Paradise to the poor little mites who live in the darkness of squalid back courts and the mean streets of our cities’.35 For older children, the Boy Scouts movement, founded by Lieut.-General Baden Powell, provided an experience of open-air life in annual camps, where boys received instruction in simple, camp-fire cooking,36 while for young men a free camping ‘holiday’ was possible by joining the Volunteer Corps, which grew up after the French invasion scare of 1859. Independent hiking and camping holidays, which became very popular between the two World Wars, were also developing before 1914, with sites approved by the Camping Club of Great Britain, founded in 1901. The lure of Nature, the desire to escape from the noise, dirt and congestion of the city, became more compelling as England passed into a predominantly urban society. This essentially Romantic movement took many forms, including the retreat of the middle classes to semi-rural suburbs, where they could enjoy detached houses on large plots for ornamental gardens, specimen trees, and lawns for tennis or croquet, both of which developed in the 1870s. The tennis party with tea in the garden was an approved institution, combining amusement with moderate exercise – 31 –

John Burnett for both sexes in a controlled social environment. For explorations further afield, bicycling also became available in the 1870s, and quickly developed into a boom leisure activity: by 1880 some 300 different models were on the market and 230 cycling clubs existed for those who liked organized outings. By then the ‘safety cycle’ with equally sized wheels had replaced the ‘penny-farthing’, and J. B. Dunlop’s invention of the pneumatic tyre in 1888 made riding more comfortable for both sexes.37 Cyclists carried their own provisions in saddle-bags, or stopped at country inns, many of which had been decaying since the railways by-passed them, and the cycling craze of the 1890s also helped to create the village tea-shop, where hungry travellers could enjoy new-laid eggs, home-made scones and ‘Hovis’ bread. Most of the outdoor meals so far described may be categorized as ‘picnics’, i.e. food consumed in the open from choice rather than necessity, and often, though not necessarily, as part of an outing away from home. The etymology of the term is uncertain. It was used by Lord Chesterfield in 1748, but was almost certainly derived from the French pique-nique and related historically to banquets in the open known as fêtes champêtres, which were common in the reigns of Elizabeth I and Louis XIV. In England in the early nineteenth century a picnic was a contributory meal for which guests either brought dishes from a pre-arranged menu or, as in the Picnic Club, founded in London in 1802, paid a subscription for food bought from caterers.38 The essence of the occasion was informality and freedom from conventional constraint, and picnics grew in popularity in Victorian times partly in reaction to the etiquette required of domestic dinner-parties. They also fitted well into the cult of Nature and the Romantic movement, favourite venues being rugged scenery, mountains and coasts, lakes and river-banks or ruined castles or abbeys. For the Wordsworths in the Lake District, indomitable picnickers in almost all weathers, the food for an excursion could be simply bread and cheese, though for a climb to the summit of Skiddaw to celebrate the victory of Waterloo in 1815, they took roast beef, plum pudding and punch.39 Queen Victoria loved to picnic when staying at Balmoral, with ponies to carry the food and the ladies – they sketched and botanized while the gentlemen made a fire and scrambled about the rocks. A large, upper middle-class picnic such as that for forty people detailed by Mrs Beeton in 1861 required elaborate planning and organization, including the selection of appropriate guests and arrangements for transport by wagonettes. The menu is considerably more substantial than one would expect today: the joints of beef and lamb, the hams, ducks, fowls and lobsters, the cheesecakes and fruit are well enough, but the collared calf’s head, the Cabinet Puddings in moulds, and the large, cold – 32 –

Eating in the Open Air in England Christmas Pudding (‘this must be good’) seem less suitable: suggested drinks totalled 122 bottles, including sherry, claret, beer, lemonade, champagne and ‘any other light wine’.40 For their rather more modest picnics, the Pickwickians were fond of pies, particularly pigeon pie and veal and ham pie (‘when you know the lady as made it, and be quite sure it isn’t kittens’: Sam Weller). By the end of the century, suggested picnic fare was becoming lighter, with more emphasis on dishes such as lobster mayonnaise and crab and salmon salads: these were recommended for a racing party at Ascot, together with foie gras, chaud-froid of quails, plovers’ eggs, curried prawns and galantine of chicken. For a shooting party in autumn or winter for twenty or so guns and up to sixty beaters a very different menu was required – hot dishes brought from the house punctually at midday and served in a marquee with appropriate silverware – Lancashire Hot-Pot, rabbit pie, jugged duck with oysters, woodcock pie, lark paté and plovers’ pudding.41

Addendum History is about continuity as well as change, and this brief excursion into eating in the open before 1914 has both parallels and contrasts with the present day. Although the numbers of farm workers have greatly declined, the nature of the work still sometimes requires food to be eaten in the fields, and it would be interesting to know how much of this is still homemade and how much bought from shops and supermarkets: it is likely that many more ‘Ploughman’s Lunches’ (bread, cheese, pickle, tomato) are now consumed in urban pubs than were ever eaten by ploughmen under a hedge. One of the greatest changes is the increase in street eating in modern cities, no longer so associated with work and poverty as in the past. Today it seems normal and ‘cool’ to eat a burger or pizza or drink a can of cola in the street, but when and where did this become so? Was it part of youth culture in the 1960s or a tourist response to high restaurant charges? Finally, the popularity of the picnic has continued to grow, with greater mobility of the population and wider access to the countryside.42 Queen Elizabeth II still holds a series of Royal Garden Parties at Buckingham Palace throughout the summer, and, when in Scotland, Prince Philip cooks chops and sausages on a barbecue. A major growth has also occurred in eating in domestic gardens, for which supermarkets offer a range of prepared foods for cooking on barbecues: we now even buy outdoor heaters to combat the English climate.

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John Burnett

Notes This chapter draws on research material that will receive more detailed treatment in my book England Eats Out, 1830–2000 (forthcoming, 2004). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Wilson, 1994, 35–7. Labourers’ Wages, 1824, vol. 1. Cobbet, 1830, 390. Caird, 1852, 84–5. Barker et al., 1970, Table 3, 43 and 46. Davies, 1977, 109–11, quoting Mrs Burrows, ‘A Childhood in the Fens about 1850–60’. Grey, 1977, 101–3. Burnett, 1994b, 51, quoting Tom Mullins. Heath, 1880, 286ff. Grey, 1977, 101–7. Grey joined the staff of the Rothamsted Experimental Station at 13, eventually rising to the supervisor grade. Horn, 1980, 29–30. Agar, 1981, 113. Francis, 1982, 17. Heath, 1874, 99–100. Thompson, 1976, 237. Burnett, 1994a, 41, quoting Kay Garrett. Davies, 1977, 4 and 20, quoting Mrs Layton. Mrs Layton was born in 1855 in Bethnal Green, London, one of fourteen children. Burnett, 1994b, 81, quoting William Luby. Journeyman Engineer [Thomas Wright], 1970, 175, 185. Mayhew, 1861, 60. Mayhew, 1861, 158. Mayhew, 1861, 160–207. Ehrman, 1999, 68–84. Evans, 1852, 145–8. Hall, 1878; Burnett, 1999, 83–4. Soyer, 1855, 114. Walton, 1992; Priestland, 1972. Walton, 1992, 7. Roberts, 1971, 82. Hewett and Axton, 1983, 11. Wroth, 1907, Preface V. Sims, 1917, 39. Journeyman Engineer [Thomas Wright], 1967, 116–21. – 34 –

Eating in the Open Air in England 34. Delgado, 1977, 30, 60–70. 35. Delgado, 1977, 81, quoting Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland. 36. Baden-Powell, 1909: ‘Every scout must, of course, know how to cook his own meat and vegetables, and to make bread [i.e. bannocks] for himself without regular cooking utensils’, 112. Recipes for meat included ‘kabobs’ on skewers. 37. Fraser, 1981, 81. 38. Day, 2000, 137–8, for the early history of picnics; Gurney, 1982, 6ff., for later history and recipes. 39. Battiscombe, 1949, 130–2. 40. Beeton, 1861, paras. 2149–52. 41. Spencer [‘Nathaniel Gubbins’], 1913, 45–8, 50, 54. 42. Leyel, 1936, lists sixty motoring menus.

References Agar, N. E. (1981), The Bedfordshire farm worker in the nineteenth century, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 60. Baden-Powell, Lieut.-General R. S. S. (1909), Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instructors in Good Citizenship, revised edn, London: C. Arthur Pearson. Barker, T. C., Oddy, D. J. and Yudkin, J. (1970), The Dietary Surveys of Dr Edward Smith, 1862–3, London: Queen Elizabeth College, University of London, Occasional Paper No. 1, Staples Press. Battiscombe, G. (1949), English Picnics, London: The Harvill Press. Beeton, I. (1861), The Book of Household Management, London: S. O. Beeton. Burnett, J. (ed.) (1994a), Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s, London: Routledge (1st edn 1982). Burnett, J. (ed.) (1994b), Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s, London: Routledge (1st edn 1974). Burnett, J. (1999), Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain, London: Routledge. Caird, J. (1852), English Agriculture in 1850–51, London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans. Cobbett, W. (1830), Rural Rides, London: William Cobbett. Davies, M. Ll. (ed.) (1977), Life As We Have Known It, by Co-Operative Working Women, London: Virago (1st edn 1931). Day, I. (ed.) (2000), Eat, Drink and be Merry: The British at Table, 1600– 2000, London: Philip Wilson. – 35 –

John Burnett Delgado, A. (1977), The Annual Outing and Other Excursions, London: George Allen and Unwin. Ehrman, E. (1999), ‘The nineteenth century’, in Johnston (ed.), London Eats Out: Five Centuries of Capital Dining, London: Museum of London. Evans, D. M. (1852), City Men and City Manners, with Sketches on ‘Change and the Coffee Houses’, London: Groombridge and Sons. Francis, R. K (1982), The History and Virtues of Cyder, London: Robert Hale. Fraser, W. H. (1981), The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850–1914, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books. Grey, E. (1977), Cottage Life in a Hertfordshire Village, Harpenden, Herts: Harpenden and District Local History Society (1st edn 1934). Gurney, J. (1982), The National Trust Book of Picnics, Newton Abbot: David and Charles. Hall, E. H. (1878), Coffee Taverns, Cocoa Houses and Coffee Palaces: Their Rise, Progress and Prospects, London: S. W. Partridge. Heath, F. G. (1874), The English Peasantry, London: Frederick Warne. Heath , F. G. (1880), Peasant Life in the West of England, London: Sampson Low. Hewett, E. and Axton, W.F. (1983), Convivial Dickens: The Drinks of Dickens and His Times, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Horn, P. (1980), The Rural World, 1780–1850: Social Change in the English Countryside, London Hutchinson. Journeyman Engineer [Thomas Wright] (1967), Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes, New York: Augustus M. Kelley (1st edn 1867). Journeyman Engineer [Thomas Wright] (1970), The Great Unwashed, New York: Augustus M. Kelley (1st edn 1868). Labourer’s Wages. Report from the Select Committee on the Rate of Agricultural Wages, and on the Condition and Morals of Labourers in that Employment, (1824), vol. 1, London: S. P. (392). Leyel, C. S (1936), Picnics for Motorists, London: Routledge & Sons. Mayhew, H. (1861), London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1: The London Street-folk, London: Griffin, Bohn and Co. Priestland, G. (1972), Frying Tonight, London: Gentry Books. Roberts, R. (1971), The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sims, G. R. (1917), My Life. Sixty Years Recollections of Bohemian London, London: Eveleigh Nash Co. Soyer, A. (1855), A Shilling Cookery for the People, London: Routledge.

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Eating in the Open Air in England Spencer, E. [‘Nathaniel Gubbins’] (1913), Cakes and Ale: A Dissertation on Banquets, etc. London: Stanley Paul and Co. (1st edn 1897). Thompson, F. (1976), Lark Rise to Candleford, London: Penguin Books (1st edn 1939). Walton, J. K. (1992), Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, Leicester: Leicester University Press. Wilson, C. A. (1994), Luncheon, Nuncheon and Other Meals: Eating with the Victorians, Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing. Wroth, W. (1907), Cremorne and the Later London: Gardens, London: Elliot Stock.

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–3 – Feeding the Shearers Endogenous Developments in Scottish Harvest Food

Alexander Fenton

The main period when food of a special nature was provided by farmers in the fields was that of the grain harvest. The available data span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and underpin the concept of ‘endogenous development’, a slow, almost unnoticed but nevertheless cumulatively important change in general eating habits, not imposed from outside the community but flowing from within it. This chapter seeks to identify a number of such innovatory changes in relation to harvest food and to the rural diet in general.

Harvest Food The provision of food for relatively large numbers of people during the harvest season seems to have been an instrument of innovation in general rural eating habits. It is striking that the First Statistical Account of the 1790s does not pay any special attention to this topic, whereas the Second Statistical Account of the 1840s is much more forthcoming. The difference must be due to the greatly increased crop acreages that accompanied the late eighteenth–early nineteenth agricultural improvement period, and the need for a greater labour input in the period prior to the development of adequate reaping technologies. The role played by harvest food has not been explored in print. A search through the Scottish Life Archive in the National Museums of Scotland revealed a good deal of photographic evidence for snacks being consumed in the open air by groups of harvest workers, sheep-shearers and peatcutters, dating from the 1920s almost till the present day. Some of the photographs, taken in the 1950s–60s in Aberdeenshire, were my own. Some greater historical depth was added by a book illustration of refreshment time in the harvest field in the 1830s in Ayrshire,1 and by a vignette – 39 –

Alexander Fenton on the corner of an estate plan from Newton, Berwickshire, in 1777, which showed ale or beer being drunk out of a staved keg. On the ground were two round wooden platters, one containing a rectangular, and presumably wheaten, loaf, with a knife on top, and the other what looks very like mutton chops.2 The Archive also contained some manuscript answers to questionnaires sent out in the 1960s. In Aberdeenshire, a lady who got the job of maid in 1892 at a farm near Rothiemay, some miles north-east of Aberdeen, remembered that bread, cheese and ale were sent to workers at the stackyard, and to the men forking sheaves in the field. The beer was called a ‘Bottle of Tam’.3 Women workers, however, got tea, which seems to have been considered more ladylike than beer. These refreshments were supplied twice a day, for the mid-morning and mid-afternoon yokings, and also when the threshing mill came, twice a year.4 A source for the period 1900–10, relating to Abernyte, Perthshire, in East-Central Scotland, contains the following information: At harvest-time and hay-time, there was a concession to the no-in-between meals for the outdoor workers, as they went on working as long as they could see, if the weather was favourable. We took out the tea or coffee made with coffee-essence in big milk-flagons and a big basket of ‘pieces’ which as far as I can remember was just plain bread and butter and jam, or perhaps bread and butter and cheese if they preferred that.

When the steam-driven threshing mill came, dinner was provided in the farm kitchen for the mill-men, family and extra hands who had come to help, but ‘[t]hey of course got a mid-forenoon and a mid-afternoon piece and tea or coffee sent out to them at 9.30am and 3pm. In those days it was unheard of to take tea or coffee without sugar, so the big flagons were all sugared before being sent out and of course milk added also.’5 The pattern for the twentieth-century evidence housed in the Scottish Life Archive is that the photographs are mainly from the Lowland farming areas of the east coast. Apart from peat cutting, there is no evidence from the north and west. The subjects of the photographs are the women who carried the refreshments to the field or stack-yard in a cloth-covered basket, often standing alongside the seated men, who have sandwiches of sliced bread in one hand and cups or mugs of tea in the other. The tea is contained in enamel flagons or more rarely in earthenware teapots. Basically, the picture is one of domestic arrangements that are transferred to an outside context, rather than a continuation of the custom of providing meals for harvest workers.

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Feeding the Shearers

Wheaten Bread and the Cut Sandwich The use of cut sandwiches, spread as a rule with butter and jam, is an innovation attributable to the adoption of oven-baked, leavened wheaten bread, which has largely replaced the older tradition of flat oatcakes, and bannocks and scones of bere-meal, pease-meal, bean-meal, or a mixture of these, baked on the flat iron girdle over an open kitchen fire.6 The generally accepted view is that the name ‘sandwich’ is due to John Montagu, fourth earl of Sandwich (1718–92), who is said to have had food on slices of bread brought to the gambling table so as not to interrupt the game. The first use of the word in print appears to be in 1762.7 This, however, was in England. In Scotland, wheaten bread was known as ‘flour bread’ or ‘loaf bread’ to distinguish it from ‘breid’, which meant oatcakes. It was baked with a raising agent and required an oven, so it was much more of a rarity amongst working folk, who had only open fires, and was more costly than the everyday flat breads. But amongst the better-off classes, who had ovens in their kitchens, in towns where there were bake-houses, and amongst bigger-scale farmers in the wheat-growing areas of Scotland, it was a frequent enough foodstuff. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the consumption of white bread as an everyday table item remained a mark of status and social class. It was said of Perthshire in 1799 that people of fashion ate wheaten bread, baked in their houses or bought from nearby towns and villages, and that the wealthiest farmers used wheaten bread more than any other kind.8 In Berwickshire, bordering with England, the daily staple in 1809 for ordinary families was said to be barley bread, generally containing a third to a quarter of pease-meal or bean-meal. The mixture was put through a coarse sieve to separate out the fibrous part of the husks, then kneaded with water and salt, without yeast, and made into flat, round cakes 1 inch thick, which were baked on a girdle over a clear fire and then toasted in front of it, exactly as in the manner of oatcakes. This, however, was rapidly being replaced by wheaten bread.9 In Angus, in east-central Scotland, wheaten bread was becoming more common by 1813.10 The basis for sandwich making, using slices clapped together, was therefore becoming more and more widespread from the late 1700s. Entries in the Scottish National Dictionary (SND), under the head-words ‘Sheave’ and ‘Shive’, meaning a slice, indicate the cutting of white or wheaten loaves into slices from the early eighteenth century, in association with the spreading on the slices of butter and later of jam also, and with the drinking of cups of tea. The increasing use of sandwiches in the nineteenth – 41 –

Alexander Fenton and twentieth centuries, therefore, undoubtedly marks the spread of an innovation that accompanied the use of wheaten bread. The mid-nineteenth-century pattern, which points to the role of wheaten bread during the harvest season, can be established from the parish-byparish entries in the New Statistical Account (NSA), published in 1845 in fifteen volumes. The data it contains stem from the ten years before that. From these, the broadly regionalized pattern of eating habits of farm workers, labourers, cotters and small-scale tradesmen and craftsmen can be derived for the whole of Scotland. There is a scatter of information on harvest food, relating to the Lowland farming districts of Scotland. In Table 3.1, this is set alongside the wider pattern of everyday cereal-based food consumption. Table 3.1 The use of wheaten bread as harvest and ordinary food Reference Parish and county

No. of bakers

I 15

Liberton, Midlothian

I 222 II 219

Corstorphine, Midlothian Nenthorn, Berwick

III 93 III 326

Roberton, Berwick Kelso, Roxburgh

III 89

Broughton, Peebles

III 5

Selkirk

IV 422 IV 113

Langholm, Dumfries Kells, Kircudbright

IV 210

Kirkmaiden, Wigtown

V 137 V 223

Sorn, Ayr Dalry, Ayr

7

V 709 V 851

Kilbirnie, Ayr Newmilns, Loudoun, Ayr Darvel, Loudoun, Ayr

5 2 4

Wheaten bread

H. Dinner: bread with beer; breakfast and supper, porridge 3 H. Dinner: 16 or 18oz wheaten loaf, and a bottle of beer O. Some wheaten bread O. Some wheaten bread, but pease and barley meal bread more common O. ‘Loaf bread’ has almost superseded oatcakes O. Town: wheaten bread; Country: bread of pease or barley 6 O. Wheaten bread becoming more general O. ‘Loaf bread’ much eaten, even by the poor O. ‘Scones’ made of a mixture of oats,pease or beans, with wheat or barley ground fine

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Feeding the Shearers Table 3.1 Continued Reference Parish and county

VIII 24

VIII 185 VIII 365

Old Kilpatrick, Dunbarton New Kilpatrick, Dunbarton Alva, Stirling Larbert, Stirling

IX 72 IX 224

Newburgh, Fife Leuchars, Fife

IX 308

Cameron, Fife

IX 330

Kilconquhar, Fife

IX 603 IX 978 X 276

Flisk, Fife Kilrenny, Fife Monzie, Perth

X 411–2 X 586

Longforgan, Perth Comrie, Perth

VIII 52

No. of bakers

O. A good deal of wheaten bread O. Wheaten bread more common in the villages 2 O. Town: wheaten bread general; Country: scones of barley and potatoes 9 O. ‘Baker’s bread’ replacing the ‘honest’ bannock O. Women’s breakfast: tea and oatcakes or wheaten bread and butter Bakers use c.1000 quarters wheat in bread per year O. Wheaten bread used H. Dinner: beer and bread O. Occasional use of tea and wheaten bread ‘becoming common’ O. A good deal of wheaten bread O. Wheaten bread becoming general

X 771 Dull, Perth X 1190 Bendochy, Perth XI 303–4 Oathlaw or Finavon, Forfar (Angus) XI 361 Carmyllie, Forfar

4

XII 305 XIII 329 XIII 155 XV 35

1 6 4

Drumblade, Aberdeen Cullen, Banff Drainie, Moray Golspie, Sutherland

Wheaten bread

O. More wheaten bread now used O. ‘Flour-bread’ sometimes used O. Tea and wheaten bread now common

O. Tradesmen and others use a little white bread

Key: H = Harvest food; O = Ordinary food

– 43 –

Alexander Fenton The third column of Table 3.1 gives the number of bakers noted for individual parishes. They were not then numerous, being found primarily in towns and in villages in central, east and south Scotland. The greatest number noted, nine, was in the town of Newburgh, Fife, which became prosperous in the late eighteenth – early nineteenth century through its linen trade, and its function as a busy seaport. The farming parish of Sorn in Ayrshire had seven, as had Langholm, Dumfriesshire, though it is less easy to say if this was due to a higher level of prosperity, and the fishing town of Cullen in Banffshire had six. Elsewhere they occurred in smaller numbers. The New Statistical Account, however, does not always indicate their presence or their numbers – for example, in Kilconquhar, Fife, bakers used annually about 1000 quarters11 of wheat in bread, which represents quite an amount of wheaten flour, but the number of bakers is not given. It must be assumed that there were many more bakers than the parish accounts indicate. Equally, it is beyond doubt that a great deal of flat bread was baked in the home, and this practice continued well into the twentieth century, even after the commercial baking and distribution of ‘white loaf’ had been well established. A number of sources, summed up in Table 3.2, give concrete information about wheaten loaves. The wheaten loaves in Berwickshire weighed 16 or 18 oz,12 i.e. a pound or just over, and at Dull, where there were four bakers, a 4 lb ‘quartern’ loaf cost 9d.13 Nearly a century earlier, one of this size, referred to in Dunfermline, actually cost a penny more.14

Shearers’ Meals The provision of wheaten bread and beer for the shearers was for the middle meal of the day, and also, though more rarely, for breakfast or Table 3.2 Size and cost of wheaten loaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Source

Date

Place

Weight

Donaldson, 1794, 24–5

1794

Per.

10 –32 oz

Douglas, 1798, 80 NSA II,1845, 219

1798 1845

Roxburgh Nenthorn, Bwk

20 oz 16 or 18 oz

NSA X,1845, 771

1845

Dull, Per.

4 lb

9d

Dunfermline, Fife SEScot.

4 lb c.1 lb

10d

Henderson, 1879, 473 SND s.v. Shearer

1879 19th–20th c.

Key: Bwk = Berwickshire; Per. = Perthshire; SEScot. = South East Scotland

– 44 –

Value

Feeding the Shearers supper. The three-meal system was clearly firmly established by the midnineteenth century, at least in the more prosperous farming districts, so more meals than one a day were expected by the harvest workers in such areas. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sources show the following pattern. In Berwickshire in 1794, shearers got porridge and milk for breakfast, and ale and bread for their other meals. A ‘Scotch chopin’ (quart) of small beer and a loaf of wheaten bread was said to provide a hearty meal. The ale cost a penny and the loaf a penny and three farthings.15 In the same county, fifteen years later, breakfast was still of oatmeal porridge, with a quart of skimmed milk, and dinner was a 1 lb loaf of fine wheaten bread and a quart of good table beer. Shearers might provide their own supper and at the end of harvest they received in lieu half a ‘forpit’ (one sixteenth of a bushel) of barley for each day’s work of the whole harvest. Earlier on, ‘within memory’, dinner had been of broth, with bread of mixed barley and pease. But this had been given up, because the bigger harvest of the days of improved farming allowed no time for cooking and baking, and in any case it had been known for reapers to be greedy and take so much that they could not work ‘till they had disgorged the burthen’,16 by being sick. In Roxburgh in 1798, the ration per shearer was breakfast of oatmeal porridge or hasty pudding, with milk, and for dinner a 20 oz loaf of coarse wheat and a bottle of small beer. ‘Tea’, i.e. supper, was the same as breakfast, or it could be of bread made of pease and barley with a little milk.17 Porridge was still being provided in Midlothian around 1839. In the parish of Liberton, for example, shearers were paid 10d or 1/ 3 a day, or even up to 2/-, plus food, which consists of admirable porridge and milk, at morning and night, the porridge made in a large boiler, into which half a boll of meal is often thrown, while the mess is stirred with an immense staff seized in the centre, and fastened at the top, which is thus made to work with a power lever. An Irish shearer has been known to eat 9 lb. weight of these excellent porridge. At noon the shearers get bread and beer.18

This huge capacity may indicate one of the reasons for the popularity of the harvest food, namely its sheer bulk as compared with the everyday. This impression is confirmed by the report of a visitor to the farm of Ledard, at Loch Ard in Perthshire. Having had his own breakfast in one of the rooms of the farm, he happened to go into the kitchen: ‘There we saw such vast platefuls of oatmeal stirabout and milk, prepared for the reapers [there were twenty of them, men and women], that I fancied they intended to supply the whole labourers of the Strath with a breakfast; but,

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Alexander Fenton on inquiry, I found that each dish, holding at least a gallon, was the morning repast of an individual!’19 In Perthshire, in 1794, the daily harvest regime differed, for loaves were provided for breakfast as well as dinner, and it was supper that was of oatmeal pottage, salt and water, with milk. ‘The farmer sends a quantity of meal to the bake-house, which is rendered, at the rate of twelve loaves from each eight pounds of meal, which affords breakfast for twelve reapers, with the addition of two English pints of beer to each, and for dinner, three pints are allowed to the same quantity of bread.’ It was estimated that the expense of maintaining a reaper, with meal at a shilling a peck, a halfpenny for baking, beer at three pence for eight English pints, and a halfpenny for milk, came to five pence and three farthings a day.20 Further information comes from investigation of the associated terminology. The ‘shearers’ bap’, known as the ‘shearers’ bun’, ‘shearers’ bannock’ or ‘shearers’ bread’ in the south-east of Scotland, weighed about a pound in the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries. Other names were ‘shearers’ rowe’ (roll), in Roxburghshire, while from Berwickshire up to Angus, the name ‘shearers’ scone’ was in use. As a letter writer of 1952 said, reminiscing about the period of 1910, ‘I used to look forward to my father coming home from the harvest field with his “shearers’ scone” tied in his red and white hanky. It was the custom in those days for the farmers to distribute large scones every day to all the harvesters.’21

The Victory of Wheaten Bread There is no doubt that there was a growing consumption of wheaten bread from the second half of the eighteenth century. Time and again, as listed in Table 3.1, the parish accounts state that a smaller or greater proportion of wheaten bread was eaten, in some places even by the poor,22 but at this period, in the run-up to the mid-nineteenth century, the emphasis was to be found much more in the towns,23 in the villages,24 and amongst tradesmen and others in a slightly higher station in life.25 It was clearly, however, making innovatory inroads into an older food system, replacing the homemade, flat, unleavened breads.26 How were these inroads made? The provision of wheaten bread as better than usual food at harvest time would have encouraged a liking for it amongst the harvesters and their families, who would at first have eaten it as something out of the ordinary, everyday routine. The wheaten loaf of a pound or more, no doubt for the most part broken with the fingers and eaten in the open air, and washed down with beer, left its impression on

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Feeding the Shearers the taste memory.27 A share of the credit must go to the ladies, who might have wheaten bread and butter for breakfast, whilst porridge was eaten by the men.28 This may well be a reflection of habits developed amongst higher-class females of earlier days, and observed and tried by houseservants from the countryside. Needless to say, this innovation was also accompanied by the drinking of tea. And the day of the more genteel sandwich, prepared in advance in the farm kitchen, seems to have reached the harvest field, on the evidence available, by the beginning of the twentieth century. The spread of wheat-flour bread continued inexorably as bakeries became ever more general, and as bread baking became increasingly industrialized. Still in the mid-nineteenth century, rural women were baking their flat breads at home, and white, leavened bread was a luxury. But by the end of the century, commercial enterprise was widening the pattern of distribution, and the eating of a wheaten loaf on the harvest field was no longer the treat it once had been. Service centres in the various counties were developing local commerce from the early nineteenth century. Not only were bakers’ shops being established, but also those of butchers, grocers and general merchants. During the 1880s, horse-drawn vans appeared on the scene. In Northern Scotland, for example, these led to growth in the activities of trading smacks that belonged to the firm of Robert Garden Ltd in Kirkwall, Orkney, a business that flourished from about 1890, and lasted till about 1934. The smacks were literally floating shops, which served supply depots, from which local traders got their supplies and circulated them widely even in the remotest parts of Scotland through horse-drawn and, from around 1916, motorized vehicles. The bulk of the dealing was in bread, butter, cheese, bacon, cereals of various kinds, oatmeal and barley meal, and wheat flour, indicating that though some white bread was bought, it continued to be a supplement to home-baked breads. In a diminished sense, it remained something of a treat, into the twentieth century,29 though, as I know from my own experience on Aberdeenshire farms in north-east Scotland, scones and pancakes made of wheat flour, baked over the kitchen fire, and spread with a layer of fresh butter and a lick of golden syrup were equally acceptable when the threshing mill came round and the pieces were carried out at the mid-yokings. Special ‘hairst scones’ were baked for harvest workers in Banffshire in the twentieth century, and there were also ‘hairst baps’, big, flat, round rolls, presumably supplied by the local baker, in the same county.30 These terms compare with the shearers’ bannocks, -baps, -bread and -buns mentioned above for the more southerly parts of Lowland Scotland. – 47 –

Alexander Fenton A newspaper cutting in the Scottish Life Archive, undated but referring to the early years of the twentieth century, brings back to mind the porridge and soup that had been provided in south-east Scotland in the eighteenth century. It gives a report by a former farm-servant that on Aberdeenshire farms, milk porridge, made with skimmed milk, was the dinner meal at least three times a week, eaten by the harvesters at the stook-side. This use of milk made it more special than usual, because the normal porridge was water porridge. And twice a week, Scotch broth and potatoes appeared at the open-air meal at 2 p.m. There was also a piece (snack) at 10 a.m., generally of oatcakes, cheese and home-brewed ale or skimmed milk. The ale was sweetened with treacle.31 On one farm in Aberdeenshire with which I was familiar, ‘honey-ale’ was made as a special treat for the harvest workers. Honey in the comb and water with a slice of bread covered with yeast lying on top were heated in a pot in the kitchen, the product was bottled and then stored in the milkhouse for eventual use, though it worked so well sometimes that the bottles exploded before the honey ale could be drunk. At all events, harvest was continuing to be regarded as a special occasion that called for special food. This twentieth-century story is very different from that of the wheaten bread and beer that were generally supplied in the south of Scotland. It points to a more archaic state of affairs. However, as has been noted, porridge was also provided in the south, and in Galloway, in the southwest, ‘harrist broth’ was mentioned in 1824, and given high praise: The broth made use of as food in harvest, was allowed to be the best broth to be met with in the country all the year round, for then the vegetable world is in perfection; then indeed they sparkle with rich een [eyes, globules of fat], and a brose [oatmeal dish mixed, in this case, with the broth] taken out of the lee side o’ the kail pot [broth pot], is quite an exquisite dish at this season, setting at naught the boasted skill of the French in the art of cookery.32

The porridge or broth was supped out of wooden bowls known as ‘bickers’ and this gave rise to a custom called a ‘bicker-raid’ in the southeast of the country, recorded in 1825, but possibly pointing to an older tradition when porridge or broth were more standard features of harvest meals than wheaten bread: The name given to an indecent frolick which formerly prevailed in harvest, after the labourers had finished dinner. A young man, laying hold of a girl, threw her down, and the rest covered them with their empty bickers. I am informed that within these thirty years, a clergyman, in fencing the tables at a

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Feeding the Shearers sacrament, debarred all who had been guilty of engaging in the Bicker-raid in hairst.33

It appears, therefore, that though wheaten bread was or became the most usual and easiest means of providing food of a better standard than the everyday for the harvest workers, there was also the possibility of providing porridge or broth or both on different days of the week in some areas. Porridge and broth and wheaten bread with beer had almost the character of a bonus or perquisite, coming as they did in addition to higher pay for the weeks of the harvest period. Such factors made harvest time attractive, so it is little wonder that tradesmen such as masons would take on a regular job with a master builder only on condition that they were allowed to work a harvest, where they could get, in the 1890s, 10 shillings a week, with porridge night and morning, and a ‘shearer’s bap’ and a bottle of ale in the middle of the day.34 It must have seemed like a holiday.

Conclusion This chapter started as an exercise in establishing how older traditions can be slowly eroded by innovations, however minor they may appear to be. By a cumulative, endogenous process, however, they can in the long run exert a great deal of influence. The following points have been identified and can be subjected to fuller investigation: 1. The provision of better quality food and drink at the harvest period is a long established tradition, going back beyond the eighteenth century, but becoming systematized in new ways in the late eighteenth–early nineteenth centuries. 2. The supplying of porridge and/or broth for dinner in harvest appears to be a more archaic feature in the more southerly parts of Scotland, largely replaced by wheaten bread and beer by the nineteenth century. The agricultural improvements and expanded grain-crop acreages from the late eighteenth century, necessitating greater numbers of shearers, must have made it increasingly difficult to prepare porridge or broth at home on a sufficient scale. It was therefore logical to turn to wheaten bread, which could be bought from one of the growing number of bakeries. 3. Agricultural improvements had led to much displacement of country people, and to an increase in the numbers available as day labourers. The main farm servants, the hinds, were expected to provide a woman

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Alexander Fenton from their household for shearing. There were also seasonally migrant harvest hands, in earlier times from the highlands and islands of Scotland and later from Ireland. The harvests of the main grain-producing areas of Scotland brought many people together, like bees round a honey pot. For such folk, white or wheaten bread was a rare novelty, and it must have given them a taste for it, when they could get it. 4. As part of the innovation process, the possibility of slicing wheaten bread and spreading it with butter and jam led to the appearance, at least by the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, of the cut sandwich. This process was supported by the spread of shops, and by the travelling vans that brought bakers’ products increasingly to the remoter parts of the countryside. A further factor was the use of sliced bread with butter and tea for breakfast by the womenfolk, possibly in imitation of higher-class practice at an earlier date. 5. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, bread and beer continued to be the provender for seasonal activities, including potato lifting, up till World War I. 6. After that war, seasonally engaged workers became more individualistic, getting their own food and preferring cash options. Endogenous development, therefore, can be identified at a number of points relating to the provision of harvest food in the main arable districts of Scotland. Such food, which could change in its nature over time, was always distinguished by its quality, which was superior to the everyday diet. This factor sparked off innovatory changes in the everyday diet. However, in the north and west of Scotland, where the emphasis was pastoral rather than arable, this did not apply to the same extent. The concept of endogenous development, therefore, is capable of helping to diagnose cultural regions, and so deserves much further investigation.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Chambers and Wilson, 1840. Fenton, 1999, 52. Possibly from ‘Tam McLelland’, a firm that distilled spirits at Wigtown. Scottish Life Archive (SLA), National Museums of Scotland, MS 1965/2: Mrs Jessie Buchanan. 5. SLA, MS 1981/44; Mrs K. Vogelsanger, Perthshire. 6. For information on the effect of the open fire on baked cereal products, see Fenton, 1998, 29–47. – 50 –

Feeding the Shearers 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Davidson, 1999, 692. Robertson, 1799, 162–3. Kerr, 1809, 241. Headrick, 1813, 302. A quarter is eight bushels, and one bushel is 36.37 litres. NSA II, 1845, 219: Nenthorn, Berwickshire. NSA X, 1845, 771: Dull, Perthshire. Henderson, 1879, 473. Lowe, 1794, 59. Kerr, 1809, 228–9. Douglas, 1798, 88. NSA I , 1845, 15. [Atkinson, T.] , 1887, 33–4. Donaldson, 1794, 24–5. SND s.v. Shear. NSA IV, 1845, 210: Kirkmaiden, Wigtownshire. NSA III, 1845, 5: Selkirk. NSA VIII, 1845, 52: New Kilpatrick, Dunbartonshire. NSA XV , 1845, 35: Golspie, Sutherland. NSA III, 1845, 326: Kelso, Roxburghshire; NSA III (1845), 5: Selkirk; NSA IX (1845), 224: Leuchars, Fife. NSA I, 1845, 15: Liberton, Midlothian; NSA II (1845), 219: Nenthorn, Berwickshire. NSA IX, 1845, 308: Cameron, Fife. See, for example, Wheeler , 1960, 147–55; Cormack, 1971, 102. SND s.v. Hairst. SLA, ‘Harvest Diet Over 50 Years Ago’, cutting from Aberdeen Press and Journal, undated. MacTaggart, 1876, 254. SND s.v. Bicker. Grosart, 1899, 162.

References [Atkinson, T.] (1821), Three Nights in Perthshire with a Description of the Festival of a ‘Scotch Hairst Kirn’ comprising Legendary Ballads Etc. in a Letter from Percy Yorke Jr. to J. Twiss Esq, Glasgow (reprint 1887). Chambers, R. and Wilson, Prof. J. (1840), The Land of Burns, a series of landscapes and portraits illustrative of the life and writings of the Scottish poet, 2 vols, Glasgow.

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Alexander Fenton Cormack, A. and A. (1971), Days of Orkney Steam, Kirkwall: Kirkwall Press. Davidson, A. (1999), The Oxford Companion to Food, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donaldson, J. (1794), General View of the Agriculture of the Carse of Gowrie in the County of Perth, London: Board of Agriculture. Douglas, R. (1798), General View of the Agriculture in the Counties of Roxburgh and Selkirk, Edinburgh: Board of Agriculture. Fenton, A. (1998), ‘Hearth and kitchen: the Scottish example’, in M. R. Schärer and A. Fenton (eds), Food and Material Culture, East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 29–47. Fenton, A. (1999), Scottish Country Life, revised edn, East Linton: Tuckwell Press. Grosart, J. (1899), Chronicles from Peebles Briggate, and Angling Haunts of the Shire, Peebles. Headrick, J. (1813), General View of the Agriculture of Angus or Forfarshire, Edinburgh. Henderson, E. (1879), Annals of Dunfermline and Vicinity, 1069–1878, with Notes and Memorabilia, Glasgow. Kerr, R. (1809), General View of the Agriculture of the County of Berwick, London. Lowe, A. (1794), General View of the Agriculture of the County of Berwick, London. MacTaggart, J. (1876), The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia (1824), 2nd edn, London and Glasgow. Robertson, J. (1799), General View of the Agriculture in the County of Perth, Perth. Wheeler, P. T. (1960), ‘Travelling vans and mobile shops in Sutherland’, The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 76/3: 147–55.

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– 4– Food Outdoors on Farms and on Estates Changing Eating Habits of Country Folk in Hungary, 1760–1960

Eszter Kisbán

The time-span 1760–1960 covers two fundamental periods of change: the mid-eighteenth-century agricultural improvements, and the suspension of private farming due to the political situation in the mid-twentieth century. This chapter discusses the organization of food provision in the fields for harvesters and other agricultural workers in Hungary during these two hundred years. It considers the changes in the system and it looks at the content of such meals. Eating out in the fields was a daily routine during the long summer period for the whole agricultural population, i.e. for over 75 per cent of the inhabitants around 1870 and still over 50 per cent around 1950. With regard to the organization of outdoor meals, questions to be asked deal with the relationship between eating at home and at work, the difference between care for food provision on farms, on the one hand, and on estates, on the other, and, in general, the continuity and change in agricultural food during these two hundred years. Special consideration will be devoted to economic and social changes as well as to food innovations.

The Rural Setting Between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-twentieth century, Hungarian agriculture was dominated by very large estates of feudal origin and by rather small farms of common people, which just provided a living for the family. Apart from some agrarian towns and small regions with special privileges, during the first half of the period the small farms belonged, according to the medieval system, to a feudal owner who could own anything from two to hundreds or even thousands of small dependent farms. Owners could not displace the farmer, whose sons always continued to use the farm, and between whom the farmland was subdivided – 53 –

Eszter Kisbán in equal proportions when he died. The services rendered for the use of these farms were set by the feudal owner, as a changing combination of agricultural products in kind, work on the estate farm, and payment in money. The new civil code of 1848 ended the dependence of the small farmers on any former feudal proprietor, and the land they worked became their property. So began the days of the peasant farms. Up to the mid-eighteenth century there had been plenty of uncultivated land in the country, which counteracted the diminishing size of the dependent farms due to the equal sharing of the inheritance amongst farmers’ sons. But after this, the widening European markets for agricultural products changed the landowners’ economic interests. They now aspired to hold the land in their own hands, and use it in the form of large estate farms. Estate modernization entailed the development of better administration, the employment of trained managers, the division of the waste estates into large but manageable estate farm units, the construction of permanent housing for agricultural servant families employed in such units all the year round, and an effort to pay extra workers at peak periods instead of taking advantage of the service obligation of the dependent farmers. Dependent farms were no longer consolidated by the regular provision of new land, and pauperization of the agricultural population increased generation by generation. The inevitable outcome was the broad social strata of landless and nearly landless agricultural workers, who, with their families, comprised about 30 per cent of the whole national population between the two World Wars. The basic market product of Hungarian agriculture began to change from live animals to grain during the late eighteenth century. Grain production predominated in the countryside during the second half of the nineteenth century, and remains an important factor. Within the new organizational framework of farms, dependent farmers were occasionally forced to use day labourers when they had to work on a feudal estate while there was still urgent work to do on their own farms. Later, free peasant farmers also needed additional hands from time to time. Such day labourers always ate with the family, as did the permanent servants who were employed, one or at most two at a time, on a minority of the family-sized farms. For feudal estates of the period, there are no records of whether or not dependent farmers were fed on the estate when summoned to work. Regulations only mention the periods of breaks in the work during the day. In earlier periods, however, the estates occasionally provided cooked food for their paid day labourers. With the increasing supply of job-seeking labourers later, this practice ended. Only in the most eastern and most – 54 –

Food Outdoors on Farms and Estates archaic large region, Transylvania, was the old-style provision of food still recorded in modern agricultural statistics by the end of the nineteenth century. During the whole period, harvesting the grain was seen as the most vital task in agriculture. It was for this that feudal estates first changed over completely to paid work. They hired whole squads of harvesters, and made sure they were properly fed.

Daily Meals: Two- or Three-meal Systems The system of daily meals remained rather archaic with the country folk throughout the period. The medieval two-meal system, formerly practised throughout the year, continued for the winter half of the year well up to the 1950s. In November to March, when there was no day-to-day work on the fields, women would cook and serve meals twice a day, at 9–10 a.m. and 3–4 p.m. The well-known three-meal system was adopted amongst the upper classes in the late seventeenth century, and the main meal was and remained the midday dinner. By the end of the eighteenth century, country folk were also tending to practise a three-meal system, with the main meal at midday during the longer, summer half of the year (April–October). Farmers, however, often inserted short transitional periods in April and September–October, i.e. outside the peak work periods in May to August.1 As women regularly worked in the fields too, the growing tendency was to prepare fresh hot food only once a day during the summer, and carry it to the fields for everybody for midday. Harvest was often an exception when the families cooked for the evening as well. In the transitional spring and autumn periods, the hot meal tended to be the supper. Hot evening meals took place after work at home. If the family looked after day labourers, they would eat one hot meal with the family at least: if taken in the evening, they would return to the farmer’s house for it. Day labourers at harvest joined in the supper as well. By customary law, St George (24 April) and St Michael (29 September) became the fixed days to mark the summer half of the agricultural year when day labourers were entitled to better wages and better food. With one - eventually two - hot meal(s) during the summer regime, other meals consisted of cold food. These were breakfast daily, dinner for a shorter and supper for a longer section of the summer period, and an afternoon snack for the hardest months, July–August, only. Breakfast was eaten after some hours of work in the fields, and the food was carried by the workers from the house. It was the same if dinner was to be cold during the transitional spring and autumn periods. For the afternoon snack, sour liquids taken

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Eszter Kisbán cold were preferred in the heat, as sour milk or a light sour soup, carried out together with the hot midday meal.

Eating at Work: Farmers and Their Day Labourers The busiest work period for the small farmer was from the beginning of May to the end of August, when the whole family, men and women alike, were in the fields, and he might even employ additional hands as day labourers. These ate with the family during the day. The farmer rose at 4 a.m. in spring and autumn, and at 3 a.m. from June to August. The animals were fed and milked, and then the people went to the fields. Day labourers, having no animals to feed, rose one hour later, and joined the farmer at his house.2 Men might have a drink of spirits with a bite of bread for ‘health’, but otherwise people did not eat at home in the morning. Breakfast and the midday meal were eaten in the fields, and supper at home at 6 to 9 p.m. according to daylight and work. During the peak period in July and August there was also afternoon refreshment in the fields at 4 p.m. The most widespread pattern for summer meals was a cold breakfast carried from home, one hot meal during the day as an absolute essential, and the third meal was either hot or cold. The additional afternoon refreshment was preferably of cold liquid food.

Bread and Lard For eating out in the fields during summer, the overall character of the food also changed. Lard became the basic food item and was also regarded as the most desirable. For the cold meals, it was eaten with bread, frequently together with some fresh vegetable (onion, paprika, cucumber). The position and status of both bread and lard were historically well established amongst the rural population. Home-made leavened bread had been a daily necessity amongst the common people since the early modern period, while lard had counted as the most precious (and also most expensive) food, reserved for those engaged in hard work. The slaughtering time for pigs was late December, and although some cooking might have to be done with small pieces of lard, lard was chiefly reserved for summer work, and especially for meals in the fields. Alternatives were cheese on days of abstinence (Friday during the whole period, Saturday up the end of the nineteenth century), and conserved sausages on rare occasions only. People who left for the fields at dawn carried lard and – 56 –

Food Outdoors on Farms and Estates bread in linen bags, slung on the shafts of tools over their shoulders. Lard was usually eaten as it was; only in the cooler mornings of the spring and autumn transitional periods men would roast it over a fire, catching the melting drops on bread. The lard, called szalonna, is the clean, hard, fatty tissue from all around the pig, separated from the animal in big pieces, conserved by dry-salting or salting and smoking, with no strips of meat in it such as are found in bacon. The pieces can be between 2 and 10 cm thick. The lard is quite dry and easy to carry.3

Hot Meals, Norms and Concepts of Prestige The women bringing the fresh hot meals out to the fields had a special way of carrying the earthenware pots in every region: in a basket on the head; on the back; in a net holding one or two pots and carried in the hand; and last, and least popular, in different forms of baskets on the arm. Even for short periods, very few family farms employed so many additional hands that food would have to be brought in wagons. Amongst the farms, there was a constant rivalry as to whether everybody’s food would be on the spot in time, i.e. just for midday. This aspect was as important as the contents of the midday dinners themselves. During the summer, as many women stayed at home in the morning as were needed for cooking and carrying out the meal, after which they joined in the work too. Regarding the number of dishes at the main meal, and the sequence of the menus during the week, the norms for the whole year directed the summer routine as well, but then people did their best to fulfil the norms or to perform even better. Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday counted as meat days all the year round, while Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday were meatless days, although neither Monday nor Wednesday was a fast day during these centuries.4 As it would have been a problem for many of the families, the norm allowed meat to be forgone on a meat day, permitting instead a kind of soup or a second course which could have been prepared with meat, though not necessarily always. Such reduction, however, happened more often during wintertime than in summer. The better summer standard was not only for the sake of calorie intake, but owed much to prestige, as people carefully watched what arrived for dinner on the next field. One-course dinners used to be in the minority, while two courses prevailed. If one course was used, it was substantial soup. If two courses, the first was always a soup, and the second a changing choice of variants

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Eszter Kisbán of porridge-like dishes, and noodles on meatless days, while vegetables were cooked to a mush that was thicker than a soup on meat days. The meat could be cooked either in the soup or with the vegetables. The meat itself was mainly smoked pork on family farms, sometimes also fresh mutton in certain areas.

The Taste for Sour Food Preparations Dishes for the fields in summer were more often sour-flavoured than dishes during the winter, for sour food was thought more refreshing during hot weather and to keep better until it reached the workers. Home-baked foods rarely went to the fields. If it did, it replaced noodles, and only very exceptionally constituted a third course. This was already going beyond the norm, as was cooking meat more often than expected or just sending out two different soups (instead of one) plus porridge (e.g. millet in milk) during especially hard work.5 A sumptuary regulation at county level complained that day labourers were too demanding and that farmers trying to attract them allowed two courses for a hot dinner and supper alike, and cold food with bread at breakfast and in the afternoon. The giving of more courses, baked foods and wine would be construed as misconduct.6 In the mid-twentieth century, nearly one hundred kinds of soups were reported from a small region alone in an intensive study.7 Though less numerous by far, many preparations of second-course dishes were still at hand for farmers’ wives. Of these, I only note that meat always came boiled, never stewed or roasted, to the fields. Two soup dishes became especially linked in the whole nation’s consciousness, at least as early as the sixteenth century, to the work then considered hardest, namely, the mowing of hay with the scythe, by men. Hence the name of one of these soups was kaszáslé (scythe-man’s soup). This was made with meat, and also had an alternative for fast-days when meat was forbidden but milk products allowed. The second soup was made with the liquid and curds of sour milk, and had the literary name of sajtlé (curds soup). Even upper- and middle-class cookery books included these dishes under such names right up to the nineteenth century. The preparation of both dishes continued amongst farmers till the mid-twentieth century, by which time even paprika and potatoes had entered as ingredients. During five centuries, and all over the country, there were several smaller variations in the recipes for these soups. The essentials were, for the meat soup, mainly smoked pork in the common household (fresh meat also when they had it), cooked in water together with some fresh vegetables, slightly thickened with beaten eggs and very little flour, and flavoured – 58 –

Food Outdoors on Farms and Estates with vinegar (upper-class households used to cook it with fresh meat). For the sajtlé for meatless days, sour milk was at hand nearly all the year round. It was strained, the curds put aside, the remaining sour liquid (whey) warmed up, the curds cooked into it with some onions, and eventually thickened with a little flour. This lumpy liquid began to be felt oldfashioned in the twentieth century, came into disuse gradually and became a subject of mockery.8 In this vine-growing country, wine was not carried to the fields as a rule, but people there drank water, best kept cool in large earthenware jugs. When farmers’, rural labourers’ and craftsmen’s sons began to turn towards modern industry in growing numbers from the late nineteenth century, the first and second generations of these new industrial workers’ families tended to continue their previous agricultural routine. If the industrial plant where the head of the family worked was within walking distance, a two-course dinner was brought to him for midday by his wife or a child. I was astonished to hear from a reliable informant that as a young boy he carried such meals to his father every day during the weeks of working the day-shift in the 1900s. And this was at the Hungarian State Ironworks at Miskolc-Diósgyõr, one of the most important early centres of heavy industry.9

Estate Labour Wage Regulation As hired work became more frequent in agriculture from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, county authorities begun to include a regulated level of emoluments in their price and wage limitations. Wages for agricultural day labourers were of two types: with and without food. Labourers seem to have preferred wages with food, although the value for food seems to have been set quite high. It was one quarter of the wage for the same work without food in 1812, for example.10 The same limitation made by Tolna county also specified the contents of the main meals in the case of the journeymen in all possible crafts eating with their masters’ families. The hot meals were a two-course dinner and a two-course supper.11 The full summer sequence of meals for day labourers is given in the joint regulation of four counties for the south-west region of the country in 1773: bread for breakfast, a two-course meal at midday, bread for the afternoon snack, and two courses of hot dishes in the evening. This applied to small dependent farms and estates alike.12 – 59 –

Eszter Kisbán During the nineteenth century, the growing market orientation of estates, and the increasing number of the free workforce, brought to an end the practice of offering food to day labourers. The work of cooking and transporting food to the fields became too much. By the end of the century, remnants of the old system continued largely in Transylvania only.13

Harvesters and Work Contracts On the estates, the scythe came to prevail over the sickle for harvesting grain, but grain continued to be cut by hand up to the end of the estate regime. Mechanization of reaping accelerated on estates from the 1890s, but because of the unlimited supply of cheap manpower using scythes, it was not completed till the end of the period in question.14 As paid harvesters increased in numbers on the estates, written contracts between estates and squads of harvesters appeared from the late eighteenth century. They became compulsory by law a hundred years later and continued up to the end of the estate system in the mid-twentieth century.15 In the early harvest contracts one of the central points related to food, and detailed mention of this issue continued later. For the workers it was important because they usually came from far away and stayed on the estate for three to five weeks, although some harvesters might be local. During the whole period, workers and estates were in agreement that the best form of wages was a defined proportion of the harvested grain. There were additional elements both in the setting of the wage, and in the defining of the tasks. Food was part of the wage, and there were two main forms of how to provide it. In the central regions, the old routine according to which the estate cooked for the harvesters seems to have terminated about the mid-nineteenth century. In a representative collection of harvest contracts covering two centuries,16 the latest to grant hot meals for the harvesters is from 1851. An earlier example is from the Festetics estate in the Balaton area from 1807. The Festetics family was one of the highest nobility. They were the first to organize higher education in agriculture in the country, ran demonstration farms, and were best at supporting modernization in every way. The contract in question was old-fashioned, probably because it related to harvesters who came from quite a remote region, amounting to sixty persons using the sickle, whereas the scythe had already become the modern tool for such work. They were contracted for four weeks and paid in cash instead of grain. The estate supplied fresh hot food twice a day, plus 2lb of bread a day (except on Saturday, which was then an abstinence day, when cheese and wine replaced the hot meal in the

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Food Outdoors on Farms and Estates evening).17 A sequence of harvest contracts from 1838, 1851 and 1862 from a church estate shows how the old form of care for food provision had begun to change. In 1838 the estate employed a woman to cook for the harvesters. Fresh hot food for dinner and supper was provided, plus bread and wine for the day – even though the harvesters were local residents. In 1851 a squad of fifty harvesters came from further away. They got hot meals twice a day, 2 lb of bread per person a day, and 340 litres of light wine for the whole group over the contract period. On Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday meat dishes were granted, but on Sundays no hot meal was provided in the evening.18 In 1862 the contract covered the hay and the grain harvests. The people came from another village again. Only the hay harvesters, twelve men and ten women, were offered hot meals. The estate commissioned the cook, but the harvesters had to bring her with them. Hot meals were offered at midday, three times a week only. They consisted of two courses. In addition, every person got an essential amount of bread and more than 1 litre of wine daily. The lady cook had to bake the bread as well. During the grain harvest, however, the workers no longer got meals but were allocated foodstuffs to provide cold meals and prepare hot dishes for themselves.19 The foodstuffs supplied for harvesters’ own preparation of hot and cold meals came to be called konvenció (convention). The harvest squads had to bring with them a person to act as cook. As harvest contracts were always signed several months in advance, the squad knew in good time what foodstuffs they would get and they brought with them the necessary supplements. Grain for bread was usually given for the whole harvest period before the work started, and the cooking ingredients at the beginning of each week. Hot meals were prepared for midday and for supper. The cook worked with the squad from dawn, and walked back to the lodging at mid-morning to prepare the food and take it to the fields before joining in the work again. In the evening, the cook went back early to have the fresh meal ready by the time the workers arrived. Firewood, fireplace, in some case cauldrons, and transport of the food to the fields at midday were provided by the estate. So was a baking oven for bread, but this was not used by squads from within half a day’s walking distance, who got bread from home at weekends. Grain for the bread during the harvest could be part of the wage, or could sometimes be an advance of earnings in proportion to the whole harvest. All these details were carefully listed in the harvest contracts. The system itself had been recorded on estates long before the practice of harvest contracts developed. Accounts from one estate in 1729 and 1741 registered harvesters cooking for themselves, and listed flour (for bread), salt, millet, lentils, smoked meat, cheese, butter – 61 –

Eszter Kisbán and dried fruit as foodstuffs they got from the estate.20 These would allow hot meals on both meat and abstinence days.

The Range of Harvest Food Provision Already in 1826,21 harvest contracts indicate how to arrange the assortment of foodstuffs for harvest workers. Three main groups were evident: grain, fat and cooking ingredients. This principle changed only during the 1930s, when estates gradually stopped providing cooking ingredients. In some earlier cases, cash was offered for completing the range of foodstuffs.22 Harvesters drank water, although some estates, if it was convenient for them, used to give light wine as well during the whole period. The estates usually paid a person to transport and carry the water to the harvesters. Several estates developed commercial distilleries from the first half of the nineteenth century, and included plain spirits in the harvester’s konvenció.23 This was drunk at dawn, and eventually with the meals as well. Grain from the konvenció was mainly used for bread, in some proportion for noodles, and a fraction to thicken dishes with flour. The second food unit, fat, was the lard described earlier. Most of it was used for the cold meals, some for cooking. Only towards the end of the period was a part of the fat given here and there as rendered fat for cooking. The mention of fat in the specified form of lard appears in the surviving contracts in 1843. There are not enough contracts from before that date to be sure, but an explanation for such timing could be the joint consequence of the increasing boom in grain, the rising demand for harvest workers, and a change of species in pig breeding. The last feature began in the late eighteenth century and was completed by the mid-nineteenth century.24 While previous breeds were lean races, the new one was a lardtype with much more fat. Workers had always been hungry for fat, and this taste could now be more easily satisfied. Another factor was that men using scythes had become the key figures in the harvest work, whereas, formerly, women, using sickles, had prevailed. Regarding cooking ingredients, the earlier in time, the more diversified they were in the lists. During the nineteenth century, peas, lentils, beans, sauerkraut, millet, maize, buckwheat, milk, sour cream, butter (instead of lard for cooking on abstinence days), fresh meat (beef and mutton), salt and vinegar were all included. With the exception of noodles ready to be cooked, the cooks could feel like farmers’ wives with their own kitchen with some of the konvenció lists. As long as the estates provided wide

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Food Outdoors on Farms and Estates selections of cooking ingredients, the large amounts of vinegar are striking. Harvest contracts show a tendency to withdraw fresh meat from the konvenciós by about 1900,25 and millet by World War I. Peas and lentils also disappeared (just as they lost ground also as an element in the farmers’ food). Estates stopped offering cooking ingredients, which they found awkward and uncomfortable to prepare or transport in additional quantities, and so the offer of sauerkraut, milk products, vinegar and even salt came to an end. After World War I, the cooking ingredients in the harvest contracts became quite monotonous. Beans remained and potatoes were added, until the whole unit covering ‘cooking ingredients’ was abolished from the 1930s, leaving grain and fat to be offered. During the 1940s, here and there another unit was abolished: the grain supplied for bread. Fat, the most important element, remained longest, and continued to be supplied, preferably in the form of conserved lard. What had been dropped from the konvenció was now brought by the harvesters from home. In the transitional period between the World Wars, for example, when they still got bread-grain and lard but only beans and potatoes as cooking ingredients, all members of the group brought dried noodles in matching forms, and onions and paprika for joint cooking.26 When harvesters cooked their dinner and supper themselves, it was hardly reported officially whether they had one or two courses for a meal, though at earlier dates the norm might have been two courses. This became simplified, especially in the Lowland area, the centre for marketing grain. During the twentieth century, one-course hot meals dominated there. An essential was soup for midday and some kind of a thicker dish in the evening. In the Lowland area, the latter tended to be a porridge-like dish cooked of small forms of noodles or of millet. With the cancellation of meat from the konvenció, meat simply disappeared during the harvest period. Lard and bread constituted the cold meals on the field at 8 o’clock in the morning and in the afternoon. With the progressive changes in the system of how estates granted harvest food, the contents of the harvesters’ meals gradually became more and more different from those of farmers and their workers. The difference both in form and content was also striking between how a labourer ate at work and at home. One point not mentioned yet was the lack of the long strip noodles and noodle dishes with curds, etc., in the estate harvest workers’ food. This was a common and characteristic dish of the country folk at the latest from the eighteenth century.27 The abstinence days even came to be called ‘noodle-days’. But to prepare noodles and noodle dishes, some pieces of special kitchen equipment were needed and the – 63 –

Eszter Kisbán manipulation took time, which was impractical for the harvesters’ cook. Thus, for the harvesters on estates, the classic noodles were abandoned, with the consequence that several kinds of porridge-like dishes were substituted as main meals even though these were now less frequently eaten in the countryside on average.

The Main Trends This discussion is not concerned with analysis of the quality of nourishment. It focuses on historical conditions that affected both workers and providers. It sets the provision of outside food against norms of the daily diet. Preparation had to be made within these norms for food to be eaten at especially intensive work periods in the fields. These took place in summer and also observed rules regarding meat and meatless days. During these two centuries there is no indication of adoption of innovations in foodstuff in this work context (potatoes, tomatoes, sugar and white ersatz coffee, however, were all tried out at home). For the first half of the period under review, outside eating was conditioned both on farms and estates by the everyday diet of the farm folk. This is what the labourers shared in. Later, estates simplified their forms of food provision, which in part included the bringing and preparing of some of the food by the labourers themselves. Food in the field brings many factors into play. The changing character of harvest food provision, its relationship with wages and wage-regulations, its reflection of daily norms of meat- and meatless days, the interplay between ‘hot’, ‘cold’ and ‘sour’, its prestige role as a form of public eating, its lack of innovating tendencies, and the interplay of changing estate responses, all combine to make it a rewarding form of socio-historical research.

Notes This study has been completed with the assistance of the Hungarian Ministry of Education’s Széchenyi-grant (1999–2002) for university professors. I am grateful to Alexander Fenton for help with the English text. – 64 –

Food Outdoors on Farms and Estates 1. In a continuous long strip of mountain regions with little arable land surrounding old Hungary, and mostly beyond the borders of the present country, older forms prevailed. Up to the twentieth century, variants of the medieval two-meal system were continued, even at work in the fields during summer. Fresh hot meals were carried out from home for those who had already worked some hours in the fields and they sat down to ‘dinner’ at about 8–9 a.m. during that season. At midday, there was a break in the work and some cold refreshment eaten. ‘Supper’ took place at home and consisted of freshly cooked food again. Kisbán, 1975. 2. Fél and Hofer, 1972, 420. 3. Rendering fat straight from the pig for conservation was an eighteenthcentury innovation with the upper classes which gradually reached the agricultural population by the mid-nineteenth century. But farmers for another hundred years made sure that an adequate supply of lard should be left. If no rendered fat was conserved, cooking could be done with pieces of lard. Rendered fat was neither salted nor smoked, and gave a more neutral flavour to dishes than lard. Kisbán, 1988. 4. Kisbán, 1994. 5. At hoeing, harvesting, in Csököly and surrounding villages, Somogy county, before World War I. Knézy, 1975, 106. 6. Joint regulation on day labour by the counties of Veszprém, Zala, Somogy and Baranya in 1773 (Kanyar, 1967, 126; Melhárd, 1896). In the early twentieth century, baked foods was included in the norm on the farms for harvest time, which counted, in regard to cooking, as festival time. Schwalm, 1989, 472. 7. Kardos, 1943, 24–7. 8. Kisbán, 1997, 482–501. 9. Berend and Ránki, 1972, 53, 58. 10. Limitation of wages, Tolna county, 1812. Wage of day labourer, working with a mattock, 1ft (forint) without or 24xr (kreuzer) with food. Domonkos, 1991, 725. 11. The journeymen were also entitled to roast meat on holidays, which indicates that this was not the case on other days. Domonkos, 1991, 724. 12. Kanyar, 1967, 126. 13. Agricultural Wages in Hungary, 1893–1913. 14. Gunst and Hoffmann, 1976, 377; Szabó, 1972, 345–8. 15. The most comprehensive study on harvest workers is the book by Iván Balassa (1985).

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Eszter Kisbán 16. With forty-four contracts between 1786 and 1945. Balassa, 1985, 294–354. 17. Balassa, 1985, 296. The earliest known harvest contracts are also from a unit of the Festetics estate (Balatonkeresztúr), from 1786 and 1787, with harvesters from two different villages. The texts are quite laconic on the point as yet, but indicate that the squad got meals, and had to bring a lady cook to prepare them. The estate paid her in grain. No list of foodstuffs is given. Balassa, 1985, 294–5. 18. Abbey of Kapornak, Zala county. Balassa, 1985, 299, 304. 19. As foodstuffs for self-catering they got bread-grain, meat, salt and wine, calculated per person, and other cooking ingredients for the whole squad together. Cooking ingredients included sauerkraut or sour turnips, beans, lentils, millet, buckwheat, milk, cheese, fat, maize and vinegar. Firewood was also granted. Abbey of Kapornak, Zala county. Balassa, 1985, 306–7. 20. Regéc, Abaúj county. Balassa, 1985, 32. 21. Chapter of the Cathedral at Szombathely, Vas county. Balassa, 1985, 297. 22. On the Royal Hungarian model farm for educational purposes in Debrecen, for example, in 1894, with the remark that from the cooking ingredients the item meat can be given in kind or the price for it instead as the harvesters prefer. Balassa, 1985, 319. 23. Balassa, 1985, 150–3. 24. Szabadfalvi, 2001, 753. 25. The amount of fresh meat was 1 lb per week for man and woman alike in 1826 (Chapter of the Cathedral at Szombathely), and 2 lb for a man, 1 lb for a woman in 1894 (Royal Hungarian model farm in Debrecen). Balassa, 1985, 297, 318. 26. Bárth, 1984, 772. 27. Kisbán, 1993.

References [Agricultural Wages in Hungary] (1893–1913), Mezõgazdasági Magyarországon, Kiadja a Földmûvelõdésügyi M.Kir. Minister, Budapest. Balassa, I. (1985), Aratómunkások Magyarországon 1848–1944 [Harvest workers in Hungary 1848–1944], Budapest. Bárth, J. (ed.) (1984), Kecel története és néprajza [The village of Kecel: history and ethnography], Kecel.

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Food Outdoors on Farms and Estates Berend, T. I. and Ránki, Gy. (1972), A magyar gazdaság száz éve [The Hungarian economy 1850–1966], Budapest. Domonkos, O. (1991), ‘Ár- és bérszabályzatok’ [Price and wage limitations], in O. Domonkos (ed.), Kézmûvesség. Magyar Néprajz III [Hungarian Ethnography III. Handicrafts], Budapest, 705–26. Fél, E., and Hofer, T. (1972), Bäuerliche Denkweise in Wirtschaft und Haushalt, Göttingen. Gunst, P., and Hoffmann, T. (eds) (1976), A magyar mezõgazdaság a XIX– XX. században (1849–1949) [Hungarian agriculture in the nineteenth– twentieth centuries], Budapest. Kanyar, J. (1967), Harminc nemzedék vallomása Somogyról [Historical documents from Somogy county], Kaposvár. Kardos, L. (1943), Az Õrség népi táplálkozása [Rural foodways in a WestHungarian region], Budapest. Kisbán, E. (1975), ‘Tagesmahlzeiten im Wandel: Am Beispiel Ungarns’, in N. Valonen and J. U. E. Lehtonen (ed.), Ethnologische Nahrungsforschung/Ethnological Food Research , Helsinki, 115–25. Kisbán, E. (1988), ‘“May his pig fat be thick”: domestic conservation of fat in Hungary’, in A. Riddervold and A. Ropeid (eds), Food Conservation, London, 26–37. Kisbán, E. (1993), ‘The noodle days: early modern Hungary and the adoption of Italian noodles in South Middle Europe’, Ethnologia Europaea, 23: 41–54. Kisbán, E. (1994), ‘Húsevõnap-tésztaevõnap: az egyházi böjti fegyelem táplálkozásszerkezet-formáló szerepe’ [The role of the fast and abstinence rules of churches in the development of the system of eating], in E. Kisbán (ed.), Parasztkultúra, populáris kultúra és a központi irányítás [Peasant culture, popular culture, central direction], Budapest, 75–98. Kisbán, E. (1997), ‘Táplálkozáskultúra’ [Food and foodways], in I. Balassa, (ed.), Életmód: Magyar Néprajz IV [Hungarian ethnography IV: ways of life], Budapest, 417–583. Knézy, J. (1975), ‘A táplálkozás szokásai és rendszere Csököly, Rinyakovácsi és Kisbajom belsõ-somogyi községekben’ [Rural foodways in Somogy county], in Somogyi Múzeumok Közleményei, 2: 103–8. Melhárd, Gy. (1896), Somogy vármegyei gazdaságtörténeti adatok [Towards an economic history of Somogy county], Kaposvár. Schwalm, E. (1989), ‘A palócok táplálkozása ünnepeken és hétköznapokon’ [Food and foodways in the “palóc” region, Northern Hungary], in F. Bakó (ed.), Palócok III, Eger, 379–495.

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Eszter Kisbán Szabadfalvi, J. (2001), ‘Sertéstartás’ [Pig-rearing] in A. Paládi-Kovács (ed.), Gazdálkodás. Magyar Néprajz IV [Hungarian Ethnography IV. Husbandry], Budapest, 749–70. Szabó, I. (1972) (ed.), A parasztság Magyarországon a kapitalizmus korában 1848–1914 [The peasants in Hungary in the early period of capitalism 1848–1914], Budapest.

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Up, Down and (Drinking and Eating) Out

–5 – Eating Out before the Restaurant Dining Cultures in Early-modern Inns

Beat Kümin

Historians of the restaurant have found little of interest in early modern inns. The social profile of restaurant patrons is carefully scrutinized, yet customers of inns attract only cursory attention. While insisting that there was no one type of restaurant, scholars envisage inns as largely monolithic institutions. The emergence of modern gastronomy is linked to factors like urbanization, commercial expansion, the growth of leisure and greater demand for luxury, but did all of this only emerge at the end of the Ancien Régime?1 Town sizes, social stratification, supply of consumer goods and spatial mobility had, after all, increased for centuries.2 Given this background, it seems time to reassess the assertion that early-modern inns were poor and inflexible. The invention of the restaurant is currently associated with 1760s Paris, where either Monsieur Boulanger or Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau – depending on whose account you follow – revolutionized the catering trade.3 Ignoring legal constraints, these pioneers transcended customary demarcations between traiteurs (caterers), rôtisseurs (roasters) and cabaretiers (innkeepers) to introduce consumer choice and structural innovations like flexible meal times, itemized menu cards and facilities for more private dining.4 An originally simple fare based on ‘restorative’ bouillons (the semantic root of the new establishments), dairy foods and vegetables then evolved into more ambitious provision and eventually a culture of culinary sophistication nurtured by famous gastronomic writers like Grimod de la Reynière. While there were intriguing correlations between bourgeois assertion and the rise of the restaurant, it will be argued here that the latter could build on a number of early-modern precedents. By the late Middle Ages, a dense network of inns existed throughout most of Europe, catering for locals and travellers in a number of contexts. In addition to selling substantial amounts of food and drink to individual patrons for consumption on the premises, they also offered banquets and – 71 –

Beat Kümin victuals to take away. As such, they played a crucial role in social interaction, increasing spatial mobility and long-distance trade.5 On the basis of evidence like travel reports, official sources and a growing secondary literature on public houses, this paper examines dining cultures and culinary standards in early-modern inns.6 Drawing primarily on the case studies of the Swiss republic of Bern and the German principality of Bavaria (where there were no restaurants before the nineteenth century), the argument evaluates contemporary impressions, practical meal arrangements and the variety of customer options. The concluding section will return to the issue of the ‘novelty’ of the modern restaurant. Modern restaurant scholarship echoes the notorious account in Erasmus’s ‘Diversoria’, where a character named Bertulf describes the eating experience in an early sixteenth-century German inn as follows: ‘[even] if you arrive at four o’clock, still you won’t dine before nine [. . . because] they don’t prepare anything unless they see everyone’s present: one service for all’. An aged servant then ‘lays the linen for as many tables as he thinks sufficient for the number of diners [. . .]. Guests are directed to every single table, eight at least to each one. Now those familiar with native custom sit down wherever they please, for there’s no distinction between rich and poor.’ The servant returns to place before ‘each one a wooden dish and a spoon made of the same silver; then a glass cup’. After waiting almost an hour, amidst much ceremony, dishes arrive. The first generally has bits of bread dipped in meat broth, or, if it’s a fish day, in vegetable broth. Next another broth; after that some warmed-over meat or salt fish. Again porridge, followed by more solid food, until at last they serve to the thoroughly tamed stomach roast meat or boiled fish – not altogether despicable, but they’re stingy with it and quickly take it away. [. . .] they’re careful to make the last act the best.

To round off, Germans like cheese, but only if ‘full of mould and worms’. As for drinks, at first ‘sharp and pungent’ wine is served, better qualities only after dinner. Meal and drinks incur a fixed charge, for ‘the one who downs the most wine pays no more than the one who drinks the least’.7 Now, given the moral and educational purpose of Erasmus’s colloquies, Bertulf’s testimony should be treated with caution, but most historians accept it as an authoritative account. This is all the more curious as other period sources paint a different picture. There is no shortage of praise for German inns, for instance, in the travel report by Antonio de Beatis, touring Central Europe in 1517–18. Wine, meat, bread, fruit and above all fish met with explicit approval, although in terms of mouldy cheese, too, the Italian had some reservations.8 – 72 –

Eating Out before the Restaurant Attempting to obtain a balanced impression, we have to look for snippets of information scattered throughout early-modern sources. A first area of interest is that of dining arrangements. In the late Ancien Régime, travellers speak of two main meals served at lunch- and dinnertime, with breakfasts and afternoon snacks also available.9 Serving times depended not just on an innkeeper’s whim, but also on the schedules of his patrons. Wake-up calls for people on post coaches came early, with German traveller Philipp Gercken taking morning coffee before 4 a.m. at Wiedlisbach (Bern) in 1773. At the spa resort of Leukerbad (Valais) in 1776, Englishman William Coxe lunched at 11 a.m. and dined shortly before 7 p.m. At the Sword in Zurich in 1782, Swiss trader (and former mercenary) Ulrich Bräker dined one hour later at 8, and further examples confirm that there was no one fixed time for everybody in every situation. According to an agreement about slaughtering rights between Swiss butchers and innkeepers, people travelling to markets ate at various points throughout the day. In 1789, one traveller touring Switzerland reported that the table d’hôte system was restricted to major towns, implying more flexible dining times elsewhere.10 As for crockery and cutlery, medieval illustrations show people eating out of shared bowls, using loafs as rudimentary plates, but by the eighteenth century individual crockery existed in all ‘better’ establishments.11 The latter was most commonly made of wood, clay or pewter, but silver appeared for special occasions or VIP patrons. The use of spoons and knives is documented since the Middle Ages, while forks became more widespread only from the seventeenth century.12 Drinking vessels, of course, were needed from the beginning: many different kinds of goblets and glasses emerged during an archaeological excavation of a fourteenth-century German inn, while eighteenth-century taverns commonly listed hundreds of glasses in their inventories.13 Did everybody sit together?14 Bertulf’s account already mentions several tables, and later travellers, too, observed people eating apart.15 Many public houses additionally offered ‘back’ or ‘upper’ rooms for more intimate dining. On an evening in 1788, for instance, a group of distinguished Danish visitors, gentlemen and ladies, had their dinner separately in a side room of the inn at Unterseen near Interlaken in Bern.16 Well before he became a famous restaurateur, Jean-Baptiste Henneveu, Parisian traiteur at the Cadran Bleu, provided not only one large hall with twentyseven tables and seventy-eight stools, but also two smaller rooms, seating some forty people each, and two yet more intimate dining parlours.17 In fact, it was even possible to ask for room service and thus to eat in total privacy. The facility is documented in England as early as 1600, but also for early modern Switzerland, and it must have been common enough to – 73 –

Beat Kümin warrant a comment in the famous Knigge guide to gentlemanly behaviour, which branded the practice as anti-social.18 As for the quality and quantity of meals, there were prescribed legal standards. Feudal lords, church bodies and secular authorities all interfered in the hospitality trade, usually for financial or moral motives. According to an early-modern Bavarian police ordinance, meals at inns were meant to consist of two different wines and no more than six dishes, including two varieties of cooked meat or two types of fish (one fried and one boiled), with cheese or fruit served at the end.19 Theory and practice, alas, often diverged. The table d’hôte system, as already noted, did still operate at the end of the Ancien Régime. Ulrich Bräker, our small businessman, spent the night of 18 September 1794 at the Eagle in Lucerne, where he dined in the company ‘of gentlemen and ladies’, ministers and other ‘distinguished’ guests. He felt embarrassed, as nobody actually talked to him, but he listened carefully to the conversation. As many as fifty-four individual dishes in six courses have been counted for some seventeenth-century establishments, but an early guide to Switzerland, penned by Johann Gottfried Ebel in the 1790s, advised that the host’s table now typically consisted of a soup, three courses and a dessert at a fixed rate of about 1 fl., the equivalent of buying ten pounds of white bread.20 Individual testimonies mention a range of good-quality dishes: in 1773–4, Gercken reports eating trout for lunch at Aarburg, and fish, roast chicken and strawberries for supper at Wiedlisbach. At Andermatt on the Gotthard route in 1776, Roland de la Platière was treated to mortadella, soup, stew, lamb, broccoli, roast veal and goose, salad, dessert and fruit, ‘all of which confirmed his already favourable opinion of Swiss inns’. According to unusually detailed financial records surviving for the public house of Grange-Canal near Geneva around 1780, the fare offered a surprisingly balanced blend of meat, fish, salads, dairy products, fruits and sweets.21 The combination of fish and meat within the same meal was typical, and it seems that almost all edible animals and crops appeared in European public houses, with an obvious bias towards local wildlife and produce. Salmon, mutton and fowl were favourites in Scottish public houses, sauerkraut and sausages already loomed large in Bavarian inns, while Swiss dessert menus included cheeses, various jams, nuts and all sorts of confectionery.22 Secular law often banned unduly luxurious items, while Catholic authorities insisted on the observance of fasting days, both probably with limited success.23 Yet it is often overlooked that the table d’hôte was by no means the only option encountered in an early-modern inn. For a start, provision could be – 74 –

Eating Out before the Restaurant dramatically more modest due to isolated location, rotten victuals or negligent publicans. In November 1779, Goethe dismissed the inn at Sion (Valais) as ‘despicable’, while Jakob Wyttenbach underwent a terrible experience at nearby Obergesteln in 1771. Various dishes came on the table, but they all smelled horrible, maggots sat in the roast and the salad was best left alone. More heartening, if simple, was the fare for early tourists on the Grimsel pass linking the Valais with the Bernese Oberland, where the host had little more than bread, hard goat’s cheese, marmot meat and a bottle of fiery Italian wine.24 The most institutionalized form of early modern consumer choice, however, was the opportunity to select from a number of meal types. The Bavarian police ordinance of 1616 not only specified a set menu for regular customers, but allowed optional extras for ‘higher’ or foreign patrons, as long as they ate at a separate table.25 In the lordship of Kitzbühel near Salzburg in 1729, an official ordinance distinguished between a ‘seigneurial’ meat meal for 35 kreuzer, a fish meal for 37, a ‘peasant wedding’ banquet for 45, a ‘lesser’ meat meal for 24 and a coachman’s dinner for 18. Furthermore, it ordered publicans to ask guests immediately upon arrival, ‘whether they desired to be treated to one of the meals [. . .] specified in the ordinance, [or] better or worse, to serve them according to their wishes, and not to trouble anybody otherwise’.26 This was a particularly extensive range of options, but most inns offered at least the socalled Pfenwert or penny’s-worth as an alternative to the full table d’hôte. From at least the sixteenth century, manorial lords and state authorities expected innkeepers to cater for patrons not wanting the full daily menu. Examples include the terms of tenure for the Lion at Worb (Bern) in 1556 and a Bavarian mandate of 1631. Many people depended on this alternative, as they were neither used to eating so much meat nor able to afford it.27 Flexible choice of dishes was available in other respects. Room service has already been mentioned: Fynes Moryson praised the English custom where a gentleman, ‘if he will eate in his chamber, [. . .] commands what meate he will according to his appetite’.28 Innkeepers also accepted advance orders for special occasions. For one of their country outings in the mid-seventeenth-century, young Bernese patricians told the publican at Jegenstorf exactly what they expected. The meal should consist of three courses, including: (1) good soups with boiled and roast meat; (2) a range of fish-, chicken- and dove-pies; (3) cakes and other baked dishes; olives; boiled and baked fish and crabs; boiled and roast poultry and doves; roast porkling; glazed roast pig; well-made sausages – also salad ‘and the like’ and finally confectionery appropriate for a ‘noble’ company. In order to create a suitable atmosphere, the visitors had luxury crockery, cutlery and even additional cooks and traiteurs brought out from the city.29 – 75 –

Beat Kümin While such patrons instrumentalized inns for a public display of status, Giacomo Casanova pursued more private desires. Staying at the Sword in Zurich, Switzerland’s foremost inn owned by the reputed capitaine Ott, he exploited the availability of room service to approach a lady who had caught his eye upon arrival. Masquerading as a sommelier or wine-waiter with the help of a member of the inn’s staff, he served the lady’s party a number of courses in her bedchamber (which must have been pretty spacious and well-furnished!). Being a man of many talents, Casanova showed great skill in carving a capon, something that earned him praise by the object of his desire. However, on this occasion at least, our sommelier had to be content with assisting the lady in taking off her boots, as the presence of other diners prevented more intimate contact.30 At the Golden Falcon in Bern, another prestigious Swiss establishment, the Lord of Spiez (a manor on Lake Thun held by the patrician von Erlach family) was a regular patron in the late eighteenth century. Among the many innkeeperbills in his archive, we find one for ‘roast chicken, fried eggs and spinach’ on 8 December 1785, clearly a relatively humble meal implying personal selection. Using the Crown’s home-delivery service on another occasion, he ordered soup, roast veal and stewed apples for a private supper in his city residence on 19 June 1783. En route between Spiez and Bern, von Erlach usually stopped halfway at the Cross in Thun, whose bills carefully distinguish between catering for himself and (much more cheaply) for his coachman.31 Back at the Falcon, a surviving ‘menu book’ for receptions and dinner parties hosted at about this time reveals widely differing percapita prices, pointing to an equally differentiated gastronomic provision.32 Figure 5.1 reproduces the first page of a lavish banquet hosted by the innkeeper Abraham Uffelmann on 5 March 1785 for members of the Bernese craft guild of the ‘Red’ or ‘Middle Lion’. The occasion was the election of a fresh set of officers, a ceremony held every ten years and marked by great pomp. Visible here is merely a part of the first course, presented in the form of a Baroque display mounted at the centre of the table. Guests were treated to a wide range of dishes including soups, bouillons, fish plates and patés, turkey, capon, duck, foie-gras and many other culinary delights. This was succeeded by another course of eighteen different roasts, numerous entremets, and some thirty-six varieties of desserts. Bon appétit!33 Private as well as representative public dining was thus routinely available well before the introduction of ‘modern’ restaurants. Even menu cards had been in sporadic use since the seventeenth century, and the availability of à la carte provision at Swiss inns is explicitly mentioned in Ebel’s guidebook.34 – 76 –

Eating Out before the Restaurant

Figure 5.1 Opening page of the ‘Menu for the banquet of the noble guild assembly [of the Red Lion] held every ten years this 5 March 1785. 60 covers at 75 Batz[en] per head’ from the ‘Menu Book’ of the Golden Falcon inn at Bern in the Swiss Confederation Source: Copyright Burgerbibliothek Bern, Mss. hist. helv. XXIII 137, p. 123. Reproduced with kind permission.

Not all patrons shared the same meal and neither did they necessarily choose the same drinks. Erasmus’s witness Bertulf speaks of cheap wine served to all diners at a fixed rate, regardless of the amount each individual consumed. Other evidence corroborates the practice, but it was certainly not universal. Secular law, for a start, always asked for bills to be made on the basis of individual consumption.35 Furthermore, in the course of the early modern period, the range of options increased. By 1800, the tavern of Johann Georg Höcht in the city of Straubing (Bavaria), for instance, offered ‘wine, brown wheat beer, coffee and other drinks’, while fashionable newcomers like brandy, spirits, gin, etc., all left instant marks in the catering trade.36 Even the warm beverages entering Europe from the late – 77 –

Beat Kümin sixteenth century soon spread beyond specialized cafés. Coffee utensils are documented in public houses at least by the mid-eighteenth century, and a rural inn like that of Spiezwiler on Lake Thun had a brass tea kettle by 1774.37 The wine cellars of major inns catered for many different tastes, to the despair of mercantilist authorities. The Council of Bern was keen to promote the sale of domestic brands, sourly Landwein from the German lands as well as the higher-quality La Côte and Ryff denominations from French-speaking Vaud, but publicans stocked foreign favourites as well. The keeper of the Lion in rural Worb got into trouble with the council for illegitimate sale of Burgundy in 1691, while luxury choices confiscated at Bern’s Falcon in 1787 included Malaga from Spain as well as Champagne and Claret from France. Throughout Bern’s Ancien Régime, white wine was drunk in much larger quantities than red, and beer as yet hardly mattered.38 In Bavaria, meanwhile, where beer had become the dominant alcoholic beverage from the late sixteenth century, the brewing profession produced many different local varieties – predominantly from barley (brown beer) and wheat (white beer), while wine remained an option for patrons ready to pay a little extra. Met or honey wine, on the other hand, declined.39 Another important eighteenth-century ‘innovation’ stressed by restaurant historians is the emergence of a ‘gastro-discourse’, i.e. the development of a public debate on the art of fine dining, in which gastronomy appears as an autonomous sphere open to critical reasoning just as, say, the fine arts, literature or politics.40 Yet again, is it not possible to point to earlymodern precursors? The genre of travel literature, expanding swiftly from the late Middle Ages, is full of examples of authors noticing and commenting on culinary cultures in early-modern inns. True, accounts such as those by Erasmus or de Beatis are mostly descriptive (rather than reflective), full of national stereotypes, moralizing undertones and – in contrast to nineteenth-century gastronomic magazines – merely occasional (rather than institutionalized) comments. Readers, furthermore, would have turned to them for practical advice rather than expert illuminations on the art of dining. However, as communications improved and published guides diversified, something like a proto-discourse was clearly emerging, covering both the quality of meals and wider cultural concerns. ‘At Nurneberg, and some other Innes of higher Germany’, Moryson observed around 1600, each guest hath his peculiar drinking glasse set by his trencher, which when he hath drunke out, if he set it downe with the mouth vpward, it is presently

– 78 –

Eating Out before the Restaurant filled againe, (in which filling the seruants vse a singular dexterity, standing in great distance from it), but if hee turne the mouth downeward, they expect till in signe of thirst it bee turned vpward.41

Some two hundred years later, the German traveller Christoph Meiners praised Bernese gastronomy as follows: The best table, and the most delicate dishes of all Switzerland, [I] found at Bex on the border to the Valais. I know nothing tastier than young potatoes and chestnuts à la crême, and carps out of Lake Geneva, prepared by the innkeeper after his peculiar fashion. I would have loved to sample trouts from this masterly hand, too, but for such large and dear fish our party was too small.42

Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie, to adduce a final example, could also be read in this way. As a regular patron of inns, his memoirs contain not just cultural insights, amorous adventures and rich local detail, but ‘above all gastronomic specialities which aroused great passion in a dedicated diner like himself’.43 In conclusion, it would be futile to argue that there was nothing ‘new’ about the restaurant. However, comparative analysis with early-modern inns yields a rather more complex picture of continuity and change. To contemplate ‘eating out’ simply for leisure looks like a genuine innovation. Pre-modern Europeans frequented inns primarily for practical reasons, i.e. because they were hungry, far from home or attending a civic or family function. The exclusive focus on quality sit-down meals, without offering accommodation or stabling, seems equally unprecedented.44 So was the idea to capitalize on the ‘medicalized consumerism’ of eighteenthcentury elites by advertising ‘salutary consommés’ and other fancy dishes to ‘fussy eaters’.45 However, consumer choice of food and drink, private and representative dining as well as variable mealtimes can all be found in early-modern public houses.46 Neither was there a lack of culinary ambitions or gastronomic literature in the Ancien Régime, even though the latter remained occasional, mostly descriptive and restricted to the limited ‘reading public’ of the time. The case of Paris, furthermore, may be atypical in several respects, not only with regard to socio-political developments in the age of the Revolution, but also due to rigid victualling laws. Food and drink retailers in the French capital were stifled by unusually rigid restrictions, problems largely unknown in other parts of Europe.47 Early-modern inns, just like restaurants, were heterogeneous establishments, catering for an increasingly complex society with many different needs and tastes. The sources reveal great variety in dining arrangements and culinary standards, including highly sophisticated provision, even – 79 –

Beat Kümin outside of major towns. Attempts to produce a detailed gastrocartography suffer from the lack of quantifiable evidence, but the case for flexibility and adaptation is pretty strong: inns responded to changing fashions, such as the growing popularity of spirits and hot beverages, and many offered options like room service, separate dining parlours and a range of set menus or à la carte selection besides the regular table d’hôte. Regional gastronomic differences are notoriously hard to determine for pre-modern societies,48 and there were good and bad establishments everywhere, but it clearly mattered whether an area preferred beer or wine and whether local specialities such as seafood, mutton or even side dishes like sauerkraut were readily available. Generalizing accounts from the period need to be used with caution: as both German and French examples illustrate, individual judgements varied greatly, reflecting personal preconceptions, cultural stereotypes and – not least – daily contingencies.49 The growth of consumer power in European public houses was a gradual process. Restaurants pushed the principle of individual choice to its logical conclusion, but they did not need to invent it. Building on early modern precedents, they evolved gastronomic provision in ways congenial to the society in which they emerged.

Notes 1. Recent work on the origins of the restaurant includes Spang, 2000, and Drummer, 1997. Both offer sophisticated analyses of modern developments (in Paris and German cities, respectively), but rather less detail on historical precedent. 2. Early-modern examples of expanding markets and improving travel infrastructure in Gräf and Pröve, 1997; Maczak, 1995; and Radeff, 1996. Behringer, 1999, even identifies a seventeenth-century ‘communications revolution’. 3. For the ongoing debate on the ‘real’ inventor of the restaurant, cf. Levy, 2000. 4. Early restaurants were ‘distinguished from inns, taverns, or cookshops by their individual tables, salutary consommés, and unfixed mealtimes’: Spang, 2000, 2; early-modern inns offered ‘a no-choice table d’hôte, where food was put down in the middle of the table at an appointed hour and the best fed were the speediest eaters’: Levy, 2000, 6. – 80 –

Eating Out before the Restaurant 5. For the range of patrons and catering contexts, cf. Kümin, 2002 and 2003. 6. For an anthology of recent approaches, see Kümin and Tlusty, 2002. In most of early-modern Europe, public houses were legally divided into ‘inns’ (offering a full hospitality service, including alcoholic drinks, hot meals, accommodation and stabling) and ‘taverns’ or ‘alehouses’ (restricted to selling either wine or ale and beer). 7. Erasmus, [1523] 1997, 371–5. 8. Beatis, [1517–18] 1905, 105–7. 9. Gercken, 1783–8, vol. ii, 1784, 282 (Switzerland); Fenton, 1998, 77 (Scotland). Breakfasts at Swiss inns just before 1800 included milk, coffee and sometimes wine, flour soup and other unspecified ‘bites’: see, e.g., Ebel, 1793, 33. In Bavaria around 1600, brandy and pepper cakes were available: Moryson, 1617, vol. iii, 81. A typical afternoon snack in late Ancien Régime Switzerland consisted of coffee, ham, roast, cheese and bread: Gercken, 1783–8, vol. ii, 1784, 282. 10. Gercken, 1783–8, vol. ii, 1784, 206; Coxe, 1801, vol. i, 397–8; Bräker, 1998, vol. ii, 329. The late seventeenth-century agreement speaks of inn patrons ‘not sitting together’ at their meals: StA BE, B V 147, 548. The report from 1789 is cited in Beer, 1949, 86. 11. Sandgruber, 1982, 218–19; at the inn of Hindelbank (Bern) on 29 September 1793, Ulrich Bräker found several plates on top of each other for a multi-course meal and even reports the availability of a nutcracker: 1998, vol. iii, 470–1. 12. Sandgruber, 1982, 218–21 (typical materials); Rageth-Fritz, 1987, 134–8 (silver plates kept at the Falcon in Bern). The rural inn of Spiezwiler (Bern) had nine pewter plates in 1774: StA BE, HA Spiez [Depot Haller], 8c; silver crockery was fairly common in Switzerland by the late eighteenth century according to Meiners, 1788–90, pt i, 144. 13. Jenisch, 1995, 271; the Klösterli, a tavern by the castle of Worb near Bern listed 242 glasses in its inventory of 1792: Schneiter, 1961, 101. 14. Some examples from the principality of Lippe in Linde, 1995, 31. 15. During his dinner at Hindelbank, Bräker observed people sitting at another table: 1998, vol. iii, 470; similar evidence from Vevey (Vaud) in Spazier, 1790, 220. 16. Reinach, 1790, 104; further examples of spatial separation in public houses in Gräf and Pröve, 1997, 64–6. 17. Spang, 2000, 78 (1775). 18. Early evidence in Moryson, 1617, vol. iii, 151; ‘M. Ott [owner of the Sword Inn in Zurich] m’a dit [. . .] qu’il dînerait avec moi tête-à-tête – 81 –

Beat Kümin

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

dans ma chambre’: Casanova [1760], 1980, 67; Knigge advised that dining at the table d’hôte was cheaper and more entertaining: 1790, 218. Landts vnd Policeÿ Ordnung, 1616, 3rd Book, 3rd Title, 1st Art. In 1646, during the Thirty Years War, the council of the Bavarian market town of Dachau imposed an upper limit of five dishes even for weddings and specified that such receptions should last no longer than three hours: Stadtarchiv Dachau, Ratsprotokoll 1646, f. 37 (10 July). Bräker, 1998, vol. iii, 519–20; Rauers, 1941, vol. i, 391 (seventeenthcentury extravagance); Ebel, 1793, vol. i, 22. Reinach, 1790, 36, 48, 58, records table d’hôte facilities at the Crown inns of Biel and Bern in 1788, covering both lunch and dinner. Comparative information on inn prices for an earlier period in Dirlmeier, 1978, 432ff. Gercken, 1783–8, vol. ii, 1784, 220, 206; Platière cited in Beer, 1949, 56; Roth-Lochner, 1991, 45ff. A wide range of animal bones were found in a late medieval inn latrine at Villingen in South Germany: Jenisch, 1995, 278; Fenton, 1998, 73 (regional specialities and combination of meat and fish in Scottish inns); Gercken, 1783–8, vol. ii, 1784, 138 (sauerkraut and sausages); dessert evidence e.g. in Meiners, 1788–90, pt i, 1788, 144, and Bräker, 1998, vol. iii, 471. Meiners, 1788–90, pt ii, 1788, 258, 383, encountered local fish like river trout, carp, pike and crayfish on the menus of Swiss inns. The Bavarian General Mandate of 31 January 1736 reminded innkeepers to follow fasting rules. According to the lease of the inn at Spötting near Landsberg in the same principality, guests should not be offered any ‘precious dishes such as game, birds or fish’: Bay HStA, GR 872/175. Goethe [1799], 1987, 621; Wyttenbach cited in Arnold, 1985, 500 (Obergesteln); Spazier, 1790, 359; according to an earlier Grimsel visitor, the marmot was rather ‘fat and tasteless’: Meiners, 1788–90, pt iii, 1790, 313. Landts vnd Policeÿ Ordnung, 1616, 3rd Book, 3rd Title, Art. 1–2. Gesatz und Ordnung, 1729 (still on display on the premises of the Eggerwirt in Kitzbühel today!). StA BE, B V 147, 776 (Worb); Bay HStA, Mandatensammlung, 1631/I/4; Sandgruber, 1982, 157. Moryson, 1617, vol. iii, 151. Hidber, 1857, 18–19. ‘Voilà, dit la charmante, un sommelier qui sert bien. Est-il longtemps, mon cher, que vous servez dans cette auberge? – Il n’y a que quelques – 82 –

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31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

semaines, Madame. Vous avez bien de la bonté’: Casanova, [1760] 1980, 65–6. All bills in StA BE, HA Spiez [Depot Haller], no. 26 b. The spectrum of per capita prices for these parties at the Falcon, 1779–86, ranges from 40 to 75 batzen: Rageth-Fritz, 1987, 212–16. 75 batzen was the equivalent of eight days’ wages for a master craftsman! Full details of the menu, the guild and the occasion in Rageth-Fritz, 1987, 155–8. Benker, 1974, 193, mentions ‘baroque’ menu cards; Ebel 1793, vol. i, 33 (tourists can order à la carte for their guides). Dirlmeier, 1978, 434 (suggesting that practices varied); Bay HStA, Mandatensammlung, 1631/I/4. Bay HStA, GR 878/186, 726. Swiss inns and taverns sold a great deal of ‘cherry water’: Gercken, 1783–8, vol. ii, 1784, 282; for the proliferation of brandy and other spirits in public houses, cf. Tlusty, 1998. Austrian and German evidence for coffee in eighteenth-century public houses e.g. in Sandgruber, 1982, 201 (Austria); and Linde, 1995, 20 (Lippe). StA BE, HA Spiez [Depot Haller], 8c (tea kettle at Spiezwiler). StA BE, B VIII 374 (11 July 1691) and B VIII 517, 61 (1787–8). ‘All kinds of wine’ were stocked by the rural inn of Kirchberg near Bern in 1773: Gercken, 1783–8, vol. ii, 1784, 219. Publicans in Rosenheim served both brown and white beer around 1800: Bay HStA, GR 878/186, 259; in the 1770s, Gercken found very good Hungarian wine at the Wild Man in Passau: 1783–8, vol. ii, 1784, 65; little met was consumed around 1660 according to Bay HStA, Landschaft, no. 1585, f. 2r. Spang, 2000, 150 and cf. Stephen Mennell’s contribution to this volume. Moryson, 1617, vol. iii, 87. Meiners, 1788–90, pt ii, 1788, 258. See also the juxtaposition of variable inn standards at Unterseen, where the keeper produced an ‘exquisitly prepared’ meal at short notice, and at Grindelwald, where food should be taken ‘only in an emergency’ and where the wine was even worse: Reinach, 1790, 72–3, 93. Introduction by M.-F. Luna in Casanova, [1760] 1980, 14. Pre-modern inns were usually required to provide both, while cookshops catered for the fast-food market. Spang, 2000, 26, 2, 16. A wealth of supporting evidence in Latham and Matthews, 2000, where the famous diarist Samuel Pepys records very heterogeneous – 83 –

Beat Kümin dining situations and experiences in seventeenth-century London taverns. 47. ‘Thanks to the uncompromising nature of guild regulation, the man who made stews technically could not sell mustard, and the preparer of pâtés was prohibited from selling coffee. Master cook-caterers held the right to serve full meals to large parties, and master winesellers could sell liquid refreshments to groups and individuals, but no tradesman was allowed to combine those functions (and others) in order to operate what we today would define as “a restaurant”’: Spang, 2000, 9. In German-speaking areas, in contrast, the basic division was simply between public houses allowed to serve hot meals (inns) and those that were not (taverns, alehouses). 48. Ehlert, 1997; an early comment on the characteristic difference between northern butter- and southern oil-cuisines in de Beatis, [1517–18] 1905, 71. 49. The fare in French inns was ‘really sumptuous – so sumptuous I wonder they can take guests for so low a price’: Erasmus, [1523] 1997, 370; praise for eighteenth-century French public houses also in Zedler, 1739–50, vol. 57, 1748, 1202. Spang, 2000, 7, 69, in contrast, highlights critical views.

References Archival sources kept in the ‘Staatsarchiv Bern’ (StA BE) and the ‘Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv’, Munich (Bay HStA). Arnold, R. (1985), ‘Gasthof- und Wirtshauswesen im Wallis des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Blätter aus der Walliser Geschichte, 18: 489–500. Beatis, A. de (1905), Die Reise des Kardinals Luigi d’Aragona durch Deutschland, die Niederlande, Frankreich und Oberitalien 1517–18, ed. Ludwig Pastor, Freiburg: Herder. Beer, G. R. de (1949), Travellers in Switzerland, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Behringer, W. (1999), ‘Reisen als Aspekt einer Kommunikationsgeschichte der frühen Neuzeit’, in M. Maurer (ed.), Neue Impulse der Reiseforschung, Berlin: Akademie, 65–95. Benker, G. (1974), Der Gasthof, Munich: Callwey. Bräker, U. (1998), Tagebücher, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. A. Messerli and A. Bürgi, 3 vols, Munich: Beck. Casanova, G. (1980), Voyages romanesques à travers la Suisse [1760], ed. M.-F. Luna, Grenoble: Presses Universitaires. – 84 –

Eating Out before the Restaurant Coxe, W. (1801), Travels in Switzerland and in the Country of the Grisons: in a Series of Letters to William Melmoth, 4th edn, 3 vols, London: A. Strahan. Dirlmeier, U. (1978), Untersuchungen zu Einkommensverhältnissen und Lebenshaltungskosten in oberdeutschen Städten des Spätmittelalters, Heidelberg: Winter. Drummer, C. (1997), ‘Das sich ausbreitende Restaurant in deutschen Grossstädten als Ausdruck bürgerlichen Repräsentationsstrebens’, in H. J. Teuteberg, G. Neumann and A. Wierlacher (eds), Essen und kulturelle Identität 1870–1930, Berlin: Akademie, 303–21. Ebel, J. G. (1793), Anleitung, auf die nützlichste und genussvollste Art in der Schweitz zu reisen, 3 vols, Zurich: Orell Füssli. Ehlert, T. (1997), ‘Regionalität und nachbarlicher Einfluss in der deutschen Rezeptliteratur des ausgehenden Mittelalters’, in H.-J. Teuteberg, G. Neumann and A. Wierlacher (eds), Essen und kulturelle Identität, Berlin: Akademie, 131–47. Erasmus, D. (1997), ‘Diversoria’ [‘Public houses’; 1523], in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 39: Colloquies, trans. C. R. Thompson, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 368–80. Fenton, A. (1998), ‘Receiving travellers: changing Scottish traditions’, in P. Lysaght (ed.), Food and the Traveller, Nicosia: Intercollege Press, 70–80. Gercken, P. W. (1783–8), Reisen durch Schwaben, Baiern, angränzende Schweiz, Franken und die Rheinische Provinzen &c in den Jahren 1779–82, 4 vols. Stendal/Worms. Gesatz und Ordnung welcher gestalten die Würth und Gastgeben der Herrschaft Kitzpichl diß gegenwärtige Jahr die Mahlzeiten [. . .] abgeben und verraithen solle (1729), Kitzbühel. Goethe, J. W. von (1987), ‘Briefe aus der Schweiz, 1779’, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. K. Richter, H. Schlaffer, H. J. Becker, G. H. Müller and J. Neubauer, vol. 2.2, Munich: Hanser, 595–647. Gräf, H., and Pröve, R. (1997), Wege ins Ungewisse: Reisen in der frühen Neuzeit 1500–1800, Frankfurt: S. Fischer. Hidber, B. (1857), Der ehemalige sogenannte äussere Stand der Stadt und Republik Bern, Bern. Jenisch, B. (1995), ‘Das Gasthaus “Zu der Mohrin” in Villingen/Schwarzwald’, Jahrbuch für Hausforschung, 43: 267–78. Knigge, A. von (1790), Über den Umgang mit Menschen, 3rd edn, ed. A. von Gleichen-Russwurm, Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek. Kümin, B. (2002), ‘Public houses and their patrons in early modern Europe’, in B. Kümin and B. A. Tlusty (eds), The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate, 44–62. – 85 –

Beat Kümin Kümin, B. (2003), ‘Eat in or take away: food and drink in Central European public houses around 1800’, in M. Hietala and Bo Lönnqvist (eds), The Landscape of Food: Town, Countryside and the Food Relationship in Modern Times, Helsinki: Finnish Historical Studies. Kümin, B., and Tlusty, B. A. (eds) (2002), The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate. Landts vnd Policeÿ Ordnung der Fürstenthumben Obern vnd Nidern Bayrn (1616) [Territorial and police ordinance for the princedom of Bavaria], Munich. Latham, R., and Matthews, W. (eds) (2000), The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, 11 vols, London: HarperCollins. Levy, P (2000), ‘Monsieur Boulanger’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 August, 6–7. Linde, R. (1995), ‘Ländliche Krüge: Wirtshauskultur in der Grafschaft Lippe im 18. Jahrhundert’, in S. Baumeier and J. Carstensen (eds), Beiträge zur Volkskunde und Hausforschung, Detmold: Westfälisches Freilichtmuseum, 7–50. Maczak, A. (1995), Travel in Early Modern Europe, trans. U. Phillips, Oxford: Polity. Meiners, C. (1788–90), Briefe über die Schweiz, 2nd edn, 4 pts, Berlin: Spener. Moryson, F. (1617), An itinerary containing His Ten Yeeres Travell Throvgh the Twelve Domjnions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland [. . .] England, 3 vols, London. Radeff, A. (1996), Du café dans le chaudron: Economie globale d’Ancien Régime, Lausanne: Société d’Histoire de la Suisse Romande. Rageth-Fritz, M. (1987), Der Goldene Falken: Der berühmteste Gasthof im Alten Bern, Bern: Francke. Rauers, F. (1941), Kulturgeschichte der Gaststätte, 2 vols, Berlin: Alfred Metzner. Reinach, J. W. (1790), Kleine Schweizerreise von 1788, Heidelberg: Pfähler. Roth-Lochner, B. (1991), ‘Les repas du graveur Fournier à l’auberge de Grange-Canal (1778–83)’, Revue du Vieux-Genève, 42–51. Sandgruber, R. (1982), Die Anfänge der Konsumgesellschaft: Konsumgüterverbrauch, Lebensstandard und Alltagskultur in Österreich im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, Munich: Oldenbourg. Schneiter, E. (1961), Worb: Schloss und Dorf, Bern: Paul Haupt. Spang, R. L. (2000), The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Spazier, K. (1790), Wanderungen durch die Schweiz, Gotha. – 86 –

Eating Out before the Restaurant Tlusty, B. A. (1998), ‘Water of life, water of death: the controversy over brandy and gin in early modern Augsburg’, Central European History, 31: 1–30. Zedler, J. (ed.) (1739–50), Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon, 64 vols, Leipzig.

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–6– Heaven or Hell? The Public House and its Social Perception in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century Switzerland

Christoph Guggenbühl

In the nineteenth century the number of public houses in Switzerland increased faster than the growth of the population, but at the beginning of the twentieth century the density of establishments serving alcohol began to fall to a substantially lower level. How should one interpret this wavelike development? Is it the result of a change of public perception and consequently new restrictive legislation? Does the image of public houses reflect the influence of the social reform movement, causing a change from ‘heavens of sociability’ into ‘dens of iniquity’? Or is this decreasing density of public houses just the result of economic business consolidation and the increasing possibilities of other leisure activities?

Qualitative and Quantitative Development of the Catering Trade in Switzerland From the end of the eighteenth century, Swiss catering businesses flourished in an ever-growing variety. In the wake of industrialization, urbanization and growing Swiss tourism, new types of catering enterprises other than traditional taverns and inns developed in order to meet changing consumer and sociability needs. This period saw the emergence of the new, Frenchstyle restaurant culture and the culture of cafés and tearooms. But in Switzerland, with its mostly rural and small-town settlement structure, the traditional public house (Wirtshaus) still continued as the prevailing type of catering establishment until sometime after World War II. Since the late Ancien Régime, official catering-business policies alternated between free enterprise liberalism and prohibitive regulation resulting from ‘trial and error’. The catering policy thus also appeared as an indicator of social anxieties and hopes: anxieties relating to the threatening decline in moral – 89 –

Christoph Guggenbühl standards and work ethic, and hopes relating to an autonomous conduct of life not solely dominated by work. After the end of the Ancien Régime, with its mostly restrictive catering policy, a liberalization of business took place in the so-called ‘Helvetian Republic’ during the period of French predominance (1798–1803). Inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution, the old catering trade privileges were abolished, which led immediately to a sharp rise in the number of businesses. The Revolution thus directly influenced the growth of public houses, through a symbiosis of politics and sociability. Public houses, as traditional centres of social communication, were transformed into ‘stages’ for revolutionary agitation. They also became targets of counterrevolutionary attacks. The proprietor of an establishment was by that fact controlling the public sphere, and had an important say in political matters. In rural areas especially, council chambers and town halls were hardly known in Switzerland. Local council debates were held either in the church or in the public house. The hostilities between the pro- and antiFrench factions brought in their wake a virtual breakdown of the political and economic order in the years from 1798 to 1803. The conservative forces finally gained the upper hand and reintroduced a restrictive catering trade policy, including a stringent limitation on the number of establishments. Around 1830 liberalism gained increasing acceptance, above all in the cantons with progressive industrialization. Man was no longer perceived as a ‘subject’, but as an individual with his specific consumer and sociability needs. The introduction of freedom of commerce and trade in the cantons and, from 1848, also in the newly constituted Federal state resulted in a gradual reduction in the restriction on numbers of catering businesses. With the new Federal constitution of 1874, economic liberalism reached its peak. The federation decreed a comprehensive freedom of commerce and trade. Regulations were applied only with regard to safety, hygiene and acts of indecency. Just as during the period of the ‘Helvetian Republic’, the consequence of the decrease in state regulation was an increase in the number of catering businesses. Owing to the lack of specific catering trade schooling and a mandatory state proficiency test in the late nineteenth century, many newcomers tried their hand at building up businesses of their own. This led to increasing competition and, so it seems, to dubious business practices. Old-established innkeepers, worried about their own businesses, argued that the overall quality of the catering trade would be unduly lowered. Consequently they teamed up with the teetotallers and other ‘guardians’ of public morals and struggled for the reintroduction of the so-called ‘requirement clause’, i.e. – 90 –

Heaven or Hell? the right of the cantons to limit the number of catering establishments in the interest of public welfare. The increase in alcoholism in conjunction with the negative effects of industrialization was instrumental in leading to an amendment to the constitution (1885); there ensued a renewed restriction of economic freedom in the catering trade. The cantons were again free to limit the number of catering establishments in the interest of public welfare. Not all cantons, however, made use of this possibility. In many places the number of establishments started to recede, but the national total continued to rise further until it reached a peak of 17,850 in 1905.1 From the 1880s various lobbies emerged, which operated ever more effectively. In 1881 the first landlords’ associations were created in the cantons of Bern and Basle. Other cantonal associations followed, which merged into an all-Swiss organization in 1891. The landlords’ associations also fought by journalistic means for their trade interests. The Landlord, the first organ of the Zurich landlords’ association, announced as early as 2 February 1896: ‘The landlords are powerful and, if they so wish, they are able to influence politics.’ As it happened, the landlords tried to bring about a lowering of catering taxes and the introduction of catering proficiency tests. In the long term the persistent lobbying proved to be quite successful. More and more cantons reverted to a limitation on the number of catering establishments and introduced proficiency tests, allegedly to protect the public welfare. And in 1947, a constitutional amendment went as far as to restrict the number of businesses in order to protect the trade from excessive competition.2 Using the all-Swiss statistics, it is difficult to make a clear-cut differentiation between the various business types of catering trades in the nineteenth century. The available data of the period simply differentiate between establishments with and without overnight accommodation and sometimes between establishments with and without alcohol. In this context, the traditional Swiss public house can be defined as a catering establishment licensed to sell alcoholic liquor and serving food and beverages mainly to locals, while overnight accommodation is non-existent or of minor importance. In spite of the lack of detailed statistics, the main trend is clear. From the years around 1830, the number of public houses rose steeply and out of proportion to the population growth. From a level of approximately 300 to 500 inhabitants per public house in the late Ancien Régime, the density of businesses rose until 1905 to a level of one business per 166 inhabitants, before falling back to a level of one unit per 269 inhabitants in the year 1937. From about 15,689 establishments in 1882, the absolute number of public houses rose to 17,850 in 1905 before receding to 15,521 in 1937.3 – 91 –

Christoph Guggenbühl Of course, depending on regulation, degree of industrialization, settlement structure and the development of public traffic and tourism, there were considerable regional deviations. Areas with small settlement structures or with scattered settlements with economies based mainly on agriculture and enjoying a high degree of communal autonomy and low regulation usually had a high density of catering businesses. In 1905, for example, the canton of Thurgau is shown with 100 inhabitants and Ticino with 81 inhabitants per public house serving alcoholic drinks.4 In general, however, more highly industrialized regions also had fairly liberal catering business legislation and a high density of such businesses. In these regions public houses often functioned as a sort of ‘substitute home’ for members of the working class dependent on living in precarious forms of accommodation. This appears to be the case in the suburbs of Zurich, such as Altstetten and Oerlikon, where in 1896 as many as fifty and fifty-eight inhabitants, respectively, were counted per public house.5 At the other end of the range, we find cantons like Lucerne with a low density of 570 inhabitants per public house in 1905.6 These latter data point to a very restricted licensing practice by the authorities, which does not mean, however, that public houses were of minor social importance there. The number of seats in them and the profits were correspondingly higher, resulting in higher incomes and improved social status for the landlords in Lucerne. Since 1905 the process of economic concentration in the sense of fewer but larger businesses accelerated. Thus the all-Swiss average of employees per catering trade establishment increased from 3.65 in 1905 to 4.48 in 1929.7 Many of the traditional alcohol-serving public houses were replaced by specialized modern establishments like cafés and alcohol-free restaurants. But even if one takes into account these new business types, the declining density of the traditional public house from 1905 appears also to be a result of its political and cultural reappraisal. The time before 1885 is marked by constant liberalization. More public houses seemed to be desired – or at least tolerated. After the constitutional amendment of 1885 the public house and its extensive distribution had a growing negative connotation. The number of liquor-offering businesses was reduced for sociopolitical reasons and taxation was increased. How did this change evolve?

Heaven Clearly, it would be too simple to understand this reversal in the number of public houses as a result of a change in attitude from ‘heaven’ to ‘hell’.

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Heaven or Hell? According to Thomas Brennan’s dictum that ‘taverns were many things to many people’,8 public houses have always been welcome objects for negative and positive projections. In this sense they have all along been ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ at the same time. And yet it seems that the criteria conducive to a positive image of the public house carried more weight before the constitutional amendment of 1885 than during the ensuing period. En Suisse tout commence et tout finit par l’auberge (‘In Switzerland, everything starts and ends in the inn’). This judgement by the Geneva man of letters Gaspard Vallette very accurately describes the paramount significance the public house had in Swiss society.9 During the Ancien Régime landlords were part of the local elite, above all in rural areas. On the strength of official concessions, only granted to politically loyal applicants, the trade enjoyed extensive protection from unwanted competition. This helped most of the landlords to become wealthy. In their role as creditors many of them controlled a network of clients, thus strengthening their political and economic influence. In the local communities landlords very often held important political posts. As noted above, prior to the appearance of council chambers the local authorities held their meetings in the public house. Since the permit to run an inn or tavern was tied to the obligation to wield police power, landlords also enjoyed the confidence of the authorities. Thus they functioned as intermediaries between the authorities and their subjects. Public houses were centres of common consumption as well as of social communication. This is also borne out by the fact that in many places inns and taverns served as post offices before specialized buildings came into being. In their capacity as creditors, local politicians and partly also as cattle and wine dealers, innkeepers had varied and, in many cases, supra-regional contacts. In politically unsettled periods they were utilized for mobilizing resistance to the authorities. In many rural revolts during the period of the Ancien Régime, landlords figured as ringleaders of the rebellious peasantry.10 Landlords managed to retain their important function as local leaders throughout the nineteenth century. Landlords and public houses played an important part in the struggle for liberalization and democratization of society. During the 1840s the progressive forces in the canton of Bern were even named after their meeting place, the Bear’s Inn, the ‘Bear Party’. The innkeepers in the canton of Basle-Land provided shelter for the immigrant participants of the German revolution of 1848. Their most prominent advocate was Johannes Mesmer, who, apart from being the owner of the Gasthof Schlüssel in Muttenz, was also a member of the cantonal government. The strong political influence of the Swiss landlords, though mostly – 93 –

Christoph Guggenbühl locally restricted, drew many suspicious and contemptuous comments from neighbouring monarchist countries. In 1834, the Austrian ambassador was quoted as saying: ‘Revolutionary Switzerland mainly consists of innkeepers, dealers and speculators.’ And an appalled Prussian diplomat remarked in 1851: ‘The country is in the hands of landlords and schoolteachers.’11 The narrow republican state structures with shrinking political hierarchies, in addition to the strong tradition of ‘politics from below’, guaranteed the landlords’ leading political role on communal and cantonal levels well into the last third of the nineteenth century. Still in the same century the public house was considered the ‘anchor of the world’ (Jeremias Gotthelf). Through travellers staying at the public house and through newspapers held for the convenience of the guests, the world found its way into the village. The public house by itself was a world of its own and constituted un fait social total (Marcel Mauss). While customary leisure-time activities included man as observer and consumer only, the public house presented a stage for varied role-playing and integral manifestations of life, ranging from self-presentation by demonstrative consumption, to political agitation and the initiation of relations between the sexes. Leisure-time occupation in Switzerland during the nineteenth century centred mainly on music and theatre associations, reading circles, gymnastics clubs and rifle associations. All of them had their basis in the public house. It is here that the trophies were exhibited, parties and meetings were held and politics and sociability merged. And it is here that amateurs performed plays, particularly in rural and suburban areas. The public house also functioned as a venue for the concerts of local musicassociations and hosted regular dancing parties as well as serving as a sort of local initiation-place and wedding market. Furthermore, it served as a proper place for celebrating private events and for demonstrating social status within the framework of the rites de passage. Whether for baptism, wedding or funeral, from the cradle to the grave, social life began and ended in the public house, the ‘heaven of sociability’. From the 1830s the protectionist measures favouring the established landlords were abandoned step by step and growing competition among the market participants resulted. Landlords strove hard to gain competitive advantage by meeting specific consumption and sociability needs and by improving the location of their establishments with a view to enhancing the loyalty of their clients. Thus, specialized catering businesses appeared, such as district pubs, homely middle-class restaurants, cafés, nightclubs and luxury restaurants. The catering establishments commuted to environmentspecific socialization-institutions and to venues for the reproduction of social roles and hierarchies. Although they officially offered free admission – 94 –

Heaven or Hell? to everyone, dress code, price-structure and political image formed invisible barriers to admittance. The relations between the sexes were also dominated by gender roles and gender status. Apart from specific festivities, nineteenth-century Swiss public houses were frequented mainly by men. The service, however, relied chiefly on women and was conceived by men as comprehensive, including ‘body and soul’. Manuals for the service staff were mainly written by men. Small wonder that they stressed – at times rather suggestively – the importance of treating the guest in a very ‘friendly’ manner, with the ulterior motive of boosting consumption. Many songs and poems, therefore, glorified life in the public house, exalting waitresses and landladies, who sacrificed themselves for the physical and spiritual well-being of the male guests. This asymmetrical relationship of the sexes between consuming men and serving women finds its expression in the semantic diminution of the female service staff. Irrespective of their age, waitresses were called ‘Miss’ or, in the German language, Servier-Tochter (literally ‘serving daughter’). Nineteenth-century students commonly spent much of their spare time in public houses, as each students’ association had its favourite local. Student songs abound in praise of life in the public house. Students looked upon it as a sort of practical training ground for a possible later political career. The students’ speaking and drinking rituals followed the rules of parliamentary debates. Drinking did away with inhibitions and the drinking rules facilitated communication between youngsters and the seasoned older members of the association. The mutual loss of inhibitions as a consequence of drunkenness tightened the bond between younger and older members, resulting in a sort of ‘conspiracy’ which, in later years, would ensure useful protection for a business or political career.12 During the boom periods of the students’ associations some 40 per cent of all Swiss parliamentarians were members.13 It is worth noting that up to 1919, 76 per cent, and between 1919 and 1968 as much as 82 per cent, of the Swiss Ministers of State (Bundesräte) had been members of students’ associations.14 Common drinking and being ‘boozed up’ was viewed by students as a state-supporting act; in fact, they interpreted it as a patriotic activity. The drinking companionship called itself the ‘Beerstate’, where, in a playful way, drinking-laws were established, violated and punished. Regulated drinking by the young students thus assumed preliminary training functions with a view to fulfil state duties in later years. But this student ‘Beerstate’ also deliberately took into account the breach of state regulations. In youthful high spirits the rules regulating closing time and the night’s rest were flouted. The police would turn a blind eye since the students could rely on the protection of influential authorities. Thus the student youth – 95 –

Christoph Guggenbühl grew up in anarchistic contempt of the petty bourgeois philistine, realizing fully well that soon they themselves would determine the rules of the state which they wilfully breached during their nightly outings. Apart from allowing these rather uncouth student pleasures, the multifarious business objects of the catering trade also served clients looking for refinement and distinction. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, hotels reminiscent of palaces and castles (Schlosshotel) appeared, catering not only to first-class tourism trade but also to neo-aristocratic ambitions of the local bourgeoisie, making them feel like a squire or a king, if only for one night. The French culture of luxury restaurants, spreading from the grand-hotels into the towns, offered a welcome backdrop for the self-portrayal of the upper classes. Well-practised gestures of humility by the service staff enhanced the class feeling of superior exclusiveness. The form of organization in a luxury restaurant bore distinct symbolic features: the elegant interior, the composition of the menu, the French gourmet language, the refined sequence of the dishes and the ways of presenting food all created a gastronomic work of art which lifted the illustrious insiders into a ‘heaven of enjoyment’. The guests were not mere consumers but active players on the stage of the ‘gourmet-theatre’. By the choice of the wine they demonstrated their expertise in the refined art of life, and with their table conversation and toasts they gave proof of sophistication and wit. Part of the new culinary culture was the sublimation of the instincts. Enjoyment consisted also in renunciation. One could afford to eat small portions. Quality instead of quantity was in demand. One takes one’s time and controlled one’s hunger by means of a variety of table rules. Domestication of the body appeared as a triumph of the mind, and waiting for the various courses even enhanced anticipation of the delight to come. The communicative and cultural rites, typical also for the village inns, the friendly togetherness of a joint meal accompanied by intellectually stimulating conversation, all combined into an interactive work of art in the luxury restaurants. Furthermore, through the common and simultaneous enjoyment of physical and spiritual food, it appeared that the anthropological division of man into body and soul might be overcome. Nature and culture came together and evolved into paradise, into heaven on earth!

Hell Complaints about the public house as a ‘den of iniquity’ are as old as the institution itself. In Switzerland such complaints became more pronounced in the wake of industrialization. The disintegration of the – 96 –

Heaven or Hell? ancient house and village communities, the anonymity and the poor living conditions in the overcrowded workmen’s apartments, called for new social meeting places and communal identity. Because wages were paid in cash, the young workmen were no longer dependent on their parents. They left home earlier and moved into the industrial centres, eluding the mechanism of traditional social monitoring. Regular evening visits to the public houses appear to derive from the new possibilities and necessities created by industrialization. They were economically possible because the wages in cash as well as spare time were at the individual and autonomous disposal of the workmen, and a psychological necessity in the sense of a need for human community and identity. The public house was not only the refuge of uprooted young workingclass people cut off from their origins. It also retained its attraction after marriage. The labourers’ life had three centres of gravity: factory, family and the public house. The sphere of the family and that of the public house could actually be in a state of competition. The father of the family had no means of influencing working hours, but he was free to decide how much time he wanted to devote to his family and how much to life in the public house. As was already shown by Maurice Halbwachs in his study of La classe ouvrière et les niveaux de vie (Paris, 1912), the labour force preferred to spend its scanty resources of time and money outside rather than within the family. This was not only the result of the cultural dichotomy typical of the time, namely that the man had to hold his own in the outside world while his wife stayed within the house, but was also due to the fact that by meeting regularly with like-minded colleagues or by taking part in political reunions at the public house, the man made clear his claim to the public sphere and his aspiration to indulge in political opposition. The spirit of solidarity and of being united under a common destiny was further supported by the interior space design, as workingmen’s pubs normally had just one spacious community-room while bourgeois restaurants and public houses were fitted with all sorts of partition walls and had a variety of backrooms or chambres séparées. While the students viewed collective drinking as a sort of ‘state-supporting’ act and the workers considered proletarian life in the public house as a ‘heaven of sociability’, the latter was characterized as a paradigm of iniquity from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. Under the moral and medical pretext of fighting addiction and sin, the state tried to restrict the number of labourers’ meetings. It was especially in the working-class residential quarters that, as a consequence of the liberalization of catering legislation, a good number of new public houses were established. Many of them became targets of increased attention by the authorities because – 97 –

Christoph Guggenbühl they were very often run by newcomers lacking professional skills and sufficient financial resources. With a density of sometimes only fifty inhabitants per public house, these establishments were exposed to severe competition. The temptation to resort to dubious practices in order to sustain business was certainly more pronounced here than in other places. Nevertheless, it is striking how many prejudices were expressed by the authorities in their ‘class struggle from above’ against the catering infrastructure in the working-class areas. In his polemic Das Wirtshaus, the Bishop of Saint Gall, Augustin Egger, pretended that the prevalent lack of faith would engender equally social democracy, alcoholism and the tavern-boom.15 An author named Traugott Siegfried claimed that the ‘army of the discontented’ was recruited from the public house. Siegfried, as well as others, recognized the relationship between deficient food supply and poverty-induced alcoholism. However, he refused to pay higher wages as, in his opinion, during the economic upswing of the early 1870s, ‘the workers had not accumulated any significant savings but rather became accustomed to the “good life”, gave themselves up to hedonism and regular visits to the pub’. It was not better wages that kept the workers away from the pub and alcohol, Siegfried went on, but rather the appeal to save. As a typical bourgeois socialreformer, he considered working-class people to be irrational individuals ruled by their physical desires, who sought satisfaction rather in a short ecstatic kick of emotion and inebriation than in the long-term rational safeguarding of their livelihood.16 An award-winning polemic bluntly stated, ‘the impoverishment of free-living workers very often resulted from an unexpected, temporary pay rise’ and ‘from the existence of drinking-dens in the working-class quarters’.17 The excessive consumption of alcoholic drinks was not seen as a consequence but rather as a cause of the poverty of the working class. The cynical dialectics of the bourgeois temperance movement held that the industrial progress was endangered by the welfare effects created by industrialization, because the workforce ‘invested’ their wage increase in higher consumption of alcohol, thereby ruining their own capacity for the work that was actually essential to achieve progress. In a similar way many authors took exception to the fact that while the working hours in the factories were restricted by social welfare legislation, the public house closing time in many cantons had been loosened: ‘Working is forbidden, but boozing is permitted.’18 The assertion made in most pamphlets that the higher density of public houses led to enhanced alcoholism can be statistically refuted. The students’ collective drinking and the drinking habits of workingmen in pubs were – 98 –

Heaven or Hell? mainly used as an instrument to promote communication and a sense of community. Addiction to drink and poverty-induced drinking to compensate for physical or psychological deficiencies took place in private rather than under the control of the landlord and other guests. In its Botschaft [. . .] betreffend die Alkoholfrage from 18 June 1884,19 the Swiss government correctly stated that the growing consumption of spirits primarily took place in private homes. An international study by the Swiss Federal Bureau of Statistics could not establish a direct relationship between the density of public houses and alcoholism in foreign countries either.20 The same applies to Switzerland. In 1882 the canton of Thurgau had one of the highest densities of establishments and yet had the second lowest mortality rate caused by excessive alcohol consumption. Conversely, Bern had one of the lowest distributions but ranked fourth from last with its alcoholinduced death rate.21 Most public houses, in fact, sold only very little quantities of addiction-favouring high-proof spirits but concentrated on serving beer and wine. It was not the density of establishments nor the total seating capacity per canton but rather the taxation policy that was – among other reasons – responsible for the different victim rate of alcoholism.22 In the polemics of the late nineteenth century the dichotomy between ‘heaven’ as the happy family life and ‘hell’ as life at the public house appears predominant. Accordingly, Traugott Siegfried wrote, ‘the happiness of the state rests in the family’.23 And an anonymous author went so far as to transfigure the well-managed family household into the ‘antechamber of heaven’. In contrast, life in the pub was looked upon as a ‘deadly evil’ and a ‘plague spot’ on the nation. In the pub one breathes the ‘vapour of the underworld’, the ‘Antichrist’ appears in the form of alcohol and threatens the performance potential of the national economy and defence system,24 or, as Traugott Siegfried puts it: ‘The public house replaces the church, drowns the school and strangles the private home.’25 Finally women had to take the blame for all the evils: ‘So many women are bad housewives, lacking a sense of order and cleanliness. They cannot cook properly so that the husband is repelled by the food and by the muddle in the flat, and is driven out of the house into the pub.’26 The woman was depicted not only as an incompetent housewife but also, in the shape of the prostitute, as a threat to man. If there was talk about ‘debauchery’ or ‘indecency’ in the pub, only women were mentioned. Prostitutes were exposed to the stringency of the then-ruling legislation but their male clients got away with it. In a likewise questionable manner the opponents of the catering establishments held that their high density was responsible for the increased divorce rates.27 They failed to recognize that both phenomena were the results of a far-reaching process of social change – 99 –

Christoph Guggenbühl following the effects of industrialization and social liberalization. Instead, the critics of the time, in a sweeping way, blamed the decline in moral standards. In keeping with this trend, Bishop Egger of Saint Gall criticized ‘the spoiled taste of the mind and the palate’. He disapproved of the way private households and public houses prepared the dishes, with too much salt and too strong seasoning, and he saw an analogy in literature and the theatre that catered to a clientele keen on ‘spicy scandals’ and ‘unhealthy excitement of the nerves’. The consumption of ‘hot’ dishes would produce great thirst that could be quenched only with alcoholic drinks. As an antidote Bishop Egger recommended milk, which was in his opinion the ‘sworn enemy’ of alcohol.28 In the wake of a gradual cutback of the privileges enjoyed by the traditional catering business and the general improvement in chances to take up the profession of landlord, a certain proletarianization of the trade became noticeable, particularly in areas of high density. In 1896, of a total of 1,117 landlords in the town of Zurich, more than 300 could not pay their taxes.29 As regards the strong market position of the breweries, Bishop Egger remarks: ‘The guests submerge in the proletariat and the landlords go along with them.’30 The propaganda against the public house pretends that the ‘busy idleness’ of the landlord job was attracting a lot of jobevaders, loafers and other good-for-little figures.31 And in its communication about the new catering trade law (1896), the government of the canton of Zurich warned of ‘sinister elements who shun regular work and for whom running a pub was the last resort’. Accordingly, the new law set out to prevent the catering business from becoming a ‘testing ground for all sorts of bankrupt individuals’. With a view to regaining the former protectionist prerogatives and in order to polish up their professional image, long-established landlords achieved an initial important success. In the plebiscite of 25 October 1885 the constitutional amendment, which allowed the reintroduction of the ‘requirement-clause’, was accepted by a majority of 230,250 for versus 157,463 against the amendment. The course of the economic development happened to assist the cause of the landlords’ and teetotallers’ lobby. Just as the new constitution of 1874, with its comprehensive liberalization, which included the catering trade, was brought into force, a pronounced decline in the economic situation began. The index of real wages dropped from 89 in 1870 to 83 in 1885.32 Employment receded in all three sectors from 1.4 million in 1880 to 1.3 million in 1888, and emigration to overseas destinations reached new highs.33 Against this background it becomes obvious that poverty-induced alcoholism, or at least the fear of it, increased. Coincidentally, many facing – 100 –

Heaven or Hell? unemployment and financial difficulties hoped to earn a livelihood by running a catering establishment. Poverty-induced alcoholism as well as the tavern boom were both consequences of the severe economic crisis in the late 1870s. But even though, as we noted, the pubs sold relatively small quantities of addictive high-proof spirits and despite uncontested statistical findings relating to the alcohol death rate and pub-density, the propaganda in support of the constitutional amendment of 1885 stubbornly maintained that alcoholism was the consequence of the pub boom. This made the public house the scapegoat and it was used as a projection screen for all crisis apprehensions. Misconception of the real correlation between cause and effect in the propaganda against the public house meant that a highly complex crisis phenomenon could be concretized and personified. Thus the crisis was given a physical shape and location, the public house, inside which one could see the faces of its victims. Therefore, the pubs’ enemies had an easy job: during the fight preceding the ballot of 1885, trade protectionist, social reformist, anti-socialist and religion-inspired culturalwar intentions merged into a heterogeneous but victorious coalition. And continued aggressive lobbying by the Swiss landlords’ association from the end of the nineteenth century helped members regain a better professional image and new economic strength. However, progressive political and socio-cultural modernization brought about a long-term scaling down of the significance of the public house. In the major towns many cultural activities were moved from the pubs to newly emerging music halls, theatres, cinemas and sports stadiums. The strengthening of direct democratic rights, the tendency to move from the public house to the town hall and the replacement of face-to-face communication by modern media like the press and later on also radio entailed a progressive shift of politics out of the pub. The table reserved for the regulars degenerated into the often-ridiculed ‘little man’s parliament’.34 Life in the pub as a fait social total came into competition with new leisure activities. The innkeepers and their associations fought in vain the spread of cinemas and radio, utilizing the same prejudices that were used against them decades before. Innkeepers complained about ‘radio-fever’, which would lead to social isolation and inhibit friendly face-to-face communication. They also claimed that the cinema would not only empty the public houses but would also lead astray and deprave the sybaritic people with its ‘poison’. The landlords’ association therefore called for high taxation and strict control of all cinemas.35 In the long term, however, landlords learned that they could not prevent but could only adapt to the new leisure-time habits. The very sophisticated ‘special interest’ offers by present-day restaurants, the expansion of the big – 101 –

Christoph Guggenbühl fast-food chains, the twenty-four-hour home-delivery services and the considerable number of restaurants with exotic kitchens have become indicators of socio-cultural modernization. In the Swiss hinterland, however, the symbiosis of the traditional village pub with associational life and politics has survived until today. And in the urban concrete desert, the modern city nomad seeks and finds his gastronomic oasis, his filling station for body and soul.

Notes 1. Schweizerischer Wirteverein, 1940, 243. 2. For general information on the history of the Swiss catering trade in the nineteenth and twentieth century, see Schweizer Wirterverband, 1991; Schweizerischer Wirteverein, 1940, 1941, 1966. See also Guggenbühl, forthcoming. 3. Schweizerischer Wirteverein, 1940, 243, 259. 4. Schweizerischer Wirteverein, 1940, 259. 5. Rudolf, 1931, 20. 6. Schweizerischer Wirteverein, 1940, 259. 7. Schweizerischer Wirteverein, 1941, 267. 8. Brennan, 1988, 311. 9. Quoted by Keller, 1913, 5. 10. Kümin, 1999a, 163–6; and 1999b, 251–8. 11. Kaenel, 1998, 17, 40. 12. For this topic, see also Schwager, 1998, 156–74. 13. Gruner, 1966, 163. 14. Altermatt, 1991, 75. 15. Egger, 1897, 60–3. 16. Siegfried, 1881, 39–40. 17. Schmid, 1882, 37. 18. Schmid, 1882, 51, 64. 19. Botschaft, 18 June 1884, 16–17. 20. Eidgenössisches Statistisches Bureau, 1884, 413. 21. Botschaft, 20 November 1884, 21. 22. Botschaft, 20 November 1884, 39–40, 68, 76–7; Tanner, 1986. 23. Siegfried, 1881, 37. 24. Anonymous author, n.d., 4–8. – 102 –

Heaven or Hell? 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Siegfried, 1881, 30. Egger, 1897, 59. Siegfried, 1881, 35. Egger, 1897, 59–60. Rudolf, 1931, 19. Egger, 1897, 54, 56. Siegfried, 1881, 31. Ruffieux, 1986, 718, 685–7. Ritzmann-Blickenstorfer, 1996, 365, 397. For this topic, see also Blattmann, 1998. Schweizerische Wirtezeitung, no. 7, 1913; no. 4, 1922; no. 1, 1925.

References Altermatt, U. (1991), Die Schweizer Bundesräte: Ein biographisches Lexikon, Zurich: Artemis. Anonymous author (n.d.), Das Wirtshausleben, Schaffhausen: Mann. Blattmann, L. (1998), ‘Studentenverbindungen; Männerbünde im Bundesstaat’, in L. Blattmann and I. Meier (eds), Männerbund und Bundesstaat: Über die politische Kultur der Schweiz, Zurich: Orell Füssli, 138–55. Botschaft des Bundesrathes an die hohe Bundesversammlung betreffend die Alkoholfrage vom 18. Juni 1884, Bern: Stämpfli. Botschaft des Bundesrathes an die hohe Bundesversammlung betreffend die Alkoholfrage vom 20. November 1884, Bern: Stämpfli. Brennan, T. (1988), Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenthcentury Paris, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Egger, A. (1897), Das Wirtshaus, seine Ausartung und seine Reform, 3rd edn, Einsiedeln: Katholische Abstinentenliga. Eidgenössisches Statistisches Bureau (1884), Zur Alkoholfrage: Vergleichende Darstellung der Gesetze und Erfahrungen einiger ausländischer Staaten, Bern: Statistisches Bureau. Gruner, E. (1966), Die schweizerische Bundesversammlung 1848–1920, vol. 2, Bern: Francke. Guggenbühl, C. (forthcoming), Das Wirtshaus. Studien zu einem soziokulturellen Komplex in der deutschen Schweiz im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, research project supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Kaenel, P. (1998), 1848 Drehscheibe Schweiz – Die Macht der Bilder, Zurich: Chronos.

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Christoph Guggenbühl Keller, P. (1913), Zur Wirtshausreform, Zurich: Zentralstelle zur Bekämpfung des Alkoholismus. Kümin, B. (1999a), ‘Useful to have, but difficult to govern: inns and taverns in early modern Bern and Vaud’, Journal of Early Modern History, 3/2: 153–75 [with bibliographical references of early modern Swiss inns and taverns]. Kümin, B. (1999b), ‘Rathaus, Wirtshaus, Gotteshaus: Von der Zwei- zur Dreidimensionalität in der frühneuzeitlichen Gemeindeforschung’, in F. Smahel (ed.), Geist, Gesellschaft, Kirche im 13.–16. Jh., Prague: Filosofia, 249–62. Ritzmann-Blickenstorfer, H. (1996), Historische Statistik der Schweiz, Zurich: Chronos. Rudolf, F. (1931), 45 Jahre Wirtschaftsgesetzgebung der schweizerischen Kantone: Erfahrungen und Ausblicke, Bern: Gotthelf-Verlag. Ruffieux, R. (1986)‚ ‘Die Schweiz des Freisinns 1848–1914’, in Comité pour une nouvelle histoire de la Suisse (ed.), Geschichte der Schweiz und der Schweizer, Basel: Helbing und Lichtenhahn, 639–730. Schmid, G. (1882), Das Schenkwirtschaftswesen der Schweiz, St Gallen: Zollikofer. Schwager, N. (1998), ‘Stammtisch und Bundesstaat: Eine Annäherung an die politische Funktion eines männerbündischen Ortes’, in L. Blattmann and I. Meier (eds), Männerbund und Bundesstaat: Über die politische Kultur der Schweiz, Zurich: Orell Füssli, 156–74. Schweizer Wirteverband (1991), Aus Liebe zum Gast: 100 Jahre Schweizer Wirteverband 1891–1991, Zurich: Wirteverband. Schweizerischer Wirteverein (1966), 75 Jahre Schweizerischer Wirteverein 1891–1966, Zurich:Wirteverein. Schweizerischer Wirteverein (1941), 50 Jahre Schweizerischer Wirteverein 1891–1941, Zurich: Wirteverein. Schweizerischer Wirteverein (1940), Das Schweizerische Gastgewerbe im Rahmen von Wirtschaft und Staat, Zurich: Wirteverein. Siegfried, T. (1881), Das Wirtshaus, 2nd edn, Basel: Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft der Stadt Basel. Tanner, J. (1986), ‘Die “Alkoholfrage” in der Schweiz im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, in M. Wieser (ed.), Drogalkohol, 1: 147–68.

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–7– Early Tourism and Public Drinking The Development of a Beer-drinking Culture in a Traditional Wine-producing Area (Meran, South Tyrol)

Oliver Haid

Public drinking, sociability and alcoholism have existed as social phenomena from Antiquity right up to the present. Although industrialization, technical innovation and rationalization in West and Central Europe went hand in hand with the unfolding of intellectual, moral and political concepts, public drinking and alcoholism did not disappear. On the contrary, the excessive consumption of spirits in the course of the nineteenth century seemed to have intensified social, psychic and economic problems.1 In public drinking, Horkheimer and Adorno recognized the dark counterpart of cultural development in the West. After nature had finally been subjected to the mind in the process of civilization, it could, in their eyes, take its revenge in the field of enjoyment.2 There have been various attempts to describe this incursion of the irrational into a world that was ever-increasing rational in its orientation. Well known are the many writers of the temperance movement who drew a very simplistic picture of contemporary developments. In their eyes, cheap spirits and, in some instances, also beer were the main reason for the spread of alcoholism among the lower strata of Western societies. And indeed, beer and spirits may be seen as the main features in the change of drinking patterns. But surely, this view masks a much more complex reality.3 The triumph of beer consumption during the nineteenth century was supported by the revolution of brewing and preservation techniques, as well as by the formation of a working class that emerged as a major consumer of the liquid, and not just in German-speaking countries.4 Traditionally, the main focus of research into alcohol consumption has been on big cities, industrialized and beer-producing areas. This was linked to major social developments, particularly mass poverty or so-called

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Oliver Haid ‘pauperism’.5 However, there was alcoholism of poverty and alcoholism of wealth.6 Beer was closely linked to both, especially because entrepreneurs saw it as an instrument with which to fight the drinking of alcohol at the workplace, relying upon its lower alcoholic content in comparison to spirits, an argument with cloven foot.7 Recent decades have shown a trend towards more balanced views and the use of a variety of source materials when it comes to the study of alcohol consumption.8 The present chapter wishes to add to this trend by looking at the way in which a beer industry settled in a wine region that considered beer as a luxury and unusual drink. It thus addresses questions of business innovation, cultural change and new social patterns caused by yet another new phenomenon, tourism.

Meran before the Advent of Tourism During the nineteenth century, the town of Meran (South Tyrol) and its surroundings, today Italian territory, was a German-speaking area within the Princely County of the Tyrol, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Elevated to the rank of a town in 1317 or shortly before, the town of Meran had been the political centre of that County for almost two hundred years, but because of various developments (which cannot be addressed here), the town almost fell into ruins. In 1816, Meran had not more than 2,218 inhabitants, and it presented a fairly rural appearance to its visitors. The fact that many citizens sheltered cows and other animals in their houses certainly contributed to this village-like character. Meran is situated in a valley open towards the south, where wine was cultivated before the Roman occupation in 15 BC. During the Middle Ages this wine-growing district supplied almost all large Bavarian and Swabian monasteries with the highly esteemed alcoholic beverage.9 The best years for viniculture in the district of Meran were undoubtedly in the Napoleonic era, when the Tyrol had been occupied by Bavarian troops, and annexed by the newly created kingdom of Bavaria. As this area was the only wine-producing district within the Bavarian kingdom, good profits could be made in the local wine business and consequently the areas of cultivation were expanded. When the Tyrol returned under Habsburg rule, the situation changed dramatically. Meran wines now had to compete again with Italian and Hungarian wines in an over-saturated market. As a consequence, throughout the nineteenth century local viniculture suffered depression. Its causes lay also in the farmers’ adherence to traditional grape tendrils of low quality.10 Nevertheless, the town of Meran remained a wine-trading and wine-consuming centre in the first half of the nineteenth century. The – 106 –

Early Tourism and Public Drinking preponderance of the wine in public life became most evident during the time of harvest. The travel writer August Lewald observed in the early 1830s: ‘Only now Meran was astir, because the vintage here as everywhere is the best time of the year. Crowds of foreigners rushed to the scene, Englishmen, French and Italians. The hosts were busy and did not have hands enough for serving, not rooms enough for lodging.’11 In addition to the twelve ‘hosts’ of the town, an indeterminate number of private persons were allowed to sell the wine they had produced. In the course of the century these licensed houses developed into taverns (Buschenschänke). Even though the town’s hosts had complained for centuries about the competition that arose from these minor retail licenses, nothing changed. Under Bavarian government, their number even increased dramatically,12 amounting to thirty-five in the year 1816.13 There is hardly any evidence of beer consumption in the town prior to 1800. The strong tradition of viniculture and the modest spending power of the local population seem to have prevented the establishment of beer breweries for a long time. The first brewery in the town was not founded before 1810, but even this was extraordinary, as wealthier towns in the area, like Sterzing, Klausen, Bozen and Trento did not yet have a brewery five years later.14 The Meran brewery, owned by Joseph Valentin Schweiggl, was situated on the river-facing side of the Arcades, the main street of the town. It soon achieved a good reputation, and in 1823 the town council provided the host of the Rose Inn (Rosenwirt) with a licence for beer retailing.15 The councillors were convinced that the beer of the local brewery was of such excellent quality that it seemed unlikely that beer would be imported from other towns like Brixen or Hall. More than ten years later the brewery of Meran was still the only one within the South Tyrolean Etsch Valley, including the important neighbouring town of Bozen.16 Josef Kofler, a man from Goldrain (Vinschgau Valley), bought the Meran brewery in 1834. He already owned a beer cellar (Märzenkeller) in Burgstall, a village located between Meran and Bozen.17 It is therefore very likely that the Meran beer was also retailed in Burgstall. During the following decades, however, the Meran brewery started to decline, and in 1857 the regional authorities had to instruct the town council to take action against the poor quality of the local beer.18

Early Tourist Development Owing to its climatic advantages, its scenic views, as well as its economic backwardness, Meran was a place that was able to enchant bourgeois and – 107 –

Oliver Haid 40,000

40,000 35,000

31,500

30,000

27,000

25,000 20,000

18,000

15,000 10,000

11,500 7,500

5,000 0

1883/4

1886/7

1904/5

1908/9

1911/12

1913/14

Figure 7.1 Number of guests in the spa district of Meran, 1883–1913. Source: Numbers taken from Abram, 1999, 86

aristocratic visitors quite easily. Although officially proclaimed as a health resort in 1836, the actual take-off did not occur for the following two decades. But from the 1860s onwards the numbers of guests, as well as those of overnight lodgings, increased steadily, almost exploding during the last years before the World War I (as shown in Figure 7.1).19 Meran was recommended to persons suffering from phthisis and tuberculosis and, later, from obesity and heart troubles.20 Frequent sojourns of members of the royalty and aristocracy had provided plenty of publicity, and those who could afford it rushed to this elegant Alpine spa.21 Except for a relatively strong Russian community, patients and tourists mainly came from German-speaking areas or other provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Partly segregated at first, aristocrats and bourgeois willingly gathered in the luxury hotels.22 Meran was famous for its mild winter, and the season started in early autumn to end in May. The usually hot summer months could be spent in special summer resorts located on higher altitude.23 Not just patients, but also a considerable part of the urban and rural population used to spend some time in the higher areas during summer. Together with the growing number of guests, infrastructure improved and the process of urbanization started. The population in the town of Meran quadrupled between 1860 and 1910 (Figure 7.2). Equally remarkable were the population growth and settlement dynamics in the surrounding villages, especially in Obermais and Untermais. – 108 –

Early Tourism and Public Drinking 14,000 11,568

12,000 9,323

10,000

8,140 7,176

8,000 5,334

6,000 4,000

4,229 2,707 2,817 2,570 2,694 3,016 2,218 2,433 2,589

2,000 0 1816

1823

1830

1836

1842

1848

1855

1862

1869

1880

1890

1899

1900

1910

Figure 7.2 Population of the town of Meran. Source: Numbers taken from Greiter, 1971: 8–9; Schweigl, 1990, 34.

Despite these changes, however, the district of Meran remained an area dominated by agriculture (see Figure 7.3). In 1900 the majority of the population (63.4 per cent) was still working in the agricultural sector, and this situation did not change in the following fifteen years. The crafts and industry sector provided a job for almost 16 per cent of the population, while the trade and travel sector had 5 per cent of the employment.24 The fact that the major part of the local working class was employed on a farm may explain the adherence to traditional patterns of alcoholic consumption in the area. In 1912 Ludwig von Hörmann, a famous Tyrolean folklorist, defined the beer and wine areas in the Eastern Alps. Except for the province of Salzburg, he did not consider beer to have achieved the status of an 9,000 8,000 7,000 Self-dependent owners Tenants

6,000 5,000

Workers Day labourers

4,000

Assistant family members Other family members

3,000 2,000

Manservants

1,000 0 Agriculture

Crafts/industry

Trade/tourism

Figure 7.3 Employment of the resident population of the district of Meran in 1910. Source: Numbers taken from Schweigl, 1990, 50

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Oliver Haid everyday home-beverage in any of the rural areas. Yet, von Hörmann did not fail to notice the rising consumption of beer among the rural population as a general trend.25 According to him, the main reason for this development was the relatively low price of beer in comparison to wine, an assumption that makes clear he was speaking of the non-wine-producing areas of the Eastern Alps. For those who could rely on their own produce, wine certainly was the cheapest alcoholic drink available. In fact, Hörmann himself admitted that the consumption of spirits was, regardless of their extraordinary spread since the 1850s, minimal in regions with a traditional viniculture, or at least a very reduced one.26 In the wineproducing regions, wine was drunk daily, and even the farmhands received their daily allocation of wine (between 1.6 and 2.4 litres) as part of the salary.27 This can be regarded as a typical situation for wine-producing regions. Isabel González Turmo has shown very similar patterns of wine consumption for Andalucía, together with the almost total absence of beer before 1900. From that date onward, there too the breweries began encroaching on the territory of the old taverns, especially because beer became fashionable among the local bourgeoisie.28 Whereas the foundation of the Meran brewery had resulted from intrinsic desires of the local community, the establishment of two coffeehouses around 1850 can be considered an effect of the continuous presence of foreigners in the town. Both coffee-houses were important meeting places for guests, and both tried to please the growing need for embellishment and entertainment. One of them was equipped with different halls for meetings and balls, the other with a big garden and outhouses. In her book on Meran the famous German author Ida von Düringsfeld described the garden of one of those public houses in the following way: The two important coffee-houses of Meran, Café Paris and the Rosengarten, are also located in the Arcades and indeed facing the mountain. The former has a garden court that reminds one of Italy, in the latter the garden is larger. Every house of the Arcades has two or three backhouses and almost always a garden bordering the side of the Küchelberg. This is also the case for the Rosengarten, whose name was not wrongly chosen, as there were roses blooming in July in intense abundance around a grotto with its water murmuring. The middle of the garden was shaded by a magnificent catalp, and a beautiful cypress stood in the corner. There was a bowling alley and a miniature shooting-stand, of which the target was in the shape of a waitress as large as life. If there is an artist troupe in Meran, it would perform in the theatre located between the garden and the house, and last winter the ‘gentlemen’s ball’ was held in the upper hall.29

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Early Tourism and Public Drinking Of course, alcoholic drinks were available in both coffee-houses, and at least the Rosengarten seems to stand in the tradition of the former taverns. Public life in the town developed in the 1860s and 1870s especially around theses two houses, and their importance as most popular meeting places for clubs and associations continued well into the twentieth century.

The Impact of Industrial Brewing Industrial brewing in this area started in the 1850s. The Jewish brothers Moritz and Wilhelm Schwarz, owners of the Schwarz banking house, established a brewery in Vilpian, a village sixteen kilometres south of Meran. In 1854 their company was enrolled in the commercial registers. Shortly afterwards, in 1860, the brothers bought another brewery in the vicinity of the town of Bozen, which ceased its production soon after.30 The Vilpian plant shortly developed to become one of the most prosperous industrial breweries in the province of the Tyrol. The two bankers became pioneers for technical innovation in the area, promoting, for instance, the construction of a railway between Bozen and Meran, a project which was accomplished only twenty years later by public authorities. Furthermore, the brothers installed a telephone-circuit that connected the plant with the Vilpian railway station, which presumably was the first of its kind in the province. In addition, the plant’s power station, built in 1897, was an excellent example for advanced Alpine engineering. It is still operative today.31 The second local brewery to be mentioned is that of Blumau, a village in the Eisack Valley, approximately five kilometres north of Bozen. Founded in 1858 by the brewer Josef Kräuter, the plant had excellent geographical advantages, as it was situated on one of the most important routes of long-distant traffic across the Alps.32 Like Vilpian, the Blumau label also did not succeed in accessing other than local markets. Forst, the most famous among the industrial breweries considered here, was founded only a few years later. Its beginnings were very modest. The brewing started on a farm called ‘Unterkoflergut’ in the neighbourhood of Forst, five kilometres north-west of Meran. In 1856 the farm-owner, Johann Wallnöfer, obtained the licence for brewing that was previously conferred on Franz Tappeiner.33 The latter participated in the company by building a rock-cave for the brewery.34 Nevertheless, in 1863 the brewery became the property of a certain Mathias Rechenmacher, who sold it to Josef Fuchs, a host’s son from the village of Latsch in the Vinschgau

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Oliver Haid

Figure 7.4 The entrance to the Forsterbraü from Habsburg Street, 1905. The buildings consisted of a boarding house, a restaurant, a pub and a beer garden. Source: Postcard 1905, author’s collection

Valley.35 Fuchs became the actual founder of the brewery, and his family still owns the plant today. The area of Forst had ideal conditions for the establishment of an industrial brewery. The place is entirely shadowed by a rock from November to February, frozen lakes were located nearby, and a precipitating stream provided plenty of fresh water. The economic success of the brewery was remarkable right from the beginning. Even though Forst did not employ more than eight people until the 1880s, the annual production of the plant increased from 283 hectolitres in 1863 to 7,133 hectolitres in 1880.36 The actual take-off, though, happened in 1892 after Hans Fuchs took over the brewery in third generation. He introduced several technical innovations, among which was a cold storage plant in 1900 that enabled brewery production also during the summer months. With the acquisition of a bottle-washing machine, bought in Chicago in 1909, the Forsterbräu was able to fill up to 48,000 bottles a day, and was able to introduce specific ‘Forst beer bottles’. Annual production of the brewery reached its peak – 112 –

Early Tourism and Public Drinking 70,000 60,000 50,000 40,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 0 1893

1894

1895

1896

1897

1898

1899

1900

1901

1910

1913

1914

Figure 7.5 The annual production (hectoliters) of the Forsterbräu. Source: Numbers taken from Dariz, 1983, 457–68

with 64,000 hectolitres of beer in 1913 (figure 7.5).37 Forst had become the biggest brewery in the most western Austrian province.38 In total, there have been twenty-five smaller and larger breweries in the South Tyrol. The three mentioned, however, were the only ones that participated in beer promotion in the town of Meran, and their success was closely connected to their capacity to establish close ties with local restaurants, bars and shops. Together the three industrial breweries covered 63 per cent of the province’s beer production in 1890.39

Beer Houses and Beer Depots The history of success of Forst’s brewery is mirrored in that of the town’s beer-houses. Two years after the acquisition of the brewery, Josef Fuchs rented one of the most prominent inns of Meran, the Raffl, in order to sell his brew directly in the town nearby. When in 1869 his lease expired, he bought a house in Arcade Street, and established the Hotel Forsterbräu (Figure 7.4).40 Some years later, a simple establishment seemed insufficient to the brewery owner, and in 1878 he bought the Raffl too. Both houses were run by the brewer’s wife with ‘energy, charm and purposeful behaviour’, as the German Rudolph Hengstenberg wrote in his memoirs.41 Other guests were also very satisfied with the Forst houses under the management of Mrs Fuchs: ‘Close to Moser’s Bookshop be found Raffl’s Inn, [an establishment] that makes totally different profits than the neighbouring bibliopoly, as beer and sausages, wine and bacon are delivered in laudable quality here.’42 – 113 –

Oliver Haid This author took an interesting view on the social tension within the town, and its link to drinking behaviour. He mentioned that the old native citizens of Meran, as well as those of Bozen, used to divide the inhabitants into Dasige (people from here), Hergeloffene (people that came ‘running along’) and Zubi-gschmeckte (foreign persons who tried to familiarize with locals). Even though the former kept quite apart from the latter, at the Raffl the well-off locals often did not dislike to associate with better-class tourists and newcomers.43 This voice is a very strong indication of the socially integrating power of the beer-houses in the town. In 1882 the town of Meran sold a large piece of land close to the Meran railway station to the owner of the Forsterbräu. On it, Fuchs built one of Meran’s major hotels, the Habsburgerhof, a mansion with more than 150 beds. In 1885, finally, Fuchs purchased another building in Meran, now situated at the margins of the old town, directly in the street that connected the centre with the railway station. Here again, Fuchs established a hotel, the Zentral, with restaurant, coffee- and beer-house, the latter for a standing public (Stehbierhalle).44 So, in the course of twenty years, Josef Fuchs had gradually developed to become one of the most important hotel owners and hosts in this aspiring health-resort. When he died in 1892, the hotels and inns in his property, including the Traube restaurant in the town of Bozen, exceeded twice the assessed value of the brewery.45 In the meantime, other breweries wished to be present in the town of Meran. Before establishing their own depots, the beer of various breweries had been made available in bottles at the counters of shops, restaurants or boarding houses. The 1894 directory of Meran lists ‘foreign’ beer from Munich (Franziskaner, Löwen), Pilsen, Kulmbach, Blumau, Vilpian and Forst in the town as well as in the village of Obermais.46 In 1904 Zipfer beer could be purchased, and in that year even English beers appeared among the stocks of a shop in Arcade Street.47 The retailer with the largest assortment of beer bottles was Ladislaus Spitkò, the lessee of the Meran casino restaurant, which was certainly the best position available in town. In 1896 the Commune of Untermais introduced a tax of 1.50 florin per hectolitre beer, and pub owners and hotelkeepers declared their sales; according to these statements, Spitkò supplied beer bottles only to two villas and the Hotel Meranerhof.48 Taxes on beer contributed to an increase in the beer price. In the town of Innsbruck a litre of beer cost 32 Hellers, but in Meran it was 40 (prices in 1877).49 Because of such price differences, some innkeepers and pub owners decided to ban beer from their offer.50 Others came to an arrangement with the authorities and brewers. Taxes could be paid as lump sums, and in 1904 Hans Fuchs (Forst) decided to give an allowance of 70 Heller per hectolitre.51 – 114 –

Early Tourism and Public Drinking

Figure 7.6 The development of the single breweries’ beer houses and depots in Meran. Source: Tourist map, circa 1900 (author’s collection)

Such co-operation on the side of the Frosterbräu probably originated from the pressure of competition in the late 1890s, when Anton Dreher, the owner of a famous brewery in Schwechat (Lower Austria) succeeded in his plans to sell his beer in Meran. He bought the old-established Stadtbräuhaus in 1895, and introduced his beer to the Meran public.52 The Schwechat beer sold very well in various countries at that time. The production of Klein-Schwechat with its 739,639 hectolitres in 1897 was seventy times higher than that of the Frosterbräu. It is no surprise that such a successful firm was eager to be present in the famous Austrian healthresorts. Schwechat had opened approximately fifty depots or establishments prior to the World War I, among which were those of Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, New York and Bombay!53 In 1912, Anton Dreher had plans to enlarge his presence in Meran, but these were made public very quickly. The local newspaper, Burggräfler, spread the news that the Starkenhof, a building adjoining the Stadtbräuhaus, – 115 –

Oliver Haid was to be acquired by the brewery for that purpose.54 It is not clear what led Anton Dreher to put his plans aside, but instead of buying the Starkenhof, in July 1912 he sold the Stadtbräuhaus to Karl Graf and Hugo Hellwig.55 The new owners restructured the inn and the restaurant, and the place was reopened in mid-December of the same year.56 Equally, the other two local quality breweries started beer depots in the first decade of the twentieth century in Meran. Vilpian stored products in the cellar of the Graf von Meran restaurant, and for some time his beer was also available in a restaurant in the parish church square. The brewery of Blumau was a very distinguished establishment in the vicinity of the town itself. It acquired a building in the village of Untermais, less than one kilometre from the town of Meran. There, a depot and garden-restaurant could be accommodated easily.57 With the increase of beer taxes in 1910, the fragile equilibrium with regard to price negotiations between the Frosterbräu and the Meran beer sellers almost ended. While in the town beer prices increased 4 Heller per litre, Hans Fuchs and restaurant owners in the vicinity of the brewery stuck to the old price. Then, the Meran innkeepers threatened to cancel orders and to give preference to the Blumau beer.58 Yet Fuchs persisted and finally succeeded, and the Meran beer sellers returned to the price of 22 Heller. This price did not differ from the one paid at Innsbruck.59 In the surroundings of the town, the plant of Forst itself was certainly one of the ideal places for a beer restaurant. During the years following its foundation, numerous visitors were attracted to this shady spot, among whom was the German writer Heinrich Noë, who commented: ‘Even more frequently visited than the castle [Forst Castle] is the brewery, which in close proximity nestles in the rock’.60 In the following decades, the brewery became a very popular destination for excursions and trips though the countryside. Even the students of the classical secondary school of Meran visited the brewery on their annual May Day excursions.61 Ida von Düringsfeld gave a short description of the brewery’s garden in the book she dedicated to Meran: ‘On the other side of the street close to the mountain the Frosterbräu offers its benches shaded by chestnut trees. Except for the winter, when the sun is not shining upon it, visitors come almost all the time: on Sunday afternoon the upper society of Meran and Partschins.’62

Events and Occasions of Public Drinking Tourists and locals enjoyed an ever more exciting social life in the developing health-resort. The increasing number of restaurants and recreational – 116 –

Early Tourism and Public Drinking associations led to intensified competition and the need to provide entertainment for their guests or members. In the process of urbanization and multi-confessional permeation of the population, interest groupings and political positionings evolved spontaneously. As a result, a multiplicity of co-operatives, initiatives, federations, associations, clubs and societies were founded during the decades before World War I, which gave rise to a much more diversified social life.63 Where single associations did not manage to set up their own clubroom or clubhouse, they usually met in pubs, hotels or restaurants. Coffeehouses, especially the old-established ones, could shelter different associations, sometimes even politically opposed among each other. This was the case, for instance, in the Café Paris, where the Conservative Citizens’ Club, the Christian German Gymnastics Club, the socialist Association for the Procurement of Cheap Dwelling in Meran and the ultra-conservative Andreas-Hofer Veteran and Soldier Association had their meetings. In 1912 the town’s conservative newspaper, Der Burggräfler, announced, advertised or reported on 213 different social events. No less than 115 (or 54 per cent) of these were organized within the municipality of Meran. Remarkable is the fact that the Café Paris took in 63 events, that is, more than half of the events scattered in the town area! Only 8 took place in the Hotel Forsterbräu, and 2 in the Stadtbräuhaus. Other beer-serving hotels and restaurants, like the Hotel Stern and Andreas Hofer (both with 12 events), also need to be mentioned. The different meetings, celebrations and concerts were organized by cultural organizations (11 events), military and hunting organizations (29 events), working-class associations (33 events), political parties (34 events), fire brigades (28 events), music bands (13 events), and gymnastic societies (14 events). In total the associations and organizations met for 64 general assemblies, 78 simple assemblies, 4 carnival feasts, 12 spring festivals, 2 summer- and 5 autumn-festivals, as well as 16 garden festivals and 17 Christmas celebrations. All this gave plenty of opportunity for drinking, especially when the guests were entertained by music, which happened in 46 cases. The restaurants also had their events, 69 in total during 1912. These consisted mainly of music bands’ concerts, sometimes also of garden festivals, dancing performances, cabaret evenings and bowling competitions. Even though I have not considered all the multiple events and performances staged in the theatre or the casino, this account gives a lively picture of Meran nightlife shortly before World War I. The rise of local beer consumption owed not only to the presence of beer-drinking tourists from beyond the main Alpine mountain ridge, but also to the creation of special occasions where the resident population could more easily diverge from its accustomed drinking patterns. – 117 –

Oliver Haid

The Temperance Movement in Meran The prominent position of Meran within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as well as its rapid social and cultural changes aroused the attention of one of the most famous representatives of the temperance movement, Professor Stefan Schöck. He was president of the first Austrian federation for total abstinence, Nephalia in Salzburg. He can be associated with those branches of the movement, which rigorously adhered to total abstinence, a position adopted since the 1880s that was antagonistic towards the more moderate organizations of temperance.64 On 9 March 1912 in the main hall of the Meran casino, Schöck delivered a lecture about the relation of alcoholic consumption to national health. During his presentation he dealt with the ‘reasons, scope and goals of the modern abstinence movement’, and was forthright in his opinions on the influence of alcohol on ‘physical and intellectual performance and the offspring’.65 The lecture was well attended, even though people had to pay for entrance. The quite successful evening might have also provided the audience with an opportunity to approach the speaker for membership in one of the temperance organizations that already existed. Yet Schöck stimulated the foundation of a local branch of his association in Meran. In his function as president, he submitted an appropriate application to the provincial government office on 25 May 1912.66 The articles of the central Nephalia association, restraining their members from buying, selling, consuming or administering any kind of alcoholic or intoxicating substances ‘for any other than industrial or curative purpose’,67 were adopted by the provincial government on 18 June the same year. One of the first activities of the new association was the organization of a lecture by Doctor von Hartungen, one of the numerous resident medical advisers in Meran. This event, staged in the casino on 10 December 1912, attracted countless visitors who were introduced into some of the most extreme views of militant teetotalism. Science had proved, so the speaker ascertained, that alcohol could not be considered to have any nutritive or curative values. In fact, it needed always to be regarded as a narcotic poison. Furthermore, von Hartungen advanced the opinion of ‘prominent medical doctors’ that half of all human diseases were caused by alcoholic consumption. Finally, he illustrated his discourse by the projection of some anatomical tables by a Viennese professor showing organic deformations such as ‘the beer-heart, the cirrhosis, the stomach and the liver of the drinker’.68 Even though this first attempt to mobilize the public met with a good reception, evidence of further activities cannot be found, and this association – 118 –

Early Tourism and Public Drinking rapidly seemed to have come to a standstill. In 1913, however, its name was changed into I. Organisation Neutraler Guttempler, or the First Neutral Organization of the Good Templars. This followed to the renaming of Austrian’s central federation.69 With this change, the Austrian federation declared its adherence to one of the early splinter movements from the famous American Order of the Good Templars, founded by Leverett E. Coon in 1851.70 The ‘Neutral’ Good Templars, first founded in 1905 in Switzerland, and which employed neutral confessional rituals, was one of the most successful organizations of the movement, expanding to other German-speaking countries during the following years.71

Conclusion For geographical and historical reasons, the local structures of alcohol supply have formed regional cultures of drinking. The role of alcohol beverages in everyday drinking during earlier centuries is still unclear to a great extent, especially in their relation to potable water.72 Because wine was part of the wage in areas with viniculture, at least for the male part of the working population, in these regions this beverage certainly had special importance in local drinking habits. Elsewhere, mainly in the urbanized centres of central and northern Germany, wine had acquired the status of an upper-class beverage.73 The near absence of beer in the wine producing areas is significant. This also applies to the South Tyrolean wine areas, where beer was not produced before 1810. The Bavarian annexation of the Tyrol in those years, and the consequent billeting of Bavarian soldiers and officials, certainly promoted the foundation of a small Meran brewery. The subsequent increase in beer consumption on the southern side of the Alpine mountain ridge must be viewed in relation to the triumph of low-fermented beer, of which the city of Munich was the centre in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Beer consumption was increasing and it advanced also in the wine-growing areas of south-western Germany soon after 1800.74 The success of the spa city of Meran certainly endorsed this development, bringing thousands of bourgeois and low aristocratic tourists from beer-drinking areas to the wine-growing valleys of South Tyrol. At the same time, immigration and urban development created a new section of the resident population that had different patterns of alcoholic consumption to the native population, which was almost exclusively oriented towards wine. The higher spending power of the population as well as the presence of tourists encouraged the foundation of small industrial breweries

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Oliver Haid between 1854 and 1858. In order to gain control over this growing market, local beer producers opened public houses, inns or hotels within the town of Meran or in its surroundings. Locations on the outskirts of the old town, especially on the arterial roads, were the most desired. Later in the nineteenth century, with the exponential increase in the number of tourists, other than the local beer labels became available in town. Not only the sale of bottled beers, but also the establishment of the leading Austrian beer, Schwechat, in Meran contributed to the variety of drinks on sale. With the development of social and political life as well as programmes of entertainment for guests, plenty of festive and sociable occasions were created that encouraged alcoholic consumption. Even though the drinking of spirits has never been as popular as in the Northern German and nonwine-producing regions, the drinking of alcohol came to be viewed as a problem in Meran. In 1912 a temperance association was founded that tried for some time to fight wine and beer consumption. When South Tyrol became an Italian province in 1918, the existing brewery industries and strong local beer-drinking habits laid the foundation of a successful consolidation of a still very small national market.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Heggen, 1988, 70–87. Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972. Heggen, 1988, 20–4. Hübner, 1994, 170–80. Rühle, 1930, 40–2. Tappe, 1994, 105. Hübner, 1994, 176. Felsberger, 1998, 7–17. Stutzer, 1980. Wohlgemuth, 1980, 4–13. Lewald, 1835, 162. Wohlgemuth, 1980, 185–217. Greiter, 1971, 194. Speckmann, 1995a. Greiter, 1971, 201. Staffler, 1839, 346. – 120 –

Early Tourism and Public Drinking 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Dariz, 1983, 450. Dariz, 1983, 446–8. Schweigl, 1990. Zimmermann, 1974, 79–90. Ellmenreich, 1937, 40–51. Rösch, 2001, 13–40. Woerl, 1908, 13–14. Numbers taken from Schweigl, 1990, 36. Hörmann, 1912, 81. Hörmann, 1912, 85. Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, 1874, 36. González Turmo, 2001, 130–43. Düringsfeld, 1868, 94–5. Speckmann, 1996. Speckmann, 1995b, 21–4. Speckmann, 1995c, 10–14. Archive of the town of Meran, Protocols of the Town-Council (Magistratsprotokoll), No. 319, 26th August 1856. Dariz, 1983, 443. Archive of the Province of Bozen, Land Register Protocols (Verfachbuch) Lana, 17th August 1863, fol. 1101. Dariz, 1983, 452–4. Dariz, 1983, 458, 464. Dariz, 1983, 466. Egg et al., 1979, 186. Perathoner, 1964, 144. Hengstenberg, 1916, 51. Noë, 1869, 363. Hengstenberg, 1916, 54. Dariz, 1983, 454. Dariz, 1983, 456. Adressbuch des Kurortes Meran, 1894, 313–15. Adressbuch des Kurortes Meran, 1904, 435. Archive of the town of Meran, file 33 (Untermais), letter from 26 February 1897. Meraner Zeitung, 44/52 1 May 1910: 3. Archive of the town of Meran, file 33 (Untermais), letter from 4 February 1897. Meraner Zeitung, 44/50, 27 April 1910: 4. Perathoner, 1964, 112. Seidl, 1993, 83. – 121 –

Oliver Haid 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

Burggräfler, 30/12, 10 February 1912: 6. Perathoner, 1964, 112. Burggräfler, 30/100, 14 December 1912: 5. Adressbuch des Kurortes Meran, 1909, 466. Meraner Zeitung, 44/50, 27 April 1910: 4. Meraner Zeitung, 44/53, 4 May 1910: 3. Noë, 1869, 365. Burggräfler,30/37, 8 May 1912: 6. Düringsfeld, 1868, 260–1. Plattner, 1999. Hölzer, 1988, 35–44. Burggräfler, 30/19, 16 March 1912: 5. Archive of the Tyrol Province of Innsbruck, Statthalterei, Associations, file no. 1085/2 (1912). Satzungen, 1906, 3. Burggräfler, 30/100, 14 December 1912: 6. Archive of the Tyrol Province of Innsbruck, Statthalterei, Associations, file no. 807 (1913). Heggen, 1988, 152. Tappe, 1994, 325–7. Hirschfelder, 1998. Teuteberg and Wiegelmann, 1972, 250. Teuteberg and Wiegelmann, 1972, 330.

References Abram, R. (1999), Das Kurhaus Meran: Ein Blick in die Geschichte der Kurstadt, Lana: Tappeiner. Adressbuch des Kurortes Meran (1894), 5th edn, Meran: F. W. Ellmenreich. Adressbuch des Kurortes Meran (1904), 7th edn, Meran: F. W. Ellmenreich. Adressbuch des Kurortes Meran (1909), 9th edn, Meran: F. W. Ellmenreich. Dariz, E. (1983), Beiträge zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte von Algund und Umgebung, Innsbruck (unpublished dissertation). Düringsfeld, I. von (1868), Reise Skizzen, vol. 7 (Aus Meran), Meran: Fr. Moser. Egg, E., Pfaundler, W., and Pizzinini, M. (1979), Von allerley Werkleuten und Gewerben: Eine Bildgeschichte der Tiroler Wirtschaft, Innsbruck, Vienna and Munich: Tyrolia. – 122 –

Early Tourism and Public Drinking Ellmenreich, A. (1937), ‘Meran als vornehmer Kurort’, in B. Pokorny (ed.), Meran 100 Jahre Kurort 1836–1936, Innsbruck: Wagner, 40–51. Felsberger, G. (1998), Das Bier als Nahrungs- und Genussmittel, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Konsumverhaltens der Arbeiterschaft in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Graz (unpublished dissertation). González Turmo, I. (2001), ‘Drinking: an almost silent language’, in I. Garine (ed.), Drinking: Anthropological Approaches, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 130–43. Greiter, A. (1971), Beiträge zur Geschichte der Stadt Meran 1814 bis 1860, Innsbruck (unpublished dissertation). Heggen, A. (1988), Alkohol und bürgerliche Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert: Eine Studie zur deutschen Sozialgeschichte, Berlin: Colloquium (Einzelveröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin 64). Hengstenberg, R. (1916), Lebenserinnerungen, vol. 4 (Meran im letzten Viertel des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts), Wannsee bei Berlin: R. Hengstenberg. Hirschfelder, G. (1998), ‘Das Wassertrinken, Prolegomena zu einer Kulturgeschichte’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 80: 325–50. Hölzer, C. (1988), Die Antialkoholbewegung in den deutschsprachigen Laendern (1860–1930), Frankfurt a. M.: Lang (Europäische Hochschulschriften, III). Horkheimer, M., and Adorno, T. W. (1972), Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Herder and Herder. Hörmann, L. von (1912), ‘Genuss- und Reizmittel in den Ostalpen: Eine volkskundliche Skizze’, Zeitschrift des Deutschen und Österreichischen Alpenvereins, 43: 78–100. Hübner, R. and M. (1994), Der deutsche Durst: Illustrierte Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte, Leipzig: Edition Leipzig. Lewald, A. (1835), Tyrol, vom Glockner zum Orteles, und vom Garda- zum Bodensee, 1833–34, vol. 2, Munich: Literarisch-artistische Anstalt. Noë, H. (1869), Brennerbuch: Naturansichten und Lebensbilder, Munich: J. Lindauer’sche Buchhandlung. Perathoner, E. (1964), Meraner Häuserchronik 1780–1964, Innsbruck (unpublished dissertation). Plattner, I. (1999), Fin de Siècle in Tirol: Provinzkultur und Provinzgesellschaft um die Jahrhundertwende, Innsbruck and Vienna: Studien. Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, O. von (1874), Culturhistorische Studien aus Meran, Leipzig: List and Franke. Rösch, P. (2001), ‘Der Kurort Meran im mitteleuropäischen Kontext’, in E. Kontschieder and J. Lanz (eds), Meran und die Künstler, Bozen: Athesia, 13–40. – 123 –

Oliver Haid Rühle, O. (1930), Illustrierte Kultur- und Sittengeschichte des Proletariats, vol. 1, Berlin. Satzungen der I. Österreichischen Gesellschaft gegen die Trinksitten ‘Nephalia’ (1906), Vienna: self published. Schweigl, A. (1990), Beiträge zur Bevölkerungsentwicklung der Stadt Meran in der Zeit von 1848 bis 1914, Innsbruck (unpublished dissertation) Seidl, C. (1993), Unser Bier, Vienna: F. Deuticke. Speckmann, W. D. (1995a), ‘Bierland Südtirol: Eine Chronik des Brauwesens und der Brauereien’, Südtirol in Wort und Bild, 39, 3: 16–21. Speckmann W. D. (1995b), ‘Vilpian’, in: Südtirol in Wort und Bild 39/3, 21–4. Speckmann W. D., Blumau, ‘Südtirol’ in Wort und Bild, 39/4: 10–14. Speckmann, W. D. (1996), ‘Bierland Südtirol: Bozen’, Südtirol in Wort und Bild, 40/1: 20–2. Staffler, J. J. (1839), Tirol und Vorarlberg, statistisch, mit geschichtlichen Bemerkungen, Innsbruck: Felician Rauch. Stutzer, D. (1980), Weingüter bayrischer Prälatenklöster in Südtirol, Rosenheim: Förg. Tappe, H. (1994), Auf dem Weg zur modernen Alkoholkultur: Alkoholproduktion, Trinkverhalten und Temperenzbewegung in Deutschland im frühen 19. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart: Steiner. Teuteberg, H. J., and Wiegelmann, G. (1972), Der Wandel der Nahrungsgewohnheiten unter dem Einfluss der Industrialisierung, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Woerl, L. (ed.) (1908), Illustrierter Führer durch den Kurort Meran mit den Kurgemeinden Ober- und Untermais und Gratsch, Leipzig: Woerl Wohlgemuth, A. (1980), Beiträge zur Geschichte des Weinbaues und der Gastwirtschaft in und um Meran von den Anfängen bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, Innsbruck (unpublished dissertation) Zimmermann, I. (1974), Nach Meran zur Kur, Meran: Kurverwaltung.

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–8– Food Culture in Slovene Urban Inns and Restaurants between the End of the Nineteenth Century and World War II Maja Godina-Golija

The history of inns in the Slovene territory is closely linked to that of the taverns from which they evolved in the Middle Ages. Both were popular in the early-modern era throughout Europe. Inns offered food, drink and a safe night’s lodging for the guests, and provided appropriate care for their horses in purpose built stables.1 Sources from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century bear witness to the fact that the food offered to the guests in inns was bad, tasteless and quite expensive. Usually the choice was limited to a few dishes that were served only at certain hours (the so-called table d’hôte), and if the guests were not there at that precise time, they went hungry. More important than the serving of food was the sale of drinks, mostly wine and low-quality beer. Both these drinks were produced by the innkeepers themselves, with the aim of making a quick profit.2 In the early stage of the catering trade, the production and sale of wine and beer were closely connected with innkeeping activities. However, at the beginning of the eighteenth century these two commercial areas were separated. This separation is linked to the increase in road traffic, river traffic and trade. Inns appeared along rivers and roads, particularly those leading to bigger towns. The construction of the South Railway from Vienna to Trieste between 1846 and 1857 directly influenced the development of the catering trade in the Slovene territory. Some town inns went bankrupt because of the reduced mail traffic, but, conversely, other inns in favourable positions, for instance close to railway stations, prospered. Some of the urban inns even grew into hotels.3

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Maja Godina-Golija

Visitors to Urban Inns During the late nineteenth century, inns had primarily a social function. People went to inns to chat or have a drink and, to a lesser extent, to have a meal. Most of the urban population had their meals at home. The people who ate in inns were generally those who were in town for business, such as tradesmen, carters, farmers who had come to sell their goods, or foreigners, who on their travels stayed in towns for a short period. Regular customers in the urban inns also included boarders, for the most part single men, widowers and pensioners, who had no other possibility of having regular meals. At weekends, well-off families, whose cooks and maidservants were off-duty, came to take their lunch and dinner in town or at neighbouring inns and restaurants. Most of the people, therefore, had meals in eating-houses only exceptionally, especially on the occasions of personal anniversaries or celebrations of business success. The catering trade generally prospered in the Slovene territory. There were very difficult years after World War I, when the majority of the population lived in great poverty, and in the years of economic crisis that affected the towns in 1930 and 1931.4 The social and national variety among the visitors to inns, their needs and buying power, stimulated a very

Figure 8.1 Garden of the Restaurant Götz. Source: Author’s collection

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Food Culture in Slovene Urban Inns diverse catering market: from first-rate, expensive restaurants for fashionable society, to good, solid inns with tasty household fare, and, finally, to roadside inns, taverns and low dives in less accessible or poorer districts.

Dishes in Urban Inns Prior to World War II most Slovene inns already had a long tradition. In general, they could be divided into village and urban inns, on the one hand, and neighbourhood inns, on the other. Town guests usually went to the latter on holidays and at weekends. Boarders visited urban inns for their lunch and dinner, and in the morning local craftsmen and tradesmen gathered in regular groups at tables, so-called štamtiš, for light meals.5 The innkeepers prepared for them and other random forenoon guests several pre-cooked dishes that were cheap but tasty and rich, such as sour soup made of chicken gizzards, pork and beef goulash, chicken and calf stew, pea and onion beef stew, spicy tripe in sauce, lungs or other innards in sauce, and fried liver and brains. Other frequenters of inns rarely came for food. In general, they ordered drinks, and if they wanted to, eat they ordered dishes from the à la carte menu. The dishes being offered in urban inns of the time were typical of the so-called ‘Viennese’ cuisine that was also prevalent in urban households. This kept its dominant position in the Slovene catering trade until the midnineteenth century, when some previously unknown dishes were introduced to the menus.6 These were primarily new meat dishes, among which goulash and individual cuts were the most familiar, especially Wiener schnitzel. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when they won recognition in Vienna, these dishes had spread with great success among the wealthy upper class across the monarchy. Around 1900 they became popular inn food in many European countries,7 a situation which has remained true to the present day. Lunch at an inn, noted for ‘good plain family cooking’, as it was often called in newspaper advertisements of the time, consisted of soup, meat, a side-dish and salad. Guests could also choose among different puddings, or stewed fruit. The most popular among the soups was beef soup with home-made noodles, fried peas, groats or liver dumplings, or other similar flour products that are boiled down in a soup, including vlivanci or ribana kaša. Vegetable soups either contained different kinds of young vegetables or were prepared as cream soups of some sort (cauliflower, spinach or tomato soup). The main course of meals in inns was meat, except for fast days,

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Maja Godina-Golija when fish, legumes and dishes based on cabbage were prepared instead. Following the Viennese pattern for main courses were different roasts, such as roast pork, veal, venison or tenderloin, and individual cuts such as Wiener and Parisian schnitzel. As seasonal food, different poultry dishes of different sorts were served, such as fried or roast chicken, and capon in the region of Štajerska (Styria). Sometimes roast turkey, goose and duck or pheasant and partridge were available. The most popular side-dish was potatoes, especially fried, mashed or jacket potatoes, and, from the beginning of the twentieth century, French fries. These were ordered less often because of their high price. As well as potatoes, cooked and stewed rice, fried potato rolls and bun dumplings were also served. Salads were seasonal. In spring it was early non-hearting spring lettuce and lamb’s lettuce, then cabbage lettuce, cabbage and beans. Innkeeping in the Viennese tradition also offered various desserts. According to the writer Stefan Zweig, the Viennese were ‘sweet-toothed in food, lovers of good wine, sharp fresh beer, puddings and cakes’.8 Usually it was different kinds of hot puddings and sweets that the innkeepers prepared daily. Among them we need to mention a kind of chopped omelette called kaizer šmorn, pancakes with homemade jam, a special kind of soft dumpling made of eggs, sugar and flour flavoured with butter called solnograški žlièniki, and various soufflés. The inns often prepared pastry, including rolls, pies, doughnuts and a kind of fried pastry called flancati, and also small cakes, such as a special kind of biscuit covered with aniseed called janeževi upognjenci, vanilla or nut crescent-shaped rolls, hussar fritters and honey cakes, which were served in baskets on the tables. Dry sponge cakes with sugar icing, called vinski konfet, were also popular with wine. Some inns also baked cakes, which were placed on trays and brought to the tables for the guests to choose from. Particular inns became known for certain home-made specialities. The innkeepers tried to use their own in the preparation of dishes that would gradually become characteristic of their inns. The type of dish, as well as the food that was prepared in households generally, depended very much on the season. In wintertime, urban inns attracted their guests with a weekly offer of pork and sausages. A woman who had been a cook recalled that before World War II the inn used up to three pigs per week and then made sausages (black pudding, meat, liver and white pudding). They put the meat in brine, smoked it or made salami.9 Before Christmas and on Ash Wednesday, inns offered fish, and at carnival time they fried shrove doughnuts and similar pastries. Freshwater fish and crabs were on the menu from May to August, when they were in season. Innkeepers also served pickled vegetables or preserved fruit, such as compotes. – 128 –

Food Culture in Slovene Urban Inns

Local Inns and Urban Restaurants Prior to World War II on Sundays and holidays the town population liked to visit the local inns. They combined these visits with family trips, either on foot or in carriages, more rarely in cars. The selection of dishes on weekdays was modest. Cold meats or simple cooked dishes, such as cooked sausage and ham or fried eggs, were on offer. At weekends, however, a greater variety of hot dishes were prepared, including the specialities of the house. The most popular Sunday dish in most inns was fried chicken, or pohanec. Apart from this, different kinds of roast were much in demand, especially pork and veal, in wintertime also pork and sausages, particularly pap sausages, black pudding and meat sausages. For Sunday guests, various kinds of sweet pastry were baked which gained a certain reputation, such as nut or poppy-seed rolls, cheese and apple pie, and a special nut or cheese-cake called gibanica. Exquisite food in line with Viennese or French culinary traditions was served in urban restaurants. Some of these were operated in a hotel setting, others were independent food-providing services. It needs to be stressed that any first-class restaurant was able to prepare the best-known dishes of international cuisine. Certain restaurants were famous for the reputation of the cooks working there. Very often the owners invited cookery experts from Vienna. The restaurants offered different dishes of the day but mostly they prepared food to order for guests. At lunchtime they offered lowerpriced menus as well as more costly ones involving different dishes. The low-priced menu consisted of soup, a meat course with a side-dish and vegetables or salad, and pastries. The more expensive menu also included a hot or cold appetizer. Restaurant patrons had the possibility of choosing from many meat courses, such as cooked beef, roast pork, roast veal, stuffed veal breasts, different types of roast beef (onion, venison, Frankfurt), pickled tongue, mashed peas and roast capon. There was also a wide selection of side-courses and vegetables: cabbage (stewed, in wine or tomato sauce), sprouts, spinach, cauliflower, kohlrabi, peas, asparagus, pumpkin and many other dishes. Restaurants also accepted orders for other meat courses. In spring these were likely to be for fried chicken, beef tenderloin, fillet and tournedos, Wiener and Parisian schnitzel, fried brains, sweetbread and liver.10 There was always a choice of desserts, which were very popular with customers. Restaurants prepared at least one hot dessert per day, such as apple, cheese or cherry pie, different soufflés (vanilla, hazelnut or chocolate), plum or apricot dumplings, rice or grits pudding with icing, soft dumplings (solnograški žlièniki) pancakes with different fillings and many sorts of – 129 –

Maja Godina-Golija

Figure 8.2 Menu card of the Hotel Meran, Marburg. Source: Author’s collection

omelettes. In the evenings, the choice of dishes was limited. Light, usually vegetable, dishes like spinach omelette, asparagus with butter, or a vegetable dish were on offer. There were also some meat dishes, such as fried calf’s head with tartare sauce. However, the choice of dishes à la carte was similar to that at midday (Figure 8.2). The assortment of food served in restaurants was also adapted to the season. Certain dishes were most appropriate at particular times of the – 130 –

Food Culture in Slovene Urban Inns year. Because cold-storage plants were in their infancy, it was impossible to store some foods during hot summer periods. In spring, around Easter time, fried kid, frogs’ legs and fried chicken were served in restaurants. There were a lot of young potatoes and early vegetables, like asparagus, cauliflower, kohlrabi, tomatoes and different salads: from early, nonhearting spring lettuce and dandelion to lamb’s lettuce. At this time of the year, many types of fish were also served, especially freshwater fish such as salmon, sheath-fish, pike, perch and trout. In the autumn, game was generally in favour, especially deer, hare, pheasant, boar, wild goose, duck and turkey. Winter was the right time for the special Slovene customary event involving the slaughter of pigs and the making of sausages. These products were then served in restaurants, the commonest among them being black pudding, liver sausage, part of the top rib wrapped in membrane, or crackling with pickled cabbage or turnip and barley porridge with pork. On fast days also appropriate food was served in restaurants, i.e. mostly vegetables and fish. On Ash Wednesday and Good Friday salt cod, also called štokfiš, was popular.11 Wealthier townspeople, especially factory-owners, wholesale dealers and lawyers, came to restaurants to celebrate different personal feasts and family celebrations, marriages, birthdays and business anniversaries. On such occasions the restaurants usually prepared a ‘classic’ menu, composed of fourteen groups of dishes. The quantity and combination of dishes was decided together with the person placing the order. In most cases it consisted of soup, a cold or hot starter, several main courses (fish, venison, poultry, various roasts), side-courses (fried potatoes, bread dumplings, stewed rice, fried crescent-shaped rolls, various stewed and larded vegetables), salads, cooked fruit, cakes, pastry, cheeses, fresh fruit, ice cream and black coffee. To accompany such festive events, excellent wines and liqueurs were served. The tables were arranged in a special shape and, unlike the normal way of serving, the dishes were served on boards prepared for six to ten people. The choice of drinks in restaurants was similar to that in inns of higher rank. Beer was sold from the cask, particularly in summertime. Wines were sold either from the cask or in bottles. Among the spirits, a lot of plum brandy, home-made fruit brandy, absinthe, cognac and various liqueurs were sold. The choice of aromatic wines consisted of vermouth and a sweet wine called prošek. There were only a few soft drinks to choose from, the commonest being raspberry juice with natural water or soda, and fresh lemonade. Apart from these, two other kinds of beverage were sold called šabesa and pokalica, made from elder tree blossoms.

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Maja Godina-Golija

New Dishes in the Inns The food in urban inns and restaurants was similar to the food in urban households. It was inseparably connected with the eating habits of the guests’ origins.12 Until the end of the 1920s it was still strongly influenced by Viennese middle-class cuisine, and it was only in certain inns that regional specialities were included on the menu, as in the Koroška region (Carinthia) a dumpling-like dish made of fresh lights and bread, called mežrle, in central Slovenia cheese and nut pies called štruklji, or rolls and cakes. In the 1930s the influence of immigrants was felt. Apart from new ingredients, they also brought with them new eating habits. Newcomers from the Primorska region, who had fled from fascist Italy to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, influenced the appearance of certain new dishes in the inns. Tripe began to be cooked in the Trieste way with parsley and garlic; inns started to provide the white bread from Primorska called bige and smoked ham. Salt-water fish and seafood gained in popularity. Usually these dishes were prepared by cooks from Primorska, who rented and managed numerous restaurants in Slovenia. Immigrants from other parts of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, particularly members of the Serbian army, spread some ingredients of Serbian cuisine to the Slovene region. Some previously unknown dishes became very popular, such as green peppers stuffed with meat, sour cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and minced meat called sarma, and meat grilled or skewered. In the 1930s inns in the suburbs of towns started to offer broiled sucking pigs, grilled products of minced meat either rolled into little elongated èevapèièi or into slightly larger patties called pleskavice .13 Slovenian cookery started to follow the example of the most famous European culinary schools. Apart from the Viennese cuisine already mentioned, most noticeable was the influence of Italian, Czech and French cooking. The superior restaurants at least tried to introduce some novelty from other cultures beside the established dishes of Viennese cuisine (steaks, roasts, goulash).14 Restaurants also played an important part in the spreading of knowledge about the preparation of certain dishes. Maidservants who came from town families to help in the kitchen learned to make these dishes at the same time and restaurants of a higher rank used to invite chefs from abroad and organize culinary exhibitions.15

New Directions in Catering The period after World War I was a time of growing industrialization in Slovene towns, which in turn affected the increasing employment of – 132 –

Food Culture in Slovene Urban Inns women. As in other European countries, there was a growing need to consume food outside one’s home. Since such food could be eaten quickly, standing up, and the time between ordering and arrival of the desired items was very short, interest in this ‘fast’ food increased enormously. Because the tempo of life had quickened and many people had little or no time to sit down at a table, beverages were also consumed standing up. The first heralds of these new times were the so-called ‘automats’, or automated buffets, which sprang up in Slovene towns, mainly after the World War I. Among the most popular were the Daj-dam in Ljubljana and the Avtomatièni bife in Maribor. These ‘automats’ contained glass cases that had been purchased abroad by the buffet owners, displaying food. In return for a coin deposited into an appropriate slot, a customer received the selected items. These automats offered various sandwiches, cakes, ice-cream and beverages. The beverage selection consisted of light or dark beer, premiumquality wines, cheaper wines from Dalmatia, liqueurs and spirits. Such buffets were also equipped with the first espresso machines. The quality of the coffee from these machines was highly praised, and automats were frequented even by those who had come from nearby coffee-houses. These new public places aroused quite a lot of interest among townspeople. The Mariborski Veèernik Jutra newspaper from Maribor reported that the opening of the automat had caused quite a sensation.16 During the first days after the opening, the place was so crowded that it was difficult to serve all of the customers. In the years that followed, its popularity did not diminish. It was especially popular among the young, especially secondary school and university students. Food and beverages from the automat were consumed throughout the day, but the number of patrons increased in the evening when people were taking their regular stroll past the buffet. Certain foods were sold in the street as well. Even though not numerous, street-vendors sold buns with cooked sausage, especially frankfurters, or sausages made of horse meat, obtained from horse meat butchers. Grilled meat, so very popular in Serbian and Bosnian cuisines, started to be sold in Slovene towns before World War II. Serbian vendors offered èevapèièi (meat patties) and ražnjièi (roasted, shewered meat). The first such vendor in Maribor had come from Serbian Leskovec in 1933, and positioned his stall in the hallway of the Halbwidl restaurant.17 The most frequent buyers were the young, chiefly students, for whom such quickly eaten dishes provided an opportunity for a hot meal. These dishes were also popular with other, older customers, especially those who had come to town for shopping, for instance to the open-air market or a fair. While more affluent customers liked to conclude their purchases in – 133 –

Maja Godina-Golija taverns or in coffee-houses, those with less money usually stopped at a street food vendor. New types of public places, the ‘public kitchens’, were created by the Chamber of Labour, the Public Employment Office and municipal communities. Public kitchens were non-profit institutions that prepared dishes especially for those families in which both parents worked outside the home. Their patrons were offered three types of differently priced dishes, each with different foods and caloric intakes. Aside from lunch, which in Slovenia represents the main, and the largest, meal, these places also served breakfast and dinner. As a result of demand among the urban population, the founders of the public kitchens extended their operations in the 1930s.18 At that time new buildings of the public kitchens in Llubljana, Maribor and Celje were opened.

Conclusion With the growing industrialization and rapid development of Slovene towns at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth centuries, Slovenes started to encounter various novelties in food consumption outside the home. This resulted in new relationships within the economic, social and cultural spheres. The German ethnologist Ulrich Tolksdorf has ascertained that these processes were most evident in everyday food consumption, which started to depend on certain new characteristics of urban life, particularly on greater mobility and higher employment rates, but also on the rapid development of the food industry.19 These changes resulted in new food selections being offered by taverns, restaurants, buffets, public kitchens and other public places.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Mennell, 1985, 184. Zischka et al., 1994, 359. Baš, 1936, 6. Godina-Golija, 1996, 99. Tomažiè, 1976, 17. Wiegelmann, 1967, 210. Wiegelmann, 1967, 211. – 134 –

Food Culture in Slovene Urban Inns 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Zweig, 1958, 33. Godina-Golija, 1996, 104. Godina-Golija, 1996, 109. Godina-Golija, 1996, 104. Godina-Golija, 1996, 108. Godina-Golija, 1996, 165. Teplý, 1968, 24. Kuharska kulinarièna razstava v Maribom, 1938, 3. Mariborski Veèernik Jutra, 6, 21.3.1932: 2. Godina, 1986, 19. Godina-Golija, 1996, 122. Tolksdorf, 1981, 121.

References Baš, F. (1936), Iz zgodovine gostilnièarstva v Mariboru [A history of catering trade in Maribor], Maribor. Godina, M. (1986), Maribor 1919–1941 [The town of Maribor 1919– 1941], Maribor. Godina-Golija, M. (1996), Prehrana v Mariboru v dvajsetih in tridesetih letih 20. stoletja [Food culture in Maribor in the 1920s and 1930s], Maribor. Kuharska kulinarièna razstava v Mariboru 12.–15.3.1938 (1938) [The culinary exhibition in Maribor 12.–15.3.1938], Maribor. Mennell, S. (1985), All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Téply, B. (1968), Iz zgodovine mariborskega gostinstva [The history of catering in Maribor], Gostilniški šolski center. Tolksdorf, U. (1981), ‘Der Schnellimbiß und The World of Ronald McDonald’s’, Kieler Blätter zur Volkskunde, 13: 117–62. Tomažiè, T. (1976), ‘Gostilne, kakršnih se pri nas spominjamo’ [Inns commemorated], Slovenski etnograf, 29: 3–39. Wiegelmann, Günter (1967), Alltags-und Festspeizen: Wandel und gegenwärtige Stellung, Marburg. Zischka, U., Ottomeyer, H., and Bäumler, S. (eds) (1994), Die anständige Lust: von Eßkultur und Tafelsitten, Munich. Zweig, Stefan (1958), Vèerajšnji svet [The world of yesterday], Ljubljana.

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Customs of Continuity and Change

–9– The Picnic in Nineteenth-century France A Social Event Involving Food: Both a Necessity and a Form of Entertainment

Julia Csergo

Throughout Europe the same word defines the same object: pique-nique for the French, ‘picnic’ for the British, picknick in German. In spite of this universality, the onomatopoeic expression, without any reference to a dietary practice or to a meal, covers several activities, socially varying, but essentially ‘eating out of doors’ when people take their food along with them. As with many other everyday social practices, picnics have not been recorded in accustomed historical sources. We can only apprehend them through surviving material objects or through numerous representations. They are described not only through literature, both fictional and narrative, but also through pictorials and long-neglected photographic sources. These can be consulted both from the point of view of the history of the representations themselves and from that of the history of the tangible culture. In the nineteenth century we witness a profusion of images and their widespread distribution.1 Consequently, when we mention ‘picnics’, images come to mind: those conveyed by the novels and stories of Zola or Maupassant,2 or those produced by the impressionist school that followed the naturalist tradition opened up by landscape painters: Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), Monet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1865) and J. J. Tissot’s Vacances (1877) or Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1881). These depictions lead us to several observations: 1. These images turn ‘picnic’ into a term that we associate spontaneously with a rustic and rural meal or a meal on the grass, an informal meal associated with relaxation, freedom, a pause and pleasure. Nevertheless, the title of these paintings is never ‘Picnic’. During the same period many English painters were representing the same type of – 139 –

Julia Csergo scenes, entitling their work The Pic-nic (Valentine Cameron Princep, 1838–1904) or Our Picnic Lock (Charles James Lewis, 1830–92), not to mention the plentiful Tea Picnic paintings, a favourite subject of many artists. 2. These representations establish the protocol of what we refer to as a ‘picnic’: countless landscapes and locations (forests, gardens, woods), social classes (peasants, bourgeois and aristocrats), and events (family gatherings and fête galante – a party of young men and women). They include a variety of (at least two) social groups, a range of types of meals (from frugal meal to gourmand feast), and manners from rustic to extremely sophisticated (more or less luxurious table linen and table objects or plates held on the lap or placed on the ground). 3. Finally, these references show that ‘picnics’ both excited the imagination and representations. If the number of the representations does not quite reflect the reality or the frequency of such social practices, in some ways they do carry a trace of the mores and social aspirations of the day. They can even be presumed to have encouraged audiences to behave as in the paintings.3 In 1878, Zola referred extensively to this phenomenon – still barely taken into account by historians – of the Parisian’s immoderate taste for the countryside, when he speaks at length about the history of landscape representation in the painting Salons that opened to increasing numbers of visitors.4 However, seeing picnics as ‘un repas en plein air, à la campagne, en forêt’ (an open air meal in the country or in the forest),5 or as a ‘repas collectif pris à la campagne’ (a collective meal eaten in the countryside),6 or in other words with a significance that lexicographers would qualify as ‘modern’ can be considered as a form of anachronism. We can accept perhaps that anachronisms, which historians have difficulty in avoiding, are one of the methods of approaching social practices of the past, especially by looking at what remains in the present.7 It is important to impose limits, however, on sources that are representations of perceptions and intentions of the author at a given point in history and our reception of these sources; the way we receive and interpret them. How can we grasp a social practice that does not leave any traces in the archives? The object of this chapter will be to attempt to apprehend this specific way of ‘eating out’, or ‘outside of one’s home’. We will do so by considering the emergence of the term and its semantic evolution. Also, we will attempt to outline the means by which during the first urban and industrial era with the arrival of leisure activities,8 the term ‘picnic’ came no longer to mean a meal taken ‘outside of one’s home’ but ‘outside’ or, in other words, ‘in the open air’. – 140 –

The Picnic in Nineteenth-century France

Picnic: A Later Term Signifying a Way of Dividing Up the Cost of a Meal Of little-known origin, the term, unheard of in the sixteenth century,9 seems to have been used for the first time in the seventeenth century, more precisely by La Bruyère in Les Caractères written between 1687 and 1688 and continued until 1694: ‘S’il se fait chez lui un pique-nique, il met en réserve une partie de tout ce qu’on lui a apporté’ (If he has a picnic at home, he puts aside part of what was brought to him).10 This date is confirmed by Bloch and von Wartburg, who note the first appearance of the term in 1694 without giving a precise reference.11 If we refer to the dictionaries of the period, the term appears neither in the Dictionnaire Universel by Furetière (1690), although it is true that it precedes the first usage of the term by four years, nor in the Richelet (1719). The first time the word is mentioned is in the third edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, which appeared in 1740. Therefore it was only officially introduced into the French language in the middle of the eighteenth century, when it is defined as a façon de parler adverbiale qui n’a d’usage que dans ces phrases, Souper à pique-nique. Faire un repas à pique-nique. Pour dire, Faire un repas où chacun paye son écot (an adverbial way of speaking that is only used in phrases such as a ‘picnic supper’, ‘to have a picnic meal’. It is used to say, ‘to have a meal where each person pays his or her share’.)

That form fell out of use, pushed aside by its noun form, ‘a picnic’, which was used in the elliptical form of ‘repas fait à pique-nique’, (a meal in the picnic style), which later led to the simplified use of ‘picnic’. How did this term come into being? Who invented it and what was the intention that could not be expressed in the existing vocabulary? None of these questions have any reliable answers. According to Bloch and von Wartburg, the expression comes from the word piquer (pick or to pinch/ swipe) but with the meaning of picorer (peck at or pinch food) (as in piquer les tables for someone who lives as a parasite) and from nique with the meaning moquerie ou chose sans valeur (mockery or something without value). According to them, the term, of French origin, was adopted throughout the rest of Europe, ending with ‘picnic’ in English in 1748 and picknick in German in 1753. That etymology is not universally accepted. The Littré of 1869 and La Grande Encyclopédie of 1885 consider it of English origin, coming from ‘to pick’ (grasp) and ‘nick’ (an instant), and proposes the spelling pikenike, piquenique or picnic. One of the hypotheses proposed and later rejected – 141 –

Julia Csergo by the Larousse universel of the nineteenth century (1866–79) shows the extent of the confusion: ‘Pique-nique’, says Larousse, ‘aurait pu s’être dit originairement d’un repas fait dans un village nommé “Pique-nique”’ (Picnic could have come originally from a meal eaten in a village named ‘Picnic’). He suggests another hypothesis, just as eccentric, according to which the term comes from a deformation of es beicktet nicht (sic), a phrase which a German traveller might have said after a satisfying meal eaten at a Parisian caterer’s. According to another hypothesis proposed by Larousse, it comes from the expression ‘Tu me piques, je te nique’ (you offend me, I mock you) – this expression itself coming from the German nicken (to wink at someone in mockery) – an expression close in meaning to ‘get back at someone’. The dominant idea here is both of revenge and a balancing out where ‘each person will get his or her own’. The term could then be used in all sorts of situations: one could love or hate ‘in picnic’, an expression used by Alphonse Karr, for example.12 Applied to a meal, the expression would therefore justify the definition ‘repas où chacun paye son écot’ (have a meal where each person pays his or her share), ‘ou apporte son plat’ (or brings their own dish) (Dictionnaire de l’Académie in the successive editions of 1740, 1762, 1798,1835, 1878 and 1931), or ‘repas où chacun des convives n’est redevable de rien à son voisin attendu que chacun paye sa part’ (a meal where no one owes anything to anyone else because participants all pay their share),13 ‘en argent ou en nature’ (paying in kind or with money).14 Payment could be of diverse nature: by paying money, by bringing one’s own meal or by providing dishes for the group. In this way the term originated to express a practice that was not covered by any other term. In 1870, Bescherelle’s Dictionnaire National endorses that same meaning even if he suggests another etymology: the expression could come from the verb piquer (pick) and the term nique, an ancient small coin. Picnic would then express a ‘repas où chacun pique au plat pour sa nique (pour son argent)’ (a meal where each person picks at a dish for their coin – for their money). According to different publications, the definition of picnic as a meal where each person brings a contribution grows in three dimensions; spatial, hedonistic and convivial: ‘Repas de deux ou de plusieurs personnes’ (a meal for two or several people),15 ‘repas de plaisir où chacun paye son écot et qui se fait soit en payant sa quote-part d’une dépense de plaisir, soit en apportant chacun son plat dans la maison où on se réunit’ (a pleasurable meal where people pay their part either by paying their share or by bringing a dish to the house where everyone meets),16 ‘repas de société [. . . , dîner improvisé’ (a social meal [ . .] improvised dinner),17 ‘repas, partie de plaisir’ (a pleasurable meal or party).18 – 142 –

The Picnic in Nineteenth-century France Originally, then, ‘to picnic’ would be to eat together away from one’s home, at someone else’s home, but not necessarily outdoors. It would be to spend pleasurable time together and share expenses by contributing financially to the meal or by bringing something to eat. This definition is confirmed by the use of the term in literature. In his Essai sur la peinture (1766), Diderot, when addressing Boucher, mentions the convivial dimension of a picnic: ‘Quand je suis en pique-nique avec mes amis et que la tête s’est un peu échauffée de vin blanc, je cite sans rougir une épigramme de Ferrand’ (When I am ‘picnicking’ with my friends and I have been warmed by white wine, I quote without blushing an epigram by Ferrand).19 It is also used by Flaubert with the meaning of a meal in which everyone shares the expenses. In Lucien Leuwen (1825–39), d’Antin and his gambling friends organize a picnic for which Mme d’Hocquincourt declares: ‘Je vais m’occuper au nom du pique-nique d’avoir du vin et de le faire frapper’ (In honour of the picnic, I will take care of the wine and make sure it is cooled). Used as a meal eaten ‘together’ ‘away from home’, but in various and private places, it is mentioned by Flaubert or George Sand, for example in Sand’s L’Histoire de ma vie, published in 1855: ‘Everard venait me chercher vers six heures pour dîner dans un petit restaurant, avec nos habitués, en pique-nique’ (Everard came to get me around six o’clock to dine in a little restaurant, with our regular companions, ‘in picnic’). Again in Le Piéton de Paris (1932), L. P. Fargue mentions a Curiosity shop where ‘des pique-niques s’improvisaient le dimanche’ (picnics are improvised on Sundays). Frédéric Le Play’s monographs about the working classes illustrate the colloquial and popular use of the term ‘picnic’ with this meaning. Among the twenty monographs about workmen in Paris (or in the near suburbs), it is used twice for meals where the expenses are shared. The first time is in an 1857 study of a shawl weaver from Gentilly where the term is used by poor families when they ‘have a picnic meal’ during a wedding ‘payant’ (where guests are charged): Les invités sont alors avertis à l’avance, et, au moment de se séparer, après les réjouissances, on fixe le chiffre de la cotisation qui doit être fournie par chaque ménage. [. . . ] Cet usage a cela d’avantageux qu’il permet de conserver, dans les familles les plus pauvres, l’ancienne habitude des fêtes célébrées au moment du mariage. (The guests are warned in advance and when it is time to go home at the end of the festivities, the cost is determined that must be provided by each family group. [. . . ] This custom has the advantage of allowing the poorest families to maintain the age-old custom of a celebration at the time of a wedding.)20

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Julia Csergo The second time it is mentioned is in a study carried out in 1891 concerning a Parisian cabinet maker who, during the summer, was accustomed to having ‘picnics’ at his friends’ home in the suburb of Ivry: ‘On se rend chez des amis et l’on paie son écot sans façon, à titre de revanche’ (We go to our friends’ home and we bear the cost for our share without any fuss, to pay them back).21 When they are referring to a meal eaten outdoors during a Sunday, the authors of monographs never use the term ‘picnic’, but expressions such as déjeuner (luncheon), dîner sur l’herbe (luncheon on the grass), or dans la campagne (in the country), or even goûter (‘snack’), which refers to a meal that the peasants eat in the fields.22 In this way, this form of a meal that can be improvised at anyone’s home, at any time, and where everyone pays their share, this use of ‘picnic’, which can be defined as a way of sharing expenses of a meal, has lasted for a long time. Yet the term has become, in our imagination, a rural or rustic meal eaten outdoors, a déjeuner sur l’herbe (luncheon on the grass). It is worth noting that the last edition of Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1931–5) still gives the definition of ‘repas où chacun paye son écot’ (a meal where everyone pays their share), while only the contemporary supplements of famous dictionaries like the Larousse,23 the Littré,24 or the Robert mention a country meal. For the origin of this modern definition of ‘meal with a group of people eaten in the countryside’, Alain Rey reports in the Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (1992) that the word was borrowed from English probably before 1870, and that the English ‘picnic’ was itself a French loan word that had developed that meaning (1748, Chesterfield). We will now consider the reasons for this mutation and the steps leading up to it.

Eating Out: Both an Everyday Necessity and an Exceptional Pleasure First, it must be remembered that in spite of the importance and the prominence of the representations of which it is the object, starting from the last third of the nineteenth century, a meal eaten in the open air was a common practice during the pre-industrial era. There is frequent evidence of this practice ranging from an everyday necessity to an exceptional pleasure. For field labourers, a meal eaten outdoors was a practice linked to their working conditions and to their meal break. According to the period, countries or regions, it goes by different names (collatio, goûter, panberare, – 144 –

The Picnic in Nineteenth-century France casse-croûte, etc.), but until the middle of the twentieth century nothing was written and no pictorial representation termed this meal eaten in a field a ‘picnic’. These practices, born of necessity, were often seen in paintings or engravings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, showing pastoral or romantic practices. Here, these images must be considered in the light of their depiction of a rural scene close to charitable Mother Nature. They would have the connotation of disgrace if they were situated in an urban setting where the act of ‘eating outside’, in the open air, was associated for a long time with a practice of the destitute and homeless.25 However, both in town and in the countryside since the Renaissance, probably following Italian fashion, and later, when verdure and gardens were customary,26 dinners and light meals eaten out doors became part of the aristocratic way of life. Put aside hunting meals, which are a particular type of meal, and look at pictorial representations of outdoors meals in gardens of Eden where paradisiacal happiness reigns, such as in the works of Lancret or Vernet. Written evidence is abundant too. For example, we can read about the distinct taste of Catherine de Médici for improvised meals in the Tuileries Gardens.27 During the seventeenth century, elite Parisians liked to ‘manger du jambon le matin aux Tuileries’ (eat some ham in the morning in the Tuileries Gardens),28 where Anne of Austria herself ‘joue la collation’ (enjoys a light meal).29 Finally, what can be said about the revolutionary banquets organized in the streets, where everyone brought the food that was to be placed on the common table, and which led to the commemoration ceremony in France in the year 2000, with l’incroyable pique-nique (the unbelievable picnic) as a meal of fraternity? Travelling was also a pretext for outdoor meals. During King Charles IX ‘s tour of France (1564–6), ambassadors tell of the taste of Catherine de Médici for meals in the countryside: as she travelled, she was followed by two beasts of burden carrying ‘fruits et confitures’ (fruit and jam) and a horse laden with ‘la malette où l’on mect la collation de ladite dame allant par pays’ (the chest that contained the meal of the lady going through the country).30 Other sovereigns too appreciated these improvised meals during their travels: Saint-Simon reports that for his journeys, Louis XIV required that his carriage be supplied with meat, pastries and fruit and that he would often stop on his way to ‘dîner sans sortir de son carrosse’ (dine without getting out of his carriage).31 Other types of evidence testify to this taste of the aristocracy for rustic meals. For example, MarieAntoinette’s travelling chest, a masterpiece of cabinet-making filled with choice porcelain, silverware and crystal glassware, gives us a foretaste of the picnic chests made by the most famous accoutrement makers in the era – 145 –

Julia Csergo of the car. During the first third of the nineteenth century, the Prince of Faucigny-Lucinge reports the special fondness of the Duchess of Berry for the brilliant entertainment obtained from ‘repas pris sur le pouce, en voiture: cela ne se passait pas tous les jours et sortait de l’ordinaire. C’était donc une vraie partie de plaisir’ (meals eaten unceremoniously in a carriage. It wasn’t something that happened every day and was out of the ordinary. It was therefore a real pleasure). For this, the butler would set up a table covered with a tablecloth made up of ‘petites planchettes repliées les unes sur les autres mais qui une fois dépliées sont assujetties par des petits verrous pour qu’elles devinssent solides’ (little boards folded one into the other, but once unfolded would be attached by little screws so that they would be stable). He would set the silver, the pitcher, the silver cups, ‘les rouleaux d’ivoire tirés des accotoirs’ (pull the ivory spools from the armrests) for the salt and pepper, and serve the meal of a perfect picnic: salami, prosciutto from Bologna, mortadella cold tongue, and chicken with ‘les membres détachés avaient été remis en place et adroitement maintenus par des fils de soie’ (the pieces which had been separated and then carefully put back and held in place with silk threads), fruit, and wine from Cyprus.32 These few references show that taking meals in the open air, only for pleasure, was a common activity among the elite, who were not obliged to do it for financial reasons.

Country Parties and Rustic Meals During the nineteenth century several factors contributed to the practice of rustic meals: urbanization and industrialization, and at the same time the development of the hygienist trend, progress in the means of transportation, and new legislation on the duration of the working week. Some brief reminders. While the hygienist trend was gaining momentum in the name of public health, and leading to improvement in medicalization and sanitation in the country,33 representations of urban pathologies, previously based on demographic pressure, anarchical urbanization, deadly epidemics, pollution and physical and moral disorders (alcoholism and debauchery), were supplemented by a new imagery linked to the confusion caused by new technology and to an acceleration of the tempo of modern life. Surrounded by the pathologies of the modern world, including nervous fatigue, exhaustion and anemia,34 the hygienist trend favoured representations, extensively depicted since the seventeenth century, of nature as a healthy haven and a source of physical and moral rest.35

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The Picnic in Nineteenth-century France At the same time the extension of the railway system and the rapid improvement of the speed of traveling, leading to a decrease in the price of railway tickets, prompted the growth of the social and geographical counter-urban phenomenon, the recreational day trip to the country called partie de campagne.36 A lot of evidence shows an increasing trend of Sunday invasions in the summer of the outskirts of a city like Paris to a distance that varied between 4 and 50 km. In 1878, Zola mentioned 500,000 Parisians, almost a quarter of the population of the city, who ‘par certains dimanches de soleil [. . .] prennent d’assaut les voitures et les wagons pour se rendre à la campagne’ (on certain sunny Sundays [. . .] storm the carriages and trains to get out to the countryside).37 Finally, the progressive and concomitant compression of work time brought about the ‘profanation’ of the values of Sunday free time.38 This day was traditionally dedicated to religion, but from then on it was (also) used for rest, recreation and family sociability, especially during days spent outside of the cities in a natural setting that became a place of regenerating leisure. In spite of the increase in these recreational day trips and the generalization of rustic meals, the term ‘picnic’ to describe these countryside meals remains absent from our sources. For example, it never appears in the guidebooks of the outskirts of Paris printed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.39 It is worth noting that this meal on the grass itself was rarely given as a model. For each site mentioned, the guidebooks pointed out restaurants, caterers, guinguettes and cafés where food could be obtained. The Cuchet and Lagarancière’s Almanach des plaisirs of 1815, a classical guidebook which enumerates the pleasures and amusements offered by the towns surrounding the capital, only mentioned the possibility of a ‘meal out of doors’ for one of the twenty-nine sites proposed, and without reference to ‘picnic’: it is Saint-Germain en Laye and its forest that offers this possibility to the Parisian bourgeoisie Les uns ont chargé la caisse de leur voiture d’excellents pâtés de rougets, de volailles désossées et de flacons de Chambertin; les autres ont apporté dans un grand panier, le bœuf à la mode, la salade toute assaisonnée, et sont obligés de se contenter du vin du crû. [. . .] Tous mangent de bon appétit, jouissent de la beauté du site, de la pureté de l’air et de cette précieuse liberté qu’on trouve si rarement à la ville. (Some people loaded their car with excellent rouget paté, boned fowl and bottles of Chambertin, others brought a big basket with beef stew, salad with dressing, and are obliged to make do with the local wine. [. . .] Everyone eats with a hearty appetite, enjoying the beauty of the site, the freshness of the air and that precious liberty so rarely found in the city.)40

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Julia Csergo Later Promenades aux environs de Paris (1841) pointed out only for Romainville, which attracted Parisians on holidays, that ‘beaucoup de sociétés dînent dans le bois, sur l’herbe; on se procure au garde chasse ou chez tout autre traiteur ce qu’on ne peut apporter avec soi, tel que pain, vin, etc.’ (a great many groups dine in the woods, in the grass, and what cannot be brought along such as bread, wine, etc., is obtained from the game keeper or a caterer). It was not until the Guide Tinnenbrock of the outskirts of Paris that, when codifying the rules for an excursion in the chapter entitled ‘Conseils donnés aux touristes pour une partie de campagne’ (Advice given to tourists for a country party), the equipment and the menu of a ‘country buffet’ were specified without ever using the term ‘picnic’.41 However, a meal out of doors, as an amusing activity, seems for a time to have been an unavoidable activity for children in Promenades aux environs de Paris. In some of these works published between 1838 and 1850, engravings portrayed scenes on the lawns of Versailles, on the Island of Sèvres or in the woods of Meudon. These scenes were called dîner sur l’herbe,42 or dîner de campagne (dinner in the countryside) – in Charonne, with a roast and a salad.43 It is worth noting that the term ‘picnic’ was almost never mentioned in travel journals or chronicles. Here are a few examples chosen from a large sampling. When visiting in Paris in 1834, the naturalist Alfred MoquinTandon went to see the usual tourist sites in the capital and participated in the inevitable partie de campagne (party in the countryside) in SaintCloud, without mentioning a ‘picnic’.44 Flaubert, although using the term in his novels, in his Carnets de voyages (1847) mentioned his supplies for the road several times and, after long and tiring hikes, his meals out of doors, which he calls casse-croûte.45 A hand-written document like the Journal kept between 1854 and 1874 by Alexandre Bruyer, a Parisian employee who loved Sunday outings, never mentioned a ‘picnic’. In the summer season, accompanied by his wife, he went on outings loaded with ‘filets remplis de victuailles’ (string bags full of food). This custom did not come from a deliberate choice or from the desire for an entertaining meal, but was adopted because their modest financial situation only allowed them to eat occasionally in restaurants. So at the edge of a wood or forest, the couple would take a break ‘sur le gazon, à l’ombre’ (on the grass, in the shade), and pull their meagre lunch our of their bag, to savour it ‘avec la lenteur des gens qui ont envie de se reposer’ (slowly like others at leisure) or ‘gaîment’ (joyfully) because they were ‘heureux de se sentir libre’ (happy to feel free).46 However, a rapid examination of journals or correspondence of foreigners travelling in France shows that for the same period the term – 148 –

The Picnic in Nineteenth-century France

Figure 9.1 Picnic food on black-and-white photograph. Source: © 2003 Corbis. All rights reserved.

‘picnic’ is used by Anglo-Saxon travellers to describe a rustic meal. Mrs Trollope, an English woman who stayed in Paris during the spring of 1835, tells of an excursion to Montmorency to visit the Hermitage, where a ‘picnic’ on the grass is followed by a walk on the paths of the foresters.47 Robert Louis Stevenson, who travelled on foot through the Cévennes in 1878, never used this term for the meals that he ate alone in the outdoors, which he was forced to do because of hunger and the absence of any inn. However, in a short text, ‘An Autumn Effect’ (1875), he tells of an outing in a cart above High Wycombe and notes: ‘The fields were busy with people ploughing and sowing; every here and there a jug of ale stood in the angle of the hedge [. . .]. There was a spirit of picnic.’48 It is a term that he associated with the pleasure of a social occasion. It was also the American Mark Twain who set sail on 8 June 1867 on the Quaker City for the famous first organized trip in the history of tourism. He gave the following subtitle to his travel journal ‘A picnic in the Old World’ because ‘this book is a record of a pleasure trip [not] a record of a solemn scientific expedition’.49 – 149 –

Julia Csergo

English Style or French Style: An Outdoor Social Occasion or an Inexpensive Meal Unlike its use in France, the term seems to have become a customary part of English as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, used to designate a ‘rustic meal’ and not a way to share the expenses of a meal. In her Journal dated 1803, Dorothy Wordsworth uses the word to designate the custom of certain upper-class young people to eat on the grass on the banks of the Thames.50 In his 1806 issue of L’Almanach des Gourmands, Grimod de la Reynière subscribes to that definition of the term. Presenting the way to organize ‘Parties de campagne érotiques et gourmandes’ (erotic and gourmet countryside parties), he explains: ‘Nous voulons traiter aujourd’hui de ces pique-niques à la campagne que l’on fait parfois entre amis pour tromper le temps, amuser son loisir’ (Today we want to deal with picnics in the country that are sometimes organized among friends to pass the time, for entertainment in their leisure hours). The following model differs from the Anglo-Saxon: On forme une société d’hommes et de femmes bien appariés, mais qui ne doivent pas excéder douze personnes. On nomme un pourvoyeur qui doit être choisi connaisseur, intelligent, probe, sachant bien acheter [. . .]; on lui remet les fonds pour lesquels chacun s’est cotisé par égale portion, selon les dépenses qu’on a voulu faire, et on le charge de tous les détails nutritifs (A group of wellmatched men and women is formed, but not more than twelve people. A purveyor is nominated who must be chosen because he is a connoisseur, intelligent, honest, knowing how to buy. [. . .] He is given the funds to which everyone has contributed in equal shares, according to the purchases desired, and he is charged with all the culinary details.)

A gastronomic meal follows, carried in large baskets: fattened chicken fricassee served in bread, galantine of beef tongue, galantine of rabbit, cold roast turkey, ham from Mayence or Bayonne, boned pullet paté surrounded by some quail or larks, timbale of partridge, frangipane tart, Savoy cake, salad, seasonal fruit, petit fours, biscuits, macaroons, jams, without forgetting, for the men, Swiss or Roquefort cheese, all of which is served with table wine, wine from Jurançon, wine from Champagne, from Malaga, from Frontingnan, liqueurs and coffee. After having specified the order of the dishes, because Grimod’s picnic is not an informal meal, he concludes:

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The Picnic in Nineteenth-century France Nous ne parlerons point des joyeux propos, des couplets érotiques et des tendres discours qui auront assaisonné les mets de cette agape champêtre. Il suffit de dire que les femmes sont jeunes et jolies et que les hommes aimables et gourmands, le reste, on le devine (We will not talk about the happy remarks, the erotic verses and the tender speeches that will have spiced the dishes of this rural feast. We will only say that the women are young and beautiful and the men appreciate good food and are friendly, the rest we can guess.)51

Is the above the reason why picnics in France have long been tainted with a certain immorality, considered as a practice of artists, students and grisettes, and bohemians of easy virtue? Is this why it was little used, at least under this terminology, in good company? The scandal caused by Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe could therefore be explained by the dramatic contrast between half-dressed women and well-dressed men because a gourmet sharing of food and women could be implied. In prudish Victorian England, picnics have a prominent place in the bible for young women published in 1861 by Mrs Beaton, The Book of Household Management, which specifies in detail the art of organizing a picnic and a model menu similar to that of Grimod. This is in sharp contrast to the oracles of French manners, which are very reserved in respect to picnics. In 1889, Baronne Staffe notes that Pique-niques and Cagnottes, a term that has today fallen into desuetude, are ‘caisse commune à un groupe de personnes, alimentée par des cotisations ou des dons’ (a common fund of a group of people which is financed by contributions or gifts), which goes back to the first definition of picnic: [. . .] il faut éviter les pique-niques. Il règne en ces parties un laisser-aller qui mène vite aux inconvenances. Chacun est chez soi et les gens de nature un peu grossière ne se sentent pas obligés à la retenue qui existe quand il n’y a qu’un seul amphitryon. Et puis, ces repas à frais communs donnent lieu à toutes sortes de remarques peu charitables, peu aimables, peu convenables: Mme une telle a apporté deux poulets et a amené six personnes. Mlle X a donné un plat de fraises et elle a mangé toutes les pêches, etc. (Picnics must be avoided. Casualness prevails in these parties, which leads to impropriety. Each person feels at home, and people who are a little uncivilized do not feel obliged to keep up the reserve that is maintained when there is only one host. And then, these meals with shared expenses lead to all sorts of uncharitable, unfriendly and improper remarks: ‘Mrs. Y brought two chickens and invited six people. Miss X brought a dish of strawberries and ate all the peaches’, etc.)

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Julia Csergo A little further she adds: ‘Les cagnottes ne me plaisent pas davantage. Au plus, pourrait-on admettre la cagnotte pour les pauvres’ (Putting money in a common fund does not please me more. At the most, a money pool would be acceptable for the poor). To finish she concludes: ‘Pique-niques et cagnottes ne sont pas en faveur dans le monde chic ni auprès des personnes délicates’ (Picnics and money pools are popular neither with stylish people nor with refined people). For Baronne Staffe, Garden parties, Lunch and Parties de campagne (country parties) are acceptable in good company with one exception, a recommendation for women: On part souvent en bande pour faire une excursion et déjeuner ou luncher sur l’herbe. Les femmes prendront garde de ne donner lieu à aucune interprétation fâcheuse dans ces parties où règne un certain laisser-aller; elles doivent s’y monter très réservées, ne pas s’isoler, enfin, pour tout dire, on ferait bien de s’abstenir de ces excursions qui ne sont possibles qu’entre hommes ou en famille (We often go out in a group, to go on an outing and to dine or have lunch on the grass. The women must be careful not to allow any misinterpretation in these parties, which are very casual; they must be very reserved and not go off alone, and finally, in a nutshell, it would better not to go on these outings, which are only possible among men or with a family.)52

The Countess of Gencé moderates this judgement in Chapter 7 of her Savoir vivre et usages mondains, dedicated to repas champêtres (rural meals), she notes: Les pique-niques sont généralement organisés par la collectivité des jeunes gens ou des familles qui en prennent l’initiative. On a protesté contre la liberté un peu large de ces réunions très gaies, sous prétexte que les convenances n’y étaient pas toujours parfaitement respectées. Entre gens bien élevés, tout est permis et les écarts ne sauraient être redoutés (Picnics are generally organized by a group of young people or families who take the initiative. There have been protests against the relative freedom of these gay gatherings, under the pretext that etiquette was not always respected. Among well-mannered people, everything is allowed and there should be no fear of lapses of conduct.)

The menu follows, which is almost invariable, with its cold meat, hot and cold pâtés and galantines, and the recommended financial organization refers directly to the first meaning of the term, still used in France: ‘Quand on organise un pique-nique, les frais sont répartis sur chaque cavalier d’après le nombre de dames présentes’ (When a picnic is organized, the expenses are shared by each escort according to the number of women present).53

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The Picnic in Nineteenth-century France

Success of Outings and Recognition of the Picnic as a Country Meal By the end of the nineteenth century the spectacular growth of various means of transportation and the henceforth-recognized success of tourism enabled ‘picnic’ to gain social recognition and become a standard term used to designate the practice of eating a meal in the outdoors. From now on, the term ‘picnic’ was to be associated with a meal eaten during a trip and just as often with one eaten during an outing or a country party. It was now considered a pleasurable meal and could even be a recreational objective. In effect, the arrival, then the slow popularization, of the bicycle, which, a little later, was followed by the automobile, considerably reinforced the geographical displacement and transposition already induced by the railways, allowing a growing number of people to participate in various outings.54 At the end of the century, the new series of portable guidebooks that were printed reveal the substantial extension of the road network and the future of new transportation techniques. The Cyclo-guide Miran, the Guide Baroncelli or the Guide Michelin, written for cyclists and/or motorists, indicate for the outskirts of Paris, for example, itineraries for day trips or longer, organized around natural or monumental, picturesque or imposing sites. At the same time, excursion company publications were becoming more numerous.55 With the ease and increase in individual transportation, a pause for refreshment in the open air became for the ‘sportsman’56 an indispensable part of the experience of a site.57 It added eating pleasure to the sensual and intellectual pleasures that came with the perception of a landscape from the point of view of its sounds, smells and sights. Integrated into the travelling experience, the word ‘picnic’ gradually took over as the generic term designating ‘a packed lunch’, formerly a necessity carried along during a trip but which has become a meal that is deliberately eaten in the outdoors, in order to savour the site visited, relish the pleasure of change that comes with travelling, nourish the physical activity enjoyed in nature, and reward the effort. The automobile particularly favoured the birth of the nomadic picnic. On the eve of World War I, a motorist like Marius Carle who drove the roads of the Alps recommended that one should always have a supply of food in one’s car in order to be able to stop to eat anywhere as soon as one found a pleasing location.58 The most spectacular expression of this justification of the distinctive practice of ‘picnics’ is found in the increase in the number of new objects such as the panier Niniche, a chest equipped with plates, forks, tinware – 153 –

Julia Csergo goblets, a coffee pot with a hot plate, and a rubber flask, the last accessory being recommended by the already mentioned Guide Tinnenbrock des Environs de Paris, which for the first time established the rules of an outing. They specified ‘l’invariable menu d’un déjeuner sur l’herbe’ (the usual menu of a luncheon on the grass): cold chicken and patés. This guide further provided a list of addresses where it was possible to obtain the first ‘boîtes de conserves à chauffoir indispensables à toute partie de campagne’ (heatable tinned goods indispensable for any country party). These tinned goods, which were still used by campers during the first half of the twentieth century, contained full meals of meat and vegetables. The lower part of these tins had a small sealed container with a wick soaked in spirits of wine, which enabled the heating of the contents of the tin to boiling point. It must be remembered that tinned goods, which were not popular in France until after World War II,59 remained, for a long time, a luxury item: in other words, through advertisements for trips and outings in automobiles, they become a symbol of picnics for the well-to-do. For example, Amieux Frère put a ‘Pic-nic’ box on the market containing une assiette, deux serviettes japonaises, un tire bouchon renfermé dans le manche de la fourchette, une fourchette, un cure dent, un verre à boire, une boîte de sardines à clé, une boîte de pâté de foie gras truffé à clé, une bouteille de Médoc, une fiole de fine Champagne, une tablette de chocolat (a plate, two Japanese napkins, a corkscrew folded into the handle of a fork, a fork, a toothpick, a glass for drinking, a tin of sardines with a key, a tin with a key of foie gras pâté with truffles, a bottle of Medoc, a small bottle of Champagne liqueur and a chocolate bar).60

During the 1920s, the number of luxury accessories continued to increase: chests, suitcases, kits, food boxes equipped with china, silver and crystal, and portable hot plates made by the most stylish accoutrement makers following the tradition of the royal chests that we have already mentioned. Around 1925, Hermès began selling a malette à picnic (picnic chest) – English spelling – containing all the necessary items: a platter for presenting dishes, thermos flasks, plates, goblets, closed cases, cups and folding tableware. In 1931 Hermès launched a new model that was a cloth case with a washable liner containing, for example, knives that could also be used as corkscrews and spoons as openers. In 1933 the chest was further improved as a folding table designed to be used for dining.61 Vuitton created other luxury items: folding tables and chairs, portable hot plates and even tents under which one could eat sheltered from the sun or unpleasant weather. All of these were proposed as picnic objects. To picnic now meant to eat in the open air but not necessarily on the grass. The – 154 –

The Picnic in Nineteenth-century France practice was beginning to resemble ‘camping’, which was originally a sporty and elegant practice. This was how the term was used by Proust, for example,62 but with paid holidays, it later represented inexpensive and popular holidays.63 Henceforth freed from the awkward notion of saving money or sharing the expenses of a meal, which was unacceptable to the customs, the savoirvivre and the conception of dining of the bourgeoisie, the Anglo-Saxon definition of ‘picnic’ was to prevail. Picnics came to be represented as a hedonistic pastime – a moment of shared pleasure centring on a meal eaten in a natural setting.

Addendum After I finished this chapter I came across Pissaro’s ‘Pique-Nique à Montmorency’ (1858), which suggests the use of the word picnic in an earlier period than I affirm here.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Chartier, 1989; Ginzburg, 1991; Michaud et al., 1992. Zola, 1883; Maupassant, 1881. Grimaldi, 1982. Zola, 1882; Clark, 1976. Robert, 1993. Rey, 1992. Loraux, 1993. Corbin, 1995. Huguet, 1961. Larousse, 1866–79. Bloch & von Wartburg, 1932. Karr, in Larousse, 1866–79. Larousse, 1866–79. Larousse, 1928. Dictionnaire de l’Académie, 1798. Littré, 1866–80. Larousse, 1885. Larousse, 1928. – 155 –

Julia Csergo 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Diderot, [1795] 1951, 1152. Le Play, 1857–75, vol. I, 1857, 320. Le Play, 1887–99, vol. IV, 1892, 69. Bonnain, 2001. Larousse, 1976. ‘Repas champêtre pris en commun’. Littré, 1994. ‘Ne s’applique aujourd’hui qu’aux repas pris en plein air’. Mercier, [1798] 1990, 457–8. Fierro, 2001. Quilliet, 1991. Boutier et al., 1984, 158–61. Tallemant des Réaux, 1960. Montpensier, 1776. Boutier, et al., 1984, 158–61. Saint-Simon, 1952, 1047. Faucigny-Lucinge, 1951, 119 Murard and Zylberman, 1996; Bourdelais, 2001. Csergo, 1995; Pinol, 1991. Kalaora, 1981. Csergo, 1998. Zola, [1882], 1994. Beck, 1997. Les guides imprimés, 1998. Cuchet and Lagarancière, 1815. Tinnenbrock, 1885. Anonymous, 1838 . Anonymous, 1850. Moquin-Tandon, 1998. Flaubert, [1847] 1998. Bruyer, 1854–74. Trollope, [1835] n.d. Stevenson, [1875] 1905. Twain [1869] 2002. Wordsworth, [1803] 1987. Grimod de la Reynière, 1806, 65–78. Staffe, 1889, 181–5. Gencé, n.d., 331–2. Rybczynski, 1991; Weber, 1986. Rauch, 1988, 1995. Weber, 1986. Fontaines, 2001. Fontaines, 2001. – 156 –

The Picnic in Nineteenth-century France 59. 60. 61. 62.

Csergo, 2001. Mise en boite, 1994. Archives Société Hermès. Proust, about Albertine: ‘Toutes mes supplications ne réussissaient pas à la retenir et à lui faire manquer une garden-party, une promenade à âne, un pick-nick.’ Larousse, 1976. 63. Richez and Strauss, 1995.

References Anonymous (1838), Promenades aux environs de Paris, Paris: Didot aîné. Anonymous (1850), Promenades amusantes d’une jeune famille dans les environs de Paris avec des remarques historiques et des anecdotes sur les lieux les plus célèbres, Paris: Lecerf et Blanchard. Beck, R. (1997), Histoire du dimanche de 1700 à nos jours, Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier. Bloch & von Wartburg (1932), Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bonnain, R. (2001), ‘La Goûter paysan’, in J. Csergo (ed.), Casse-croûte: Aliment portatif, repas indéfinissable, Paris, Autrement/Mutations, 206, July: 89–99. Bourdelais, P. (2001), Les hygienistes: Enjeux, modèles, pratiques, Paris: Belin. Boutier, J., Dewerpe, A., and Nordman, D. (1984), Un Tour de France royal: Le voyage de Charles IX, Paris: Aubier. Bruyer, A. (1854–74), Journal, bound manuscrit. Chartier, R. (1989), ‘Le monde comme représentation’, Annales ESC, 6: 1505–20. Clark, K. (1994), Landscape into Art, London: J. Murray. Corbin, A. (ed.) (1995), L’Avènement des loisirs 1850–1960, Paris: Aubier. Csergo, J. (1995), ‘Extension et mutations du loisir citadin. Paris’, in A. Corbin (ed.), L’Avènement des loisirs 1850–1960, Paris: Aubier, 119–68. Csergo, J. (1998), ‘La partie de campagne au XIXe siècle’, in M. Balard (ed.), Fêtes, sports et loisirs dans le sud-est parisien XVIIIe–XXe siècles, Clio 94/16: 151–62. Csergo, J. (ed.) (2001), Casse-croûte: Aliment portatif, repas indéfinissable, Paris, Autrement/Mutations, 206, July. Cuchet, J., and Lagarancière, A. de (1815), Almanach des plaisirs de Paris et des communes environnantes, Paris: Goujon. Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, 5th edn, Paris: J.J. Smits, 1798.

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Julia Csergo Diderot, D. (1951), ‘Essai sur la peinture’, Œuvres complètes, Paris: NRF, La Pleïade (orig. 1795). Fargue, L.P. (1932), Le Piéton de Paris, Paris: Gallimard. Faucigny-Lucinge (1951), Souvenirs inédits, Paris: A. Bonne. Fierro, A. (2001), ‘Manger dans la rue sous l’Ancien Régime’, in J. Csergo (ed.), Casse-croûte: Aliment portatif, repas indéfinissable, Paris: Autrement/Mutations, 206, July: 132–41. Flaubert, G. (1998), Par les champs et par les grèves: Voyages, Paris: Arléa (orig. 1847). Fontaines, G. (2001), ‘Dans le panier des voyageurs lyonnais’, in J. Csergo (ed.), Casse-croûte: Aliment portatif, repas indéfinissable, Paris, Autrement/Mutations, 206, July: 161–5. Gencé, Comtesse de (n.d.), Savoir vivre et usages mondains, Paris: Bibliothèque des ouvrages pratiques. Ginzburg, C. (1991), ‘Représentation: le mot, l’idée, la chose’, Annales ESC, 6: 1219–34. Grimaldi, N. (1982), ‘L’Esthétique de la belle nature: Problèmes d’une esthétique du paysage’, in F. Dagognet (ed.), Mort du paysage? Philosophie et esthétique du paysage, Seyssel: Champ Vallon. Grimod de la Reynière (1806), Almanach des gourmands, 4e année. Huguet, E. (1961), Dictionnaire de la langue française du XVIe siècle, Paris: Didier. Kalaora, B. (1981), ‘Les Salons verts: Parcours de la ville à la forêt’, Tant qu’il y aura des arbres, Recherches, 45, September, 85–109. Larousse, P. (1866–79), Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, Paris: Larousse. Larousse, P. (1885), La Grande Encyclopédie. Larousse, P. (1928), Larousse du XXe siècle. Larousse, P. (1976), Grand Larousse de la langue française. Le Play, F. (1857–75), Les Ouvriers des deux mondes, 1st series, 5 vols Paris: Société internationale. Le Play, F. (1887–99), Les Ouvriers des deux mondes, 2nd series, 5 vols Paris: Firmin Didot. Les guides imprimés du XVIe au XXe siècle: Villes, paysages, voyages (1998). Colloque Université Paris VII, 3–5 December. Littré (1994), Dictionnaire de la langue française. Loraux, N. (1993), ‘Eloge de l’anachronisme en histoire’, Le Genre Humain, 27: 33–9. Maupassant, G. de (1881), Les Dimanches d’un bourgeois de Paris, Paris. Mercier, L. S. (1990), Le Nouveau Paris, Paris: Laffont ‘Bouquins’ (orig. 1798). – 158 –

The Picnic in Nineteenth-century France Michaud, S., Mollier, J. Y., and Savy, N. (1992), Usages de l’image au XIXe siècle, Paris: Créaphis. Mise en boîte (1994), Catalogue exposition Musée National des arts et traditions populaires, RMN. Montpensier, Mme de (1776), Mémoires, Paris. Moquin-Tandon, A. (1998), Un Naturaliste à Paris sous Louis-Philippe: Journal de voyage inédit, Paris: Sciences en Situation. Murard, L., and Zylberman, P. (1996), L’Hygiène dans la République. La santé publique en France ou l’utopie contrariée, Paris: Fayard. Pinol, J-L. (1991), Le monde des villes au XIXe siècle, Paris: Hachette. Quilliet, B. (1991), Le Paysage retrouvé, Paris: Fayard. Rauch, A. (1988), Vacances et pratiques corporelles, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Rauch, A. (1995), ‘Les Vacances et la nature revisitée’, in A. Corbin (ed.), L’Avènement des loisirs, 1850–1960, Paris: Aubier, 81–117. Rey, A. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Robert. Richez, J-C., and Strauss, L. (1995), ‘Un temps nouveau pour les ouvriers: les congés payés’, in A. Corbin (ed.), L’Avènement des loisirs, 1850– 1960, Paris: Aubier, 373–412. Robert (1993), Le nouveau petit Robert, Paris: Dictionnaires Robert. Rybczynski, W. (1991), Waiting for the Weekend, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Saint-Simon, C. H. de (1952), Mémoires, Paris: Gallimard, La Pleïade. Staffe, Baronne de (1889), Usages du monde: Règles du savoir vivre dans la société moderne, Paris: V. Havard. Stehdhal, Romans et nouvelles, NRF, La Pleïade, 1952. Stevenson, R. L. (1905), ‘An Autumn Effect, in Essays of Travel, London (orig. 1875). Tallemant des Réaux, G. (1960), Historiettes, ed. A. Adam, Paris. Tinnenbrock (1885), Guide des environs de Paris, Paris: Tinnenbrock. Trollope, Mrs (n.d.), Voyage en France, Paris: Fayard. Twain, M. (2002), The Innocents Abroad, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Weber, E. (1986), France, Fin-de-siècle, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Wordsworth, D. (1987), The Grasmere Journal: The Revised Complete Text, London: Michael Joseph (orig. 1803). Zola, E. (1994), Aux champs, Paris: Rumeur des âges (orig. 1882). Zola, E. (1971), Au Bonheur des dames, Paris: Garnier Flammarion (orig. 1883).

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–10 – Trick or Treat? How to Wine and Dine (as a Group) for Free

Marc Jacobs

No Free Lunch ‘There is no such thing as a free lunch.’ This American proverb illustrates that strings tend to be attached to food offered for free. On the website of the no-free-lunch organization (www.nofreelunch.org), doctors and pharmacists act as killjoys by critically pointing out the consequences of accepting free dinners paid for by pharmaceutical companies. Usually groups try to keep those strings out of the picture, to ignore and even deny them. Here the rules of the economy of symbolic goods apply.1 In this chapter I focus on a specific subset of free dinner and drink situations, where groups take the initiative and point at the ‘strings’ attached to (not) offering food or drink, or better, attached ‘to the group’ – in other words, where entitlements are expressed to and/or through eating and drinking out, not to alleviate one’s hunger but for conspicuous collective communication through consumption of food, collective sociability and celebration. Occasions of collectively eating or drinking outside the household as a group, paid for by someone else under the threat of symbolic violence, existed not only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also in the late Middle Ages and the early-modern period. A well-tried method was closing the group, making it into a ‘corps’ and asking newcomers to pay for a dinner for the members. In many corporations, varying from shooting associations, municipal councils or guilds, this was made obligatory and prescribed in the statutes of the organizations. It suffices to read through Arnold van Gennep’s Manuel de Folklore français contemporain or books about popular culture in different regions in Europe to assemble a whole series of examples of groups feasting inside or outside the house at the occasion of important moments or punctuation marks in the festive year cycle or the life cycle. Van Gennep also documented many

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Marc Jacobs forms of ritual begging for food in early modern, nineteenth- and twentiethcentury customs. In the context of this book I explicitly focus on overt forms of symbolic violence (trick) in the streets publicly involving collective food and drink consumption (treat), with special attention to rough music rituals.2

The Festive Year Cycle At the beginning of January, small groups of children in Flemish villages and urban settings today still go from door to door asking for something to eat (usually candy) or for money. The ritual of the ‘Three Kings’ (Twelfth Night) is now rather innocent. Nineteenth-century prohibitions, however, show that these customs could cover aggressive forms of begging. Anke van Wagenberg-ter Hoeven has examined the evolution of the theme in art history: both the celebration indoors (Twelfth Night) and in the streets (Starsingers). Paintings and engravings from the seventeenth century provide information about these customs, next to scarce written accounts. Interesting sources are the so-called ‘king’s letters’: woodcuts or copper engravings that are subdivided into compartments with figures who represent a king and his court, each accompanied by an appropriate poem. The compartments were cut into strips and served as lots and scripts for the ‘king’s roleplaying’. Next to figures like king or adviser, there were also the scripts of ‘le tireur de vin’, ‘sommelier’, le ‘maître d’hostel or ‘le cuisinier’.3 These words sound familiar in the world of the restaurant after the French Revolution. Before the end of the eighteenth century, groups went through the motions characteristic for royal or noble banquets, in their own home (inviting friends) or often in inns and cafés, by playing the game with the king’s letters. Some of these images were moralizing, using the technique of the world turned upside down: admonitions to temperance. The social inversion and déplacement of a courtly ritual to popular, rural inns may be a source of inspiration for the development of the rituals of the classic restaurant, where the burghers were treated like kings or noblemen. The exchange of gifts, sociability and convivium were also of great importance in Starsinging, a theme depicted from the 1630s way into the nineteenth century. The feast gradually moved from indoors to outdoors, from the homes and the inns to the street and to a ritual of costumed ‘begging’. Even nowadays, people not offering anything can be confronted in Flanders with songs that offer a very mild version of ‘trick or treat’.

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Trick or Treat? This brings us to a second custom that has been imported in the late 1990s in Flanders and is still spreading: Halloween. No continuity can be (re)constructed from alleged pre-Christian or Celtic rituals in Ireland to early-modern or nineteenth-century customs or to present day trick or treat pranks in the United States. Tad Tuleja suggests that the trick or treat Halloween as we know it today (as one of the first examples of ‘globalization-generated customs’) was strongly influenced by two forms of social tension in the United States: the juvenile vandalism of the nineteenth-century Halloween and the social turmoil of the Great Depression. Tuleja shows that the phrase ‘trick or treat’ and the ritual linkage of threat and reward gradually became widely known from the 1930s onwards, not before. Public mayhem and prank vandalism as Irish imported traditions were associated with the idea of Halloween in nineteenth-century America. Halloween pranksters symbolically attacked domestic borders. In urban settings, anonymous vandalism sometimes got out of hand in the 1930s. To fight the so-called ‘Halloween problem’, local governments and shopkeepers organized collective entertainment and started to play along, inviting children in and giving them sweets and drinks. In the 1930s Doris Moss suggested buying off potential tricksters with candy treats. Mischief was tamed by constructing an American holidays-styled custom: commercial in intent and infantile in appearance. In the second half of the twentieth century, instead of inviting children in and offering something home-baked, Halloween evolved towards a ritual of ‘hit and run’ by children seeking bought goodies: The masked solicitation ritual, which in the 1940s led to snacks with the neighbors, has become so transformed by the art of manufacture that it now generally endorses mass production and commodity fetishism. Not only are the treats and the costumes store bought, but the exchange relation that the ritual’s actors model has itself commodified, like the ‘let’s get on with it’ formality of fast-food purchasing.4

Trick-or-treaters must bid for the consumers’ attention and offer themselves as neatly packaged products. In response to urban legends about razors and cyanide in the free candy, especially from the mid-1980s onwards, guidelines are published only to accept wrapped treats, reliable products packaged by established companies. Fears for (real) Halloween sadists, monsters and crooks have stimulated initiatives in shopping malls to have the local youth perform their trick-or-treat tour during a prescribed period of time on Halloween night in the mall, a pseudo-public place and a safe environment.5

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Marc Jacobs Steve Siporin has suggested that Halloween pranks perform some of the same functions as charivaris.6 Other customs in the States have likewise been connected to European charivaris and youth groups in earlymodern society. Stephen Nissenbaum has reconstructed the history of American Christmas and shown how it was transformed into a festival of domesticity and consumerism, by combining St Nicholas/Santa Claus, the Christmas tree and the practice of giving gifts to children. The Puritans of colonial Massachusetts did not celebrate Christmas but systematically suppressed it (it was illegal between 1659 and 1681), as it was an occasion for drunkenness and riots as ‘wassailers’ extorted food and drink from the well-to-do. Nissenbaum provides a powerful synthesis of what happened: The modern notion of charity does not really convey a picture of how this transaction worked. For it was usually the poor themselves who initiated the exchange, and it was enacted face-to-face, in rituals that would strike many of us today as an intolerable invasion of privacy. At other times of the year it was the poor who owed goods, labor, and deference to the rich. But on this occasion the tables were turned – literally. The poor – most often bands of boys and young men – claimed the right to march to the houses of the well-to-do, enter their halls, and receive gifts of food, drink, and sometimes money as well. And the rich had to let them in – essentially, to hold ‘open house’. [. . .] In return, the peasants offered something of true value in a paternalistic society – their goodwill.7

Cultural historians have argued that this type of role inversion functioned as a kind of safety valve to channel resentments. They have suggested that by inverting the hierarchy, it was reaffirmed. This point has especially been made in research on a custom that has come to serve as a platform for interdisciplinary research: charivari.

The Pan is Mightier Than the Sword Charivari is the word most generally used to denote a discordant noise, rough music, a cacophony, with or without an elaborate ritual, directed as a form of mockery or sanction against individuals or households who offended against certain community rules. The French word for ‘rough music’, charivari, has functioned since the 1970s as a scientific shibboleth and paradigmatic concept. This ritual of symbolic violence offers insight into many fields of interaction, in both the public and the private sphere and in the interactions between both. It has popped up in all corners of scientific literature (and now also in food history).8 – 164 –

Trick or Treat? Let us consider charivari as a special type of social occasion, in the sense Anthony Giddens has defined it in structuration theory.9 A social occasion is a formalized context, bounded in space and time, in which gatherings occur. A gathering is an assemblage of people comprising two or more persons in contexts of co-presence. A context refers to ‘bands’ or ‘strips’ of time-space within which gatherings take place. Different gatherings can form and disappear in such a context. Specific patterns tend to be recognized as appropriate for the occasion: official or intended conduct. A place (streets near a house) can be the locale of many gatherings (and social occasions) but usually there is a normatively sanctioned overriding social occasion in a sector of time-space to which others copresent are supposed to be subordinated. Special bracketing markers (noise, moving as a group, pots, pans and other kitchen utensils out of the domestic context . . .) turn the charivaris into powerful overriding social occasions. Rough music is a sign for all those in a situation of co-presence of a charivari that special presuppositions for interaction and communication are valid in that context. A repertoire of symbols (objects used for cooking and for feeding people and animals, horns, purification products, waste products, effigies . . .) or symbolic actions (dissonant noise with pots, pans and other instruments, riding a donkey backwards, riding a stang, burning puppets . . .) has been outlined in the canon of folklore studies and cultural history. These assemble the most typical cueing markers and communicative actions in charivaris. Similar markers were important elements of historical or contemporary official social occasions like parades, processions and public punishments. E. P. Thompson made a very valuable and useful comment: [T]he forms of rough music and of charivari are part of the expressive symbolic vocabulary of a certain kind of society – a vocabulary available to all and in which many different sentences may be pronounced. It is a discourse which (while often coincident with literacy) derives its resources from oral transmission, within a society which regulates many of its occasions – of authority and moral conduct – through such theatrical forms as the solemn procession, the pageant, the public exhibition of justice or of chastity.10

The collective actions can be distinguished by a special name given to the overriding social occasion. Participants or contemporary observers often used special words, emic concepts, to refer to this occasion: charivari or many other names. The social occasion called charivari as a whole is strongly oriented towards a specific relation among a limited set of persons,

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Marc Jacobs e.g. in a household or in the pool of marriageable people in a village. One or more symptoms of the relation, usually interpreted as a transgression of implicit rules of interaction, are the so-called occasions (adultery, wife beating, pregnancy of an unmarried girl, remarriage . . .) of a charivari. Another typical feature is illegal legitimacy or legitimate illegality. There has to be at least one official superstructure, with normative and/or judicial powers, which transcends the group of local participants in the collective action (the state, a church). This actor categorizes the special social occasion as a whole or subsections as illegitimate and therefore as potential objects of sanctions by a third party (judicial system). On the other hand, there is another collective actor that evaluates and defends the action as legitimate under the circumstances, as a custom. The ritual provided a way out, to modify – to remedy – the disturbance in the relation of the individual or the household and the local community or groups via a token of sociability, an investment in external sociability. By means of a charivari, the local community makes it clear to the wrongdoer that it disapproves of the union he engages in. But, in the meantime, it also offers a chance to put things right, to ‘modify this situation in practice’. The solution is a payment, of which all sources assure that it put an end to the charivari, or if it was made in advance, prevented it. This payment was made to the organizers of the charivari, so most often to the local youth group, in money or in kind, in the form of a temporary open expense account in the village in or to drinks offered at home. It was not uncommon that people had to do both: paying and offering drinks. If we take into consideration the dark number of avoided rough music incidents, the importance of these free collective meals cannot be underestimated. In many rural communities or urban groups (neighbourhood, guild, etc.), the connection between marriage and a collective treat for young people or representatives of a larger group was almost systematic. In this sense, apart from the many other messages and possibilities of symbolic sanctions, the charivari cases of ‘offering wedding beer’ – kwanselbier – incidents and ‘wedding meals’ refer to a system of reciprocity that was one of the motors of a complex system of intertwining systems and processes, lumped together as ‘popular culture’.

Charivari, Eating and Drinking Out By analysing rough music cases, it is possible to discover unwritten rules that applied in specific social occasions, including implicit codes of conduct in alehouses, taverns, pubs, restaurants, etc. Charivari-prone,

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Trick or Treat? for instance, were situations when a wife came to the pub, made a scene and dragged her husband home, with or without violence. This semipublic manifestation of female domination, or at least of entitlements in a setting where men and young men are together, was a sensitive matter. In nineteenth-century Béarn (France), villagers organized a course d’âne or asouade (riding a donkey backwards, facing and often holding the tail) to make clear that wives should not come and get their husband in the alehouse. In Sterrebeek (Belgium) in the 1890s, the visitors of the cafe annex grocery shop Bon Marché were regularly confronted with furious spouses at home. As such incidents became public knowledge, the customers of the café assembled pots and pans and performed a charivari in front of the house of the victim. In Belgium, cases are documented where an imposed diet was one of the elements that triggered a charivari. In June 1890 a man from Nederokkerzeel joined the household of the father of his bride in Erps-Kwerps. The man was no longer allowed to smoke and hardly received any food at all. The household was confronted with a charivari, burning of puppets and songs about appropriate meals for a husband. In the village of LouiseMarie, shortly after the World War II, a rich spouse wanted to enjoy her adultery and tried to get rid of her man in order to entertain her lovers at home. She decided to put her husband on a diet of only bread, water and cucumbers. Hence the man, from a rich household, who did not receive any spending money, had to go and beg for food in the village. A huge charivari against the spouse followed, even including a special song with rhymes referring to the severe food regime. One of the most frequent occasions for charivari (as a ‘trick’) in the southern and northern Netherlands from the seventeenth until the twentieth centuries was the refusal to grant the local youth and neighbours a special treat at the occasion of a (re)marriage. This also applied for members of corporative groups. Marrying members of guilds of archers, for example, were supposed to offer a barrel of beer and/or a meal, or else a symbolic sanction could follow. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries church and state authorities in the southern Netherlands tried actively to combat these customs and the youth groups organizing them. There were several strategies to deal with the youth culture. Repression and prohibition were one, incorporation and subsidizing the meals and drinks by authorities another.12 We should consider that many charivaris in early-modern Europe involved some kind of patronage by local elites and could be used for political purposes. Next to domestic occasions, the majority in these rural settings, early-modern charivaris were also used in conflicts with tax – 167 –

Marc Jacobs collectors and other official intruders. In this chapter, however, I will not examine the important wave of political charivaris in the period between 1780 and the 1850s, which would require a special study.13 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, charivari was the object of and a weapon in a power struggle of the church, seconded by the state against youth cultures in the countryside. This resulted in a number of prohibitions and court cases. The results of the considerable and systematic attack on the festive culture of youth groups, based on eating and drinking out, should not be underestimated.14 Young unmarried people in rural communities in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century did not always have the same spending power as the McDonald’s and party generations of today. Nicole Castan emphasized this point while examining charivaris in late eighteenth-century Languedoc: The local priests pointed out that the young people did not have enough money to amuse themselves. [. . .] ‘While they were longing for pleasure, and as they were normally kept away from the inns and games, these idle young people were all too keen to enroll themselves behind a few hot-heads who led them to a charivari as if it were an expedition. Was it not the promise of free food and of participating in the society of squanderers (“fricasseurs”) that scandalized the adults?’ [. . .] The charivari was slipping from inflicting public blame and sanctioning attacks on the collective moral standard to pure and simple exaction.15

Daniel Fabre has pointed out that these youth groups could be traced, but they also mainly crystallized as a ‘corps’ at the occasion of local feasts (ducasses, kermesse, vogue, etc.), marriage festivities and charivaris. These feasts are recurrent observation opportunities to trace the existence of a Jeunesse.16 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, beer, wine and food were still being offered and requested at the occasion of a remarriage or a marriage. Sometimes the actions were relatively innocent, playing with the register of gift economy. Not offering food or drink resulted in small Flemish communities like ’s-Gravenwezel in attaching blocks or shoes as a kind of offertory-boxes or alms boxes on trees. But full-blown charivaris were also possible. In the beginning of the twentieth century, seventy-year-old Simon from Beverlo (Belgium) married a young girl. He was particularly stingy and refused to offer the farewell beer. He even remarked provocatively that they could go and lie under the water pump. Three days of heavy rough music were the result. Often negotiations took place before the marriage. If a ‘stranger’ or widower wanted to marry a girl from Eisden (Belgium) in the early twentieth century, the local youth went with a lot of rough music to the house – 168 –

Trick or Treat? of the bride, where they demanded a barrel of beer as a ransom. This was consumed the next Sunday. Refusal resulted in one week of charivari. In Gestringen (Belgium) the wealth of the families concerned played an important role in order to determine the volume of beer to be paid (on sanction of charivari): 33, 66 or 100 litres. This calculation of the wealth and capital of potential victims before setting a price on stopping a charivari was quite a common practice. It is plausible that families with considerable financial and symbolic capital were inclined simply to pay the meals instead of standing the humiliation. This is what Fabre and Traimond documented for the Medoc, Gironde and Béarn regions in France: ‘The bourgeoisie of landowners, grown rich between 1830 and 1860 by planting and exploiting the “landes”, were undoubtly the most compliant. They were able to pay and they did pay most of the time; the charivari thus entered in the forms of quests assuring the financing of popular festive activities and generating a form of redistribution.’17 Many feasts in inns and restaurants have been organized in the past just in order to avoid charivaris. This increases considerably the dark number of charivari-related occasions of dining and drinking out. Historical sources rarely mention these ‘charivaris that never took place’ but were directly related to consumption of food and drink. In the 1910s in Zoutleeuw (Belgium), a widower who had plans to remarry hired the local town crier (belleman) to announce publicly that he would offer a barrel of beer if his young bride were to be spared from a charivari. A nice detail is that early in the evening the parents of the charivarizing youth had come to the pub and emptied the barrel. Offering food or drink was one of the ways to stop charivaris from going on night after night. In Zonhoven (Belgium) the first ban of a remarriage was followed by an evening of deafening rough music until money for a party of eating and drinking for the youth was offered. In early twentieth-century Tollembeek (Belgium) unequal relations (an old widower marrying a young girl, a rich farmer marrying his maid) were confronted with de hond branden (‘burning the dog’, a charivari) on their wedding day or at the return of their honeymoon with dreadful rough music. The only way to stop it was by offering food and drink either in the house of the victim or in a local pub. Rough music could also take a much more positive turn and simply announce the wedding and the meal. In a 1949 dictionary of American folklore, an important evolution in the first half of the twentieth century is highlighted: ‘The convivial and social features of the shivaree have gradually been taken over by more agreeable and harmless functions, such as parties, bridal showers, and “open house”, while the honeymoon and – 169 –

Marc Jacobs the motor car together have provided first a convenient escape and then a substitute.’18 Let us also reflect on a powerful icon or representation that has been propagated by American films. Couples leaving the wedding party to depart on their honeymoon often make use of a car. Not only a banner with the message ‘Just Married’ is attached to the car but also noise-making metal objects connected with food: tin cans from soup, beans, etc. The honeymoon is a modern invention, about a century old, notwithstanding the marketing that leads us to believe otherwise. In their reconstruction of the honeymoon scripts in the United States between 1922 and 1960, Kris and Richard Bulcroft and Linda Smeins discovered that dining out together was one of the crucial practices in which the couple engages, next to getting familiar with the tourist gaze or confrontations with natural wonders (like Niagara Falls). Honeymoons offered (the first postponement of) the first opportunities to cook or to dine out together. Making use of the restaurant services could also be part of the rite of passage. In the complex construction of the honeymoon, one image or norm seemed to prevail according to the researchers: ‘honeymooning should be [. . .] a picnic, a holiday from reality for two, an escape from accountability to anyone but each other’.19 In the organization of marriages, receptions apart from the wedding meal have become common, even when the treat of a charivari has now faded completely in most regions. In 1974 an inquiry was made in Flanders and the Walloon part of Belgium: ‘Are the fiancé or fiancée obliged to offer something to young people in their environment or entourage?’ Three patterns emerged: regions where the obligation existed, regions where the custom was still intensive, and regions where there were no such obligations: ‘The traditional barrel of beer had ceded its place to the reception, in the way it was done in the city, in the evening in the salon of a specialized traiteur or in a parochial hall. The concept of the “youth of the neighbourhood” had faded away and had evolved towards the circle of friends, who did not necessarily live in the immediate surroundings.’20

Rough Eating and Drinking Out A related practice to the charivari was the jonchée or jonchade, where a path was laid between two houses using waste or other materials, including food. In Wieze (Belgium) in the middle of the twentieth century, a farmer’s son had cheated on a girl. The houses were connected during the night by a line of over 100 kilos of sugar candy. Such tracks were usually

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Trick or Treat? drawn anonymously, at night and in silence. In contrast to types of charivari, we can say that offering food or drink was not usually the way to stop the actions. Of interest are cases where eating out(side) was part of the charivari. In northern Brabant (the Netherlands) the word for charivari was also used in everyday life to refer to ‘sitting together at a table to eat’: tafelen (to ‘table’, literally). On 21 August 1765 the Council of Brabant discussed a detailed report about charivari customs in the regions. Fiscal lawyer W. van der Esch described the custom of tafelen or toffelen. When a marriage promise was broken, the charivari was staged in front of the house. Next to making noise, the ritual consisted in setting up a kind of giant table with carts and a grindstone from a miller. On that table a (rotten) cadaver of an animal (a cow, a horse . . .) was served. Large containers or kettles with human and animal dung were carried to the table. The dung was smeared on the table, then on the rest of the house and on everything around it. Two straw puppets (one with a hat and one with a bonnet, representing a husband and wife) were carried to the table and seated in the dung as a parody of dining out. Really enjoying food as a form of (ending a) collective action was also frequently documented. In those cases it made a difference if owners of restaurants or taverns organized or sponsored the charivari. On 20 December 1897 a noisy charivari took place in the rural village of Deurle (Belgium). The innkeeper, Gustaf Vits, and his customers fired small cannons and performed a play to mock the schoolmaster who had been officially removed from office by the municipal council and the Provincial Deputation. All participants and spectators were offered free beer and gin, paid for by Vits and two municipal councillors.21 In Flanders, Sofie Peeters (1833–1916) had witnessed what happened to unmarried mothers in the nineteenth-century village of Stekene: In the evening a merry and mocking feast was organized on the street or on a field nearby the farm [where the unmarried mother lived]. The bachelors of the neighbourhood and beyond, even married people were present. A great fire was lit. A huge old pot was brought to the scene together with an amount of buckwheat flour. It was used to make dough to make pancakes. Hanging iron and frying pan were ready. Pancakes were baked for all people present. People drank, sang, danced and jumped until late in the night of even till morning. Some people were blowing on horns, beating on tin lids, on old cooking pots, and guns were fired, so it really resembled a wild theatre of Indians. And the Law could not intervene, as the rough crowd was too big.22

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Marc Jacobs

Figure 10.1 Valentin de Zubiaurre (1801–1900), The Village Feast, oil on canvas, 140 × 198cm. Source: © Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent.

In Lieferingen (Belgium) in the nineteenth century de beest jagen (chasing the beast: rough music) lasted three to nine days. The charivari ended in an outdoor feast: baking and eating pancakes and making and drinking coffee. In the region of the Flemish Ardennes in the first half of the twentieth century, baking and eating waffles in the open air were a classic ingredient of a scharminkeling (chasing the monkey: rough music), usually on the ninth day. Chantal Decubber documented this extensively. In the middle of the twentieth century a giant charivari was organized in Schorisse. There a family was buying a lot of items on credit but they never settled their bills or debts. The local shopkeepers organized the scharminkeling: rough music, burning puppets, and lasting nine days. On the final day a wafelbak (a Dutch word indicating the baking of huge quantities of waffles, to be consumed in a group or to be sold for a good cause) was organized, sponsored by the shopkeepers. A special song with lyrics like ‘buy my song and then enjoy the waffles and the (free) beer’ was composed, printed and sold. In the same region, in Nukerke (1950s), a charivari was organized against a farmer who was mixing cheap margarine with the real butter he sold. Just after World War II a charivari in Mater at – 172 –

Trick or Treat? the occasion of a double adultery was ended by baking waffles. The same happened in the case of a married man from Mater who had made a young girl pregnant. As the special song indicates, this had happened in the fields, when the wife returned home to get tea for the workers. This song also concluded with an invitation to enjoy waffles and beer. One of the most important forms of charivari involving food and drink was the pseudo-marriage feast. In a number of villages in Belgium, like that of Sombeke-Waasmunster, until the first half of the twentieth century, if preparations for a wedding flopped after the first or second ban, then village inhabitants orchestrated a pseudo-marriage in a local inn. A bride (often a transvestite) in a nicely decorated cart was picked up at the border of the village and symbolically married to a(nother) man. An extravagant collective dinner was included and followed by a tour of the cafés in the village. Precisely such a mock wedding involving food was staged for a film of the folklore in twentieth-century Asselt (in the Netherlands, located near the Swalm, close by the industrial community of Swalmen).23

Conclusion Albert Piette has brilliantly demonstrated that researchers try to see the ritual and to ignore the ‘noise’. By developing a method to discover le mode mineur (the ‘subordinate manner’), he tries to notice those seemingly irrelevant details (like having a snack or drinking before, during or after a procession or parade) that at first sight are not part of the procession or manifestation.24 The ‘noise’ of the charivari tends to mask the festive side of the ritual. In this essay I have drawn attention to the importance of eating and drinking in the streets in rough music. I have discovered that free meals and drinks could be not only the preventative or result of charivaris, but also part of the symbolic repertoire itself. In the nineteenth century in France political charivaris go hand in hand with the political, sometimes state sponsored banquets, republican feasts and then fêtes nationales in France’.25 In this chapter I have discussed many customs involving trick or treat aspects and showing family resemblances. Tad Tuleja suggested that these customs are created not tree fashion, but river fashion – out of constantly shifting tributaries rather than taproots. [. . .] Romantic agonizing aside, this process needs not to be seen as devolutionary. Halloween itself had often been described as ‘degenerate’, but as lived reality, it is nothing of the kind. Trick or treat is no more a degenerate Samhain custom than the singing of the Internationale is a degenerate Maypole rite or an adult is a degenerate child.26

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Marc Jacobs There is an interesting symbolic dimension to charivari, in the perspective of eating and cooking ‘in’ or ‘out’. Pots, kettles and pans are usually situated in the private domain. In the social occasions called charivari, these objects, usually objects with a history of cooking and eating within a family, were used in a different context, outside the house. When a group of people assemble in the streets with pots, pans, kettles, boilers, tinplates, spoons, forks, and so on, they are recognized not as cooks but as the performers of a charivari. The objects are not used to cook a meal but through a symbolic transformation they can actually yield a meal, in an attempt to stop the noise. It is a remarkable example of symbolically linking the (household or family material) history of domestic (kitchen) utensils from several households in a village or neighbourhood to food and drink as a group process. The notions I have used to identify and describe charivaris can be useful to describe different forms of eating out and the locations where these actions take place. The definition as a ‘social occasion’(Giddens) provides interesting possibilities for the study of collective eating-out facilities (like restaurants), including the elements of special names and directionality. Drinking and eating out by groups of young bachelors and husbands had a number of unwritten rules, conventions that can be detected when infractions and transgression took place and when these infractions were sanctioned by forms of ‘popular justice’. These included rules about separation of domestic and semi-public spheres, and about the power relations between husbands and wives, and about parents and adolescents. When eating out was also a matter of illegitimate legitimacy (charivari), then the treat could be part of the trick.

Notes 1. Bourdieu, 1980; compare to Shuman, 2000. 2. If the source is not indicated, then I refer to the catalogue of charivari cases (and sources) in Jacobs, 1985. 3. Van Wagenberg-ter Hoeven, 1997, 31–47. 4. Tuleja, 1997, 86–7. 5. Best and Horiuchi, 1985, 488–99; Belk, 1997, 105–32. 6. Siporin, 1997, 53. 7. Nissenbaum, 1996, 9: ‘Christmas was a time when peasants, servants, and apprentices exercised the right to demand that their wealthier neighbors and patrons treat them as if they were wealthy and powerful.’ – 174 –

Trick or Treat? 8. A general overview of charivari as a topic in international scholarship is presented in Jacobs, 1986, 1989; and Thompson, 1991. 9. Jacobs, 1993, 59–62; Giddens, 1984. 10. Thompson, 1991, 478. 11. Belmont, 1981, 17–18. 12. Pleij, 1989, 303. 13. Jacobs, 1993, 75–8; Romme, 1988. 14. Rooijakkers, 1994. 15. Castan, 1981, 201. 16. Fabre, 1996. 17. Fabre and Traimond, 1981, 29. 18. Leach, 1949, 212. 19. Bulcroft et al., 1999, 48 and passim. 20. Doppagne and Peeters, 1975, 300. 21. Van den Heede, 1982. 22. Jacobs, 1985, 247. 23. Van der Ven, 1948. 24. Piette, 1996. 25. Ihl, 1994. 26. Tuleja, 1997, 86.

References Belk, R. (1997), ‘Carnival, control, and corporate culture in contemporary halloween celebrations’, in J. Santino (ed.), Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 105–32. Belmont, N. (1981), ‘Fonction de la dérision et symbolisme du bruit dans le charivari’, in J. Le Goff and J.-C. Schmitt (eds), Charivari, Paris: EHESS, 15–21. Best, J., and Horiuchi, G. (1985), ‘The razor blade in the apple: the social construction of urban legends, Social Problems, 32: 488–99. Bourdieu, P. (1980), Le Sens pratique, Paris: Minuit. Bulcroft, K., Smeins, L., and Bulcroft, R. (1999), Romancing the Honeymoon: Consummating Marriage in Modern Society, London: Sage. Castan, N. (1981), ‘Contentieux social et utilisation variable du charivari à la fin de l’Ancien Régime en Languedoc’, in J. Le Goff and J.-C. Schmitt (eds), Charivari, Paris: EHESS, 197–205. Doppagne, A., and Peeters, K.C., et al., (eds) (1975), ‘La répartition géographique des coutumes en rapport avec le mariage (Belgique et

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Marc Jacobs Europe)’, in Actes du colloque international. ‘Amour et Mariage en Europe’, Liège: Musée de la Vie Wallonne, 298–318. Fabre, D., and Traimond, B. (1981), ‘Le charivari gascon contemporain: un enjeu politique’, in J. Le Goff and J.-C. Schmitt (eds), Charivari, Paris: EHESS, 23–32. Fabre, D. (1996), ‘“Faire la Jeunesse” au village’, in G. Levi and J.-C. Schmitt (eds), Histoire des jeunes en Occident: L’époque contemporaine, vol. 2, Paris: Seuil, 51–83. Giddens, A. (1984), The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ihl, O. (1994), ‘Convivialité et citoyenneté. Les banquets commémoratifs dans les campagnes républicaines à la fin du XIXe siècle’, in A. Corbin, N. Gerôme and D. Tartakowsky (eds), Les usages politiques des fêtes aux XIX et XXe siècles, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 137–57. Jacobs, M. (1985), Charivari: Een aanzet tot interdisciplinaire studie van volksgerichten in Vlaanderen (einde 17e–begin 20e eeuw), Gent: Universiteit Gent. Jacobs, M. (1986), ‘Charivari en volksgerichten: sleutelfenomenen voor sociale geschiedenis’, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 12: 365– 92. Jacobs, M. (1989), ‘Charivari in Europa: een historisch en comparatief perspectief’, in G. Rooijakkers and T. Romme (eds), Charivari in de Nederlanden: Rituele sancties op deviant gedrag, Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut, 281–96. Jacobs, M. (1993), ‘Charivaris, peasants and political culture in the southern Netherlands in a comparative European perspective, 18th–20th centuries’, in S. Woolf (ed.), The World of the Peasantry. Le Monde de la Paysannerie, Florence: European University Institute, 51–85. Leach, M. (1949), ‘Charivari (American shivaree)’, in Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. Volume One: A–I, New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 212. Nissenbaum, S. (1996), The Battle for Christmas, New York: Vintage Books. Piette, A. (1996), Ethnographie de l’action: L’observation des détails, Paris: Métailié. Pleij, H. (1989), ‘Van keikoppen en droge jonkers: spotgezelschappen, wijkverenigingen en het jongerengericht in de literatuur en het culturele leven van de late middeleeuwen’, Volkskundig Bulletin, 15: 297–315. Romme, M. (1988), ‘Charivari en pattriotisme: een nieuw perspectief’, in G. Rooijakkers (ed.), Voor Brabants Vryheyd? Patriotten in StaatsBrabant, ’s-Hertogenbosch: CBG, 105–21. – 176 –

Trick or Treat? Rooijakkers, G. (1994), Rituele repertoires: Volkscultuur in oostelijk Noord-Brabant 1559–1853, Nijmegen: SUN. Shuman, A. (2000), ‘Food gifts: ritual exchange and the production of excess meaning’, Journal of American Folklore, 113: 495–508. Siporin, S. (1997), ‘Halloween pranks: “just a little inconvenience”’, in J. Santino (ed.), Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 45–61. Thompson, E. P. (1991), ‘Rough Music’, in Customs in Common, London: Merlin Press, 466–538. Tuleja, T. (1997), ‘Trick or treat: pre-texts and contexts’, in J. Santino (ed.), Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 82–102. Van den Heede, U. (1982), ‘Scharminkeling te Deurle in het jaar 1897’, Jaarboek Heemkring Scheldeveld, 11: 89–104. Van der Ven, D. J (1948), Asselt aan de Maas: Kerk en kasteel, boerenheem en volksleven in een Limburgse heerlijkheid, Eindhoven: De Pelgrim. Van Wagenberg-ter Hoeven, A. (1997), Het Driekoningenfeest: De uitbeelding van een populair thema in de beeldende kunst van de zeventiende eeuw, Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut.

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–11– The Rise of Restaurants in Norway in the Twentieth Century Virginie Amilien

The destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves.1 Brillat-Savarin New York, 23 March 2001 – Continuing on its migration journey, Norwegian Skrei travels from its home – the winter-clad Norwegian coast – to the US continent, in celebration of its three-month spawning season, from January through March. This year, Seafood from Norway, in collaboration with Executive Chef Marcus Samuelsson of Restaurant Aquavit and Executive Chef Rick Moonen of Oceana Restaurant, are bringing this increasingly appreciated fish to today’s dining experience.2

After winning the Bocuse d’Or, the famous culinary competition established by Paul Bocuse in 1987, Norwegian chefs have travelled around the world promoting the image of Norwegian ingredients and food culture. They have been acclaimed (almost) everywhere. Yet, considering both festive and everyday food habits in Norway, the story of Norwegian chefs conquering the New World with their luggage full of skrei (better-quality cod, fished in winter) really sounds like a fairy tale. Although the number of restaurants has grown considerably in the past fifteen years, Norway can hardly be viewed as an ‘eating-out nation’. Chefs and Norwegians have relatively little interaction with each other, and the number of people eating out once a week is small or almost insignificant. This chapter throws light on this puzzling contradiction. Its aim will be to understand why there is such a large gap between restaurant chefs and everyday cooks, or between elitist and popular culinary culture and their respective discourses and practices; it will also explore whether this gap is changing in any way. Drawing on literature and travel books, I will briefly present a longterm vision of eating out in Norway, and link it to the concept of (food) – 179 –

Virginie Amilien culture. I shall look at a definition of the restaurant from a Norwegian perspective, and consider information on Norwegian consumer habits and eating out in general. Next I shall concentrate on restaurants, and try to understand their role in present-day Norwegian society. I shall also explore the role and significance of chefs (who have become stars), as well as the food they serve. To conclude, I shall try to investigate the tension between the local (Norwegian) cuisine and the global (international) cuisine, viewing both cuisines as cultural and mental phenomena. Norwegian ‘eating out’ can be looked at from many different points of view. ‘Eating outside’ in the forest is, for example, a very common way of having a Sunday lunch, while ‘eating out at work’ in the canteen with food taken from home is a daily way of spatially eating ‘out from home’. The many facets and conceptions of ‘eating out’ are well reflected in the different sections of the present book, and this chapter will concentrate on the urban and modern aspect of eating out in Norway (i.e. ‘dining out’, or ‘eating at the restaurant’). In such a perspective, eating out in Norway is related to the weekend and to special events, as opposed to weekdays and everyday life.

Norwegian Food Culture Because Norwegian food culture and food habits are in general not well known, it is important to begin with some basics, and even to go back briefly to the time of the Vikings. Régis Boyer, one of the world’s greatest specialists in Scandinavia, wrote in one of his books on the Vikings that ‘the gastronomy was certainly not very commendable’.3 Recent interviews with tourists reveal that many still have the same assessment of Norwegian food. Even Norwegian citizens often say that they do not have a food culture. This, of course, is by definition impossible, but it reflects a view that everyday food is not seen as a product of culture. The Norwegian food pattern has a common structure built on four daily meals. Breakfast is important, and it is usually composed of open sandwiches with fish, cheese, meat and jam. Lunch has the same format and ingredients. The slices of bread are then wrapped in paper and brought from home to work or school, which is called the matpakke. Dinner is usually early, around 5 p.m. It is a family meal with a substantial warm dish as the main course. In the evening, people have a night snack, often consisting of bread or cereals. Three out of the four daily meals are therefore based on bread. Boiled potatoes, meatballs, fish balls, pizza, rice or spaghetti are the commonest dishes for dinner.4 Although the matpakke has become a typical Norwegian lunch by its form and content, it is quite – 180 –

The Rise of Restaurants in Norway difficult to find any specific dish or any particular ingredient to illustrate the peculiarity of Norwegian food habits in general. On the other hand, both formal and moral frames of Norwegian food culture are definitively specific. Food culture is built on a formal duality, which often reflects a powerful moral dichotomy. Let us consider the most usual example of traditional food in Norway, i.e. meatballs, which have been claimed as the national dish of Norway and even of Scandinavia. In August 2001, the newly married Norwegian Crown Princess declared in a newspaper interview about her husband that ‘His meatballs were at least as good as mother’s.’5 The year before, the same newspaper had presented the young bachelor Prince Håkon with a plastic bag containing a frozen pizza that he was going to have for dinner. Once married, he had bought the Chef’s ABC (a traditional cookbook), he had learned to prepare a meal and could serve meatballs. Prince Håkon can be seen as a model for Norwegian teenagers, representing the status quo. In the above quotation, he appears to emphasize the national popular value of meatballs and pizza in Norwegian food culture. To stay with the meatballs for a while, in May 2000, Osloposten published an article entitled ‘Meatballs with Michelin stars’.6 A journalist had asked Hellstrøm, the celebrity chef at Bagatelle, Oslo’s most ‘exclusive international restaurant’, to make Norwegian meatballs.7 The article presented the request as an incredible challenge, almost a crime or a sin, as the subtitle states: ‘To ask for meatballs at Bagatelle is like swearing in church.’ The message was obvious: meatballs are simply not eaten at a good restaurant! Both anecdotes tell us that meatballs are a part of the traditional popular culture in Norway. This example not only stresses the symbolic value of meatballs, but it also illustrates the duality between home (‘in’) and restaurant (‘out’). It demonstrates a fascinating dichotomy: meatballs can be eaten at home, but not at the restaurant. This reflects the fact that, in general, Norwegian food culture is built on a network of dualities like ‘eating in’ and ‘eating out’, daily life and special events, healthy and unhealthy, popular and elite or necessity and pleasure (just to give a few examples). Such are the conflicts that underline the ambivalent aspect of the Norwegian diet, either at a basic, purely material level or at a complex, symbolic one.

Before the Restaurant To understand this dichotomy properly, it is necessary to make a trip into the past. Although the concept of the ‘restaurant’ was hardly used before – 181 –

Virginie Amilien the nineteenth century, eating out had been a central feature since Viking times. Dinner was an important social event in the old sagas and Edda poems. Aaron Gourevitch gives the banquet three main functions: a political one (for example, dinner in honour of a powerful konungr), a religious one (with an offertory to influence, for example, the weather or fishing) and a social one, with a precise structure based on gift and exchange.8 Dinner was the meeting place, but its culinary content was definitively not an attraction. There is hardly any information about the pleasure of eating and tasting food, whereas there are plenty of quotations that emphasize the role of the banquet with its peculiar social structures. Eating out, therefore, was primarily a (regulated) social event. Apart from banquets, travellers needed to eat out, of course. Hospitality played a major role, simply because there were no commercial eating places. So everybody took in guests, and guests offered gifts. The old Edda, in Havamål, described in detail the ritual with regard to hospitality. The rules were very structured, and it was clearly apparent that drinking was much more important than food. Although in 1300 the king had promulgated an order to set up inns along the roads, people travelling in Norway before the Reformation in 1535 had to rely mainly on private hospitality. It was considered a great honour to have visitors, and both poor and rich people did their best to welcome their guests.9 Norwegian monasteries were poor and did not play as important a role as in the rest of Europe. However, priests took up a large part of the burden of hospitality. Travellers were always given a bed to sleep in, and they were offered food and drink. Francesco Negri, an Italian traveller, stopped at priests’ houses during his long journey through the north in the middle of the seventeenth century. He described the welcome by one priest, who soon began to drink with me from a big brandy mug, and went around the room until the mug was empty. [. . .] Then we left and went to the table, which was richly laid with meat and fish as usual. Different courses followed each other with quite a long dead time in between, which were filled by drinking a very good beer from a large silver tin. This tin circulated from one guest to another, after the host himself had drunk first [. . .]. on the inside of the tin, there were some marks [. . .] and it was not permitted to drink less than from one mark to another one, but it was possible to drink more.10

Many other sources emphasize the predominance of drinking above eating, as well as the importance of dinner as a public and formal social event. Usually, travellers were offered enough food. Travel expenses relate a significant difference between peasants’ houses and rich residences. Between 1753 and 1794 Arni the Sailor was – 182 –

The Rise of Restaurants in Norway several times in Norway. He was welcomed in various houses, and was offered different types of food. One meal consisted of bread, potatoes and flour pudding, while another was composed of venison, pork meat or fish. The description of the poor man and the rich one reminds me of the old Edda poem, where three types of men with their respective houses and food habits are described. As Bjarne Rogan reports, Arni had most problems staying in town, where the food was expensive and bad. There were many local places where city people could drink and, sometimes, eat a meal. In a book about Kristiania one can read that these ‘small restaurants’ were for ‘small people’. The working class could get a breakfast or a lunch, including food and beer, for a reasonable price.11 Several sources emphasize that alcohol constituted an important part of the turnover, and drinking created many social problems for these small restaurants. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the urban middle class opened its doors to visitors (something the upper class already did in a more restricted circle). Travel memoirs describe Norwegians influenced by European culture, speaking several languages and often travelling abroad. Meals are described in French terms, with the remark that these were based on international ingredients. At the same time commercial ‘hospitality’ was being organized. The improvement of the road system gave rise to ‘relay stations’ where travellers could get new horses and eat some food. ‘Relay stations’ offered simple food that was based on local ingredients and cooking traditions. These places prospered throughout the whole country.

The Emergence of Modern Restaurants The first modern restaurant, Engebret, opened in the then capital, Kristiania, in 1857, and became the symbol of professional restaurants. Many restaurants or cafés followed this example. Henry Notaker’s book on Norwegian historical menus displays a continental French cuisine for the period.12 Cafés were the meeting point for intellectuals, and represented the elite food culture. In Mysteries, Knut Hamsun wrote about the Grand Café in Oslo: ‘Grand was the famous place in town were the big world met’.13 Menus from that time list turtle soup, lobster Parisienne, plaice with Hollandaise sauce, roast duck and melon, to give just some examples of international dishes. This type of food could be found anywhere in Europe, and Richard Wilk quotes almost the same dishes in his article about Belizean food.14

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Virginie Amilien Rural Norway responded to growing tourism by establishing new hotel-restaurants throughout the country. English tourists were often the principal guests in these mountain hotels. However, after World War II it became difficult to manage such firms, and they evolved from tourist hotels into conference hotels. Eating out, then, became part of an activity related to one’s job. In the 1980s, as a consequence of a new alcohol policy, the number of places to eat in large cities expanded suddenly. From 1980 to 1990, liquor licences in Oslo increased from 83 to 226, and in 1999 there were about 1,000. Most of the new eating places are simple and offer primarily drinks. There are few chefs who would open exclusive establishments.15 This recent expansion has not led to a radical change of mentality, but rather to a surge in bankruptcies. This by the way, is why the Norwegian restaurateurs’ organization recommended its members in 1989 to think twice before opening a new place: ‘Want to open a café? Change your mind!’16 This all too brief historical description shows that eating out has different connotations in Norway. A definition of ‘restaurant’ is thus necessary at this stage of my argument, because the concept has quite a different meaning in Norway than it has in most of the rest of Europe. Historical and geographical factors give the word ‘restaurant’ an added value in Norway, where it refers to French style and continental cuisine. Establishments called restaurants are mainly a part of the urban landscape. Rural Norway offers a number of hotel-restaurants, particularly aimed at either Norwegian travellers or foreigners. These places are also adopted as ‘the’ local eating place on Sundays, but Norwegians would hardly label these places as ‘restaurants’. Cafés and patisseries constitute a group of eating places that would have been called ‘restaurants’ in many European languages, but in Norwegian they keep their own terminology. Following Finkelstein’s suggestion of a typology for restaurants, present-day Norwegian eating places can be divided into five main groups: exclusive restaurants with excellent food and haute cuisine; ‘leisure’ restaurants with often original and modern food based on continental or exotic cuisine; local restaurants or ‘cafés’ with simple food (i.e. Norwegian or ethnic restaurants); roadside inns, called veikroer; and, finally, fast-food restaurants.17 In the last decade a few gourmet restaurants have appeared far from town centres. Famous chefs cook in these places, and they attract customers from cities and foreign countries because of their quality and culinary expertise. In addition, the country is sprinkled with small veikroer, which often represent the only eating place around for people living in the countryside. Linguistically, therefore, Norwegian people just use the term ‘restaurant’ to describe the two first groups, and possibly – but rarely – some places from the third group. – 184 –

The Rise of Restaurants in Norway Structurally, inns and fast-food restaurants refer both to special situations and to specific food. Both categories are often combined, either by the consumer or by the owner of the place: they propose ‘easy’ food. Clearly, they do not necessarily require a chef. This is the reason why I chose not to include them in my further argument. Each of the five types of restaurants described above could actually be specified according to the price level. Exclusive restaurants are naturally extremely expensive, and very few people can afford the menu and the wines. They are not representative in a quantitative way, although they offer very valuable qualitative information, and may serve as a point of culinary reference. This chapter therefore focuses on leisure and local restaurants, which contribute to the myth of a modern eating-out society.

Norwegian Eaters Today In the dichotomy ‘eating in’ versus ‘eating out’, ‘in’ refers to family, home and everyday life, whereas ‘out’ refers to society, restaurants and special events.18 In between is the matpakke, which is usually ‘home food’ eaten ‘outside the home’. This difference between everyday life and a special event is one of the most important dualities in Norwegian (food) culture.19 It is a complex matter. Only 7 per cent of the whole Norwegian population did not eat out in the space of one year.20 Nevertheless, the Norwegian consumer has not, until recently, been oriented towards social life outside the home. Religious, historical, cultural, economic and geographical reasons can explain this long-term ‘indoor’ mentality. Despite statistics, of which the above is one example, the fact remains that eating out is not a common part of Norwegian life. This is confirmed by most recent research on food habits in Norway, showing that eating out indeed constitutes a very small part of the everyday life of Norwegians.21 In fact, people go to a restaurant only on special occasions. Other statistics show that about 10 per cent of the whole population never visit a restaurant, while about 60 per cent go to a restaurant between three and eleven times a year (or fewer), and 12 per cent eat out weekly, while 35 per cent do so once a month.22 A recent report on Nordic eating patterns confirmed this picture. It revealed that Nordic consumers generally do not eat out a lot, while it underlines the differences within Nordic countries. Six per cent of the Norwegian people reported that they had visited a restaurant or a café the day before the interview, while in Sweden 14 per cent had done so.23 This simply confirms the fact that people do eat out, but not frequently. Eating out is definitively a special event, and the day on which Norwegian people – 185 –

Virginie Amilien eat out is often characterized as ‘a non-ordinary’ day.24 There are four main criteria distinguishing those who often eat out from those who do so rarely: age, income, place of residence and education level. A typical restaurant patron could be described as either young or highly educated, and definitely urban.25 Both geography and economy may be considered material barriers while age and education work as cultural factors. Comparison with other European countries emphasizes the very low frequency of eating out in Norway. In Great Britain, for example, the numbers of people who eat out either weekly or monthly are double the Norwegian figures,26 while in France almost 18 per cent of the total meals were eaten out in 1991.27 Such findings with regard to Norway contrast with the prediction of researchers like Ritzer, Finkelstein or Fischler, arguing the importance of restaurant meals in modern everyday life, and forecasting a huge increase of outside meals in the coming years.28 However, gourmet writing on food is the most frequent public food discourse in present-day Norway.29 Norwegian newspapers have daily or weekly reports on restaurants and cafés, judging food, service and setting on the basis of a scale that is similar to the Guide Michelin’s system. Norwegian chefs are TV heroes, and Boys Out for a Walk, a broadcast with Arne Brimi, a famous chef cooking in natural surroundings, was the most watched television programme of 2000. This eating-out discourse in the mass media has created the image of a ‘new’ Norway, where urban life and restaurants have progressively taken over from traditional rural food habits. Occasionally, the discourse is corroborated by studies on consumption habits,30 which statistically, but often erroneously, support this image. One example may elucidate this: it has been shown that the average Norwegian consumer today spends 30 per cent more money in restaurants and cafés than ten years ago. However, it must be noted that the money spent includes not just restaurants, but all eating and drinking out, at cafés, bars, fast-food establishments or wherever. Another example is the fact that eating places are flourishing in the largest cities of the country. And in fact, the number of restaurants indeed almost doubled between 1985 and 1996 in Oslo, Norway’s capital. However, these numbers say nothing about the high number of bankruptcies in the restaurant business! I can only agree with the fact that a change is currently occurring in Norway’s culinary culture. Yet, this phenomenon is restricted to the fancy culinary habits of a group of people that could best be described as an urban elite. The general public has a far more practical definition of ‘eating out’, and does so generally for special family events. The following picture thus emerges: there is a long-lived, clear distinction between popular food culture and elite restaurant culture, but only the latter is the object of public – 186 –

The Rise of Restaurants in Norway discourse. I therefore detect a paradox between eating in and eating out in Norway, which may roughly be schematized in the following way: on the one hand, there is little media interest in the commonest practice of daily meals, and, on the other hand, there is huge media interest in a marginal mode of eating.

Food at Restaurants A study based on restaurant menus in five of the largest Norwegian cities shows that restaurant food (taken in the Norwegian sense) is similar in all cities.31 Restaurant food could roughly be ascribed to two main types. First, there is a continental cuisine based on fresh vegetables, fresh pasta, rice and various kinds of potatoes accompanied by meat, fish or game, a reasonable choice of wine, and desserts. Second, there is the food that may more particularly be found in local restaurants, consisting of meatballs, pork and fish, usually served with boiled potatoes, carrots or root vegetables, or ethnic food, such as Chinese or Indian. In these restaurants, desserts and wine are secondary and simple. Eating-out food can be divided into global and local food. Inns and rural places traditionally provide local food and cuisine or global everyday food like burgers and pizza, whereas urban cafés and restaurants are inspired by continental cuisine and apply international ingredients and names. This represents, on the one hand, a popular food culture and, on the other, a professional food culture. The first was built on a traditional cooking style reflecting day-to-day habits, while the second developed from a continental cuisine, and mirrors the style of French restaurants. In an analysis of the duality of the traditional Norwegian food culture, I showed that these two ways of cooking express and conceal two different mentalities.32 The typical Norwegian mentality can be understood through the popular traditional food culture, while the continental gourmet way of thinking makes up the foundations of the professional mentality (which includes chefs and cooks for the upper classes). For almost 150 years these two traditional food cultures have co-existed and evolved in parallel: they have almost never met each other, and have therefore never mixed. In a long-term view of the mentality I distinguish two ways of thinking, which reinforce the two ways of ‘acting’ described earlier. From a diachronic point of view, the duality between ‘eating in’ and ‘eating out’ existed long before the first restaurant had emerged, as did the conception of eating out as a social and public event, as well as the priority of drink experience over food experience (an alcoholic beverage is traditionally not a part of the meal). These dichotomies did not evolve fundamentally over time, and – 187 –

Virginie Amilien they can be followed from the Viking period to the present day. They support the duality, and add a long-term dimension to the tension noticed between eating in and eating out. Actually, the duality is largely based on a cultural distinction: the ideological way of thinking corresponds to the professional one, and the practical side reflects popular culture. Although this professional mentality could be associated here with a modern elite and academic hedonism, let us remember that the professional mentality is the result of training, and not of social distinction. Although cooks and chefs come from various social groups, they think of food as a pleasure, and not as a mere necessity. This cultural distinction is evolving. Recently there has been a change, instigated by the opposition between an ideological and a practical view. Until now, the ideological and political conception related to Norwegian food has supported popular culture and, in particular, a peasant culture that had been adopted as the national image. Such a view was not interested in the professional culture of food. The physical part of the Norwegian national identity was built mainly on the concepts of nature and rural culture, while the spiritual part was based essentially on ideas of straightforwardness and equality. In such a national framework, there was no place for a gourmet discourse. Popular food culture was stressed, particularly in the 1930s and 1960s, in political visions and governmental programmes focusing on local and national cooking. A popular culture could be used to reinforce national identity, but not a professional one. Opposed to this, restaurant culture reflected global, continental bourgeois habits. Nowadays, the gourmet, the restaurant, their discourse and the urban have a place in the construction of Norwegian ideology and identity. This new political direction has been intensified in the last five years by many instances of government support for local food projects, the added value programme for food,33 and, of course, by the particular evolution of the restaurants.

Evolution of Restaurants: From Necessity to Pleasure It seems that the following two quotes encapsulate this evolution, since they borrow words, ideas and concepts from haute cuisine: With the notion that food is something more than a bare necessity, 25-year-old Norwegian super-chef Trond Moi has broadened the term gastronomy considerably, and is now breathing new life into old Norwegian cooking traditions. Embla has a snack, Moi-style.

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The Rise of Restaurants in Norway Have you ever heard of a dish called ‘Norwegian Rissoles on Vacation in China’? Or how about ‘Wooden Plank Salad?’ These are just a few examples of the witty temptations that make up the menu at Bølgen and Moi Café. Situated a few kilometers outside Oslo, the cafeteria offers far more than a cup of coffee; you can get anything from a brownie or a muffin to fresh reindeer or wild duck. The idea is to not only satisfy your hunger, but to include all the senses in the experience of a great meal. If left to the chef, Norwegian and Nordic champion Trond Moi, you would never get the same dish twice.34

Cooking, here, is represented as an art. The artistic argument places this cooking philosophy on a professional, global scale, and far from the traditional popular food culture. On the other hand, the whole idea is constructed on the myth of national identity. The journalist indeed associates Embla (the very first woman in Norse mythology) with Moi, and Moi links gastronomy to ‘Norwegian traditions’. The recent evolution is stimulated by political interest in food culture. As mentioned above, governmental programmes emphasize food culture, especially local features, while a gastronomic institute provides scientific backing for the project. The aim of the Gastronomisk Institutt is essentially the culinary education of the Norwegian people. Their mission is difficult, but chefs working there are active and passionate. Various food producers or organizations, such as those linked to the meat and dairy sectors, and the State Council for Health, sponsor this institute. One of the most popular cooking fashions is the ‘nature cuisine’ created by the abovementioned Arne Brimi, a chef who became a star while symbolizing the ‘real’ Norwegian: he likes hiking in the mountains, breathing fresh air and cooking traditionally. In fact, restaurants, which used to be official guardians of elitist culinary values, are now becoming the figureheads of new traditional cooking. As noted above, popular food culture and professional cuisine, mirroring two different worlds, have evolved in a parallel way for 150 years. These two worlds (or mentalities) have now been linked to each other by combining the national symbol, nature, with food culture. This may be seen as a ‘naturalization’ of culture. From this perspective, local food plays a major role. ‘Local’ is associated with geographical roots, tradition, family and other factors of identity, which used to represent the popular culture of food, but the local expression of food cultures now follows professional references and rules. ‘Nature cuisine’ follows a global grammar and a continental structure. ‘Nature cuisine’ requires a local base and is built on regional food culture.35 This tension between global and local becomes fundamental in the process of creating a new traditional culture, and it is the reason why an increasing number of restaurants now offer local produce and traditional food. – 189 –

Virginie Amilien I can therefore note an exchange of values in the recent period. Veikroer, which originally sold local food, are now focusing on a global presentation and a ‘McDonaldized’ economy,36 whereas urban restaurants, which were created around an international conception of ‘eating out’, now emphasize local ingredients and local recipes. Local food culture takes many feelings and social values into consideration. Restaurants working within a ‘local’ perspective highlight especially the concept of ‘quality of food’ and ‘pleasure of eating’. Eating out is built on a tension between a practical and a social need but also between necessity (nytte) and pleasure (nyte). This opposition is fundamental in Norwegian culture. Pleasure in eating is hedonism, and it is incompatible with everyday life. In such a moral context, eating out will always be a special occasion, and never a common event. Consumption is routine and not necessarily hedonism.37 If eating out is to become a consumer phenomenon, totally dependent on consumer behaviour, would this have some impact on the speed of the evolution of mentalities? A change of mentality usually takes several generations, while we are here observing just the first stage. Norwegian consumer habits with regard to eating out are now rather restrained, and the future will tell in which way the ‘call of a naturalized pleasure’ in food will transform popular mentalities. The gap between the ideological vision of ‘eating out’ and the practice seems finally to be based primarily on cultural skill and a difference in mentality. Popular and professional (or elitist) food cultures have always been different, and it may take a long time before they meet at all. A mental evolution would also mean that food could be experienced as pleasure, and not only as a necessity. From this perspective, restaurants may play an important role as an attractive carrier. Chefs are in a position to transform political and ideological theories in practice. Yet the function of restaurants is not only political and ideological, but also fundamental and pragmatic in the demonstration of gastronomy. Chefs and restaurants show an active participation in the quest for a modern national identity based on local and regional feelings and food. All over the world I can see changes in national identities, which often adopt new cultural forms.38 From this perspective, Norway constitutes an interesting case study because the foundations of the coming identity are based on subjects like food hedonism and ‘eating out’, which today are still unusual in everyday life. If Norwegian national values progressively move from an ascetic to a gourmet food conception, from a rural to an urban view, and from nature to food culture, then one is undoubtedly reminded of the famous quote from Brillat-Savarin with which I began this chapter, ‘The destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves.’ – 190 –

The Rise of Restaurants in Norway

Notes 1. ‘La destinée des nations dépend de la manière dont elles se nourrissent.’ Brillat-Savarin, La physiologie du goût (original from 1826). Taken from the English translation, Brillat-Savarin, 1986, 4. 2. From an article in www.seafood.com (2001). 3. Boyer, 1992, 125. 4. Fagerli, 1999; Kjærnes, 2001. 5. Dagbladet (one of the largest Norwegian newspapers), 18 August 2001. See also Amilien, 2001, on this subject. 6. Osloposten (a free newspaper distributed in Oslo), 10 May 2000. 7. Expressions in quotes are borrowed from the newspaper article. 8. Gourevitch, 1983, 230–4. 9. B. Rogan, in an excellent article about hospitality until the nineteenth century: Rogan, in press. 10. Fransesco Negri travelled in Norway between 1664 and 1665. My translation from Heartfelt, quoted in Rogan, in press. 11. Muus, 1922. 12. Notaker, 1991. 13. Hamsun, 1973. 14. Wilk, 1999. 15. Thon, 1993. 16. Thon, 1993, 267. 17. Finkelstein, 1989. 18. Amilien et al., 2000. 19. Bugge and Døving, 2000. 20. Bjørkum et al., 1998. 21. Fagerli, 1999; Bugge and Døving 2000; Bye, 1999. 22. Kjærnes, 2001. 23. Kjærnes, 2001. 24. Kjærnes, 2001. 25. Fagerli, 1999; Bye, 1999. 26. Warde and Martens, 1999. 27. Manon, 1993. We have to consider the importance of the canteen in the daily consideration of eating out in France. The study shows that 0.50 meal per person is taken and paid for in a restaurant (and not in a canteen). From this perspective, we speak about the restaurant as leisure; the socio-professional difference is important. 28. For example, it was estimated that by the close of the twentieth century, more meals would be consumed outside the home than in (Finkelstein, 1989). – 191 –

Virginie Amilien 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

Døving, 1997. SSB (Statistics Norway): ‘NOS levekårundersøkelse’, 1998 (table 2). Amilien, 2002a. Amilien, 2002b. Verdiskapingsfondet, Matprogrammet, etc. ‘Food Is an Art’, http://norway.origo.no/culture/embla/features/ trond_moi.html. In Norway there is no real opposition between local, regional or national references. On the contrary, we could argue that these identity values complete and reinforce each other. See Hodne, 1997. I refer to Ritzer, 1998. Warde and Martens, 1999. Wilk, 1999.

References Amilien, V. (2001), ‘What do we mean by traditional food? A concept definition’, Lysaker: SIFO Note no. 4 (http://www.sifo.no). Amilien, V. (2002a), ‘Survival and nature as an expression of authenticity in Norwegian urban restaurants context’, in M. Hietala (ed.), The Landscape of Food, Helsinki. Amilien, V. (2002b), ‘Askeladden au royaume de France, ou dualité de la cuisine traditionnelle norvégienne’, in M. Auchet (ed.), Colloque en hommage à Régis Boyer, Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 181– 98. Amilien, V., Døving, R., Nyberg A., and Roos G. (2000), ‘Global and local food in the Norwegian food system: a comparative study between eating in and eating out’, paper presented at the Food Culture Millennium, New York. Bjørkum, E., Ekström, M. P., Gronow, J., Holm, L., Kjærnes, U., and Mäkelä, J. (1998), Utespising i Norden: Nordisk konsumentforskning, Lillehamer 11–14 Nov. Boyer, R. (1992), Les Vikings: Histoire et civilisation, Paris: Plon. Brillat-Savarin, J. A. (1986), The Physiology of Taste, San Francisco: North Point Press. Bugge, A., and Døving, R. (2000), Det norske måltidsmønsteret – ideologi og praksis, Lysaker: SIFO. Bye, E. (1999), Bruk av drikkevarer – hvem, hva, hvor?, Lysaker: SIFO Report no. 8. Døving, R. (1997), Fisk: En studie av holdninger, vurderinger og forbruk av fish i Norge, Lysaker: SIFO Report no. 12. – 192 –

The Rise of Restaurants in Norway Fagerli, R. A. (1999), Changes in Norwegian Food Habits, Lysaker: SIFO Report no. 1. Finkelstein, J. (1989), Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners, Oxford: Polity. Gourevitch, A. (1983), Les catégories de la culture médiévale, Paris: Gallimard. Hamsun, K. (1973), Mysteries, London: Souvenir. Hodne, B. (1997), Nasjonalisme og nasjonal identitet, Oslo: P2 – akademiet/Kulturredaksjonen. Kjærnes, U. (ed.) (2001), Eating Patterns – A Day in the Lives of Nordic People, Lysaker: SIFO report no.7. Manon, N. (1993), Repas à l’extérieur du domicile en 1991, Rapport INSEE consommation modes de vie no. 56. Muus, R. (1922), Gamle Kristiania-originaler, Kristiania: Aass. Notaker, H. (1991), Den norske menyen, Oslo: Ed. Det Norske Samlaget. Ritzer, G. (1998), The McDonaldization Thesis, London: Sage. Rogan, B. (in press), ‘L’hospitalité en Norvège’, in A. Montandon (ed.), Hospitalité en Europe, Université de Clermont-Ferrand II, Centre de recherches en communication et didactique Clermont-Ferrand. Thon, S. (1993), Vertskap i Norge: Norsk hotell- og restaurantvirksomhet gjennom tidene, Oslo: NHRF. Warde, A., and Martens, L. (1999), Eating Out, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilk, R. (1999), ‘Food and nationalism: the origins of “Belizean Food”’, paper presented at the Hagley conference, Delaware.

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Up, Down and (Drinking and Eating) Out

–12– The French Novel and Luxury Eating in the Nineteenth Century Karin Becker

In the realistic and naturalistic bourgeois novel of the nineteenth century, dining in restaurants plays a prominent role. The novelists considered in this chapter – Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Maupassant1 – describe practically every type of restaurant, in this way reflecting on all sorts of such establishments at their time, from the grand restaurant du boulevard to the simple country hotel. They go into detail about these places, which conveys a high degree of authenticity. They describe thoroughly the name of the établissement, its location in the urban landscape and the architecture of the building as well as the rooms, the arrangement of the rooms and their furniture, the quality of the cuisine, the outfits of the personnel and the range of patrons. In this chapter, I shall describe the specific ‘gastronomic discourse’ of the novelists and compare it with the style of contemporary restaurant guides. As regards terminological issues, the authors use the words établissement and maison, as well as restaurant in a general sense. From time to time they make use of the expression restaurat to highlight an archaic use of language, or the term restaurateur to emphasize the importance of the chef. In most cases, restaurant means a fancy establishment, famous and with high prices, known in French as a grand or bon restaurant. Such words were used at the time to label contemporary restaurants such as the Café Riche, the Rocher de Cancale, the Trois Frères Provençaux, Robert, Véfour, Véry, and so on. Where the authors emphasize the exclusive character of such restaurants, they sometimes speak of a restaurant élégant, of a grand restaurant des boulevards or of a grand restaurant du Boulevard, which means especially the Boulevard des Italiens. In other cases, the term restaurant covers a more modest establishment, where the cuisine is not so exquisite and where the prices are more moderate. Thus, restaurant is used for the Boeuf à la mode, the Cadran Bleu, the Coq-Faisan, and so on. It is also used to designate the provincial – 199 –

Karin Becker restaurants (e.g. the Grand Café de Normandie in Madame Bovary) or even simple inns frequented by clerks, workers or students (e.g. the famous Flicoteaux praised by Lucien in Illusions perdues). In these cases, the novelists refer to restaurants à prix modéré or restaurants à quarante sous as well as to restaurants champêtres or auberges de campagne. Occasionally they wish to highlight the contrast with grands restaurants by speaking of a petit restaurateur, an expression designating a pleasant though not luxurious atmosphere. Apart from the word restaurant, the novelists use the terms taverne, cabaret, estaminet, brasserie and guinguette to distinguish establishments selling drinks rather than food. Yet most of these provide meals, and so the meaning of the words has to be seen in a wider sense. This also goes for the various marchands de vin frequented by the protagonists of the novels (e.g. the marriage of Gervaise and Coupeau in L’Assommoir), and for the various cafés, which have private rooms on the first floor in addition to the dining room at street level. For these cafés the authors stick to café de . . . in spite of their transformation into a restaurant (as with the restaurants frequented by Regimbart in L’Education sentimentale: Café Gascard, Café Grimbert, Café Halbout). Actually, this terminology is also to be found in the case of the most famous restaurants, such as the Café Anglais or the Café Riche, where the authors speak of les grands cafés du Boulevard. Apart from restaurants as such, another category of dining places plays a prominent role in the novels dealt with here: the hotels and boarding houses which provide rooms as well as meals. The service is restricted principally to the tenants of the rooms, but other guests are accepted, joining in for the meals. This is the case, for example, with the famous Pension Vauquer in Le Père Goriot, where a distinction is made between pensionnaires internes and externes, the latter making use of the house’s services only for the meals. The internes enjoy the very familiar character of the dinner, which is called table d’hôte. This is often found in the novels mentioned here, as in L’Education sentimentale (where the table d’hôte of Mlle Vatnaz is quite famous), or in Nana (where Chez Laure is a meeting point for lesbians). The hotels have an appropriate importance in the novels. Often, the protagonists take a meal there when on a voyage or out on a short country trip. This is especially the case in Maupassant’s stories, as in Une partie de campagne. In general, as noted above, the authors give precise details about the nature of the establishment when they situate a scene in a restaurant, hotel or at a table d’hôte. Very rarely indeed do they write simply ‘dans un restaurant voisin’, ‘dans un bon restaurant du boulevard’ or ‘dans un petit – 200 –

The French Novel and Luxury Eating restaurant des environs’. This is all that is said when the dining scene is of no special importance for the story. But when a scene contributes to the progress of the story, to the description of the characters or to evoke a milieu or setting, the restaurants are described with details that improve the authenticity and historical realism. It is rare that the reader is not provided with the name or the address of a restaurant. We may therefore speak of the minimal formula of enseigne plus adresse. One may be tempted to mark the restaurants of the novels on a map of Paris, as was done by Anthony Rowley for the restaurants mentioned in the novels of Balzac and Zola.2 But, of course, these novels should not be seen as actual guides to restaurants, for they are not historical documents, but imaginative texts. Many of the places are in fact fictitious. Nevertheless, the localization of restaurants in novels highlights the authors’ intention to make use of the rhetoric of the various restaurant guides of their time. Within the sphere of fiction they therefore participated fully in the (construction of the) discourse of the gastronomic society of the nineteenth century. This discourse is used for all sorts of restaurants, but especially for the grands restaurants du Boulevard. This style of restaurant was well known to the contemporary public, either because the readers themselves had visited such a restaurant, or because the relevant guides had been read. Hence, the indication of the address of a restaurant has no special informative value. When Balzac explained that the Rocher de Cancale is in the rue Montorgueuil, that Véry and Véfour are situated in the Jardin du Palais-Royal, that Robert has his dining place two steps away from Frascati, and that the Café Riche is at the corner of the rue Peletier, these are details generally known to the public. Such details are given for other reasons. They have the valuable effect of allowing the reader to feel that he was participating in the culinary cult and being part of the elite involved in gourmet society. At the same time, the procedure established the authors in their position of connoisseurs. Indeed, their biographies show them to have been frequent patrons of these establishments. The detailed and realistic description of dining places was therefore both a hint that linked cognoscenti and a signal of understanding sent from the author to the reader. The situation is different as regards the petits restaurants, cabarets, marchands de vin and auberges mentioned in the novels, because the reader normally would not have recognized them (insofar as they were not fictitious, in any case). Sometimes the mention of an address provides a mere hint by the protagonist (i.e. the author). Thus, Étienne Lantier in L’Assommoir dines ‘chez Thomas, à Montmartre’, ‘chez François, au – 201 –

Karin Becker coin de la rue des Poisonniers’, ‘à la Ville de Bar-le-Duc […] en bas de Montmartre’, ‘au Moulin de la Galette […] en haut de la butte’, ‘aux Lilas […] rue des Martyrs’, ‘au Lion d’Or […] chaussée Clignancourt’, ‘aux Vendanges de Bourgogne’, ‘au Cadran Bleu et au Capucin’ or ‘du côté de Belleville’. This full enumeration presents a gastronomic peregrination, describing a complete quarter of the town by giving the addresses of the restaurants. In other novels these ‘inscriptions’ appear throughout the text. For example, in L’Éducation sentimentale Frédéric dines for ‘quarante-trois sols le cachet, dans un restaurant, rue de la Harpe’. Regimbart, in the same novel, prefers ‘un petit café de la place Gaillon’, and Deslauriers ‘un petit restaurateur, rue Saint-Jacques’. Georges Duroy, in Bel-Ami, dines ‘chez un marchand de vin auprès de l’arc de triomphe de l’Étoile’, or ‘au CoqFaisan, rue Lafayette’. Gervaise and Coupeau, in L’Assommoir, celebrate their wedding ‘chez Auguste, au Moulin d’Argent, boulevard de la Chapelle’, and for the funeral of Mme Coupeau, they invite their friends ‘chez un marchand de vin de la rue Marcadet, à la descente du cimetière’. Meanwhile, Claude Lantier, in L’Oeuvre, likes dining ‘dans la rue de la Femme-sans-Tête, [. . .] chez Gomard, un marchand de vin, dont l’enseigne: Au Chien de Montargis, l’intéressait’. This list of smaller restaurants could be extended. From time to time, the restaurants are used to produce the very atmosphere of a residential district on a symbolic map. Such is the case with the unpretentious ‘cabaret des Halles’, where Frédéric in L’Éducation sentimentale finds room when all other restaurants are already closed. The same also goes for the ‘cabaret au sommet des buttes de Montmartre’ in La Curée, where Aristide Saccard views Paris from above, the wine inn on the ‘boulevard intérieur’ which Clothilde de Marelle in Bel-Ami prefers to the noble Café Anglais, and the miserable Pension Vauquer ‘établie rue Neuve-SainteGeneviève, entre le quartier latin et le faubourg Saint-Marceau’. Similar functions are of course performed by the grands restaurants of Tout-Paris in that they determine the character of the different quarters of Paris. Balzac highlights especially the Palais-Royal as the place to find a global clientele, as well as exquisite cuisine. In the novels of other authors the restaurants of the Boulevard des Italiens take up this role. The novelists localize not only the Parisian restaurants, but also those in provincial cities and hostels in the countryside. Topographic details in the dialogues of their protagonists may read like information for travellers, similar to the first tourist guides of this period, which try to depict the richness of the regional cuisine. For example, the painter Claude Lantier, in L’Oeuvre, ‘connaissait, après Mantès, un petit village, Bennecourt, – 202 –

The French Novel and Luxury Eating où était une auberge d’artistes’. The protagonists of the short story La femme de Paul prefer ‘le restaurant Grillon, situé au bord de la Seine’, those of the novel Pierre et Jean ‘l’auberge de la Belle Alphonsine dans la Normandie’. In Illusions perdues, they praise a ‘fameux aubergiste de l’Houmeau’; in Madame Bovary, the pharmacist Homais dines at his favourite restaurant, ‘le grand café de Normandie’ in Rouen. There is also the Pavillon Henri IV on the Terrace of Saint-Germain, mentioned several times by Maupassant. Thus, the novelists seem to have participated actively in the propagation of appropriate addresses of restaurants, and thus in the campaign of the gastronomes of their time. They achieve the position of connoisseurs by presenting their special knowledge, and at the same time they invite and tempt the readers to join in the great ideological project of the gastronomie française. However, in claiming the right to praise a restaurant, the novelist also claims the right to criticize where particular criteria of quality are not met. Thus, several protagonists (and with them the authors) vehemently criticize restaurants which are out of their depth and deemed unacceptable. They usurp the position of expert judges in gastronomic questions, ‘hiding’ in their novels in fact a gastronomic guide similar to Grimod’s Almanach, which made the gastronomic critics an institution in France and indeed in Europe. One can say that the novelists put the institution of the restaurant on the agenda: they contribute to the discussion of such places in the society of their time while claiming a position within the sphere of gastronomic guides and criticism. As a consequence, the mechanism of the market is very noticeable in this literature. This is highlighted by the fact that restaurant prices are often an issue, which is a third way to make a contribution to the public discussion. The restaurants in the novels can be classified by price, beginning with simple gargotes à dix-huit sous up to the grands restaurants du boulevard, where a dîner might easily cost the fantastic sum of 100 francs per person. For the protagonists of the novels, the bill to be paid constitutes an important element in determining the choice of restaurant in a given situation. The young countrymen coming to Paris to start a career could measure the steps of their success by the category of restaurant they could afford. They quickly realize that social success in Paris means high expenditure at the level of restaurants that their success obliges them to visit, and that these costs are much higher than anticipated. This might even cause their ruin, for which Lucien de Rubempré, in Illusions perdues, is an example. This is how we have to understand Balzac’s phrase: ‘On ne se figure pas le nombre des gens que la Table a ruinés’ (Le Cousin Pons). – 203 –

Karin Becker Often, a young man’s success could be assessed by his bills in the Parisian restaurants. A good example is offered by the fortunes of Georges Duroy in Bel-Ami. Right from the beginning, the reader is faced with this financial aspect: ‘Quand la caissière lui eut rendu la monnaie de sa pièce de cent sous, Georges Duroy sortit du restaurant.’ At the onset of his career, he has to eat in simple places with fixed prices. In order to survive, he has no choice but to keep count rigorously: On était au 28 juin, il lui restait juste en poche trois francs quarante pour finir le mois. Cela représentait deux dîners sans déjeuners, ou deux déjeuners sans dîners, au choix. Il réfléchit que les repas du matin étant de vingt-deux sous, au lieu de trente que coûtaient ceux du soir, il lui resterait, en se contentant des déjeuners, un franc vingt centimes de boni, ce qui représentait encore deux collations au pain et au saucisson, plus deux bocks sur le boulevard.

In the process of advancement of his career, Duroy is able to visit restaurants of a progressively higher level. Thus, he usually dines in the Bouillon Duval up to the moment when he is paid for the publication of a first article. After receiving a regular salary, he begins to take ‘un déjeuner succulent dans un bon restaurant à prix modérés’. Then, he is seen ‘chez un marchand de vin auprès de l’arc de triomphe de l’Étoile’, and eventually he has access to the grand restaurants like the Café Riche. Nevertheless, his lover Clothilde has to give him 130 francs so that he can pay the bill . . . When he finally can afford to eat twice a day in one of the grands cafés of the Boulevard, things start to change for the worse and he is reduced again to eating in a stingy eating-house. Once more his lover has to give him the money to eat in a restaurant . . . for 2.50 francs. The experience of his failure makes him promise himself that he will never again live above a level he can afford, and that he will eat in more moderate restaurants, especially those of the bourgeois type like the Coq-Faisan. Actually, his more modest living fits in better with his nature and his real needs. His parents, who possess a small cabaret in the country, live in quite narrow circumstances, and his susceptibility to luxury is only the vision of a parvenu celebrating his first success. In addition, marriage to Madeleine makes it impossible to eat out any longer. From then on, he visits restaurants only to please his mistress Clothilde, who prefers more modest establishments like taverns and wine bars, ‘où vont les employés et les ouvriers’, to the grands restaurants. The question of restaurant bills is not limited to parvenus, but also plays a prominent part throughout the novels as an indication of social position, whether real or a protagonist’s false appearance of wealth. Bachelard in

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The French Novel and Luxury Eating Pot-Bouille is a good example of the first type. He gives several banquets for his friends at 300 francs each, and so becomes well known in the Boulevard cafés. Philippe Bridau, in La Rabouilleuse, is an example of the second type, when he offers a banquet at 100 francs in the Rocher de Cancale. This is complete bluff, far beyond his financial means. On the other hand, several protagonists try to keep the bill down. This may be seen as an expression of a degree of parsimony or a matter of bare necessity. Illustrative of this is the typical scene at the end of Gervaise and Coupeau’s wedding party in L’Assommoir. A discussion takes place because of the price of the party, which is much higher than anticipated (instead of the 75 francs envisaged, the landlord has made many additions). In this case, the meal is for workers, but the tendency to complain about the size of the bill is found in the bourgeois milieu too. An example is Monsieur Arnoux in L’Éducation sentimentale: ‘Il se recria considérablement devant l’addition, et il la fit réduire.’ In these cases, the proportion of price to quality is the issue: as far as high-quality dining is concerned, nobody would dare to complain. Instead, the protagonists (or, in a direct comment, the novelists) often praise the cuisine of the Boulevard cafés. Balzac, for example, writes about the ‘cuisine du Rocher de Cancale, comme Borel la soigne pour les gourmands qui savent l’apprécier’. Complaints in such establishments are rare. Where they occur, it is usually a person trying to show off his expertise in matters of cuisine to the others by complaining and attracting their attention. Regimbart in L’Éducation sentimentale causes a scandal at the Trois Frères Provencaux: Il eut beau se transporter dans la cuisine pour parler lui-même au chef, descendre à la cave dont il connaissait tous les coins, et faire monter le maître de l’établissement, auquel il ‘donna un savon’, il ne fut content ni des mets, ni des vins ni du service! A chaque plat nouveau, à chaque bouteille différente, dès la première bouchée, la première gorgée, il laissait tomber sa fourchette, ou repoussait au loin son verre; puis s’accoudant sur la nappe de toute la longueur de son bras, il s’écriait qu’on ne pouvait plus dîner à Paris!

In most cases, complaints are voiced in more modest restaurants, where guests discuss the disparity between the quality of the cuisine and the prices. Nevertheless, they do not complain to too great an extent, because they depend on these restaurants too much to start a dispute with the owner. Patrons without the possibility of changing restaurants are often the victim of an unscrupulous owner, as is the painter Claude Lantier in L’Oeuvre, who is regularly exposed to the tyranny of the owners. In the Chien de Montargis, he is urged to eat an ‘ordinaire de huit sous’, which – 205 –

Karin Becker

Figure 12.1 Honoré Daumier, (1808–79), ‘Garçon! . . . voilà! . . . mais il y a cinq quarts d’heure que je vous demande un biefsteack et que vous me dites voilà, je veux manger autre chose . . .’, lithograph, 23.1 × 18.4cm. Source: From the series Motions parisiennes in Le Charivari, 8 December 1839 © Bruno and Sadie Adriani Collection, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

means ‘un bouillon dans un bol, où il trempa une soupe, et la tranche de bouilli, garnie de haricots, sur une assiette humide des eaux de vaisselle’. In a hostel in the country near Bennecourt, he is served an inferior dinner, ‘l’omelette trop cuite, les saucisses trop grasses, le pain d’une telle dureté, qu’il dut couper des mouillettes pour qu’il ne s’abîmait pas le poignet’. And at the buffet during an exhibition, which should have brought about his success, he has to accept an appalling quality ‘truite amollie par le court-bouillon, un filet desséché au four, des asperges sentant le linge humide’. Happily, there are also small restaurants where just the opposite is true: the quality of the cuisine is beyond expectations and the prices are low! Places to be enumerated here are the famous Flicoteaux, the café on the – 206 –

The French Novel and Luxury Eating

Figure 12.2 Édouard Manet, Le café, 1869, lithograph, 268 × 353cm. Source: © Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery, Washington

Place Gaillon which gratifies even Regimbart, and the long list of ‘maisons de confiance’, favourite restaurants frequented by Lantier. Even a pension can surprise by the quality of its dishes, as in Chez Laure, where they serve ‘un ancien dîner solide d’un hôtel de province: vol-au-vent à la financière, poule au riz, haricots au jus, crème à la vanille glacée’. There are even some restaurants in the country which deserve the praise of the guests, such as the Grand Café de Normandie, where Homais enjoys a fine dinner: ‘Il voulut, avant de s’en aller, voir le maître de l’établissement et lui adressa quelques felicitations.’ This grand gesture is, however, intended ironically, since it reveals the ignorance of a countryman trying to show off his knowledge of the habits of the capital. The novels present in this way (imaginary) information on the restaurants’ names, addresses, prices and the quality of the cuisine. These constitute the basic outline of the description. In several cases the novelists also give details of architecture, furniture and decor. Again, we find here a typical feature of the contemporary restaurant guide that would evaluate restaurants by the dimensions of their dining room and cabinets, the kitchen equipment, the furniture in the salons, the cleanliness and the – 207 –

Karin Becker service. The novelists often provide much more detailed descriptions of the restaurants than the guides, using stylistic and rhetorical means to evoke the atmosphere. With regard to more popular or modest restaurants, like hotels, cabarets or wine inns, descriptions emphasize the grande salle or salle commune, which are the only rooms accessible to guests. Commonly, these are depicted as long rooms with low ceilings, insufficiently lit by small windows and candles. Instead of the small single tables of the grand restaurants, there are long wooden tables, positioned in parallel, giving the room a ‘monastic’ atmosphere (‘quelque chose de monastique’, Balzac, Illusions perdues). Table linen is seldom used, and the wood shows numerous traces of constant use. An example is the wine inn where Georges and Clothilde sit at ‘une table de bois vernie par la graisse des nourritures, lavée par les boissons répandues et torchée d’un coup de serviette par le garçon’. For the novelists, cleanliness is an important criterion: they are zealous in emphasizing cleanliness, which is a new issue in the ideology of the bourgeoisie. Wherever a restaurant is below standard as far as cleanliness is concerned, the authors criticize it by having the characters in their novels express their disgust and rejection. They note the absence of napkins. If one is supplied, it is often covered with stains and remnants of food, obviously having already been used by other guests. Sometimes small crumbs lie on the table or are simply brushed onto the floor. Serving staff wear dirty clothing and carry dirty trays. The chairs show severe signs of use or are on the brink of breakdown. The mirrors on the wall are covered with a thin, gray layer and are fly-blown. Noise and smells from the kitchen bother the guests. Such an ambience is sometimes described in a shocking and suggestive manner, and the reader is continually confronted with terms like ‘ordure’, ‘saleté’, ‘grossièreté’, ‘pestilence’ and ‘puanteur’. In general, the novelists criticize these popular establishments from a perspective that is superior and elitist. Reading between the lines, one can perceive a certain voyeuristic amusement in unmasking the secret desire of the bourgeois to participate in a culture without severe restrictions. Clothilde de Marelle, for example, concedes a ‘plaisir âcre, la joie d’une jouissance scélérate et défendue’ in these inferior establishments. As far as the grands restaurants are concerned, the description always involves praise. The characters’ enthusiasm shows the author to be a connoisseur, endowed with knowledge that enables him to assess the luxury of the decor and the quality of the cuisine. In the novels, all the dining scenes in great restaurants take place in the intimacy of one of the smaller rooms on the first floor. This is why the authors describe not so – 208 –

The French Novel and Luxury Eating much the restaurants as a whole, but the furniture and decor of the cabinet (which is also referred to as salon, appartement or salle). Besides the cabinet, sometimes the staircase leading to the upper floor is described. Zola writes in La Curée: ‘De légers fumets de marée et de gibier traînaient, et le tapis, que des baguettes de cuivre tendaient sur les marches, avait une odeur de poussière.’ Having climbed the stairs, the client follows gloomy passage-ways before entering his room. As Zola writes of the Café Anglais in Nana: ‘Des becs de gaz brûlaient sous le plafond bas, une vague odeur de cuisine dormait entre les plis des tentures.’ Maupassant describes the Café Riche in Bel-Ami: L’air est rempli d’une rumeur confuse, ce bruissement des grands restaurants fait du bruit des vaisselles et des argenteries heurtées, du bruit des pas rapides des garçons adoucis par le tapis des corridors, du bruit des portes un moment ouvertes et qui laissent échapper le son des voix de tous ces étroits salons où sont enfermés des gens qui dînent.

The walls of the rooms being not very thick, one could sometimes hear the ‘tempêtes de rire et de cris’ of the neighbours. That is why Maxime in the Maison Dorée of the novel La Curée can hear the voice of his father, and shouts ‘Tiens! Papa qui est à côté!’ The furniture of these special rooms is very similar to that in the other rooms of superior restaurants. It is often described as a little square room with silk or cloth wallpaper, and the colour frequently gives the room its name (hence the ‘white room’ in the Café Riche). There are mirrors on the walls and sometimes on the ceiling. In the Café Riche the mirrors are curiously covered with confessions of some kind, which are scratched into them with the diamonds of the female guests. Lighting is managed either by ‘chandeliers’, which produce an atmosphere of elegance through the reflections of the mirrors, or by gas lamps, which can create a rather bright illumination or can be dimmed. In the centre of the room is a table for two or four persons with some chairs and a sofa, as well as a shelf for the service. The main piece of furniture, however, is a great divan with several pillows, very worn and very untidy. It is almost impossible to use it as furniture for the meal, but afterwards the tired diners can recline upon it. Its primary function can surely be seen in conjunction with the erotic dimension of these dinners. This erotic function is tied up with an image of secrecy about these chambers. The intimacy of the dinners allows the male participants to indulge in a unity of eroticism and eating. This aspect is firmly denied by the official code of the bourgeois dinner culture, but the presence of demimonde women points to the opposite. The honest bourgeoise would not – 209 –

Karin Becker be granted access to these rooms, because she would risk losing her reputation. Jeanne in Maupassant’s Une vie, for instance, does not risk entering a restaurant, despite her having been hungry for hours: ‘Elle voulait entrer prendre un bouillon dans un restaurant, mais elle n’osait pas pénétrer dans ces établissements, prise d’une espèce de honte, d’une peur, d’une sorte de pudeur.’ Nevertheless, the idea of transgression of moral limits is a source of great temptation, which is why in the later novels some bourgeois figures do try to invade this mysterious place. Madeleine Forestier and Clothilde de Marelle in Bel-Ami dare to meet in a chamber of the Café Riche, ‘voilées, discrètes, avec cette allure de mystère charmant, qu’elles prennent en ces endroits où les voisinages et les rencontres sont suspects’. This is also the case with Henriette, in Maupassant’s Imprudence, who is ‘timide, voilée et ravie’ up to the moment she enters this ‘endroit pas comme il faut [. . .] où on s’aime tous les soirs’. Owing to her complete ignorance of the context of such restaurants, she even has difficulty in finding the appropriate term: when she asks Paul to visit a ‘cabaret galant’ with her, she does not know that a private chamber in one of the grands cafés is meant. In general we can state that this secret place with its furniture for obvious purposes and its discreet staff involves great ambiguity with regard to the bourgeois way of living. The private chamber is, on the one hand, right in the centre of the life of the boulevard, but, on the other, it is at its very edge. Looking out of the window, the protagonists can see the ‘va-et-vient continu des promeneurs’ and the window bars of other restaurants. They can hear the noise of the people in the street as well as the coaches. This is the description by Maupassant in his short story Yvette: ‘Une cohue agitée grouillait sur le boulevard, cette foule des nuits d’été qui remue, boit, murmure et coule comme un fleuve, pleine de bien-être et de joie.’ To observe the life of the boulevards was a principal attraction in a restaurant, or, in the words of Balzac, ‘ce spectacle que présentait le restaurant’, ‘qui ne se trouve d’ailleurs qu’à Paris’ (La Rabouilleuse). We may therefore conclude that the grand restaurants are visited par goût, the small restaurants par nécessité. The gastronomic authors of the bourgeois century distinguish with finesse the mangeur from the dîneur, and it is in this sense that Balzac writes of the restaurant Flicoteaux: ‘On y mange, rien de moins, rien de plus.’ In clear contrast to this, a dinner in the Café Anglais represents a way of living which allows the dîneur to participate, as Balzac says in Honorine, ‘à ce milieu spirituel, compréhensif, critique, où vivent les Français’.

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The French Novel and Luxury Eating

Notes I thank my husband, Michael Sethe, for the translation of the French version, which is based on chapter III.3.2. of my book mentioned in the bibliography. 1. See the list of the novels at the end of this chapter. 2. Les Français à table: Atlas historique de la gastronomie française, Paris, 1997.

List of Novels Analysed Honoré de Balzac:

Gustave Flaubert:

Emile Zola:

Guy de Maupassant:

Physiologie du mariage (1829) La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote (1830) L’Auberge rouge (1831) Eugénie Grandet (1833) Traité des excitants modernes (1833) Le Père Goriot (1835) La Vieille fille (1836) Illusions perdues (1837/39/43) La Rabouilleuse (1843) La Cousine Bette (1846) Le Cousin Pons (1847) Madame Bovary (1856/57) L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) Trois contes: Un coeur simple (1877) Bouvard et Pécuchet (1880) Le Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues (1880) La Curée (1871/2) Le Ventre de Paris (1873) L’Assommoir (1876/7) Nana (1879/80) Pot-Bouille (1882) La Joie de vivre (1883/4) Germinal (1885) L’Oeuvre (1885/6) Une vie (1883) Bel-Ami (1885) Pierre et Jean (1888) Boule de suif (1880) Le Gâteau (1882) L’Héritage (1884) Imprudence (1885) Le Rosier de Mme Husson (1887)

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Karin Becker

Bibliography History of Restaurants Altwegg, J., ‘Die Kochkunst geht auf die Straße: Der Siegeszug des Restaurants in der Französischen Revolution’, in U. Schultz (ed.), Speisen, Schlemmen, Fasten: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Essens, Frankfurt a. M. and Leipzig, 1993, 269–83. Andrieu, P., Histoire du restaurant en France, Montpellier, 1955. Aron, J.-P., Le Mangeur du XIXe siècle, Paris: Laffont, 1973, 19892. Benker, G., Der Gasthof: Von der Karawanserei zum Motel; vom Gastfreund zum Hotelgast, Munich, 1974. Courtine, R., La vie parisienne: Cafés et restaurants des Boulevards 1814–1914, Paris: Perrin, 1984. Finkelstein, J., Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Marenco, C., Manières de table, modèles de moeurs: 17e–20e siècle, Paris: Editions de l’E.N.S, 1992. Martin-Fugier, A., La vie élégante ou la formation du Tout-Paris 1815– 1848, Paris: Fayard, 1990. Mennell, S., All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, Oxford and New York: B. Blackwell, 1985. Ortoli, V., Paris, capitale de la gastronomie, Paris, 1984 (the map ‘Evolution de la géographie des restaurants de Paris’ is reproduced in: Pitte, J.-R., Gastronomie française: Histoire et géographie d’une passion, Paris: Fayard, 1991). Pitte, J.-R. (ed.), Paris: Histoire d’une ville, Paris, 1993. Revel, J.-F., Un festin en paroles. Histoire littéraire de la sensibilité gastronomique de l’antiquité à nos jours, Paris, 1979. Rowley, A., ‘Histoire du restaurant à Paris’, in P. Marchand (ed.), Restaurants de Paris, Paris: Gallimard, 1993, 44–7. Rowley, A. (ed.), Les Français à table: Atlas historique de la gastronomie française, Paris, 1997. Spang, R. L., A Confusion of Appetites: The Emergence of Paris Restaurant Culture, 1740–1848, dissertation, Cornell University, 1993. Willms, J., Paris, Hauptstadt Europas, 1789–1914, Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988. Zeldin, T., A History of French Passions, 1848–1954: vol. 1. Ambition, Love and Politics, Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.

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The French Novel and Luxury Eating

Editions of Texts Balzac, H. de, La Comédie humaine, ed. P.-G. Castex, 12 vols, Paris: La Pléiade, 1976–81,. Flaubert, G., Oeuvres, ed. A. Thibaudet and R. Dumesnil, 2 vols, Paris: La Pléiade, 1951–2. Maupassant, G. de, Contes et Nouvelles, ed. L. Forestier, Paris: La Pléiade, 1974–9. Maupassant, G. de, Romans, ed. L. Forestier, Paris: La Pléiade, 1987. Zola, É., Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire, ed. A. Lanoux, 5 vols, Paris: La Pléiade, 1960–7.

Research literature Aubin, M.-C., Nourriture et société dans la Comédie humaine (1793– 1823), dissertation University of Manitoba, 1992. Becker, K., Der Gourmand, der Bourgeois und der Romancier: Die französische Eßkultur in Literatur und Gesellschaft des bürgerlichen Zeitalters, Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2000 (Analecta Romanica 60). Bernard, M. La Comédie humaine à table: De l’utilisation romanesque, linguistique et stylistique de l’alimentation dans l’oeuvre d’Honoré de Balzac, Liège, mémoire de maîtrise dactylographié, 1979. Boussel, P., Les restaurants dans la Comédie humaine, Paris: Tourmelle, 1950. Brown, J.W., Fictional Meals and Their Function in the French Novel 1789–1848, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Bué-Proudom, F., La table dans tous ses états: Thème et figure littéraires à travers le roman du XIXe siècle, thesis, Université Toulouse – Le Mirail, 1992. Forestier, L., ‘La nourriture dans Pierre et Jean’, in C. Lloyd and R. Lethbridge (eds), Maupassant conteur et romancier, Durham, NC, 1994, 149–60. Jouanne, K.H., Food and Eating in Zola’s ‘Rougon-Macquart’, thesis, University of Iowa, 1996. Kiltz, H., Das erotische Mahl: Szenen aus europäischen Gesellschaftsromanen des neunzehnten und beginnenden zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, Bonn, 1982.

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Karin Becker Klose, J., Tafelfreud und Liebesleid: ‘Essen und Trinken’ bei Balzac, Flaubert und Zola, Frankfurt a. M., Bern, New York and Paris: Lang, 1987. Lotte, F., ‘Balzac et la table dans la Comédie humaine’, in L’année balzacienne 1962, 119–79. Preiss, A., Le thème de la nourriture et du repas dans l’oeuvre romanesque d’Émile Zola (Le Ventre de Paris. L’Assommoir. Germinal), mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Paris IV, 1977.

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–13 – Escoffier, Bocuse et (surtout) les autres . . . Towards a History of Cooks in France in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Alain Drouard

Both historical and professional literature testify to the evidence that cooks are given little recognition in France.1 This lack of knowledge in a country that is the second agricultural nation in the world and that prides itself on being the premier gourmet country in the world may surprise. But France is also a country with a Catholic culture, and the distinction between the soul and the body has always led to a hierarchical organization of intellectual activities. Mathematics and philosophy remain far more prestigious subjects at the university than nutrition or sexology. In spite of the impetus given in the past by the École des Annales and of recent encouraging developments, the history of food is still a vast area that is badly in need of attention. The history of the group practising the profession of cook from the middle of the nineteenth century up to now is primarily that of the quest for professional status and social recognition. While glory and fame have been the lot of great French chefs for some thirty years, the history of the common cook does not merge with that of famous chefs. Until World War II the situation of the immense majority of chefs and cooks was close to that of servants or employees. In restaurants, chefs were under the authority of the owner and/or the maître d’hôtel, who were themselves in direct contact with the clients (the cooks, so to speak, remained hidden). Chefs have tried to break free from this double supervision and to gain independence. During the inter-war years some of the most famous chefs became owners of their restaurants, and after the war this movement expanded. Cooks in bourgeois families, however, counted as mere domestic employees, and they had to wait until the 1960s to obtain the status of wage earners (which they preferred). To put it boldly, the history of cooks is to some extent that of a rising social mobility. Originally, cooks were mere domestics of the aristocracy – 215 –

Alain Drouard and high bourgeoisie, then they gradually obtained the status of artisans, and conquered some autonomy. After 1950, some of them became the owners of their business. However, a linear and optimistic vision of the history of cooks conceals many other realities. Today, just as in the past, the situation of most cooks is that of manual workers doing a hard and barely respected job. This chapter wishes to explore this multi-faceted process of a quest for professional status.

The Early Restaurant and Cooks’ Search for Recognition The history of the cook and cuisine in France is the history of the relation between cooks, gourmet-writers and the bourgeoisie, i.e. the new ruling class. After the Revolution, the number of restaurants grew in Paris and the greater cities, paralleling bourgeois demand. There were fewer than a hundred restaurants in Paris before 1789, but there were five to six times more in 1804. Already by 1825 Paris totalled 900 restaurants, and at the end of the July Monarchy there were nearly 2,000. This rapid development went hand in hand with a diversification of types: first-class luxury restaurants with service à la carte; second-class restaurants with menus à prix fixe; and popular restaurants like the Duval bouillons, brasseries, and wine merchants.2 Around 1900, Paris had 1,500 restaurants, 2,900 hotels, 2,000 cafés and brasseries and 12,000 wine merchants (of which 75 per cent offered food). One may say that gastronomy, primarily if not exclusively dealing with first-class restaurants, was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Discourse and literature on the art of fine eating were originally destined for those starting to make their way in the world and for the nouveaux riches.3 But these gourmets have in fact also been the promoters and the major actors in the formation of a national cuisine. Any cuisine, and in particular French cuisine, may be defined as a set of relations of mutual dependence between cooks, on the one hand, and gastronomic critics, on the other. Gourmets, who are not skilled professionals but critics and writers, not only make and unmake the reputation of cooks and restaurants, but they also define national cuisine in their books, by specifying its content and by naming the dishes and ingredients that represent and symbolize it. The most striking example is the pot au feu (beef stew), considered as the French national dish by many authors at the end of the nineteenth century.4 Considering the history of the common cook undoubtedly contributes to the knowledge of the formation of French national cuisine. – 216 –

Escoffier, Bocuse et (surtout) les autres . . . Before entering the core of this chapter, it must be stressed that the development of the profession of cooks involved classification at quite an early stage.5 Already in the mid-nineteenth century, cooks were divided into three main categories. The two most important comprised the cooks of the maisons bourgeoises and of the restaurants, and the third category consisted of cooks working in institutions (like schools, the army, hospitals or prisons). The rapid growth of the number of restaurants of different styles led to a pressing demand for cooks, which coincided with the emergence of an organized labour market. This market, i.e. the supply and demand for permanent jobs as well as for occasional ones, was almost entirely under the control of the bureaux de placement (employment agencies). These agencies demanded a percentage of the wage, and were therefore not popular among cooks. Reacting against the agencies’ conditions and influence, in 1840 the cooks founded the Société de secours mutuels des cuisiniers de Paris, and in 1842 the Société des cuisiniers français. Their members were helped and supported when ill, unemployed or old, and by so doing some influence was exerted on the labour market. The Société met with a genuine need, and during the Third Republic membership of the Parisian branch increased rapidly, as shown in Table 13.1.

Professionalism through Schooling and ‘Propaganda’ To achieve improvement of the social condition of cooks and for obtaining social recognition for the profession, the Société des Cuisiniers Français struggled from the 1880s to establish professional education. This aim coincided with a more general interest in the professionalism of cooking. The Académie Nationale de Cuisine was created, reviews such as L’Art

Table 13.1 Members of the Société de secours mutuels des cuisiniers de Paris Year

Members

Paying members

1887 1898 1911 1919 1926

2,374 2,546 2,708 5,086 4,926

1,093 1,483 1,982 3,000 4,185

Source: Archives of the Société de secours mutuels des cuisiniers de Paris

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Alain Drouard Culinaire in 1883,6 Le Pot au feu and La Cuisine française et étrangère in 1891 were launched, while culinary exhibitions and competitions were organized.7 Also, household training and culinary classes, such as Le Cordon bleu in 1896, were established. However, the creation of a formal education system was seen as the best way to achieve professionalism. To sustain this, L’Art Culinaire wrote in one of its first issues (1883) that ‘we emphasize once more the goal of the Société des Cuisiniers Français, which is the foundation of a professional school. We are not sure that our colleagues have understood the meaning of such school in as much as they are afraid that this school may mean a threat to our corporation’. Such a school, the École professionnelle de cuisine et des sciences alimentaires, was opened on 20 March 1891. It was located in the Parisian rue Bonaparte, in an edifice of a bureau of the Mont de Piété. The French Ministry of Trade supported the school financially. Its goals were ‘to train practitioners in all branches of the art of cooking and food sciences: cuisine, pastry making, confectionery, liquor, the skills of wine-waiting, pork-butchery, canning food, etc’. The teaching would lead to professional diplomas (called the ‘certificate of professional capacity’), and it was organized on two levels: first, there was the basic teaching for men, which was meant to be a ‘specialized initiation’; and, second, there was the higher theoretical and practical education, which would lead to a diploma for teaching the culinary arts in schools. In addition, at the initiative of Charles Driessens, the school organized courses of économie domestique (household economy), defined as preparatory courses for ‘girls and housewives’. In 1889, Charles Driessens had organized courses on enseignement ménager (household training) to ‘regenerate’ the people’s morality. This household school wished to teach young girls about food in general,8 but it particularly aimed at training pupils to fight against the fléaux sociaux (social plagues) of the time, as the following explains: ‘When in her future home the girl will use the knowledge of the value and characteristic of food, or in one word, when she will be able to practise the science of the household, alcohol will have one enemy more, and one consumer less.’ The housewife was expected to carry out a far simpler form of cuisine than the great chefs would do, although she would be inspired by them. Some great chefs were indeed concerned with the training of the housewife. Urbain Dubois, in his foreword to the Nouvelle cuisine bourgeoise, specified the objectives and the conditions of the training of housewives: I have tried to avoid presenting recipes that could be practised neither by housewives nor by cooks. A good housewife must gain merit from doing well

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Escoffier, Bocuse et (surtout) les autres . . . with little; the goal is certainly difficult to reach, but it will be possible if she does not scorn to adopt the practices I teach, and if she sticks to a method that is basic to any economy: not wasting anything that can be used. Finally she should remember that the most expensive food is always the one which is prepared without calculation and knowledge, giving neither satisfaction nor profit.9

So, the housewife, a woman of the people, was supposed to learn culinary techniques from bourgeois cuisine, and then put these into practice for the well-being of the working class. The École professionnelle de cuisine et des sciences alimentaires, however, was not a success: it existed less than two years! It met with the hostility of the great majority of restaurant owners, who were attached to the system of apprenticeship that provided them with a reservoir of cheap labour. Culinary exhibitions and competitions also served to demonstrate the professional qualification of chefs and cooks. The idea was first expressed by the famous chef Joseph Favre, author of the Dictionnaire Universel de Cuisine, and founder of the Union universelle pour le progrès de l’art culinaire (‘Universal Union for the Progress of Culinary Art’). The first Culinary Exhibition was held in Frankfurt in 1878. Four years later, another one was set up in Paris (there, Escoffier showed his fleurs de cire or ‘wax flowers’),10 with a third following in the city two years later.11 More exhibitions were to follow, attracting an increasing number of visitors. These exhibitions allowed the witnessing of the development of the cuisine, and more in particular of the haute cuisine which was then at the peak of its success. Genuine showcases of French cuisine, these exhibitions were supposed to demonstrate the artistic qualities of the chefs and cooks, and to underline the strategy of professionalism and the cooks’ social progress. But they also had teaching and training functions, as appears from the following: The workers have before them models and examples, which could be used as a starting point. They lead to a great and noble spirit of emulation, and encourage study by future exhibitors; they give the hesitant the courage and resolution to create, to have their place among the bold and skilful who dare to display their work and to face the judgement of Masters, which sometimes are very severe.12

Nevertheless, their basic goal was the selection of the best professionals by means of theoretical and practical tests, which were carried out in public. The Culinary Exhibitions thus anticipated the creation of the competition of ‘Best Professional Worker of France’ in 1929.13 – 219 –

Alain Drouard

A Rather Ambiguous (Legal and Social) Status around 1900 At the end of the nineteenth century the vocabulary of the profession revealed many uncertainties about group identification and social status. Cooks used quite different words when they spoke or wrote about their trade. The term ‘corporation’, which was often employed, referred to the Ancien Régime with its corporations, its sworn members, its companions and its masterpieces. More modern references were also made, and both the working class and the artisan trade were to be found in texts. Often cooks used the word ouvrier (‘worker’) to define their trade, which was in fact close to craftsman since it indicated someone who produced decent work (an œuvre). The gastronomical press used the then well-known phrase of un bon ouvrier (‘a decent, able worker’), but this phrase was somewhat ambiguous because it compared the activity of the cook to that of a factory operative and thus a common wage earner. Yet in 1887, cooks of restaurants and hotels were recognized as wage earners, and admitted as such according to the jurisdiction of the Conseils des prud’hommes.14 This decision, however, was questioned within the profession, as testified by the following text: The title of workman is granted to the hotel and restaurant cook. Should he be congratulated? He is ‘promoted’ to the rank of worker, and he is now just like any other workman. Cook, zinc worker, and mason: equal conventional status. But what are the gains in terms of dignity? As a matter of fact such admission to the world of respectable workers does not lead to a rise in social status, well to the contrary. This title of workman as granted by the law does not advance the cook. It simply classifies him, and the classification is far from adequate. Whatever one says or produces, whatever one writes or argues, fine cuisine is an art, not a trade. The cook must thus be classified as an artist, not as a workman. Only by his artistic talent will the cook gain public esteem, and not by admission to the respectable world of the prud’hommes [. . .]. The culinary corporation has very special traditions that clearly distinguish it from all the other corporations, and assign it to a natural place within the liberal professions.15

And finally, there was a military vocabulary: the cooks formed a team placed under the strict authority of the chef. A ‘grand chef’ who supervised a team of several dozen of employees was a gros bonnet (literally, ‘a big cap’), and a chef who commanded a less significant brigade was a petit bonnet (literally, a ‘little cap’). Just below the chef were the chefs de partie, then came the commis (helpers), while the plongeurs (dishwashers) were – 220 –

Escoffier, Bocuse et (surtout) les autres . . . right at the bottom of the kitchen hierarchy. Orders (one may read this both in the military and the trade sense) cried out in the kitchen were known as the coup de feu (literally, the shot). The cooks of the maisons bourgeoises were also labelled chefs. They could be assisted by (first and second) commis, or by additional cooks, who often were former cooks (and called in the jargon extras). The vocabulary of this time reflected well the ambiguous social status of chefs and cooks in French society. Originating mostly from the provinces and having popular roots, they entered training at the age of 14 after graduating from primary school. Cooks of maisons bourgeoises and restaurants spent ten or more years in several kitchens before becoming chefs themselves. Although they were the absolute masters in their kitchen, they were mere servants just like any domestic employees. Nevertheless, these professionals were craftsmen who created masterpieces every day to satisfy their employer – in a word, artistic artisans, an ambiguous classification indeed.

Disintegration during the Inter-war Years The Great War disrupted many things, including the world of professional cooking. Yet in the early 1920s the situation of cooks was full of contrasts, and some successes strike observers. Léopold Mourier, the chairman of the Société mutuelle des cuisiniers de Paris, donated the considerable legacy of 20 million francs at his death in 1923. The very famous Auguste Escoffier was made Officier de la Légion d’ Honeur in 1928, while Francis Carton took over from Mourier as the head of the Société mutuelle des cuisiniers. In the provinces, some renowned cooks set up their own businesses: Alexandre Dumaine at Saulieu , Bize at Talloires, and Eugénie Brazier, Marie Bourgeois, La Mère Guy and La Mère Filloux as the mères lyonnaises (‘the mothers from Lyons’). However, the war caused irrevocable changes in the profession. Many young people turned away from a painful and poorly paid job, and preferred to seek employment in industry or administration. In 1919 the system of cooking education, which had never been well established, underwent a profound crisis. In order to remedy this, a new charter was elaborated in 1928, which specified the conditions of cooks’ training, and which guaranteed their (social) rights. Training of a future cook would last two years, followed by one year of advanced training (cf. the structure of the 1891 école). On top of the lack of interest in a profession that was no longer prestigious, however, unemployment struck young apprentices in

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Alain Drouard the 1930s. Hotel owners recruited young people before their graduation in the summer and returned them to the labour market in the autumn, without letting them finish their apprenticeship. Under such circumstances it is hardly surprising that immediately after World War I the world of the professional kitchen was full of tensions and conflicts. Conflicts occurred between chefs and restaurant owners, between chefs and maîtres d’hôtel, between hotel owners and cooks, between the cooks themselves (e.g. the Société de secours mutuels des cuisiniers de Paris opposed to the trade union), and between cooks and gastronomy critics.

Wage Workers and Stars after 1945 The liberation and the ensuing, long reconstruction of France led to general social changes which gradually modified the social situation and status of the cook. It is useful to make a clear distinction between the cooks of the maisons bourgeoises and those of restaurants. Domestic cooks had long been classified as ‘servants’, but in the 1960s they started to be considered as wage earners with the same social rights as other workers (e.g. paid holidays and retirement pensions). Domestic cooks saw this as a real improvement. However, the working conditions of cooks remained different from those of the majority of wage earners. This was due to the rather special working hours: work started very early and finished often very late, while the weekly rest day could not be fixed (e.g. every Sunday). After more than a century, the bureaux de placement were formally ended.16 As mentioned above, the Sociétés mutuelles had been created to replace these bureaux, which had led to conflicts. After the war, the state prohibited the creation of new employment agencies. To continue an old battle and to show clearly their aspirations toward the status of wage earner, cooks, and primarily cooks of the maisons bourgeoises, demanded the establishment of a pension system similar to those of other employees. Parallel with this process of demanding salaried status for the profession, there was a slow ‘emancipation’ of the cook vis-à-vis the restaurant owner. This emancipation started with the acquisition of some restaurants, but it also made use of other means such as information campaigns and the setting up of associations. In 1949 the Association des Maîtres cuisiniers de France was established. In 1951 this association published a charter that stated, among other things, ‘Binary by nature, a cook should not only offer quality in cooking but also be a high-level restaurant

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Escoffier, Bocuse et (surtout) les autres . . . manager.’ The association was elitist in inspiration, and wished to associate all chefs who became owners of their restaurants. In 1953, the already famous chef Raymond Oliver appeared on the television screens alongside Catherine Langeais in a programme entitled Art et magie de la cuisine. This was the beginning of a process leading to stardom for some chefs, which peaked with the enormous (and indeed international) success of the new cuisine in the 1970s. In 1948, Raymond Oliver bought Le Grand Véfour in Paris. In 1952 Andre Guillot, at the end of a long career at the Italian embassy and at the service of the poet Raymond Roussel, set up the Auberge du Vieux Marly near Paris. At the same time Jean Delaveyne acquired the Camélia at Bougival. Chefs who became owners of their restaurants often named the places after themselves. Thus, L’auberge de Collonges au Mont d’Or simply changed into Paul Bocuse. Cooks developed and affirmed the superiority of the kitchen vis-à-vis the dining room (and its staff) by imposing the service à l’assiette (literally, the serving on the plate, i.e. the organization of the dish on the plate in the kitchen). Inevitably, this reduced the role of the personnel to that of ‘carriers of plates, whose activity is restricted to lifting the silver bell-shaped covers over the meals’.17 Compared to the situation at the beginning of the nineteenth century and even during the inter-war years, this was a considerable change: great chefs appeared in the ‘open’, i.e. not only in the dining room but also in the media. In this period some restaurant cooks were immensely successful and a few made a fortune (primarily because of nouvelle cuisine). However, partly because of this stardom for some, the gap between restaurant cooks and cooks of maisons bourgeoises increased: the latter felt forgotten. Christian Millau, co-author of the Nouveau Guide Gault et Millau (the bible of nouvelle cuisine in the 1970s), wondered about the role of this ‘new cuisine’, referring to the success story of a profession that viewed the future with confidence, especially within the context of the euphoria of the ‘glorious thirty years’, when the French made of gastronomy, including the appreciation of wine, one of their preferred passions and distractions. It would be unfair not to commemorate this epoch, and it would be dishonest to make sarcastic remarks about this golden age of the restaurant business where a degree of quasi-perfection was reached, in an atmosphere of happiness and pleasure, albeit one carried away by a wave of enthusiasm.18

Nouvelle cuisine witnessed an alliance between chefs and cooks in their social rise, with the creation of a new medium – the Nouveau Guide Gault

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Alain Drouard et Millau – and the setting up of a new social target: becoming a cook executive. Nouvelle cuisine involved both a simplification and a lightening of the cuisine, which was initiated at the end of World War II by cooks such as André Guillot. He recalled: Indeed since 1947 I innovated in some aspects of the culinary art, respecting the ideas and ethics of my old master Fernand Juteau. I removed a) the roux in the sauces b) this horrible espagnole c) the vol-au-vent and bouchées à la reine (chicken’s vol-au-vent), these being rituals used for over a century which I have replaced by puff pastries (a genuine feuilleté could have been only light; thus ‘light puff pastry’ is a pleonasm) d) the overloaded menus. My formula was only one dish (but a large one), a small pleasant and original starter, and a light dessert afterwards. I also advised only one wine to harmonize with the large dish.19

The Present Stage or the Alliance of the Agro-food Business with the Great Chefs The world of haute cuisine has become a kind of Chinese shadow theatre: the great chef is a cook-entrepreneur, a businessman and a financier. He is no longer the craftsman he once was. The same man is now a great cook surrounded by his often-large brigade, sometimes consisting of thirty to forty men; he works as an artisan preparing a masterpiece; and he is an advisor for powerful groups of the food industry. This role of consultant explains his participation in the industry either through a wish to ‘democratize’ haute cuisine or out of a concern to improve the quality of industrial products. Great chefs continue to prepare a ‘traditional’ cuisine with fresh products, i.e. an ‘old’, exquisite and expensive cuisine that aims to keep up the image of the cook. Such an image of the great chef is used for the marketing of industrial produces in supermarkets: the cassoulet or the sauerkraut of Paul Bocuse by William Saurin, the ready meals of Senderens at Carrefour, or those of Joël Robuchon for Fleury Michon. Such relationships between famous cooks and the agro-food business had been established some twenty years ago. The pioneer in this was undoubtedly Michel Guérard, one of the chefs of nouvelle cuisine, and successful author of several books on cuisine légère (light cuisine). He signed an initial contract with Nestlé in 1976, more precisely with the Findus group. As he himself explained later, the expectations were mutual:

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Escoffier, Bocuse et (surtout) les autres . . . When in 1976, at the request of the president of Nestlé I went to visit the factory in Beauvais, I realized that he was not seeking my collaboration for simple approval [in French: ‘pour ma signature’]. What he really wanted was that I’d invest my knowledge in the production process. I also had certain expectations with regard to this collaboration. As one works in a rather empirical way in the kitchen, it was natural that one wishes to understand the scientific process of cooking. My observations of the industrial ways of food production have helped me a lot, not only in the culinary field but also in general.20

His example was followed by Paul Bocuse, who worked for William Saurin, and, later, by other great chefs. Today, many great chefs work in close collaboration with the agro-food business (e.g. Bernard Pacaud in Paris, and Michel Bras in Laguiole). But one may ask, for how long? At present, we are approaching a stage where the cook is no longer associated with the food industry, but rather with international finance, which brings together chefs, entrepreneurs and investors. We may refer to the enterprise of Bernard Loiseau, which has been on the stock market since 1998. These joint ventures with the food industry (involving coercive contracts) are now quite complex: counselling, training of cooks, direct publicity for products. For chefs this participation in the agro-food industry brings a sort of democratization of haute cuisine: ‘Chefs must become the messengers of quality not only for artisans and farmers, but for the agro-food industry as well. Never have we [i.e. the great chefs] been solicited by the industry in this way.’ And further: ‘Chefs will disappear if they do not take care of our everyday nutrition.’21 Thus, the alliance with the food industry not only allowed chefs to cope with the expenses of running luxury establishments and to finance considerable investments (sometimes amounting to dozens of millions of francs), but was also the only way of escaping the growing gap between ‘high and low nutrition’, between gastronomy and the food of the majority of the people, a gap that is widening because of so-called mal bouffe (or junk food), Kreutzfeld–Jacob disease or any other development seen as a real threat. Great chefs, or at least those in the spotlight of high gastronomy, can see only advantages from this alliance with agro-business. But it is far from clear whether the quality of the cuisine has gained from the process: let us wait and see what happens to the food eaten by the majority of the French. So far, one thing is clear: there is very little connection between ready-made dishes prepared by big chefs for wide distribution and food prepared and served at their restaurants.

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Alain Drouard

Conclusion Today, as yesterday, it is difficult to define the social and professional status of the chef in French society. Is a cook an artisan, a tradesman, an artist, a wage earner or an entrepreneur? Beyond the diversity of situations contained within these definitions, one cannot but stress the endurance of the problems of classification and identification and the search for their solutions. Just as was the case at the end of the nineteenth century, today there still is no national cooking school in France, and chefs continue to complain about the absence of adequate social recognition. The extraordinary success of the French great chefs, recognized and celebrated by the mass media both inside and outside of France, cannot hide a crisis in this profession, which is clearly marked by the fact that thousands of cooks abandon their profession every year as soon as they graduate from professional schools. Insufficient salaries, working hours far beyond thirty-five hours, as well as the success of fast food restaurants, are among the causes.

Notes 1. Pellaprat, 1942; Toussaint-Samat and Lair, 1989; Neirinck and Poulain, 1988. 2. Drouard, 2000. 3. Huetz de Lemps and Pitte, 1990 . 4. One may read in L’Art Culinaire (1883, 74): ‘The classic pot au feu [. . .] is best called a national dish because it is cooked in all households and in palaces and is the staple food of the working class.’ 5. Statistical data on the profession are not complete and, moreover, difficult to use due to their discontinuity and heterogeneity. Cooks of the bourgeois households are considered as employees. 6. Founded on 19 January 1883, L’Art Culinaire was a creation of the chefs, as was emphasized in its first issue (same date): ‘Edited exclusively by practitioners, all the articles are signed by their authors with full responsibility of those concerned.’ 7. Founded in 1891, La cuisine française et étrangère wished ‘to spread the know-how of the culinary art in our country, to develop the professional and industrial importance of cooking and, if we may express ourselves this way, to popularize gastronomic taste.’ The cooks’ intentions were specified in the following way: ‘We are especially concerned with scientific research into nutritional substances, research which is – 226 –

Escoffier, Bocuse et (surtout) les autres . . .

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

indispensable to a modern cook, who is bound to fulfill an important role concerning the character and the role of hygiene in culinary science’ (15 August 1891, no. 1, 1). ‘Already in 1889, the time when I founded the course of training in household management, I was teaching cooking, how to measure nutritional value, its properties and its preparation.’ In 1895 Charles Driessens was one of the first chefs who had been decorated and nominated as a member of the Académie de cuisine. Dubois, 1889, 1. In 1885, Auguste Escoffier published a work on this subject: Les fleurs de cire (with a second edition in 1910). Owing to the internal conflicts of the profession, an Académie de Cuisine and a Société des cuisiniers français were established at the initiative of Joseph Favre, which were charged with the organization of the culinary contests. Gilbert, 1927. The competition was organized by a non-profit association, the ‘Company of the Best workmen of France’, created in 1929 and recognized of public utility in 1932. The title is granted every four years. The badge is a bronze medal which evokes the Compagnons du Tour de France, with Jacques Master, the architect of the Temple of Solomon, in long robes, handling a pair of compasses. The Conseils des prud’hommes had been established at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Napoleon to deal with individual work conflicts between employers and employees. Chatillon Plessis, 1890. The law of 24 May 1945 concerning the employment of workers stipulated the dissolution of the employment agencies. Freddy Girardet, quoted in Les colloques de la Fondation Auguste Escoffier. Actes, 1998. Millau, 1998, 64. Guillot, 1976. Extract from ‘Agroalimentaire et restauration’, 2000. Libération, 29 December 2000.

References ‘Agroalimentaire et restauration à l’heure de la décrispation’ (2000), L’industrie hôtelière, October, 546: 28–35. Chatillon-Plessis (1890), ‘Le chef ouvrier’, L’Art Culinaire, 30 April: 77–9. – 227 –

Alain Drouard Drouard, A. (2000), ‘De Grimod à La Reynière: éléments de sociologie historique de la critique gastronomique’, Papilles, 16: 49–58; 17: 45– 62. Dubois, U. (1889), Nouvelle cuisine bourgeoise pour la ville et pour la campagne, Paris: E. Dentu. Escoffier, A. (1885). Les fleurs de cire, Paris: Éditions Art Culinaire. Gilbert P. (1927), ‘Les expositions culinaires du passé et de l’avenir’, La Revue Culinaire, 8/83: 203–7. Guillot, A. (1976), La grande cuisine bourgeoise, Paris: Flammarion. Huetz de Lemps, A., and Pitte, J.-R. (eds) (1990), Les restaurants dans le monde et à travers les âges, Grenoble: Glénat. Millau, C. (1998), ‘La révolution culinaire des années 70’, Colloques de la Fondation Auguste Escoffier. Actes, 1998. Neirinck, E., and Poulain, J.-P. (1988), Histoire de la cuisine et des cuisiniers, Paris: Malakoff. Pellaprat, H. (1942), Le cuisinier, Paris: Berger Levrault. Toussaint-Samat, M., and Lair, M. (1989), Grande et petite histoire des cuisiniers de l’Antiquité à nos jours, Paris: R. Laffont.

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–14 – Continuity and Change in British Restaurants, 1951–2001 Evidence from the Good Food Guide

Alan Warde

Introducing the Good Food Guide Britain has a reputation for indifferent cuisine, which has been reflected in an undistinguished restaurant culture throughout most of the twentieth century. Perhaps the nadir of eating out coincided with the announcement of the inauguration of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Food, which subsequently resulted in the publication of the Good Food Guide (GFG) by its founder, Raymond Postgate, in 1951.1 The GFG appeared every second year until 1963, whereafter, under the auspices of the Consumers’ Association, it has been published annually. Its content basically revolves around identifying and listing ‘the best’ places to eat out in Britain. It provides information, of different types and levels of detail over the years, about what sorts of food and drink, at what kinds of price, are available in those places. The principle behind including only a small proportion of the commercial establishments serving food to the public throughout the UK is their approximation to standards of excellence. The GFG is the most widely cited consumer guide to fine dining in the UK. It was perhaps overly self-congratulatory when it tagged its 2001 edition on the cover: ‘Independent, unbiased, authoritative and hugely influential’. Quite how influential it has been is one topic of discussion in this chapter, where it is used as a lens through which to observe change in part of an economic field, the up-market sector of the restaurant trade. The story I tell concerns the implications of its acting as a self-appointed consumer watchdog organization and how its functions changed as it became entangled in the co-production of a market niche and a gastronomic field.

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Alan Warde

Intimations of Change since 1951 Compare the views of the first and the most recent editors of the GFG regarding the quality of British restaurant food. In the absence of any general summative survey of the conditions of British restaurants in the early editions, it is only possible to present a retrospective judgement about what things were like in 1951 as Postgate reflects, after ten years, on the customary awfulness of the immediate post-war years: If the decennial period is considered as a whole [. . .] moderate congratulations on our progress is permissible. In other words, food in Britain is nothing like as bad as it was ten or so years ago. But then, it was intolerable in those days. There is still a lot of dreadful food served in this island but at that time there was practically nothing else at all but dreadful food. One had to single out for praise places where a joint and two veg were merely edible, and the staff was neither obviously incompetent nor unbearably rude; they were so rare. Rarer still were the pubs and hotels where you got enough to eat; we were still under the influence of rationing and helpings were tiny. In fact, meek though we are, if we hadn’t all been pretty hungry, we probably would have refused to eat what we were offered. As for the materials, butter was never used in cooking; it was always marge. Cream was never real cream; it was a sort of sweetened white grease offered under one of various fancy names. From the Argentine to the Cape the world was combed to secure for us the worst cuts of the most elderly and stringy cows and ewes. Made-up foods, such as sausages and pies, contained so small a proportion of animal protein to ‘filling’ that the meat was not so much a component as a flavour – a delicate and distant flavour at that. Nothing, however repellent, was what it should be; and there was even a shortage of sago and parsnips. The cooking of these inferior and ill-chosen materials was in general as bad as could be; where there were sauces – or flavours – they came out of a bottle, directly or at one remove. That has changed. Materials are better and more abundant, and though in roughly half the establishments in the country the cooking is as bad as it was then, in the other half it isn’t. This is in part at least due to the action of the members of the Good Food Club, and the circulation of the Good Food Guide. The places that try, and succeed, have been rewarded by increased patronage; complaints have been made to those that don’t. That is what is called ‘public pressure’, and that in the long run is the only certain means for assuring improvements. As a result, the standard of cooking required to secure admission to the Guide has been slowly and silently inched upwards with each issue.2

The difference between this rather grudging acknowledgement of slowly improving quality in a national culinary scene and the celebratory tone of the late 1990s makes a stunning contrast. Compare the view of the current editor, Jim Ainsworth, who insists that contemporary British – 230 –

Continuity and Change in British Restaurants restaurants are of very high quality achieved through a distinctive and flexible appropriation of ideas from other cuisines. For example, the 1997 editorial, having identified a variety of current problems in provision (like excessively large restaurants, smoking policies, BSE, and very high markups on wine), concluded in a section ‘Nobody does it better’: Lest this seem like a chip-on-the-shoulder gripe, it is worth recording that there is much to celebrate. Restaurants in Britain are doing nothing short of a grand job. ‘I wish’, confessed one former Guide editor over lunch, ‘I had had the restaurants you’ve got’. It is the exuberance, the joy, the fun in both kitchen and dining room that strikes home. Native talent is doing wonders all around the country. Brasseries, bistros and cafés continue to open. Reverence takes a back seat as sheer pleasure comes to the fore. At long last this country really gets a buzz from eating out, and at long last we have restaurants to cherish and be proud of on a scale never before experienced. London continues to be ‘destination city’ for food. Not every part of it is well served, but the centre has great vitality, and the peripheral, less ambitious pub and shop conversions continue, albeit at a gentle pace. Around the country some city centres are jumping: look at Leeds, look at Edinburgh. Some of the best chefs around the regions are setting up a café here, a bistro there, and installing trusted sous-chefs to look after them [. . .]. In truth, there has never been a more exciting time to eat out because of the generally high standard, at least in restaurants that appear in the Guide, and partly because of the wonderful mix of cooking styles. Some represent a strict national or regional culinary heritage, others borrow ideas and ingredients form wherever the chef fancies, but together they provide unprecedented variety: of food, of price, ambience, location and lots more. It is simply too good to miss.3

The GFG’s preferred account is of much change and little continuity. Unsurprisingly, editors liked to congratulate themselves and the Guide for having improved the standards of catering in Britain. But how, why, and in what ways did it represent change?

Making a Difference: The Organization and Tactics of a Culinary Social Movement The literature on consumer movements is generally thin and it is difficult immediately to place the Good Food Club in the history of British consumerism, for it took an unlikely and unprecedented form. It preceded the establishment of the Consumers’ Assocation by several years. As Mennell notes,4 the much smaller and exclusive Wine and Food Society of André Simon in the inter-war years might have provided something of an example, – 231 –

Alan Warde but it had had limited impact on popular taste or the catering trade. Britain had only a tenuous tradition of gastronomy to draw upon, particularly apparent by comparison with the field in France.5 Some light can be shed by reference to the work of Rao.6 Primarily concerned to understand innovation in organizational forms, she argues for the application of ‘the cultural-frame institutional perspective’ of American economic sociologists DiMaggio and Fligstein to non-profitmaking consumer organizations. She offers an account of the history of relations between Consumers’ Research and the Consumers’ Union which, perhaps unexpectedly, resulted in the latter becoming the dominant organization of the American consumer movement in the second half of the twentieth century. Methodologically, she stresses the need better to examine existing institutional conditions and the alternative forms of organization available at any point in time in order to explain which projects win out and are responsible for the propagation of new organizational forms. She looks at the production of non-profit consumer watchdog organizations (CWOs) in the USA: ‘CWOs are social control specialists who institutionalise distrust of agents by inspecting their performance on behalf of their clients and who sustain social order.’7 Isolating key aspects of processes involved in their establishment, including the role of professionalization, the balance of political forces and state regulatory intervention, she emphasizes that new types of organization tend to recombine elements from existing forms. The Good Food Club combined several existing formats. It mimicked the amateur and voluntary character of other clubs for enthusiasts which provided leisure opportunities and which could sometimes operate as informal pressure groups. It also owed something to the ethics and language of the co-operative movement. There is no direct evidence in the columns of the guide of influence by the emergent consumer movement in the USA, but it certainly engaged in similar strategic activities, transmitting information about the availability and terms of exchange of commodities. It frequently reviewed the legislation about the rights of the customer and very explicitly encouraged customers to complain when dissatisfied, a trait that probably took a long time to establish in Britain, if indeed it is yet established.8 Equally importantly it sought to educate consumers in the realm of taste; part of the rationale for initially identifying criteria for classifying restaurants was to make explicit for members what it was that made a restaurant ‘good’. The GFG was run, with very little practical support, by Postgate from the front room of his house for a decade. An historian of the labour movement, he combined a commitment to consumer co-operation with a – 232 –

Continuity and Change in British Restaurants personal enthusiasm for food and wine. At the outset the GFG was an active, campaigning movement, a culinary social movement. It absolutely required, and annually reiterated, that its readers’ reports were the basis of its capacity to have an impact. In the editorial to the 1953–4 edition, Postgate captures the elements of civic duty associated with membership and participation when he said of the Club, ‘The subscription is the 5/needed to purchase the Guide, and the membership card is the possession of the Guide [. . .] if you stop at that point you are an inactive member. You profit by the knowledge and public spiritedness of others. The active members are those on whom the Club depends [. . .].’ The GFG assumed responsibility for challenging current practice and advocating change. This was done though discussion of the qualities that make a good restaurant. It raised issues of what it might be good to eat, and in what circumstances eating in a public context might be rewarding. Its publication and circulation offered an opportunity to express opinions on behalf of customers. In the process it provided free publicity for those subsequently recommended by being listed. The content of the GFG is in important part stamped with the concerns, prejudices and opinions of its five editors to date. However, they are under some constraint from their reporters, who are also their readers. In the early days all reports were from amateur volunteers, members of the Good Food Club. It continued to be referred to as a Club until at least 1983. Initially, the GFG simply described what was available. It was a gazeteer that used interested parties from the public to exercise some simple judgements about whether a place was worthy of inclusion. By nature of its existence, or rather by virtue of its growth in size and influence, its judgements came to have some commercial significance as some establishments felt it appropriate to take notice of its recommendations and its justifications. Its biggest innovation in terms of transmission of information about consumption was probably that it classified and evaluated a service product rather than a manufactured good. To have instituted a system, in the late 1940s, for making judgements about quality was something of an achievement.

A Measure of Success: A Social Movement and the Making of a Niche Market One of the least satisfactory aspects of the burgeoning social scientific analysis of consumer culture is its tendency to divorce the understanding of consumption from that of production. A good deal of this arises from – 233 –

Alan Warde lack of reflection on the social construction of markets. The commonsense understanding, arising from the dominant theory of markets as a means of achieving equilibrium between supply and demand, offers an image of producers bringing items already formed to market and consumers independently choosing among them, their influence extending no further than rewarding some and punishing other firms by deciding whether to purchase or not. From such a view we get the notion that the power of consumer of primarily one of exit rather than voice,9 with many commentators believing that exit is the optimal weapon for consumers to ensure that they obtain that which they most want. However, few markets work like that, and the fact that the market for eating out, where conditions are more reminiscent than most of the beloved spot markets of neoclassical economics (i.e. where there are many small producers and many consumers), is significantly co-constructed through representations on behalf of consumers by means of instruments like the GFG. This makes an interesting challenge to the central tenets of neo-classical economic theory. A product market gets made as it becomes bounded, through particular forms of competition between producers, usually in the face of an heterogeneous and unorganized aggregate of consumers. In this case the consumers were highly organized, or rather, and more precisely, were represented as organized, represented by their collected opinions as expressed through the GFG. It seems that the early trade response to the GFG was largely hostile. The food enthusiasts mobilized as the Good Food Club (which was orchestrated minority opinion) necessarily hoped to deliver customers (more customers, new customers, more loyal and discriminating customers) to restaurateurs. The symbiosis between the GFG and the trade is of course one of the most determining and distinctive aspects of the process. For the GFG to succeed in its own terms, it requires an expansion and improvement in the output of the industry. Indeed, when it began there was barely an ‘industry’ at all. To some degree commercially provided good food was available in small restaurants in London, but almost nowhere else before World War II, while fine dining was mostly in the grand hotels. This remained largely true until the 1960s, with the world of small, petit bourgeois production, aspiring to high-quality provision, scarcely existing. The traders didn’t much like the idea that their customers’ opinions should be made public, to judge from Postgate’s regular mention of complaints and threats of legal action against the Guide by slighted restaurateurs. This might appear short-sighted given that the Guide provided free market research, that it delivered a new group of customers, and that – 234 –

Continuity and Change in British Restaurants it provided some explicit guidelines or targets for provision which would help in the self-justification of the trade as a whole and especially those establishments included.

Campaigning by Complaining: A Chronology of a Strategy We can trace a pattern of changing complaint and exhortation over the years through the editorial commentary. The GFG was never the vehicle for fundamental political critique of the processes of consumption. That would hardly be expected since establishing a market was a precondition of the goal of decent provision. Nevertheless, there was space elsewhere for a radical critique with impact on industry, as demonstrated by the American Consumers’ Union, Naderism and subsequently the environmental movement. There was more of a radical edge in the early days, but this can be detected less through change in the topics of complaint than in their relationship to a changed institutional and historical context. The change in context might perhaps best be described as the increased acceptance of commercial culture. The GFG becomes an increasingly incorporated instrument in a commercialized culture, one characterized by the proliferation of shopping guides of all kinds, the transmission of style information, encouragement of day-dreaming about anticipated pleasures from new commodity transactions, and the publication of ranked evaluations of performance. Overall, the topics of editorial complaint remain fairly constant over time. At the beginning of the period and at the end, there is adverse comment on: high prices; additional payments for ‘extras’ – vegetables and cover charges, for example; excessive mark-up on wines; poor handling of wine; inept service; even more so, service charges; misleading information, especially passing off non-fresh food as fresh; issues of timing – closing hours, being rushed to vacate a table; commercial sharp practices of various kinds, including unitemized bills; smoking; music; and the quality of ingredients – in the earlier days processed foods, latterly other forms of technological modification. A few sources of complaint more or less disappeared. There came to be less criticism of the composition of dishes and how they had been cooked, implying greater technical skills among chefs. The arrogance of the trade was less frequently remarked. In the early days the attitudes of restaurateurs were often deemed authoritarian and their approaches pretentious. Objections to restaurants as locations for class distinction and snobbishness almost disappeared, along with campaigning against the – 235 –

Alan Warde imposition of formal dress codes. Hence, there is some ground for thinking the GFG had some impact in its calls to make eating out a pleasant experience for all people - that is, all who could afford the prices. A commercial form of democratization probably did occur. The commitment to inventive amateurs who set up a small business, those whose entries were the staple establishments of the Guide in the 1970s and 1980s, began to waver in the face of professionalization in the catering trades, though a suspicion of large operations remained. Criticism of the uniformity of menus, a complaint made particularly in the 1970s, disappeared too, though it perhaps reappeared in another guise as scepticism of fashions. Also disappeared entirely were matters of labour conditions and mention of political issues, which appeared occasionally in the 1960s and 1970s when, for example, Postgate attacked refusals to serve customers on racist grounds (1961) and Driver criticized the poor pay and conditions of catering staff (1973). In their place, a few new topics of criticism have arisen in the last decade or so. New forms of commercial sharp practice have been identified: credit cards left open after a service charge had been levied is thought particularly objectionable. Concern with nutritional value and health consequences of menus appeared at the end of the 1980s, followed by issues of food safety, with consideration of topics like BSE and GM foods. Some critical remarks were made about the following of fashions and the over-decoration of foods, and there was an occasional warning against complacency in the trade. Otherwise, the editorials at least did not uncover new failings in the industry. So, while the content of critique does not change greatly over the years, and the Guide always presents a catalogue of current failings in the industry, the relative significance of the critique probably has changed. There has been a growth in facility for comparing products, for complaining, for making public discontent with industry, etc. It is probably a defining feature of a consumer culture that it generates a mode of systematic public complaint, but the GFG pre-dated establishment of a consumer culture in the UK. One of the primary set of mechanisms through which this culinary social movement helped to make the niche market for the contemporary restaurant was through deploying critique to establish standards of high quality.

Cultural Struggle and the Definition of Quality The world of GFG restaurants is (though certainly not exclusively so) a cultural field, by which I mean its practices and their pretensions to – 236 –

Continuity and Change in British Restaurants excellence are subject to aesthetic judgement. Since we are all aware that good taste is contestable, it is interesting to see how the process has operated over time. As time passed, editors became increasingly conscious of the problem of determining standards. Ironically, although the content of the entries which describe the experience at any establishment in the GFG is increasingly formulated in aesthetic terminology, the extent of the technical detail, systematic classificatory information and measurement has increased at least in equal proportion. There has been extended deliberation over how to evaluate restaurants. Initially it was just a matter of finding places that would be acceptable given their own different purposes or missions. The GFG was operating, we might say, a system of regulation by setting minimum standards. It subsequently sought to provide more summary information about places, and fell into the habit, practised by many other organizations in other fields by the 1980s, of giving entries numerical scores. The last three editors all tampered with the classification and measurement system. This had the effect, contrary to the explicit intention of its first proponent, Smith, of making itself amenable to compilation as a ‘league table’. One of the apparent contradictions of a thoroughly rationalized, hierarchical classification of excellence is that the scores render equivalent and comparable that which the descriptions in the GFG differentiate. The use of a linear scale encourages the notion of a contest, and increasingly the Guide moved from cataloguing acceptable places to organizing a contest between restaurants. This contest was accounted for in aesthetic language. The virtues of ‘Modern British Cooking’ and then ‘Real Food’ were espoused by Driver and Smith, respectively, the principles being ones of fresh and seasonal ingredients, local supplies, simple preparation of high-quality produce, etc. The diffusion of Modern British Cooking as a style might be seen as the cultural apogee of the Postgate project, prescribing a style, and embodying culinary values that would have been congenial to him. However, no sooner had that been established, and some progress made towards its diffusion in the field, than it was challenged by another contender for the definition of a dominant legitimate aesthetic, which might be described as ‘Virtuous Eclecticism’. For example, Ainsworth in his first editorial praised variety: Hundreds of dishes, in scores of restaurants, do not fit easily into any single national framework. Tagliolini with ceps and creme fraiche, steamed mussels with curry spices and coriander, roast quail with wild mushrooms and polenta, and lambs steaks with parsley pesto and Spanish butter-beans. those are all from just one menu in one restaurant. What a glorious mix [. . .]. And this

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Alan Warde particular brew could only happen here. No other country has quite the same blend of British, French, Italian, Spanish, Indian, Chinese, Thai and other cultures to call on. In that sense, diverse as it all is, it is very British, full of real invention and the sheer exuberance of let’s-have-a-go cookery [. . .]. It is British in the sense that Britain is the melting pot. British cooking is no longer defined by just what we grow here, or by traditional recipes and techniques. It is the sum of what we cook here.10

Associated emergent tendencies of the 1990s which sustained and glorified ‘Virtuous Eclecticism’ included greater celebration of chefs, more explicit confidence in the excellence of British food, a more Londoncentric view, a celebration of fun, pleasure and entertainment, and a greater indifference to the issues of authenticity of cuisine as commentary became focused more on trends and fashions. By such means the GFG played a part in the making, simultaneously, of both a market and a cultural field. Commercial competition is conducted through cultural struggles, by providing products which conform to current definitions of what is aesthetically most pleasing and through the promotion of contests around performance. For the producers there is a commercial contest which increasingly requires concentration upon an aesthetic dimension. Meanwhile the customers are engaged in activity within a field, marked by cultural distinctions, which was made by, for, and in the image of the British middle classes.

Halting Movement: The Dynamics of a CWO Gabriel and Lang identify ‘four waves of Western consumer activism’.11 The first took the form of the co-operative movement, a nineteenthcentury ‘working-class reaction to excessive prices and poor quality goods’. The second wave was concerned with ‘enabling consumers to take best advantage of the market, rather than trying to undermine the market through co-operative action or political agitation and lobbying’. Value-formoney was a key slogan, and the strategy is essentially to inform and educate the individual consumer. The third was Naderism, based on a more general and sustained critique of the corporations and their behaviour. The fourth was a search for an alternative approach to consumption based on an essentially environmentalist critique. In these terms, the Good Food Club is probably best identified as an early example of second-wave consumer protest. It was a very early, if not the first, example of its kind in the UK. Its initial raison d’être was that of the co-operative movement, to challenge ‘excessive prices and poor – 238 –

Continuity and Change in British Restaurants quality goods’, and its organizational form, a club with a concerned membership, had a model of collective pressure in mind. Thus Postgate described the Club’s success as ‘the result of active and sometimes venomous consumer cooperation, directed to raising up the good restaurant and putting down the bad’.12 It also exhibited some elements of third-wave critique of the logic and modus operandi of capitalist economic organizations. However, it came to operate primarily with the strategy and tactics of second-wave activism, providing information and education about the nature and conditions of a market, while simultaneously exhorting customers to use their authority and rights as individual consumers to secure improved standards. The principle of an independent consumer guide was not yet established in the UK when the GFG first emerged. The last mention of threats to sue for libel was in 1979, as it was for offers of payment for inclusion. Subsequently the GFG and the catering trade have become more reconciled to one another. From the early 1980s there was an increasing tendency to talk as if addressing the trade: to advise restaurateurs on restructuring, to give very explicit advice about what would increase their chances of inclusion in the Guide (see 1986, pp. 18–19 and 1999, pp. 21–3), to pronounce on what will make a profit, e.g. by altering opening hours (1995), and to explain why the complaints typically offered by the GFG and their reporters are useful to it – because pleased customers return (1996). The culinary world conveyed by the GFG looks ever more like an internally referential system operated by experts. Its message is increasingly facilitated by cultural intermediaries, with a phalanx of journalists, professional restaurant critics and other experts contributing feature articles to the Guide itself, and reflecting in other media its judgements and findings. It now operates in closer co-operation with the catering trade. The editors after 1990, Jaine and Ainsworth, were both former restaurateurs. Since 1982, when Roux was invited to write a feature article putting the point of view of ‘the other side’, practising restaurateurs have been frequent contributors to the Guide. The economic and practical problems of restaurateurs have come to be looked upon in a more sympathetic light, though it had always been recognized that it cost more to supply the type of food required by the GFG. The political and consumer edge of criticism has also been blunted and softened, as the issues brought to the reader’s attention have increasingly become ones which focus singularly on the terms of the commercial exchange. That the GFC has become primarily what Gabriel and Lang would call a second-wave consumer movement outfit is confirmed by the credo of the incoming editor in 1995, which primarily seeks value-for-money for all consumers: – 239 –

Alan Warde It is our view that neither reporting on nor eating well in restaurants should be the prerogative of the select few. Everybody who eats out has the right to expect fair value for money, to get the best-quality food that their £10, £20 or £50 a head will buy. That’s why we are here: to help you get the best deal for whatever amount of money you wish to lay out, based on the experiences of fellow diners.

As with many other forms of consumer organization, the passage of time leads to a gradual incorporation or recuperation, contact and communication paving the way for a greater sympathy for the problems of the producer, resulting from an enhanced ability to see the world from the other point of view. Increasingly, the GFG is more a form of entertainment and a channel for running a contest. In the process it has become more important in defining those current styles which are worthy of acclamation. Restaurants are necessarily drawn into the process, as are the cultural intermediaries who present and discuss information about restaurants to the general public. It is probably not stretching too far to say that this segment of the catering industry now has many of the features of art worlds. There is a community of agents and a set of organizations, an institutional ensemble, which signifies the emergence of a commercialized art world, where reputations are made and broken in accordance with an internal logic which governs opportunity, judgement and more besides. The process of commercial incorporation is not all-embracing: the GFG still depends upon its volunteer reporters and can claim a ‘popular’ legitimacy to its judgements and an openness to contrary opinions which other guides might not. Nevertheless it has now reached a point of accommodation with a much restructured industrial sector.

Conclusions In Critique of Neo-classical Conceptions of the Market and Consumption The GFG originated as a culinary social movement which, through its ‘voice’, established terms upon which a lucrative niche market could be founded. It seems likely that the GFG has had some impact in affecting the nature of provision, though it is impossible to judge how much in comparison with the many other pressures upon restaurateurs – from other media like television and the press, from competition within the catering industry, from innovations in agriculture and the food manufacturing sector, etc. The apparent influence of the GFG is always much enhanced – 240 –

Continuity and Change in British Restaurants by its own construction of the past as a time of customary awfulness. Nonetheless, by acting as a particular type of intermediary between demand and consumption, the GFG has been a tool of market-making in which it has helped set, if not determine, standards of provision within that niche market. It is very unusual that markets get made in this way, as is the extent to which consumer wants were achieved through consciously applied pressure. Despite some recent theoretical accounts of market-making which attribute significant influence to consumers (e.g. post-Fordism), few really demonstrate that changing demand pushes the process.13 The story of the GFG is, however, an instructive example of consumer-led demand. However, although it probably could only happen in a sector where costs of entry for new businesses are low, this new niche was the product not of anonymous market forces, but rather of collective organization. Moreover, it was a movement of an affluent section of the population whose tastes could be represented in a coherent or unified manner. Arguably, then, the odd features of this club are evidence of the extent to which it is producers (with their techniques of advertising and promotion) which drive forward most market formation. The GFG is the exception that proves the rule that most markets are constructed by producers.14

The Fusion of Economy and Culture in the Twentieth Century The GFG made a market and a cultural field; indeed in the UK you might say that the cultural field of appreciation of fine food has been remade in the marketplace. Eating out has gradually come to be presented as an aesthetically governed practice, a result of an evolved collusion between producers and consumer representatives. Its history offers a good example of aestheticization effected through the culture industries, of the increasing application of aesthetic criteria to commercial production. The aesthetic and the economic were bound up together from the very beginning. However, their relationship has changed over time. Not only did the movement become less political, and more purely a second wave consumer movement, but in the process it changed its aesthetic register from being a pursuit of a defined standard of excellence to one which was more amenable to style and fashion. In doing so, it moved from a protest to a contest modality, in line with other fields where the consumer guide has proliferated as a means to orient potential customers to selections in the face of variety. This is, arguably, the context for the proliferation of guidebooks generally, a response to the problem of what to consume in a

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Alan Warde situation of immense variety. And it is probably no accident that the score, the mark, the rank in the league table, is a standard solution which excuses the reader from having to make judgements which would otherwise require a level of knowledge, investigation and discrimination which is beyond their capabilities or the rational use of their resources. There is a certain irony that the solution of the summary score bears all the hallmarks of the positivist knowledge of high modernity.

From Social Movement to Commercial Contest The GFG succeeded in establishing and policing standards without any formal authority to do so. It operated as a technology of recommendation. The Editor’s commentary synthesizes opinions, solicits complaints and identifies items for campaigning. Of course, he cannot prescribe action as the state or an industry standards agency might. But he has had the power to create and express the opinions of a concerned public, to lay claim to be genuine public opinion because of its participatory structure; as Jaine put it, an ‘exercise in selective democracy’ (GFG, 1992). However, the GFG has gradually moved from acting as a type of campaigning social movement or CWO to being the orchestrator of an annual aesthetic contest. Though not a total reversal, for the GFG remains an independent source of consumer information and a critic of aspects of contemporary restaurant practice, the review of style differences replaces pressure for improvements in quality of cuisine. As with many other consumer organizations previously, the GFG has ceded a degree of control as its identity has changed.15 The control over the setting of culinary standards has largely reverted to the industry, though they continue to be aided by the free market research which the GFG has been supplying for half a century.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

For detail of origins, see Driver, 1983, 48–53. Good Food Guide (GFG), 1961–2, 11ff. GFG, 1997, 22. Mennell, 1985, 281. Mennell, 1985; Ferguson, 1998. – 242 –

Continuity and Change in British Restaurants 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Rao, 1998. Rao, 1998, 914. Warde and Martens, 2000, 175–84. Hirschman, 1970. Ainsworth, GFG 1995, 21. Gabriel and Lang, 1995, 153. Postgate, GFG 1968, 6. Warde, 1994. E.g. White, 1981; Aspers, 2001. Rao, 1998.

References Aspers, P. (2001), ‘A market in vogue: fashion photography in Sweden’, European Societies, 3/1: 1–22. Driver, C. (1983), The British at Table, 1940–80, London: Chatto & Windus. Ferguson, P. (1998), ‘A cultural field in the making: gastronomy in 19thcentury France’, American Journal of Sociology, 104/3: 597–641. Gabriel, Y., and Lang, T. (1995), The Unmangeable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and Its Fragmentation, London: Sage. Hirschman, A. (1970), Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Mennell, S. (1985), All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, Oxford: Blackwell. Rao, H. (1998), ‘Caveat emptor: the construction of nonprofit consumer watchdog organizations’, American Journal of Sociology, 103/4: 912– 61. Warde, A. (1994), ‘Consumers, consumption and post-Fordism’, in R. Burrows and B. Loader (eds), Towards a Post-Fordist Welfare State?, London: Routledge, 223–38. Warde, A., and Martens, L. (2000), Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption and Pleasure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, H. (1981), ‘Where do markets come from?’, American Journal of Sociology, 87/3: 517–47.

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–15 – Eating in the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Stephen Mennell

Since the belated publication in English of Jürgen Habermas’s book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989 [orig. 1962]), there has been a considerable preoccupation among sociologists and political scientists with the notions of ‘the public sphere’ and ‘civil society’. Much of the interest in Habermas’s book arose from the collapse of communism in Europe in 1990, and from the need of the former Soviet satellite countries to establish stable democratic institutions and independent organs of public opinion. The invitation to write this chapter prompted me to reflections of less political moment on the book: to re-examine the material on the history of gastronomy which I originally gathered principally for my study of the development of taste in food and eating in France and England.1 The bourgeois gastronome – not himself a cook, but an expert in the art of eating and a leader of public opinion in matters of culinary taste – is a minor but interesting figure in the sequence of development described by Habermas. The emergence of gastronomes, gastronomy, a dining public and a public sphere of gastronomic discourse is a footnote to the overall process, and in a modest way may raise some questions about Habermas’s thesis. In Strukturwandel des Öffentlichkeits, Jürgen Habermas presents an historical sociology of the ‘bourgeois’ public sphere. This emerged in Western Europe, he argues, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in close connection with the development of a market economy, standing structurally between the state and civil society but belonging to the latter. It was a sphere in which the critical public discussion of matters political, social and cultural was institutionally guaranteed. In so far as a public sphere had existed previously within the absolutist state, it had, according to Habermas, been one in which the ruler’s power was merely represented before the people. In the bourgeois public sphere, in contrast, state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse – 245 –

Stephen Mennell among the people. Since the late nineteenth century, however, the bourgeois public sphere has declined. As Thomas McCarthy succinctly summarizes Habermas’s argument: with the further development of capitalism, the public body expanded beyond the bourgeoisie to include groups that were systematically disadvantaged by the workings of the free market and sought state regulation and compensation. The consequent intertwining of state and society in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant the end of the liberal public sphere. The public sphere of social-welfare-state democracies is rather a field of competition among conflicting interests, in which organizations representing diverse constituencies negotiate and compromise among themselves and with government officials while excluding the public from their proceedings.2

Has a parallel process occurred in the rise and fall of a public sphere of eating?

An Autonomous Sphere of ‘Taste’? ‘The publicum’, writes Habermas, ‘developed into the public, the subjectum into the [reasoning] subject, the receiver of regulations from above into the adversary of the ruling authorities’.3 While Habermas is here thinking mainly of political issues, he shows clearly how the pattern of development was also evident in the sphere of what came to be called ‘culture’. Music, for instance, until the end of the eighteenth century, ‘remained bound to the functions of the kind of public-ness involved in representation – what today we call occasional music’. Only then, with the development of public concert societies, did there arise ‘something like music not tied to a purpose’ and ‘an audience gathered to listen to music as such’. What was true of music was applicable to art more generally: ‘Released from its functions in the service of social representation, art became an object of free choice and of changing preference. The ‘taste’ to which art was orientated from then on became manifest in the assessments of lay people who claimed no prerogative, since within a public everyone was entitled to judge.’4 Something similar began to happen about the same time in the domain of food and eating, with the burgeoning of the first great restaurants in Paris. But I shall argue that what was novel in the Paris of the Directory and the Empire was not the restaurant as a place where one could buy a meal outside one’s own home, but rather its connection in an emergent social figuration with the gastronome as a recognizable figure, with gastronomic writing as a distinct genre, and with a public opinion informed – 246 –

Eating in the Public Sphere by both. For in few fields of culture was the judgement of lay members of a broad public accepted uncritically and without debate. Habermas points to painting as the area in which the conflict about lay judgement as a critical authority was most severe, precisely a field hitherto dominated by a small circle of connoisseurs. One thinks of the salon des refusés and the Impressionists as late as the 1860s and 1870s. In the course of the eighteenth century, there emerged the art critic, who ‘assumed a peculiarly dialectical task: he viewed himself at the same time as the representative and as the educator of the public’. Gastronomes too have functioned both as spokesmen for and leaders of the dining public – and consciously so at first, for the experience of haute cuisine had been as narrowly confined socially as had that of music or painting. Gastronomy has generally been seen one-sidedly as the preserve of an elite, laying down canons of ‘correct’ taste for those wealthy enough to afford them. I want to argue that, whether they intended to or not, gastronomes have also performed a democratizing function in the shaping of taste. Gastronomic writings, in common with manners books, perform this function because the moment they are printed they disseminate knowledge of elite standards beyond the elite – and, of course, authors and publishers seek the financial rewards of sales outside the most exclusive circles. Both functions – of articulating elite standards and of democratizing taste – always co-exist in gastronomy, though the balance between the two has tilted during the last two centuries. That tilting can be traced through a continuous line of development linking Grimod de la Reynière’s Almanach des gourmands (1803–12) to the restaurant guides of today.

Forerunners of the Gastronome The word ‘gastronomy’, learnedly derived from Greek, seems to have been invented by Joseph Berchoux in 1801, who used it as the title of a poem.5 The term was rapidly adopted both in France and England to designate ‘the art and science of delicate eating’. ‘Gastronome’ was a back-formation from ‘gastronomy’, to designate ‘a judge of good eating’.6 The invention of new words proves nothing in itself of course, and, as Norbert Elias warned, ‘nothing is more fruitless, when dealing with longterm social processes, than to attempt to locate an absolute beginning’.7 But Habermas’s account of the structural development of the public sphere does help us to understand the context in which the terms appeared at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the ways in which gastronomes at that time differed from their various precursors. – 247 –

Stephen Mennell As early as the sixteenth century, Montaigne describes a conversation with the Italian chef of Cardinal Caraffa, who spoke pretentiously about his art, ‘bloated with grand and magnificent words, such as one might use in describing the government of an empire.’8 The chef was clearly skilled at making fine distinctions in the judgement of taste, but that did not make him what would later be called a gastronome. He was not addressing a public, but working for a single patron and essentially using his skills to represent the power and prestige of the patron – the quality of whose table no doubt sustained his claim to membership of a limited circle of connoisseurs in this as in other areas of taste. That inference is supported by the cringing tone in which seventeenth-century cookery books were dedicated to prominent courtiers by their often anonymous authors, as well as the explicit representation of particular meals or dishes as having been served in such and such a noble household on a particular occasion.9 By the mid-eighteenth century, however, something resembling a public gastronomic controversy was taking place in Paris.10 That it happened then and there is consonant both with Habermas’s account of the emergence of a ‘bourgeois’ public sphere during that century and with his stress on its more restricted growth in France than in England. The occasion of the controversy was the publication in 1739 of the book Les Dons de Comus, attributed to Marin, who is thought to have been cook to the Duchesse de Gesvres and then to the Maréchal de Soubise.11 The book itself was less a recipe book than a manual on the rules governing the composition and serving of meals, listing possible dishes rather than explaining how to cook them; it is addressed not only to cooks but ‘mainly to people who are curious to know how to give a dinner, and to be served delicately [. . .] according to the latest taste’. It was by clear inference addressed to the upwardly mobile rich bourgeois who wished to know how things were done in the best courtly circles. What caused the controversy, however, was less the book itself than its long and erudite prefatory Avertissement, attributed to two Jesuits, PP. Pierre Brumoy (1688–1742) and Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant (1690– 1743). They discoursed learnedly on the anthropology and history of the human diet, and went on to theorize about the superiority of what was in the 1730s and 1740s called the nouvelle cuisine compared with the older French cuisine as it had developed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It provoked an immediate response, the pamphlet Lettre d’un pâtissier anglois (1739) attributed to the Comte Desalleurs, a minor courtier, who satirized the pretentiousness of the Avertissement and the preciousness of the nouvelle cuisine.12 This defence of the view that in food as in other things old ways are best called forth in turn the Apologie – 248 –

Eating in the Public Sphere des modernes (1740), in which the littérateur Meusnier de Querlon made it plain that the parties to this superficially gastronomic squabble recognized its links with battles between the old and the new in other cultural spheres. Not only is this reminiscent of Dryden’s participation in London half a century earlier in the battle of the ‘ancients and moderns’ to which Habermas refers,13 but it also demonstrates the displacement of latent political controversies into the cultural arena in the more censored life of ancien régime Paris. Indeed the Lettre d’un pâtissier anglois contains a long reference to The Craftsman, one of the key periodicals in Habermas’s account of the development of the public sphere in England.

What the Revolution Did for Gastronomy ‘The Revolution’, writes Habermas, ‘created in France overnight, although with less stability, what in Great Britain had taken more than a century of steady evolution: the institutions, which until then had been lacking, for critical public debate of political matters.’14 The same impression of an abrupt rupture also dominates the popular account of the origins of the restaurant. The story goes that the skilled professional cooks hitherto employed in the kitchens of aristocrats who had fled abroad or perished in the Terror, finding themselves without work, were obliged to open restaurants and cook for whoever was able to pay and chose to enter. There is a grain, but only a grain, of truth in that. There was certainly nothing new in being able to purchase professionally cooked food and eat it outside the home, at least in the towns. Apart from the ancient inns and cookshops, from the seventeenth century there were the coffee-houses or cafés as popular meeting places in most of the important cities of Europe,15 the importance of which in the social development of the public sphere Habermas emphasizes, since they served as centres of political intrigue and commercial intelligence. Closest approximations to the later restaurants, however, both in their social functions and in the food they served, were the taverns of eighteenth-century England. By the mid-eighteenth century many taverns in London were noted eating places and social centres, some large enough to cater for vast municipal banquets, and patronized by the aristocracy and gentry as well as merchants and intellectuals. Contrary to the later pattern, eating out was better established among the English upper classes than among the French. This too was probably related to political patterns: the annual meeting of Parliament in the winter and spring of each year was associated from the seventeenth century with the annual migration of the leading families from their

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Stephen Mennell country homes to London for the ‘Season’, and apart from the grandest, who had their own large London houses, many would stay in lodgings and often ‘eat out’. There was no exact counterpart to this in France until after the Revolution. All the same, the first restaurants did begin to appear in Paris before the Revolution. The highly restrictive monopoly of the Paris guild of traiteurs was breached, and several subsequently famous restaurants opened their doors in the 1780s, which suggests that a market for eating out was developing in elite circles in France as well as in England. What the Revolution did was to forge in Paris a counterpart to the connection which had long existed in London between parliamentary life and the life of the taverns and coffee-houses. As a newly powerful group, the deputies were well placed to set a fashion which others would follow. It was under the Directory and the Empire especially that the great restaurants of Paris began to set an international model. Competition among them fostered innovation, above all new dishes and an increasingly haute, labourintensive and therefore expensive, cuisine with ‘artistic’ pretensions both visual and gustatory. But, from a sociological point of view, at least as significant in the process of competition was the formation of a wellinformed and knowledgeable eating public. The cook’s patrons were now many, not few. The relationship was by now a market relationship. The market was fostered and enlarged by what, rather than the restaurant per se, was arguably the decisive French contribution to eating as a social activity: the invention of gastronomic literature as a genre, and of the social role of the gastronome.

The Social Role of the Gastronome Grimod de la Reynière (1758–1838) was the most important of the founding fathers of literate gastronomy – not only in the Almanach des Gourmands (published annually from 1803 to 1812, except in 1809 and 1811), but also in the Manuel des Amphitryons (1808) and the monthly Journal des Gourmands et des Belles (1806–8).16 The first edition of the Almanach contained an ‘Itinéraire nutritif, ou promenade d’un gourmand dans divers quartiers de Paris’, which was to be the centrepiece of successive issues. It came to cover not only restaurants and cafés but also rôtisseurs and traiteurs, grocers, greengrocers and florists, butchers and tripières – food suppliers of every kind in Paris. Grimod was a flâneur half a century before Baudelaire and a whole century before Georg Simmel celebrated the social type.

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Eating in the Public Sphere Grimod and his imitators played a significant part in the growth of a public for the burgeoning trade of restaurateur. Who most needed whom is, however, debatable. The rise of the restaurant had begun before 1789, and it had become part of the fashionable scene in Paris during the decade before Grimod published the first issue of the Almanach. Nevertheless, when the number of participants – in this case both restaurateurs and diners – is large and continually growing, it is arguable that an informed and coherent public opinion generally necessitates more open and formal media of communication to supplement informal networks of gossip.17 Inevitably this brings about a differentiation within the dining public between the relatively more powerful leaders of opinion who write the gastronomic criticism and the relatively less powerful who merely read it. Whatever influence gastronomes had in shaping taste was exerted in a consistent direction – towards discrimination, choice and delicacy in matters of eating, which are the kernel of the gastronomic message. The social role of the gastronome is essentially urban in character because it is at the opposite pole from the principle of traditional rural self-sufficiency: eating the product of one’s own land and taking it as it comes. More self-evidently, the gastronomic spirit is rare among those whose poverty allows them little choice. There must be food in abundance and variety, and of course variety and subtlety in cookery to permit gastronomes to select some things and reject others. Yet a wealthy stratum and town life are probably not sufficient conditions for the emergence of the gastronome and gastronomy: there is little sign of them in, for instance, Amsterdam at the height of its wealth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The original locus of refinement in eating appears to have been court society. Why, then, did the gastronome as a distinct figure appear in France after the Revolution? Possibly a comparison with dandyism is revealing. A dandy, ‘one who studies above everything to dress elegantly and fashionably; a beau, fop, “exquisite”’, is a figure more native to England than is the gastronome, and the word came into vogue about 1813–19 for the ‘swells’ of the Regency period. The dandy is to matters of dress what the gastronome is to matters of eating. In his biography of Benjamin Disraeli, Robert Blake remarks of dandyism: It seems to be a characteristic of an era of social flux, when aristocracy is tottering or uncertain, but when radicalism has not yet replaced it with a new set of values. It flourishes in a period when manners are no longer rigidly fixed, but have not yet degenerated into mere anarchy, so that there is still a convention to rebel against, still a world to be shocked and amused by extravagance and eccentricity. The dandy must have a framework within which to operate.

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Stephen Mennell The social grades must still exist, but it must be easy for those with sufficient courage, carelessness or sheer brazen determination to climb from one to another.18

This hypothesis seems to fit not only the 1830s and 1890s in England, when, as Blake observes, dandyism was prevalent there, but also the first decades of the nineteenth century in France, when the gastronomes first appeared. The provocative, somewhat exhibitionist lifestyle of Grimod and his circle in particular was strikingly parallel to dandyism, mainly differing in its use of food rather than dress as a means of display. Of course it was not necessary that the precise social conditions which favoured the emergence of the gastronome endure for gastronomy as a literary genre to survive. Once the tradition had been created, it could persist, while changing its emphases and functions according to changing circumstances. At first the elite-defining function is more evident than the democratizing one. It is apparent in the display of expertise. The gastronomes encouraged talk about food; without talk, critical appreciation of the cooks’ achievements would be impossible, and only critical appreciation would give the cooks an incentive to compete with each other for the patronage of an informed public. The fashion no doubt took a long time to become universal. Curnonsky, while noting that in his youth it had not been the done thing to talk about what one ate, remarks that after World War I things progressed to the point that in France it was acceptable even to discuss how much it had cost.19 Gastronomes and gastronomy had, however, also played a democratizing role from the earliest stages. It has to be remembered that as a distinct figure, the gastronome appeared on the scene in the course of a general widening of the market for sophisticated cooking. When appearing to be at their most elitist, effete and exclusive, gastronomes and gastronomy were also helping to widen the circle for good eating. In a more egalitarian period, their activities in making known the pleasures of the table, and encouraging more cooks and diners to share their own interest in them, have become more evident; and in the process the gastronomic tradition has itself evolved.

The Decline of the Public Sphere and of the Autonomy of Taste? From the late nineteenth century, Habermas, as we have seen, traces an apparent decline of the ‘bourgeois’ public sphere through its widening to – 252 –

Eating in the Public Sphere include many more competing interest groups, resulting in an interpenetration of the state and civil society and a loss of autonomy in the public sphere. These developments in political economy are also reflected in a transition ‘from a culture-debating to a culture-consuming public’.20 He stresses in particular the decline of gentlemen’s clubs and societies as a forum for discussion, Put bluntly: you had to pay for books, theatre, concert, and museum, but not for the conversation about what you had read, heard and seen and what you might completely absorb only through this conversation. Today this conversation itself is administered. Professional dialogues from the podium, panel discussions, and round table shows – the rational debate of private people becomes one of the production numbers of the stars in radio and television, a saleable package ready for the box office. [. . .] Discussion, now a ‘business’, becomes formalized.21

Here the influence on Habermas of the ideas of the first generation of the Frankfurt School about the ‘culture industry’ and the manipulated quality of opinion and taste in contemporary capitalist society is very evident. He also cites English-language writers influential in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Whyte (1956) and Riesman (1950), who depicted trends in American society towards a privatized way of life and pressures to conform, and Kornhauser (1960), which summed up social scientists’ thinking in the Cold War decades after the defeat of Hitler about the undermining of free public opinion in the origins of totalitarianism. But he also drew on Galbraith’s (1952) notion of ‘countervailing power’, which to some extent runs in the opposite direction and seems applicable to the more recent history of gastronomy. An image of the world of the contemporary restaurant very much in line with Habermas’s is found in the work of Joanne Finkelstein. She views dining out ‘as a means by which personal desires find their shape and satisfaction through the prescribed forms of social conduct’ and thus as an example of ‘how human emotions become commodified’.22 Even a family visit to McDonald’s is promoted as offering the experience of ‘a sense of occasion’, while at more exclusive venues, ‘pleasure may accrue from the diner’s use of the event to suggest the personal possession of culturally valued characteristics such as wealth, fine taste and savoir faire’. Choice of a restaurant and choice of what one eats there are commonly seen as expressions of an individual’s own particular tastes, yet, argues Finkelstein, ‘the styles of interaction encouraged in the restaurant produce an uncivilized sociality [. . .] The artifice of the restaurant makes [. . .] us [. . .] act in imitation of others, in response to fashions, out of habit, – 253 –

Stephen Mennell without need for thought and self-scrutiny.’23 This represents the continuation of a long line of social theorists’ thinking about the ‘unauthentic’ experience of self in modern society from Simmel through Marcuse and Habermas to the more frivolous Baudrillard. But some aspects of the contemporary gastronomic scene suggest at least the presence of countercurrents.

Gastronomy and Democratization In France, the activities of Curnonsky and his circle marked an important development in the gastronomic tradition. Curnonsky was the pseudonym of Maurice-Edmond Sailland (1872–1956). In 1928 he founded the Académie des Gastronomes, modelled on the Académie Française – only one of many such new organizations in the twentieth century, which at least serves as a reminder that there are counter-currents to the decline of clubs and associations depicted by Habermas. The real significance of Curnonsky and his friends was that they seized the opportunity of linking gastronomy and tourism, and thus initiated a great interest in and vogue for French regional cookery. The alliance of tourism and gastronomy was particularly to the advantage of tyre companies like Michelin and KléberColombes, who began to publish their celebrated guides to the restaurants and hotels of France. ‘The motor-car’, wrote Curnonsky, ‘allowed the French to discover the cuisine of each province, and created the breed of what I have called “gastro-nomads”.’24 A parallel development in England was the foundation of the Wine and Food Society by André L. Simon in October 1933. As an organization the Society marked an interesting transition between the small, exclusive gastronomic dining clubs of the past and mass-readership campaigning publications like the Good Food Guide. The Society’s quarterly journal, Wine and Food, soon excited hostility from the hotel trade. A comprehensive paper on ‘The Present State of Gastronomy in England, with Some Suggestions for its Amendment’ presented at a meeting of the Society surveyed the scene in some detail, spoke of ‘a pretentious dullness’ as the chief characteristic of food in English hotels and restaurants, and finally blamed the apathy and indifference of English diners for the indifference and laziness of its cooks. The paper provoked a hostile letter from Sir Henry Dixon Kimber on behalf of the Hotels and Restaurants Association of Great Britain: he threatened to withdraw support from the Society if this sort of thing continued (both the paper and the letter were printed in Wine and Food, Winter 1934). While this did not gag the Society completely, it

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Eating in the Public Sphere did perhaps make it wary of indulging in blanket condemnation; and, pursuing a transparent strategy of co-option, it invited Kimber to address its Annual General Meeting the following year.

Guides to Eating Tourist guides to hotels and restaurants are an old-established institution, and the idea of grading establishments in terms of comfort, facilities, service and cuisine was familiar long before World War II. Guides like Michelin, however, made – and still make – their judgements without publicly discussing the grounds for reaching them in particular cases. Even the greatest eating places simply receive their two- or three-star listings with at most a laconic line or so mentioning a few of the specialités de la maison. The more ‘talkative’ kind of guidebook, which describes each restaurant and comments critically on its strengths and weaknesses, its particular style and the personality of its chef, is a post-war development in both England and France. In England the Good Food Guide and Egon Ronay’s annual guides, and in France the Gault–Millau guide, have all appeared on the scene since World War II. Gault–Millau and Ronay are rather similar, in having been initially the work of campaigning individuals, but gradually growing into large organizations with trained and paid inspectors to visit and judge hotels and restaurants. The Good Food Guide is rather different in that it involves many hundreds of the dining public in making reports on their own experiences. Both of the British guides have often been highly critical of mass catering, and seem on occasion to have achieved some improvements,25 though equally often they seem to have been swimming against the tide.26

Conclusion This excursion into gastronomic history can scarcely be claimed as test of Habermas’s model of the development of the public sphere – his theory is too wide in scope for a discussion confined to the domain of eating to be adequate to that task. Nevertheless, Habermas’s work seems to me to help make sense of the main stages of gastronomy, and at the same time this gastronomic material can perhaps be used to air a few reservations about the theory. Montaigne’s Italian chef neatly illustrates a stage of development when ‘public-ness’ (to use an awkward translation of Öffentlichkeit) took the form of representation: this chef simply displayed the arcane standards – 255 –

Stephen Mennell developed among a very restricted social elite. The Pâtissier anglois controversy nicely illustrated the limited development of the public sphere in France, with participants conscious of the wider political significance of a discussion about taste. The emergence of Grimod, Brillat-Savarin and their many imitators after the French Revolution, on the other hand, is clearly one facet of a true ‘bourgeois public sphere’ in Habermas’s sense. Later still, the development in the twentieth century of gastronomic pressure groups and campaigning guides illustrates much of what Habermas has to say about the decline of the bourgeois public sphere. We can see their battles with the food industry and demands upon government as the product of the interpenetration of state, economy and civil society, and of the commercial shaping of taste. They are also a manifestation of the principle of countervailing power. As to reservations, a minor one concerns the question of whether clubs and associations have been on the decline in twentieth-century society. As the exclusive preserve of ‘gentlemen’ they perhaps have, but it is questionable whether the sheer propensity to form associations has declined. The history of gastronomy is full of new foundations. Empirical sociological research suggests that membership of ‘secondary groups’ is still disproportionately middle-class, and it tends to be the supposed instability and manipulability of opinion among an ‘available’, unrooted, lower class that is – or was in the 1950s when Habermas was writing – most feared by culture critics of the left and the right. More recently, Robert Putnam has produced a mass of evidence to demonstrate that in the USA the stock of ‘social capital’ – meaning the participation by individuals in the whole range of collective activities that Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated in Democracy in America in the 1830s – has declined very markedly since the 1950s, and he predicts that similar paths will be followed in other Western countries.27 My main doubts about Habermas’s thesis concern his assumptions about bourgeois public opinion as the outcome of rational discussion between free, equal and independent citizens. This was certainly how early theorists saw it, but whether we should take their word for it is another question. This model plays a part in Habermas’s thought – in the ‘ideal speech situation’ of his later theory of communicative action as much as the early work we have been considering – equivalent to the economists’ model of perfect competition, and indeed it is largely derived from that.28 Like perfect competition, it is rarely met with in the real world, because opinions are always formed within figurations of many interdependent – and unequally interdependent – people. Taste and opinion are always shaped within changing power balances, and to recognize that ab initio – 256 –

Eating in the Public Sphere leads to a somewhat less apocalyptic vision of contemporary trends than Habermas’s. I have hinted at how such shifting power balances can be studied in the context of the history of gastronomy. Finally, I have some difficulty with any notion of ‘authenticity’ in taste and culture. During the crisis of confidence following the événements de mai in 1968, it was common for cultural policy-makers, on the one hand, to deny any intention of imposing ‘high culture’ on people from above, while, on the other hand, deploring (after the fashion of the cultural elitists of the Frankfurt School) the effect of the culture industries in debauching mass tastes. These two views were typically reconciled through the hope that if people’s tastes were manipulated neither by the proponents of high culture nor by big business, with only the neutral help of cultural midwives called animateurs, there would be a spontaneous blooming of a rich and diverse culture.29 These dilemmas are neatly reflected in the history of gastronomy. In order to have any chance of successes in their trials of strength with the mass producers, the leaders of any consumer movement have to ensure that they are seen as the delegates or spokesmen for substantial numbers of followers. Thus, like the leaders of political parties, the editors of the guides have to pay as much attention to persuading their followers as persuading the caterers that their tastes are right. For the editors of the Good Food Guide, which at least pretends to be the democratic expression of its readers’ taste, this causes some qualms. Christopher Driver reflected on the problem in the 1980 edition. Given that many, probably most, people were perfectly content with mass-produced food, by what right did the Guide rate more highly the preferences of those who were not so content? The Guide itself, he admitted, had done at least its share in persuading the British bourgeoisie into eating more garlic per capita than the northern French did, and into eating its lamb and duck as pink as its sirloin. Most of those who made reports for the Guide liked their food that way – in part because the Guide had told them it should – but was it objectively better? Grimod de la Reynière would not have been troubled by such self-doubt – Montaigne’s Italian still less. One reason for the doubt is that no matter that large numbers of the ‘bourgeoisie’ have come to share such tastes, they are manifestly a small minority of the people at large and of the market. In consequence, the outcome of trials of strength on the upper level between self-appointed leaders of culinary public opinion and the mass producers of food depends not only on the leaders carrying their followers with them, but also on the balances of power on the lower level between groups bringing to the market very different likes and dislikes. Taste and opinion always have been, and always will be, produced in imperfect markets in that way. – 257 –

Stephen Mennell

Notes 1. Mennell, 1985. 2. McCarthy, 1989, xii. 3. Habermas, 1989, 26. I have made minor changes to the published translation of Habermas’s book. 4. Habermas, 1989, 39–40. 5. Berchoux, 1801. 6. For a more detailed exploration of this semantic field, see Mennell, 1985, 266–7. 7. Elias, 1983, 232. 8. Montaigne, 1962, 294. 9. See Mennell, 1985, 69–83. 10. Mennell, 1981. The texts of the main contributions to the controversy are reproduced in this publication. 11. Marin, 1739. 12. Desalleurs, 1739. 13. Habermas, 1989, 32–3. 14. Habermas, 1989, 69–70. 15. Ball, 1991. 16. See also Bonnet, 1986. 17. More exactly, this is a special case of the general exigency on growing and increasingly ‘opaque’ networks (Max Weber used the word undurchsichtig) to develop institutions capable of introducing at least the semblance of greater transparency; see Elias, 1978, 85ff. This usually involves some differentiation between ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’. On the functions of gossip in power relations between ‘established’ and outsider groups, see Elias and Scotson, 1965. 18. Blake, 1966, 78. 19. Curnonsky, 1958, 241–2. 20. Habermas 1989, 159ff. 21. Habermas, 1989, 164. 22. Finkelstein, 1989, 4. See, too Finkelstein, 1985. 23. Finkelstein, 1989, 5. 24. Curnonsky, 1958, 53–4. 25. See Mennell, 1985. 26. My study of British food guides covers the story only to circa 1980; Alan Warde’s chapter in this book updates the story for the 1980s and 1990s 27. Putnam, 2000. 28. Habermas, 1984/7. 29. See Mennell, 1979, for a sceptical view of this. – 258 –

Eating in the Public Sphere

References Ball, D. (ed.) (1991), Kaffee im Spiegel europäischer Trinksitten/Coffee in the Context of European Drinking Habits, Zurich: Johann Jacobs Museum. Berchoux, J. (1801), La Gastronomie: ou l’homme des champs à table, poème didactique en quatre chants, Paris: Giguet. Blake, R. (1966), Disraeli, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. Bonnet, J.C. (1986), ‘L’Ecriture gourmande de Grimod de la Reynière’, Histoire 85: 83–6. Curnonsky [pseud. of Maurice-Edmond Sailland] (1958), Souvenirs, Paris: Albin Michel. Desalleurs, R. P., Comte (1739), Lettre d’un pâtissier anglois au nouveau cuisinier françois. Paris. [Text reprinted in Mennell, 1981, 11–24.] Elias, N. (1983), The Court Society, Oxford: Basil Blackwell (orig. 1970). Elias, N. (1978), What is Sociology? New York: Columbia University Press (orig. 1970). Elias, N. and Scotson, J. L. (1965), The Established and the Outsiders, London: Frank Cass (Revised ed., London: Sage, 1994). Finkelstein, J. (1985), ‘Dining out: the self in search of civility’, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 6: 183–212. Finkelstein, J. (1989), Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners, Oxford: Polity. Galbraith, J.K. (1952), American Capitalism, London: Hamish Hamilton. Grimod de la Reynière, A.-B.-L. (1803–12), Almanach des gourmands, Paris. Grimod de la Reynière, A.-B.-L. (1808), Manuel des amphitryons, Paris: Capelle & Renaud. Habermas, J. (1984/7), The Theory of Communicative Action (2 vols), Boston: Beacon Press (orig. 1981). Habermas, J. (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge: Polity (orig. 1962). Kornhauser, W. (1960), The Politics of Mass Society, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McCarthy, T. (1989), ‘Introduction’, in J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Oxford: Polity, xi–xiv. Marin, F. (1739), Les Dons de Comus, ou les délices de la table, Paris: chez Prault fils. [Text of the Avertissement reprinted in Mennell,1981, 1–9.] Mennell, S. (1979), ‘Theoretical considerations on the study of cultural “needs”’, Sociology, 13/2, 235–57. – 259 –

Stephen Mennell Mennell, S. (1981), Lettre d’un Pâtissier Anglois et autres contributions à une polémique gastronomique du XVIIIe siècle, Exeter French Texts LII; edition prepared and with an introduction [pp. v–xxxi] by S. J. Mennell, Exeter, University of Exeter. Mennell, S. (1985), All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Mennell, S. (1989), Norbert Elias: Civilisation and the Human Selfimage, Oxford: Blackwell (Revised ed., Norbert Elias: An Introduction, Dublin: UCD Press, 1998). Meusnier de Querlon, A.-G. (1740), Apologie des modernes. Paris. [Text reprinted in Mennell, 1981, 25–42.] Montaigne, M. de (1962), Essais, in Oeuvres completes, Paris: NRF (orig. 1595). Putnam, R. D. (2000), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster. Riesman, D., with Glazer, N., and Denney, R. (1950), The Lonely Crowd, New Haven: Yale University Press. Whyte, W. H. (1956), The Organization Man, New York: Simon & Schuster.

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Creating Semi-public Places of Endless Choice Restaurants of All Types

–16 – Technological Innovations and Eating Out as a Mass Phenomenon in Europe A Preamble

Adel P. den Hartog

At present, eating out may be considered a much-discussed mass phenomenon. In countries with a relatively late start in eating out on a massive scale, as is the case in the UK, the subject is being examined particularly by sociologists, who ask significant questions such as whether family meals are or are becoming a practice of the past.1 But in France, with its longstanding tradition of restaurants and cafés, eating out has also gained in popularity, and the academic interest there has grown equally. The success of eating out may be easily demonstrated by a few statistics. In France, for example, the proportion of eating out in relation to total food expenditure rose from 11 percent in 1969 to 19 per cent twenty years later.2 Such an increase contrasts with the dramatic fall of food expenditure as a proportion of total family spending, which is a European development. For example, in the Netherlands this proportion fell from some 50 per cent in 1900 to 18 percent in 1999.3 The actual expenditure in money on eating out has grown twice as much as the total sum spent on food.4 It is important to realize that eating out was certainly not absent in preindustrial Europe. Yet in the twentieth century it gradually became a mass phenomenon that included eating in snack bars, canteens, all types of restaurants, diverse shops, and getting food from vending machines. Figures for the last ten years of the twentieth century would suggest that eating out is still an expanding activity (see Table 16.1); indeed, it may now be considered an intrinsic part of urban daily life.5 A requirement for this success was technology. At some point in the nineteenth century, it became technically possible to separate the place of production (the kitchen) from the place of consumption (the dining room, the bar, the street . . .). Before about 1800, in nearly all eating places the kitchen and the place for eating were not separated, and the cook prepared – 263 –

Adel P. den Hartog Table 16.1 Consumption expenditure in restaurants, cafés and hotels in the European Union (volume indices, 1990 = 100) Year

1988

1990

1993

1996

1997

Belgium Denmark Germany Greece France Ireland Italy Netherlands Austria Portugal Finland Sweden UK

90.7 97.9 91.4 95.3 94.0 86.0 96.2 89.6 91.9 91.6 94.6 104.6 91.6

100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

103.1 108.0 102.3 103.8 100.0 116.7 100.9 115.1 106.2 101.1 83.4 89.7 95.0

110.5 110.8 – 114.1 100.8 143.4 112.7 118.1 102.4 – 92.8 101.0 103.0

114.9 – – 122.4 102.8 148.0 113.7 124.4 102.4 – 98.1 100.0 –

Source: Eurostat, 2000

all the food on the spot. Then, gradually, he began to utilize prepared ingredients, and later even ready-made dishes and meals. This progression from ‘self-prepared’ to ‘ready-made’ food took place also in the home. It gave rise to the birth of the catering industry in the twentieth century. The provision of food for large groups, of good quality and at reasonable prices, indeed necessitated broad technological support. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the technological basis and process that sustained and encouraged the development of eating out as a mass or popular phenomenon. It is based on the conceptual framework presented in Table 16.2. In the development of eating out and its technology, one can distinguish immediate technological processes and underlying technological processes, making mass feeding outside the home possible. Immediate technological processes are innovations in new cooking equipment and sources of energy, of which the enclosure of the fire is an important step. This chapter focuses on the underlying technological processes, the major ones being the rise of modern lighting, which made a ‘longer day’ for all sorts of activities, and the innovation of techniques related to pre-cooked and prepared ingredients, foods and meals.

Modern Light as a Precondition for Mass-scale Eating Out In pre-industrial Europe activities outside the home took mainly place during daylight. Walking in the evening was dangerous: in rural areas darkness could be nearly absolute, and in the cities only a few points were – 264 –

Technological Innovations and Eating Out Table 16.2 Conceptual framework of technological innovations for eating out as a mass phenomenon Processes Immediate technological processes

Underlying technological processes

Period of general acceptance New sources of energy l Gas l Electricity New cooking equipment Modern light Making the day longer Food technology l Canning l Cooling, freezing l Freeze drying l Microwave l Food packaging freshness Transport, logistics l Motorized delivery van with cooling l

(1910–20) (1930) Enclosure of fire (1860–1910) 1790–1900 1860 1880 1950s 1947–70 1990 1920–50

dimly lit. This situation changed completely with the invention of what may be called ‘modern lighting’. In Europe and North America from 1780 to 1900, a crucial evolution took place in the pattern of daily activity, when Europeans and Americans discovered ways of making ‘from the night a day’. This had far-reaching consequences for the rhythm of daily life since more time came available for work and study, but also for public entertainment such as theatre, coffee-houses or restaurants. It started with the Swiss Ami Argand, son of a watchmaker, who in 1783 invented an oil lamp that produced a stable, bright light. Soon this was applied in places where such lighting was desirable, i.e. in streets and public establishments. It was an efficient solution to problems related to the weak and fluttering lighting of the usual oil lamp and other forms of illumination.6 The common light sources had been suitable only for relatively small spaces. In order to light up spaces for evening activities, it was necessary to burn a large number of oil lamps or candles. It was quite cumbersome, however, to keep the light on and to maintain the appliances.7 Another exigent factor of traditional lighting was the high price of the light source, the vegetable and animal oils. The application of the cheaper mineral oil, paraffin, in the 1850s and 1860s provided a more affordable source of light for the common man and for the cheaper cafés and pubs. In the beginning, however, paraffin lamps were not very safe because of the danger of explosion. Moreover, an unpleasant aspect of the – 265 –

Adel P. den Hartog lamp was that it produced not only heat in the room but also much water vapour.8 In 1847 a Dutch author noted about the inconveniences of existing lighting in public places that ‘many a coffee-house boy hoped that his boss would change the oil smoke for what was called the pure gas flame’.9 Gas lighting was indeed a far better energy form. Although many experiments with gas lighting were made in France and Germany, England can be considered the cradle of the gas lighting industry with the Gas Light and Coke Company of 1812.10 In the nineteenth century, gas was almost exclusively used for lighting. It provided a much more stable source of light and it did not ‘dance’ around a wick. The definite breakthrough of gas lighting in major cities on the European continent occurred in the 1840s: finally, it made streets safe to walk in and for going out for evening activities.11 In 1850 Paris was not yet the ville de lumière, but after the urban reconstruction of Hausmann, which started in 1861, the city obtained large and well-lit boulevards with shops, cafés, restaurants and stalls for delicacies and oranges.12 Contemporaries were not always charmed with the new opportunities for going out by night. For instance, as early as 1819 the Kölnische Zeitung warned against the construction of the gas works in Paris. According to the newspaper, it would lead to a decline in morals as the artificial light would dispel the fear of darkness, which deterred the more weak-willed from committing an offence. Light would ensure that drinkers could remain in the pub for during the whole evening, and it would lead to moral lapses among couples in love.13 Night lighting indeed received a negative connotation: the gas-lit street lamp with a lady waiting underneath became a symbol of prostitution and crime.14 On the other hand, the clearly-lit cafés of Paris impressed and dazzled visitors.15 Gas lighting, however, remained expensive. A list of users of gas lighting in 1850 in the Dutch city of Leiden shows that the majority of users were factories and institutions, among which were included shops and coffee houses.16 The French author J.-K. Huysmans noticed in 1876 the difference between Paris and Amsterdam. Unlike Paris, where the cafés were well lit and bright, in an Amsterdam café he had to drink and eat in a sparsely lit environment.17 In the 1880s gas lighting gradually became old-fashioned because of the rise of an alternative with much more potential for activities inside but particularly outside the home, namely electricity.18 This new source of lighting was the centrepiece of the Parisian World Exhibition of 1900, but initially it was expensive and only present in establishments with substantial financial means, such as public buildings, luxurious shops and hotels.19 In the beginning electricity was expensive, and only establishments with substantial financial means could venture to adopt this new form of – 266 –

Technological Innovations and Eating Out lighting. Indeed, one had to install its own electricity generator. In Amsterdam in 1870, a modern café-restaurant, Die Port van Cleve, was opened, and in 1879 the owners decided to install electrical lighting. For that purpose a Gramme dynamo was imported from Belgium and installed by an engineer from Liège with two workers. Many directors of large establishments visited the café-restaurant to observe this wonder of electrical lighting.20 The advantage of this new light source vis-à-vis gas can be illustrated by the introduction of electric lighting in 1881 in the winter garden of Amsterdam’s Hotel Krasnapolsky (Figure 16.1). An important advantage of electric lighting over gas was that much less heat was emitted. With gas lighting the temperature could increase to about 29° Celsius in the winter garden, which was of course most inconvenient for the pleasure-seeking bourgeoisie of Amsterdam. For this reason electric arc lamps were introduced. This made a considerable improvement as the temperature was drastically reduced. On the other hand, the lighting was not very atmospheric, and so the management decided to place Edison light bulbs next to the arc lamps. Another disadvantage of gas lighting was that in crowded spaces such as cafés and theatres, gas used much oxygen and produced harmful substances. As a result many visitors suffered from headaches. There was also a fire hazard.21 With the development of the light bulb and electricity it was possible to light smaller rooms such as ordinary cafés, restaurants and shops without too many difficulties. In the Netherlands in the 1920s, electricity was present in all towns and cities.22 It replaced the paraffin lamp of the ordinary people in their homes and cafés.23 In the twentieth century electricity became so omnipresent in European cities and towns that light ceased to be an underlying technological factor in the further development of eating out as a mass-scale phenomenon. Neon light, neon signs and advertisements came to characterize the new urban mode of going out.

Eating Out and Food Technology The role of food technology in the development of eating out has so far received little attention from food historians, though its importance with regard to mass catering has recently been stressed once more. According to the president of Unilever Food Service, to work in the kitchen of a public place is basically a pain in the neck; it’s like working in a factory. Customers will not notice the difference between industrially and traditionally prepared foods. Industrial food has a nice taste and is much

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Adel P. den Hartog

Figure 16.1 The electrically lighted winter garden of the Hotel Krasnapolsky, Amsterdam. Source: De Natuur, 1886

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Technological Innovations and Eating Out cheaper for it saves on working hours and pay.24 ‘Ready-made’ food is all around . . . Several studies have rightly pointed out that modern inventions in food preservation such as canning were stimulated by military needs. A classic example was the invention of modern food preservation in glass by Nicolas Appert (1810), meant for the French army, and the successful follow-up in England of canning for the British Royal Navy.25 For early modern food technology the main emphasis was on food preservation and not so much on the aspects of user convenience. In the 1880s artificial refrigeration and freezing became technically and economically feasible via a technique based on cooling by evaporation and using ammonia compression. Frozen meat could from then on be imported in mass quantities into Europe from Australia and the Argentine. A difficulty, however, was the slow rate at which foodstuffs were frozen, which could lead to the formation of large ice crystals that ruptured the cellular structure of meat, destroying much of the texture, flavour and natural juices. Moreover, in England before 1914 no respectable workingclass housewife would go to a butcher’s shop selling only imported frozen beef and mutton.26 In the early nineteenth century, restaurants could get their food supplies directly from the market, or food sellers went directly with their merchandise to the kitchen. With the extensive growth of restaurants in the cities, wholesalers emerged who specialized in supplying hotels and restaurants with food and related products. Meanwhile a gradual process of change took place in the preparation of food at restaurant level. In the long run not all restaurants could manage a system based on freshly bought and selfprepared food. Costs of labour were rising. For the cheaper restaurants and other food outlets there began a process of separation between preparation in the kitchen and consumption in the same establishment. The divorce between production in the kitchen and consumption has been the basis for the development of a catering industry.27 At the end of the nineteenth century in the cheaper segment, owners of restaurants and hawkers were forced to utilize already prepared products such as tinned vegetables, soups, meatballs, frankfurters and other sausages. Vegetables in tins were used, particularly in the off-season when prices were high, but they were also more convenient as the perishable food product could be easily stored without the danger of spoilage. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Schoondergang cannery in Leiden produced vegetables for restaurants in tins containing from 1.5 up to 6 litres. Well-known preserved products were spinach, green peas, green beans and slicing beans.28 Clearly, these are not examples of gourmet types of vegetables. In 1929 a milk bar – 269 –

Adel P. den Hartog (melksalon) in the city of Groningen offered, in addition to dairy products, a simple hot meal including beef, green beans and pineapple, apparently taken from tins. Also striking was the offer of a roll with tinned sardines.29 Tinned green peas remained a popular ingredient in cheaper restaurants in the Netherlands far into the twentieth century. After World War I a new type of restaurant, the cafeteria, appeared in major cities of Europe. It was an American innovation of the 1890s, but in the United States it gained momentum in the 1920s by serving quick and cheap snacks and meals to the growing number of office workers in the cities. This type of restaurant was based on food counters, cleanliness, convenience, speed and a respectable atmosphere, so women could also enter without any difficulties. The running costs had to be as low as possible; this could be achieved by a system based on unskilled workers, easy-to-prepare foods, and in particular by utilizing canned and precooked foods to the fullest extent.30 The concept of the pre-war cafeteria was brought to perfection by the fast-food chains that appeared in the United States with the rise of McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King in the mid-1950s. These were based on a highly rationalized production system in their own factories of identical portions of food that could be frozen, refrigerated and shipped to any restaurant of the chain.31 The nature of this type of restaurant and even of the more traditional ones changed fundamentally: the kitchen was no longer a place for food production but increasingly a place for heating up pre-cooked foods. Owing to this system of mass production the foods concerned had to be basic, not requiring complex and varied preparation methods. As a result fast foods such as the pizza, hamburger and the taco that became so popular in Europe later in the 1990s were poor copies of their home-made ancestors.32 Likewise in Europe there was a need for rationalization in restaurants, in particular for the more popular ones, by taking advantage of modern food technology. The fast-food chain of Wimpy Bars that developed in England in 1954 is well known. In the Netherlands Wimpy appeared in 1963 and in1978 there were 21 Wimpy Bars in the country. In the early 1980s Wimpy disappeared rather quickly because of a serious conflict between the franchisers and the organization.33 However, a Dutch system had already been started on a large scale at the end of the 1920s by Heck, a firm whose cafeterias were inspired by British tea-rooms.34 The cafeterias and the related chips shops (friethuizen) introduced from Belgium in the 1930s were originally based on self-produced meals, fries, croquettes and other snacks. In the 1950s, however, pre-cooked foods started to become of increasing importance. From a number of artisan-type or traditional establishments some small-scale enterprises emerged producing – 270 –

Technological Innovations and Eating Out pre-cooked snacks for local cafeterias and other eating outlets.35 These foods could be transported fresh, in tins or frozen. An example is a firm in Zutphen in the Netherlands that in 1953 started to produce tinned frankfurters (knakworst) on a national scale for cafeterias and snack bars. Soon a large range of other products followed to serve the expanding cafeteria and food snack sector. In 1960 the Zutphen-based firm had twenty-two vans and became an important supplier of pre-cooked foods for catering establishments.36 Other firms specialized in the production of pre-fried chips or fries (known by the uncomplimentary term ‘factory fries’). According to a marketing study in the Netherlands, 40 per cent of cafeterias already used the pre-fried fries coming from specialized chip manufacturers. In 1995 the self-preparation of fries had disappeared and the market became dominated by one firm, Aviko, with a huge export to Germany and even to Belgium, the birthplace of fries.37 In the progress of eating out, the role of food technology became of increasing importance at two levels: in food-preparation techniques in the catering industry and in the logistics of transporting pre-cooked foods to the restaurants and other eating outlets. Already in the United States the Department of Agriculture noticed in 1975 that convenience foods had become of importance also for the higher segment of catering, hotels and restaurants. The explanations mentioned were the high costs of labour and energy, equipment, food ingredients, and the lack of culinary skills.38 Food technology was essential in the development of new pre-cooked products, in such a way that it could be served to the guests as if it was prepared from fresh ingredients in the kitchen of the restaurant. The spray-drying technique for making instant powders, originally developed for making milk powder, was applied to the manufacturing of soup mixes. The newer methods have virtually eliminated heat damage, off-colour, off-flavour and off-texture. The packaging industry has contributed likewise to convenience foods not only at the consumer level, but also at that of the catering industry for packaging and transport of pre-cooked foods as frozen, freeze-dried, dehydrated and also fresh.39 Similar developments occurred in Europe, but more slowly at first.

Eating Out: Fresh but Frozen Freshly prepared foods and meals were essential for most restaurants, but high costs, as already discussed, forced the cheaper restaurants to make increasing use of processed foods in tins or of dehydrated foods. This, however, was to the detriment of the concept of ‘fresh and tasty’. Frozen

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Adel P. den Hartog foods proved to be a better alternative. The problem, however, was how to keep costs down by making use of pre-cooked foods and maintaining at the same time a high-quality or gourmet type of food and meals. Compared to canning and dehydration techniques, freezing has less influence on texture and taste. In the 1930s, however, the freezing of pre-cooked meals was still very cumbersome. There was no easy and satisfactory method of thawing and heating a meal for consumption once it was frozen.40 Despite this serious handicap, freezing and cooling became the method for preservation of high-quality products for catering.41 From the 1930s onward various efforts were made to resolve these problems at two levels: in improvements in the freezing techniques, and in the techniques of thawing and heating to maintain a palatable fresh food or meal. It was in the United States that Clarence Birdseye developed a method of what he called ‘quick freezing’. In 1929 Birdseye was able to quick-freeze all sorts of food at a commercial level.42 In Europe Unilever took samples of Birdseye products for research in 1933. As a result the company set up the firm Frosted Foods in England, producing foods based on Birdseye’s quick-frozen method. By 1943, after an initially slow growth in popularity at the consumer level for frozen foods, Unilever virtually owned Birdseye, and in 1957 it acquired the Dutch firm Vita (later known as Iglo), which had been producing frozen foods for the Holland-America shipping line and some hotels since the 1930s.43 A breakthrough for mass catering and restaurants was the innovation of high-quality in-flight frozen meals. This started during World War II. The US government asked Pan American World Airways to establish an American presence in a number of remote countries, including the African colonies of Europe. As the airline felt that it could not secure safe food supplies in some areas in which it was to operate, it turned to Birdseye’s new method. At first raw frozen foods were taken, but soon the airline realized that it was more practical and convenient to ship quick-frozen meals and heat them in-flight. At the same time the US Navy became interested in serving hot meals for their flight crews. The WL Maxson Company produced the first in-flight dinners as well as the Maxson Whirlwind Oven. This convection oven was specially developed for reheating frozen foods. The firm became the Frigidinner Company and can be seen as the starting point of the entire American prepared frozen-food industry.44 In Europe Unilever, among others, produced prepared frozen foods and meals for planes, trains and snack bars from 1946 onwards.45 The delivery of frozen food products to restaurants and shops required in the long run new types of delivery vans, first with insulated storage space in the van and later vans with complete refrigeration.46 Refrigeration at household level – 272 –

Technological Innovations and Eating Out and later for transport vans became technically possible thanks to the invention of a small-sized electrical motor. The first practical electrical fridge for household use appeared in 1925 on the market in the United States and was introduced by the firm of Kelvinator in Detroit.47 The achievement of high-quality frozen foods and meals lies in the technique not only of freezing, but also of reheating into a palatable meal. Apart from the above-mentioned convection oven, a real breakthrough in the widespread acceptance of quick-frozen foods and meals was the invention of the microwave oven. In September 1940 at the request of the British government, Percy Spencer of the firm Raytheon in Massachusetts became responsible for the production of magnetrons for the microwave radar. Radar was a British invention. In 1945 after the war when the production of magnetrons stopped, it was Spencer who saw new applications, the construction of a magnetron for cooking food. The first microwave oven, the Radarange, appeared on the market in 1947 in the United States. It was the size of a fridge, needed water-cooling, and was as expensive as a car. It could only be used in restaurants, catering institutions and hospitals. From a commercial point of view the Radarange was not so successful. However, at the end of the 1960s the firm succeeded in making a smallsized and more practical microwave oven, such as we know today.48 Since then, the microwave oven has achieved success at both the restaurant and household level.

Producing Fresh Foods for Eating Out In the 1980s consumers became increasingly interested in fresh foods. Fresh is, however, a relative concept, and is perceived by the consumer at the moment of purchase and consumption.49 Serving restaurants and snack bars with fresh foods that hardly required any preparation time in the kitchen became the domain of two types of enterprise: the medium- and large-scale food service industry for the cheaper restaurants and other eateries, and the artisan-traiteur type of enterprise. This will be illustrated by two examples. In the 1980s the Italian pizza became a very popular food in Europe. Unilever developed two kinds of pizzas, one for consumption at home and one for snack bars and caterers. The technological question was how to prepare a pizza base, which is in fact a type of bread, so that it could be kept for a long time. It was sensitive to moulds and other micro-organisms as well as to drying out. Unilever used its own already-developed technology for pre-baked bread. This technology was based on the knowledge that in well-baked bread coming straight from the oven, all living organisms have been killed. The pizza – 273 –

Adel P. den Hartog was packaged and than pasteurized. A new mathematical calculus enabled the manufacturer to predict rapidly and precisely the microbiological properties of the packaging materials in relation to the keeping properties of the product. For snack bars and caterers two types appeared on the market: a pizza base together with separately packed fillings, and oversized bases only. The latter could be used by snack bar owners wanting to make their own fillings and selling pieces of pizza to their customers.50 Pre-baked bread is now, in most restaurants, an indispensable product for serving freshly baked bread at any time. On a more artisan scale and sometimes on a semi-industrial level, caterers started to supply the better restaurants with already-prepared meal components and meals. Because of increasing personal costs, lack of welltrained kitchen staff and lack of time, caterers became of great importance for the further development of eating out in quality restaurants. Alreadyprepared products included freshly made pasta, sauces, fillings, fonds, roasts, patisserie and dessert ice. All products were cooled or frozen and among the top segment of caterers no additives were used. Apart from improved freezing and cooling techniques, new food packaging started to make a contribution to improve the supply of fresh foods. In the 1990s the packaging industry developed so-called ‘modified atmosphere’ (MA) packaging. This has been of particular importance for packaging ready-to-use vegetables and fruit. In MA packaging the composition of the air and the foil is such that it delays the ripening and ageing processes and so safeguards the freshness of the food.51 Traditional packaging methods were no longer sufficient to provide fresh and ‘natural’ convenience foods for restaurants and the fast-food sector. Convenience for the kitchen also meant that the chef could no longer control food safety, as he or she became increasingly dependent on the food industry and caterers. Already in 1961 the senior nutrition adviser to the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture had pointed out the possible dangers to the food industry of its use of food additives such as colorants, emulsifiers, anti oxidants, etc. and problems of polluted machines. In this context he did not touch the issue of hygiene.52 Needless to say, well-known firms always tried to keep health hazards for their customers at a minimum level, but there was no international recognized system. The development of a food safety management system, what is now known as the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP), can be traced back at least to 1972. In 1993 the HACCP was adopted by the European Union, which meant that the HACCP system is now part of the national legislation of all member states.53 The food service industry is well aware of the potential risks to their customers, the restaurants and fast-food outlets. – 274 –

Technological Innovations and Eating Out

Concluding Remarks Food technology has been closely associated with the development of eating out as a mass phenomenon. The demand for food at reasonable prices in restaurants, snack bars and other eating outlets has resulted in a process of separation in the restaurant as a place of production and consumption. It has given rise to the development of a catering industry and food service, supported by technological innovations. What has been the effect on the quality of eating out from the gastronomic point of view? The role of the top segment of restaurants with its artisanal way of cooking has not only satisfied the needs of gourmet-type consumers, but has also served as a reference point for restaurants and the food service industry, which have made efforts to marry convenience as closely as possible with a fresh, high-quality product. Generally speaking this has not applied to so-called ‘fast foods’, which are highly dependent on food technology for mass production. These foods have become immensely popular, but have aroused feelings of horror among food purists. As a reaction to this in 1989 the Slow Food movement emerged. Slow Food is the opposite of fast food and is an international association with the aim of educating good taste and promoting food culture. It consists of producers and consumers, with a head office in Piedmont, northern Italy. Increasingly eating out also meant that nutritional and health dimensions needed to be taken in consideration. Fast foods – and also sumptuous gastronomy - were generally at odds with a prudent and healthy nutrition.54 This chapter is an introduction to the wide complexity of the technological basis of eating out. A further study of specialized journals and magazines in the field of food technology and those of the restaurant sector will give more empirical data and insight. In most kitchens of restaurants and in nearly all fast food outlets, convenience has become an integral part of the system. In fact, in the Netherlands it has been estimated that only 5 per cent of the better-quality restaurants can still produce their meals entirely in an artisanal way.55 However, the kitchen chef has not been unseated. In the United States, the cradle of modern food technology and eating out, it was noted at the end of the 1980s that, despite rapid technological changes, the human touch of the chef in the kitchen and of table service remained of crucial significance.56 The quality of the meals served will not fully depend on the food service industry only, but also on the chef’s skills to make meals to look and taste as if they were fully selfprepared.

– 275 –

Adel P. den Hartog

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Warde and Martens, 2000, 1–16; Murcott, 1997, 32–49. Le François et al., 1996, 826. CBS, The Hague, 1979, 2000. Ahold Quartly Results, 2001. Wood, 1992. Blühm and Lippincott, 2000, 26–7. Berkers, 1993a, 97–8. Stokroos, 2001, 69–72. Hageman, 1842, 77. Berkers, 1993a, 103–5. Dil and Homburg, 1993, 120. Olsen, 1991, 64–5, 77. Blühm and Lippincott, 2000, 212. Blühm, 2000. Olsen, 1991, 272–3. Berkers, 1993b, 179. Huysmans, [1886–7] 2001, 43–4. Dil and Homburg, 1993, 133. Weber, 1993. Stokroos, 2001, 121. Berkers, 1993b, 185–7. Hesselmans, 1993, 156–7. Berkers, 1993b, 188; see also Schivelbusch, 1988, on the topic of artificial light in general. 24. ‘Moving unsentimental chefs from pain to gain’, Financial Times, July 2001, 14. 25. Heer, 1966; Morris, 1958. 26. Shephard, 2000, 289–90, 297–8. 27. Glew, 1973, 19–31. 28. Kroef, 1992, 18–19. 29. Boiten, 1986, 75. 30. Levenstein, 1988, 186, 187–8. 31. Schlosser, 2001. 32. Ritzer, 1996, 7–8. 33. Zuiderveld, 1995, 69–70. 34. Zuiderveld, 1995, 25–8. 35. Albert de la Bruhéze, 2000, 363–4. 36. Zuiderveld, 1995, 61–2. 37. Zuiderveld, 1995, 77–9. – 276 –

Technological Innovations and Eating Out 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

Convenience Foods for the Hotel, 1976. Convenience Foods for the Hotel, 1976, 1–3. Rogers, 1969, 1–3. Buiter, 2000, 339–51. Shephard, 2000, 301–5; Roberts, 1973, 108. Wilson, 1968, 184–5, 225. Livingston, 1990, 56. Buiter, 2000, 348. Teuteberg, 1991, 152. De Haan, 1977, 20–1. Grauls, 1993, 70. Schogt and Beek, 1985, 122–5. The analysis is based on a study carried out by a working group of food technologists, marketing specialists and nutritionists under the auspices of the STT (Future of Technology) foundation, the Netherlands. Unilever Research Laboratorium, 1986, 33, 44–7. Peppelenbos, 1997. Dols, 1961. Hoogland et al., 1998, 145. Kouwenhoven and van der Veer, 1990; van der Heide, 2001; Lee, 1978. Hentzepeter, 2000. Lampi et al., 1990, 68–9.

References Ahold Quarterly Results (2001), Zaandam, 9 March. Albert de la Bruhéze, A. (2000), ‘Snacks’, in J. Schot, H. W. Lintsen, A. Rip and A. Albert de la Bruhéze (eds), Techniek in Nederland in de twintigste eeuw, vol. 3: Landbouw en Voeding, Zutphen: Walburg Press, 353–67. Berkers, E. (1993a), ‘Een nieuw licht’, in H. W. Lintsen (ed.), Techniek in Nederland: De wording van een moderne samenleving 1800–1900, vol. 3, Zutphen: Walburg Press, 91–105. Berkers, E. (1993b), ‘De negentiende eeuw verlicht’, in H. W. Lintsen (ed.), Techniek in Nederland: De wording van een moderne samenleving 1800–1900, vol. 3, Zutphen: Walburg Press, 173–88. Blühm, A. (2000), ‘Bei der Laterne’, Kunst Schrift, 44/5: 14–21. Blühm, A., and Lippincott, L. (2000), Licht! Het industriële tijdperk 1750–1900, kunst & wetenschap, technologie & samenleving, Zwolle: Waanders. – 277 –

Adel P. den Hartog Boiten, L. (1986), Eten om te leven en leven om te eten: Groningers aan tafel sinds de middeleeuwen, Groningen: Culinaire Vakschool en Groninger Museum. Buiter, H. (2000), ‘Koelen en vriezen’, in J. Schot, H. W. Lintsen, A. Rip and A. Albert de la Bruhéze (eds), Techniek in Nederland in de twintigste eeuw, vol. 3. Landbouw en Voeding, Zutphen: Walburg Press, 339–51. CBS (1979), Tachtig jaar statistiek in tijdreeksen, The Hague: CBS. CBS (2000), Statistisch jaarboek 2000, The Hague: CBS. Convenience Foods for the Hotel, Restaurant, and the Institutional Market: The Processor’s View (1976), Washington, US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Economics Report no. 344. De Haan, D. (1977), Antieke huishoudelijke apparaten, Baarn: Moussault. Dil, G., and Homburg, E. (1993), ‘Gas’, in H. W. Lintsen (ed.), Techniek in Nederland: De wording van een moderne samenleving 1800–1900, vol. 3, Zutphen: Walburg Press, 107–33. Dols, M. J. L. (1961),‘Gevaren voor de mens verbonden aan enkele ontwikkelingen in de voedingsmiddelenindustrie’, Annalen van het Thijmgenootschap, 49/1, 16–21. Grauls, M. (1993), Uitvinders van het dagelijks leven, Antwerp: Coda. Glew, G. (1973), Cook/Freeze Catering: An Introduction to its Technology, London. Hageman, H. H. (1842), Nederlanders door Nederlanders geschetst, Amsterdam: Laarman. Heer, J.(1966), World Events 1866–1966: The First Hundred Years of Nestlé, Vevey: Rivaz. Heide, R. F. van der (2001), ‘Voedingsbeleid: de consument tussen overheid en bedrijfsleven’, in A. P. den Hartog (ed.), De voeding van Nederland in de twintigste eeuw, Wageningen: Wageningen Press, 145– 58. Hentzepeter, V. (2000), ‘Convenience is niet meer uit te bannen’, Food Management, 18/4: 10–1. Hesselmans, A. N. (1993), ‘Elektriciteit’, in H. W. Lintsen, (ed.), Techniek in Nederland: De wording van een moderne samenleving 1800–1900, vol. 3, Zutphen: Walburg Press, 135–61. Hoogland, J. P., Jellema, A., and Jongen, W. M. F. (1998), ‘Quality assurance systems’, in W. M. F. Jongen and M. T. G. Meulenberg (eds), Innovation of Food Production Systems. Product Quality and Consumer Acceptance, Wageningen, 139–58. Huysmans, J.-K. (2001). In Holland (‘En Hollande’, La Revue Illustrée, 15 Dec. 1886, 15 Jan. 1887), Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep. – 278 –

Technological Innovations and Eating Out Kouwenhoven, T., and Veer van der, O. (1990) ‘Snacks, een nieuwe eetcultuur’, Voeding, 51: 10–13. Kroef, M. (1992), ‘Conservenfabriek Schoondergang’, in De kunst van het bewaren: Industrieel erfgoed in Leiden, Leiden: Stichting Industrieel Erfgoed Leiden, 18–24. Lampi, R. A, Pickard, D. W, Decareau, R. V, and Smith, D. P. (1990), ‘Perspectives and thought on food service equipment’, Food Technology, July: 60–9. Le François, P., Calamassi-Tran, G., Hébel, P., Renault, C., Lebreton, S., and Volatier, J. L. (1996), ‘Food and nutrient intake outside the home of 629 French people of 15 years and over’, European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 50: 826–31. Lee, P. R. (1978), ‘Nutrition policy from neglect and uncertainty to debate and action’, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 73: 581–8. Levenstein, H. (1988), Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet, New York: Oxford University Press. Livingston, G. E. (1990), ‘Foodservice: older than Methuselah’, Food Technology, July: 54–9. Morris, T. N. (1958), ‘Management and preservation of food’, in C. Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and T. I. Williams (eds), A History of Technology, vol. 5, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 26–52. Murcott, A. (1997), ‘Family meals – a thing of the past?’ in P. Caplan (ed.), Food, Health and Identity, London: Routledge, 32–49. Olsen, D. (1991), De stad als kunstwerk, Amsterdam: Agon. Peppelenbos, H. W. (1997), ‘Betere verpakkingen voor groente en fruit’, Eyes on Food, 13: 60–1. Ritzer, G. (1996), ‘Fast food restaurants (and other means of consumption): a postmodern perspective’, Sociale Wetenschappen, 39/4: 3–16. Roberts, R. (1973). The classic slum. Salford life in the first quarter of the century, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rogers, J. L. (1969), Production of Pre-cooked Frozen Foods for Mass Catering, London: Food Trade Press. Schivelbusch, W. (1988), Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century, Leamington Spa: Berg. Schlosser, E. (2001), Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Schogt, J. C. M., and Beek, W. J. (eds) (1985), De toekomst van onze voedingsmiddelenindustrie, Amsterdam: Elsevier. Shephard, S. (2000), Pickled, Potted and Canned: The Story of Food Preserving, London: Headline. Stokroos, M. (2001), Verwarmen en verlichten in de negentiende eeuw, Zutphen: Walburg Press. – 279 –

Adel P. den Hartog Teuteberg, H.-J. (1991), ‘Zur geschichte der Kühlkost und des Tiefgefrierens’, Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte, 36: 139–55. Unilever Research Laboratorium (1986), Unilever researchprijs 1986, Vlaardingen: Research Laboratorium. Warde, A., and Martens, L. (2000), Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption and Pleasure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, E. (1993), France, fin de siècle, Amsterdam. Wilson, C. (1968), Unilever in de tweede industriële revolutie 1945–1965, The Hague: Nÿhoff. Wood, R. C. (1992), ‘Dining out in the urban complex’, British Food Journal, 94: 3–5. Zuiderveld, U. (1995), De snelle hap. De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse cafetaria en fastfoodsector, Doetinchem: Misset.

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–17– The Rising Popularity of Dining Out in German Restaurants in the Aftermath of Modern Urbanization Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg

In the year 2000, 76 per cent of the German population indulged in some kind of eating out. The total expenses for all persons older than fifteen years amounted to DM 160.1 billion or DM 2,164 per head.1 The catering trade, with 1 million employees, had a turnover of DM 60 billion. On average, everybody went out to dine three times a week, spending in restaurants, cafés and snack bars altogether nearly DM 42, or DM 13 per meal. The midday meal was taken outside the home in 35.8 per cent of cases, and breakfast in 24.2 per cent of cases (the latter being a new trend). Restaurants of all kinds were visited by 32.1 percent of all consumers, who spent 51.8 per cent of their total eating-out expenditure there. Small snack bars, including those in bakeries, butchers’ shops and other foodstuff outlets, were the preferred choice of 37.9 per cent, who spent 20.6 per cent of their eating-out budget there (76.9 per cent of this related to take-away products). The scale of these figures raises questions. What do we really know about dining out in the past, and where do these huge quantities and sums come from? Research has been done, but with rather unsatisfactory results.2 This chapter investigates the question of how the German catering trade developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under the collective term ‘restaurant’, Germans at present understand several kinds of places providing meals outside the home. The expression was borrowed after 1850 from the French and referred at first only to the top level of gastronomy. The older names were Wirtshaus, Taberne or Schenke (beer house or wine tavern) and Gasthaus or Gasthof (inn), which were all replaced later on by the legal category Gastwirtschaft and Gaststätte. The German restaurant today is only one part of the greater catering and hotel trade. Actually, all the different kinds of gastronomy had the same job – selling ready-made eatables and drinks to their guests. In

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Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg ordinary daily language the expressions ‘restaurant’ and Gaststätte now dominate, and they are used synonymously.

Forerunners and the First Modern Restaurants The modern restaurant in Central Europe has early roots.3 In ancient Roman towns in southern and western Germany there were many socalled tabernas in which food and drink were sold. These functions were retained until the early Middle Ages. After the conversion to Christianity, the larger towns and bishoprics were ordered to arrange Gastung (hospitality) for the sovereign or his messengers, and to establish, like the monasteries, a hospitium (Hospiz, Hospital, Spital) for pilgrims, the ill and poor persons on the move. Since the twelfth century, as an outcome of increasing long-distance travel in all German towns, there were beer houses, wine taverns and inns, besides Herbergen (lodgings). The Gastwirt (innkeeper) now had to be paid for his legal duty to host other persons. He received some privileges from the town authorities, but had to pay duties for the concession. The beer, wine, food and prices were strictly controlled to avoid adulteration and cheating. Gambling, swearing and blasphemy, as well as excessive drinking, were generally forbidden; although, of course, the authorities often had to intervene in cases of drunkenness and fighting. For many centuries there was no clear division between common lodgings, beer houses, taverns or inns, on the one hand, and private, official and business premises, on the other. The old right of hospitality, based on the principle of mutuality, endured among aristocrats, clergymen, students and patrician merchant families, who felt obliged to take in guests of the same social rank and profession in their castles, colleges and merchant halls. The urban trades also had common rooms for drinking and settling their affairs (Trinkstuben), and lodgings for travelling journeymen (Gesellenherbergen). These ways of providing hospitality for travellers were a cross between hospitality and the catering trade. Many of these old inns, beer houses, wine taverns and lodgings were still in existence around 1850.4 The decisive rise of the modern restaurant began in the age of the French Revolution, when many cooks engaged with households of the nobility lost their position and offered their cooking skill to a broader public.5 It is estimated that the number of Parisian restaurants increased between 1789 and 1820 from 30 to 3,000. Favoured cooks went abroad, including to the neighbouring German states. In this way the French grande cuisine, successor to the older haute cuisine, was internationally

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The Rising Popularity of Dining Out in Germany reinforced and the idea of the modern restaurant transmitted from France to Central Europe.6 It is no wonder that some of the first German restaurateurs were French cooks. This new form of eating out was promoted by the literature of the so-called gastrosophes, who initiated the first science of culinary culture and tried to improve the quality of bourgeois cuisine.7 In Germany, as in France, however, it took nearly a generation for the restaurant to prevail as a new form of gastronomy.

The Increase in Numbers of Hotels, Restaurants, Inns and Taverns, and Population Growth Urban trade registers demonstrate the spread of the German restaurant in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main and Munich between 1840 and 1930.8 These towns have been chosen for investigation because they had a similarly increasing number of inhabitants and of foreign visitors. New, exclusive hotels were built, and an increase in visitors to restaurants and public houses of all sorts was registered. The data show a slow increase up to the 1870s, followed by accelerating growth, with a peak in the number of restaurants between 1910 and 1915. This strong growth fell again during World War I and was then partly compensated for in the 1920s.9 Though the figures are not complete for the first period, it is clear that the real spread of the German restaurant did not begin before the 1870s. This turn of events was linked to the fact that all older inns, public houses, taverns and lodgings were affected by many different local regulations reflecting the regulations of medieval corporations. With the introduction of the first national liberal Trade Law in 1869/71, the whole catering trade came under uniform legislation, and stipulations regarding running a gastronomic business of any kind (including the small liquor and spirit trade) became very lax. The number of restaurants, inns, taverns and public houses increased between 1869 and 1877 in Württemberg by 44 per cent, in Bavaria by 36 per cent, in Prussia by 31 per cent and in Badensia by 28 per cent.10 The national statistics indicate that the growth in the numbers of restaurants, inns and pubs around 1900 was much faster than the general population growth (see Table 17.1). As demonstrated by an inquiry carried out in 261 German boroughs in 1898, it was impossible to differentiate between the several kinds of outlets of the catering trade. These covered the metropolitan hotel-restaurant as well as the confectioner’s shop with a small coffee bar, big ‘beer palaces’ with hundreds of seats and small traders selling only hot sausages. – 283 –

Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg Table 17.1 The rise of the German catering trade in comparison with population growth, 1895–1907 (per cent) Year

Population

Catering trade

13.7 38.0

37.6 94.4

1882–1895 1882–1907 Source: Eiben, 1910, 2–4

Industrial towns also had, besides the small licensed liquor shops, numerous unlicensed and hidden liquor shops instead of pubs and restaurants. Other statistics also indicated that the catering trade involving one owner or tenant decreased between 1882 and 1925, while those with up to five owners or tenants increased rapidly. This shows the large concentration process that was similar to that going on in other trades during this period. Clearly, World War I and the succeeding years up to the great monetary crisis of 1923 caused a contraction of the whole hotel and catering trade.11 In comparison with other trades, the catering industry gained in importance. In 1882 the catering trades reached the sixth rank, and in 1907 the third rank in terms of the number of firms and employees. In 1927 restaurants and pubs had a turnover of RM 5.25 billion, outpacing the butchers with RM 4.5 billion and the bakeries with RM 2.5 billion.12

The Restaurant as a Business The modern restaurant differed from the traditional inn in that the guests no longer sat together at a single table (table d’hôte), eating a common menu at a fixed time and at the same price. In a modern restaurant, everybody had a separate table and could choose from the dishes on a menu card in accordance with desire or buying power. This implied that the restaurateur had to keep at hand a larger quantity of food, and have better kitchen equipment and trained kitchen personnel. The setting-up of the daily or weekly menu plan, the purchase of the raw materials at the market, or, better, through specialist middlemen, the storing of food in time and finally the presentation as well as the supervision of the whole meal all meant that a professional cook was required.13 A larger restaurant kitchen around 1900 was organized as shown in Table 17.2. In 1913, in order to provide food prepared by 200 cooks for 10,000 daily patrons, the renowned Berlin restaurant Kempinski had to keep in stock, every day, the following: 1,250 kg meat, 400 kg fish, 150 kg lobsters, 100 kg caviar, 30,000 crayfish, 20,000 oysters and 18,000 fresh – 284 –

The Rising Popularity of Dining Out in Germany Table 17.2 Division of labour: functions of a restaurant around 1900 Designation

Duties

Maître de cuisine (Chefkoch)

Setting the menu, purchase of raw goods, controlling the other cooks

Garde-manger

Carving of meat and fish

Rôtisseur

Preparation of roasting

Saucier

Preparation of sauces and ragouts, tasting of the menus

Entremetier

Preparation of soups and vegetables

Pâtissier

Responsible for desserts (ice cream, pastry, confectionery)

Source: Glücksmann, 1917, 66

rolls.14 Instead of the old turnspit above the open fire there was an electric ‘roasting jack’ which could roast a large number of chickens and joints of mutton at the same time. The oysters, arriving fresh twice a day from the central market-hall, were opened mechanically. Moreover, 2,000 pheasants came in during the season shortly after shooting. In the cellars of this luxurious super-restaurant thousands of bottles of wine were stored. The history of Kempinski is relevant. The German-Jewish Kempinski family started in 1872 with a tiny trade selling fine Hungarian wines. In Berthold Kempinski’s dark cellar room between the wine casks, his wife served only sandwiches and boiled eggs preserved with salt water and vinegar in a glass jar. This trade developed so successfully that in 1889 a large house around the corner could be purchased. It was extended into a luxurious four-storey restaurant. After the German Emperor had visited it and appointed Berthold Kempinski to be a Royal Prussian Councillor of Commerce, this locality became one of the meeting-points of Berlin high society, as well as of tourists. Guests could choose here among high-priced table delights with eight courses and cheap dishes for half the price, for instance, fried potatoes with beefsteak and apple compote for 2 German Marks. The processing of large quantities of food required a change from traditional kitchen techniques.15 The old coal kitchen-stove became outmoded and after the 1880s restaurant owners turned to the gas range and after 1900 to the electric cooker. In addition, industry produced new pots and pans, the isolated standing large cooking vessel, the electric vegetable steam-cooker and the first bulk dishwasher.16 From 1900 on, restaurants also installed cold-storage rooms and were pioneers in the application of artificial cooling and freezing techniques. Together with the – 285 –

Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg storage of tinned food, it became much easier to prepare many dishes quickly at the same time.

The Differentiation of Dishes in the Light of Menu Cards Examination of seventy-one menu cards from Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main and Munich shows that up to 1900 an average of eight courses were provided by restaurants. This number was reduced to four or five dishes in the 1920s.17 A closer look at the contents shows that in the late nineteenth century the meals in large restaurants were prepared rather expensively with many international elements. French cuisine still had the greatest influence, but the model was no longer Marie-Antonin Carême’s classic L’art de la cuisine française au XIXe siècle, but the illustrated and voluminous cookery book La cuisine classique, first published in 1856, by Urbaine Dubois and Émile Bernard, both favourite cooks of the Prussian King and later German Emperor Wilhelm I.18 Both authors related not so much to the classic grande cuisine, but to the cuisine bourgeoise. Both were royal cooks, who had already served as maîtres de cuisine at several courts in Europe, but they did not promise ‘a king’s revels’ and considered meals more than just ‘buildings of food’. They underlined the new trend toward a simpler presentation of the dishes, but with much higher quality in terms of taste. The many decorations of Carême’s table were omitted. Another ‘king of the cooks’ was Georges-Auguste Escoffier, who went further in this direction, and positively replaced the service à la française by the service à la russe. This meant that the dishes were no longer presented simultaneously on the sideboard, but were carried one after the other from the kitchen to the table to keep them warm.19 Very heavy meals were perceived as out of date, especially after World War I. Manuals for the gastronomic trade now gave hints on how to use the new kitchen techniques and the new Taylorist methods as a form of kitchen rationalization. The menu cards hold fast to a certain number of well-tested and successful French and English recipes. However, from the 1890s an effort was made to translate foreign culinary terminology into German. In the waiters’ experience, a growing number of guests had problems in understanding the menu card. Translations of the card into German likewise pointed to the rising popularity of the German restaurant.20 M. C. Banzer, who was the director of the International Association of Cooks and its ‘Museum for Cookery Art’ in Frankfurt am Main, published many menu cards in 1922, including those of smaller restaurants.21 It is striking that they contain not only dishes from a particular region, but also dishes and

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The Rising Popularity of Dining Out in Germany ingredients that evoke the grande cuisine. Leading restaurants did not dispense with oysters, caviar or lobsters, and continued to rely on the classic French order of the menu.

New Ideas for Presentation and Decoration of the Meals Right from the beginning, restaurants tried to endow meals with a special aesthetic character, by means of particular presentation and decoration. This new trend for luxury extended from the architecture and fitting out of the dining hall to costly tableware, silver cutlery and other extravagant table decorations. All manuals and periodicals of gastronomy, such as the illustrated monthly Kochkunst and Tafelwesen (‘Art of Cookery and Table Matters’), edited by the International Association of Cooks, regularly published suggestions for the manner of presenting menus.22 For instance, the centrepiece, which had always played a role at banquets since the Renaissance, lost its central decorative function. Instead of sugar sculptures, confectioners now shaped small statues, chiselled ice bars for caviar or baked large decorated pyramid cakes as the central piece on the table. The spread of the ‘cold buffet’ after 1900, which allowed patrons to serve themselves, was especially suitable for the invention of new decorations.23

Restaurant Patrons The growth of restaurants cannot be separated from the growth of German towns in the late nineteenth century. There was increasing mobility, both nationally and internationally, as can be seen from the statistics in the German Centre of Foreign Traffic. The new railway network facilitated travel for business, holiday and amusement to spa towns and summer resorts, social visits and participation in conferences and various meetings. Just after 1850, the first big hotels were established in Bremen (Hillmann’s Hotel), Heidelberg (Europäischer Hof) and Stuttgart (Marquardt’s Hotel). After the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, more such hotel palaces were built in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and other towns, mostly next to central railway stations. The Kaiserhof (1874) and the Hotel Adlon (1909) in Berlin, the Frankfurter Hof (1876) in Frankfurt am Main, the Hotel Atlantic in Hamburg, the Breidenbacher Hof in Duesseldorf and the Hotel Brenner in Baden-Baden gave an architectural stamp to the appearance of these towns and became centres of a new metropolitan social life. Of the situation in Berlin in the 1920s, a popular writer wrote that ‘thirty thousand foreigners want to sleep daily in thirty thousand beds and to sit – 287 –

Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg on thirty thousand chairs to dine’.24 In Germany in 1925 there were 44,968 hotels and inns with a restaurant, besides 40,505 small boarding houses which served only breakfast.25 Germany became increasingly a land of tourists. In 1932 14.9 million guests with 46.7 million overnight stays were counted. As the trade statistics in the directories from Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main and Munich demonstrate, the total number of gastronomic firms increased between 1840 and 1930 more than the number offering accommodation only. This helps to demonstrate that the mass of the smaller restaurants, which cannot be separated from beer houses and wine taverns, were the primary outlets for the rising demand of the native population for eating and drinking facilities outside their homes.

The Restaurant as a Centre of Social Communication and Representation Why did the modern restaurant, as a rather young branch of the economy, attract so many visitors in so few decades? The newly erected hotel palaces, like the emerging department stores, served as symbols of a new metropolitan culture. Here, for the very first time, patrons saw electric bulbs and elevators, central steam heating, running water and English water closets. The restaurant, supported by powerful investment companies, always aimed at the highest possible degree of luxury. Fierce competition continually forced the large metropolitan restaurants to adopt the latest standards of technique and architecture. Photographs of around 1900 show how luxurious dining halls looked.26 It is no wonder that journalists in illustrated papers often described these as new ‘temples of gluttony’.27 The restaurant in the big city was not only a place of social communication, as was the old beer house and wine tavern, but it also became a medium of self-presentation and a kind of vanity fair, where the patrons could ‘see and be seen’. At the five o’clock tea (Fünfuhrtee), dancing to a Hungarian gypsy band became fashionable. Dinner in the evening before a visit to the theatre, music hall or cabaret became part and parcel of a single cultural experience. Modern glamorous nightlife and the rise of the restaurant developed in parallel. It was no accident that exclusive restaurants and expensive wine taverns were located next to places of metropolitan entertainment. Special restaurant guides published by the tourist bureaux showed visitors how to find an eating place in line with their budget and wishes. Since the big towns had mass events and a huge number of tourists nearly – 288 –

The Rising Popularity of Dining Out in Germany every day, it was often difficult to get a seat in a famous restaurant. Selfservice restaurants (Automatenrestaurants), small snack bars and beer halls without chairs (Stehbierhallen) aimed at the common people with low incomes. In their numerous small pubs in Berlin the Aschinger Brothers offered only one dish – a plate of pea soup with one small sausage, one glass of beer and additional rolls free. Their principle was: ‘Step in fast and get out fast!’ This kind of restaurant marked the beginning of the fast-food restaurant that was named Schnell-Imbiss (‘quick bite’).28 Even after World War I the popularity of the restaurants did not fade. Eating out was a welcome safety valve for the frustrated ‘thirst for pleasure’, as one gastronomic expert noted.29

Social and Economic Barriers and the Cultural Critique In principle, all social classes could visit a fancy restaurant in full anonymity, but those with lower incomes could of course not afford to do so. A mixture of all classes or a democratization of (high) food culture did not take place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The broad mass of the German population, especially agrarian families and households of urban workers, including the lower middle classes (Mittelstand), with little education and no knowledge of elitist rules and norms, were very shy about entering a luxurious restaurant with waiters inside wearing black tailcoats. Level of income, dress, table manners and the menu card with French and English gourmet expressions all set up strong barriers against entrance. Besides, it was impossible for a woman to visit a restaurant without a male companion, because this would not be ‘ladylike’. This was a continuation of the old custom that eating and drinking outside the home for a single woman was most ‘dishonourable’. Only the cafés were an exception here, because they had no licence for alcoholic beverages and closed earlier in the evening. Every guest was welcomed here, and an English writer in his book about Germany praised especially the friendly family atmosphere (Gemütlichkeit) in coffee-houses. An inquiry by the National Statistical Board in 1927/8 into the expenditure of households of workers, clerks and civil servants shows that before 1914 2.5 per cent and after 1918 0.9 per cent of total income was spent on eating out.30 Such very low proportions can also be recorded from other sources.31 One reason was the traditional communal meal system of the family. It was indeed a general custom in rural areas that all meals, including those for feasts, were prepared by the peasant woman, assisted by her daughters, servants and female neighbours. In the village inn (Dorfkrug), only men sat and drank, though at different tables, strictly separated by – 289 –

Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg social rank. A little room at the rear (Herrenstube) was reserved for the local dignitaries (parson, mayor, teacher, physician, landlord’s steward, etc.) On Sundays and other festival days, when there was dancing, skittles, a parish fair or competitive shooting by the local rifle battalion, it was common to serve substantial local dishes for everybody at a fixed price. Then the whole family with their servants squatted close together on benches, often eating from common bowls as they did at home.32 The plain country people, who were not used to handling a fork and knife correctly, did not consider visiting an urban restaurant, because they were not sure how to behave there. Daughters of peasants, who had been in the service of a hotel, a restaurant or an urban household, or who had attended the cookery course of a house-keeping school, helped to spread the urban cuisine to the countryside. However, urban workers, often of country origin, continued the tradition of their old rural beer houses in the town, and visited only similar small public houses, taverns and liquor shops. They remained far from casinos, with their club-like character, and other restaurants of the ‘fine lords’, where noble landlords were being increasingly replaced by urban parvenus. It is remarkable that public opinion criticized social inequality less than growing individualism. Eating out was perceived as a danger to the old family community as the nucleus of society and state. The restaurant was seen as a symbol of the ‘giant town’, and as operating according to soulless principles that alienated humankind from ‘natural places’. Hostility to the big town and the idealization of rural life became another popular trend at the time and a basis for alternative life-reform movements that propagated anti-alcoholism, vegetarianism, sports, nudism and clothing reforms. Restaurant owners and cooks ignored such ideas, of course. No attention was paid to Max Rubner, a leading Berlin professor of nutrition physiology, who had calculated that a Berlin consumer in 1908 received over five times more calories per German Mark in a public soup kitchen than in a restaurant (see Table 17.3).33 Table 17.3 The physiological value of a normal midday meal in a restaurant compared with other forms of eating out in Berlin in 1908 Eating Place

Calories

Protein in g

Restaurant Coaching inn Workers’ pub Soup kitchen

775 1,862 1,919 3,991

83 72 78 108

Source: Rubner, 1930, 60

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The Rising Popularity of Dining Out in Germany

Final Remarks The German restaurant has roots reaching far back to ancient Roman times and the Middle Ages, yet the ‘modern’ restaurant did not emerge before the 1870s as an autonomous branch of gastronomy being a product of urban growth, regional and social mobility and the transition to a free market economy. French culinary art influenced the German states during the nineteenth century more or less in the form of the grande cuisine, as for other parts of Europe. This dominating position was challenged by the emerging cuisine bourgeoise. From this the restaurant was derived, operating with integrating functions, and through which elements of the classic art of French cookery passed into the German kitchen. The grande cuisine, reserved for small aristocratic circles before 1789, succeeded in this way in forcing a great breakthrough. Distinguished hotels and restaurants not only offered French dishes, but also had menu cards in French. This French influence declined from the 1890s, when the fashion for dining out and the numbers of restaurant patrons were increasing. Beside their widening range of international dishes, German restaurants always offered regional dishes, which were difficult to distinguish from each other. Certainly there was a group of recipes known all over Germany, but there was no such thing as a German national cuisine. Restaurants developed into a fast-growing branch of the economy that outstripped the traditional food trades within a few decades, shaped the face of the large towns with their modern architecture and techniques, and gave a feeling of a new metropolitan lifestyle. Like all structural innovations, this revolution in culinary culture has two aspects. On the one hand, the relatively high expense of dining out greatly exceeded physiological needs and was, considering the deficiencies of people’s nutrition, a kind of quantitative ‘waste’, serving only the demand for luxury of the tiny well-to-do upper-class sector. But, on the other hand, the new culinary spending produced qualitative food improvements with many consequences in other spheres of life. The metropolitan restaurant, as one symbol of an autonomous civic urban culture, opened the possibility of the most important innovation: that a patron could more or less decide by himself what, where and with whom he liked to eat – if he had the means. Ancient barriers against public dining out were gradually abolished, and the development of modern forms of mass consumption were encouraged. Where large parts of the ‘working classes’ and especially the rural population remained ‘shy’ of participating in this urban gourmet luxury up to the 1930s, the reason was not only economic inequality, but also totally different patterns of table manners, education and leisure habits. – 291 –

Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg The motives for visiting a distinguished restaurant remained from a certain viewpoint astonishingly similar to the stay in an old inn, wine tavern or rural beer house. Eating and drinking provided in both cases for physical satisfaction and social communication and could satisfy the desire for reputation and power, as well as the thirst for pleasure and the erotic. The traditional aspects of tasting, seeing, feeling and hearing were newly shaped by restaurant meals. Excesses in eating and especially in alcohol drinking, often severely criticized by health reformers around 1900, were not created by the catering trade or the processes of urbanization and industrialization alone. Such forms of exuberant enjoyment had often been seen in the past. What was really innovative was the fact that the restaurant, in a very close symbiosis with theatres and modern leisure life, made ‘going out’ a fashionable phenomenon. The large number of the smaller-scale catering trades always limped behind this trend, but rendered it much more popular.

Notes 1. See for the following figures Centrale Marketing-Organisation der Deutschen Agrarwirtschaft-CMA, Pressedienst 12, 2001, 2–3; Zentrale Markt- und Preisberichtsstelle für Erzeugnisse der Land-, Forst- und Ernährungswirtschaft -ZMP, Bonn, 2001. 2. Special studies in modern German restaurant history are Borchardt, 1901; Bauer, 1920; Potthoff and Kossenhaschen, 1932; Rauers, 1942; Hoffmann, 1954; Benker, 1974; Maurer, 1981; Jenn, 1993. 3. Hoyer, 1910; Kachel, 1924; Grimm, 1960; Peyer, 1987; Kollmer and Rohr, 2000. 4. There are many descriptions of old inns, ale houses, wine taverns and lodging houses in the travel literature and memoirs, see Rauers, 1942, vol. 1. 5. The French word restaurant, the present participle of the word restaurer (restore, strengthen), meant in the beginning only to supply somebody with beef-tea. For the development of the restaurant especially in Paris see Braudel, 1985, 210; Mennell, 1985, Chap. 7; Altwegg, 1993, 269– 83; Spang, 1993. 6. Aaron, 1967, 15; Mennell, 1985, Chap. 7. 7. Brillat-Savarin, 1976; Rumohr, 1978; Anthus, 1962; Vaerst, 1975. See also Courtine and Desmur, 1970; Rath, 1984; Barlösius, 1988. – 292 –

The Rising Popularity of Dining Out in Germany 8. My grateful acknowledgements are due to the former student and member of my research staff Christian Drummer for gathering these sources from urban archives and for assistance in evaluating these figures. See Drummer, 1997, 305–14. 9. ‘Der Einfluss des Weltkriegs’, 1919, Krueger-Tenius, 1917. 10. Tenius, 1898, 3–35; Schuftan, 1903, 12; Böhmert, 1913, 213–42; Müller, 1903. 11. Glücksmann, 1927, 56. 12. Mendel, 1931, 166; Jeiter, 1927. 13. Guyer, 1874, 24; Glücksmann, 1917, 2; Großes Restaurations-Kochbuch, 1905; Guy, 1971. 14. ‘Moderne Riesenküchen’, 1913, 1018–19; Pracht, 1994; Köster, 1964; Krieger, 1923; Erman, 1956; Kempinski, 1997. 15. Zobeltitz, 1901/2; Gollmer, 1909; Andritzky, 1992, 37–53; Teuteberg, 1997. 16. Commission, 1882, 686–7; Stehle, 1929, vol. 2, 568, 591, 611. 17. Malortie, 1883; Banzer, 1922; Richter, 1925; Bickel, 1986; Andritzky, 1992, 374–5. 18. Carême, 1833–5; Dubois-Bernard, 1874; Biasci, 1991; Pitte, 1991; Marenco, 1992; Barlösius, 1999, 150–2. 19. The famous master cook Georges Auguste Escoffier (1847–1935), born in Villeneuve-Loubec, started his profession in a hotel of a relative in Nizza in 1860. After the German–French War, 1870/1, he was maître de cuisine in Paris, Nizza, Cannes and at the Ritz Hotel in London. He also wrote several other cooking books and gained a broad international reputation. See beside Escoffier, 1923, also Visser, 1991; Ottomeyer, 1993, Zischka et al., 1993; 20. Blüher, 1925, Hering, 1929. 21. Banzer, 1922; Banzer and Friebel, 1931. 22. See the numerous articles in the Zeitschrift Kochkunst und Tafelwesen, (Frankfurt a. M., 1901ff); Gollmer, 1909; Balzli, 1931, 13–15; Ottomeyer, 1993. 23. Henningsdorf, 1903. 24. Kiaulehn, 1958, 224. 25. Hoffmann, 1954, 106. See also the historical portrayals of more than 199 renowned hotels, inns, restaurants, wine taverns, beer houses and cafés with their leading gastronomes by Bredehorn, 1926; Hegenbarth, 1903; Rauers, 1942, vol. 2. 26. Sombart, 1922; Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein zu Berlin, n.d.; Revel, 1997.

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Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg 27. See the descriptions of large hotels and restaurants by Ostini, 1904/5; Hoffmann, 1911; Boll & Pickard, 1907; Hoffmann, 1941; Köster, 1964; Bauer, 1982; Lerner, 1976; Pini, 1987; Klötzer, 1990. 28. Andritzky, 1992; Wagner, 1995; Allen, 2002, 95–114. 29. Glücksmann, 1927, 75. 30. Triebel, 1991, vol. 1, 360, (with new calculations by Christian Drummer). 31. Teuteberg, 1981; Teuteberg and Lesniczak, 2001. 32. Weber-Kellermann, 1987, 340–50; 398–401. 33. Rubner, 1930, 60–1.

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The Rising Popularity of Dining Out in Germany Barlösius, E. (1999), Soziologie des Essens, Weinheim and Munich: Juventa-Verlag. Bauer, H. (1920), Tisch und Tafel in den alten Zeiten: Aus der Kulturgeschichte der Gastronomie, Leipzig. Bauer, R. (ed.) (1982), Zu Gast im alten München: Erinnerungen an Hotels, Wirtschaften und Cafés, Munich: Hugendubel. Becker, K. (2000), Der Gourmand, der Bourgeois und der Romancier: Die französische Eßkultur in Literatur und Gesellschaft des bürgerlichen Zeitalters, Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann. Benker, G. (1974), Der Gasthof: Von der Karawanserei zum Motel, vom Gastfreund zum Hotelgast, Munich: Callwey. Biasci, C. (1991), Das Alte im Neuen: Kulturgeschichte der französischen Küche, Bielefeld: Biasci. Bickel, W. (1986), Wer ist wer auf der Speisekarte: Biographische Notizen zum Verständnis der Speisekarte, Stuttgart: Matthaes. Blüher, P. (1925), Meisterwerke der Speisen und Getränke: Französisch– Deutsch–Englisch (und andere Sprachen), 7th edn, 2 vols, Nordhausen. Böhmert, W. (1913), ‘Die Gast- und Schankwirtschaften nebst Angaben über polizeiliche Regelung des Wirtschaftsbetriebs und die alkoholgegnerischen Vereine’, in Statistisches Jahrbuch deutscher Städte, 19: 213–42. Boll & Pickard (eds) (1907), Berlin für Kenner, Berlin. Borchardt, F. (1901), Das Gast- und Schankgewerbe in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Greifswald. Braudel, F. (1985), Sozialgeschichte des 15.–18. Jahrhunderts: Der Alltag, Munich: Kindler. Bredehorn, W. (ed.) (1926), Die deutschen Gaststätten: Bilder aus ihrer Vergangenheit und Gegenwart I: Westdeutsche Ausgabe, Düsseldorf. Brillat-Savarin, J.-A. (1976), Physiologie des Geschmacks oder Betrachtungen über transzendentale Gastronomie; theoretisches, historisches und zeitgemässes Werk, allen Pariser Feinschmeckern gewidmet, Munich: Heyne. [Originally published in French in 1825: La Physiologie du goût, ou meditations de gastronomie transcendente; ouvrage théoretique, historique et l’ordre du jour, dédié aux gastronomes parisiens, Paris.] Carême, M.-A. (1833–5), L’art de la cuisine française au XIXe siècle, Paris: Renouard. Commission für Arbeiterwohl (ed.) (1882), Häusliche Glück:. Vollständiger Haushaltungsunterricht nebst Anleitung zum Kochen für Arbeiterfrauen,11th rev. edn, Mönchen-Gladbach and Leipzig; reprint Munich, 1975. – 295 –

Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg Courtine, R., and Desmur, J. (eds) (1970), Anthologie de la litterature gastronomique, Paris: Ed. de Trévise. ‘Der Einfluss des Weltkrieges auf den Bestand der Gast- und Schankwirtschaften in Preussen’ (1919), Die Alkoholfrage, 15: 201–3. Drummer, C. (1997), ‘Das sich ausbreitende Restaurant in deutschen Großstädten als Ausdruck bürgerlichen Repräsentationsstrebens 1870– 1930’, in H.-J. Teuteberg, G. Neumann and A. Wierlacher (eds), Essen und kulturelle Identität: Europäische Perspektiven, Berlin: AkademieVerlag, 303–35. Dubois, U., and Bernard, E. (1874), La cuisine classique: Études pratiques raisonnées et demonstratives de l’École française appliquée au service à la russe, 6th edn, 2 vols, Paris: Dubois. Eiben, G. (1910), Die Berufsverhältnisse der deutschen Gasthaus-Angestellten und deren soziale und wirtschaftliche Förderung durch ihre Berufsorganisation und die Gesetzgebung, Oldenburg. Erman, H. (1956), Bei Kempinski. Aus der Chronik einer Weltstadt, Berlin: Argon. Escoffier, G. A. (1923), Kochkunst-Führer. Ein Hand- und Nachschlagebuch der modernen französischen Küche und der feinen internationalen Küche, 4th edn, Nordhausen [Originally published in French in 1902: Le guide culinaire. Aide-mèmoire de cuisine pratique, Paris.] Gastronomische Zeitung. Ein theoretisches und practisches Mittheilungsblatt für Hôtel- und Gasthausbesitzer, Weinhändler, Cafetiers, Conditoren, Köche, Restaurateurs, Hausfrauen, Feinschmecker, Gourmets etc. vols 1–4 (1840–4). Glücksmann, R. (1917), Privatwirtschaftslehre des Hotelgewerbes, Berlin. Glücksmann, R. (1927), Das Gaststättenwesen, Stuttgart. Gollmer, E. (ed.) (1909), Die vornehme Gastlichkeit der Neuzeit: Ein Handbuch der modernen Geselligkeit, Tafeldekoration und Kücheneinrichtung, Leipzig. Grimm, J., and Grimm, W. (1960), ‘Wirtshaus’, in Deutsches Wörterbuch, 14, Halle: Niemeyer, 698–701. Großes Restaurations-Kochbuch. Ein Hand- und Nachschlagebuch der modernen Restaurations-Küche (1905), Frankfurt a. M. Guy, C. (1971), La vie quotidienne de la societé gourmande en France au XIXe siècle, Paris: Hachette. Guyer, E. (1874), Das Hotelwesen der Gegenwart, Zurich. Hegenbarth, F. (1903), Historische Hotels und Gaststätten sowie hervorragende Persönlichkeiten im Wirts-Beruf, Dresden. Henningsdorf, H. (1903), ‘Das kalte Buffet im Privathause’, in Kochkunst. Illustrierte Halbmonatszeitschrift für Hotel, Restaurant, Herrschaftsund bürgerliche Küche, 5: 287–8. – 296 –

The Rising Popularity of Dining Out in Germany Hering, R. (1929), Lexikon der Küche: Gekürzte Kochanweisungen, fachgewerbliche Angaben, Ratschläge usw. über Weine-GetränkeServieren. Fachwörterbuch Deutsch–Englisch–Französisch, Italienisch– Spanisch, 8th rev. edn by Walter Bickel, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann. Hoffmann (1911), Hotel Adlon Berlin, Darmstadt. Hoffmann, H. (1941), Gaststätten, Cafés und Restaurants, Ausflugs- und Tanzlokale, Bars, Trink- und Imbißstuben in Deutschland und dem Ausland, Stuttgart. Hoffmann, M. (1954), 2000 Jahre Gaststätte, Frankfurt a. M. Hoyer, K. (1910), Das ländliche Gastwirtsgewerbe im deutschen Mittelalter nach den Weistümern. Phil. Diss., Freiburg. Jeiter, H. (1927), Das Berliner Wirtsgewerbe vor dem Kriege, Tübingen. Jenn, A. (1993) Die deutsche Gastronomie: Ein historische und betriebswirtschaftliche Betrachtung, Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Fachverlag. Kachel, J. (1924), Herberge und Gastwirtschaft in Deutschland bis zum 17. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart. Kempinski Hotel Bristol Berlin (ed.) (1997), Ku’damm No. 27, Munich: Faber. Kiaulehn, W. (1958), Berlin. Schicksal einer Weltstadt, 6th edn, Munich and Berlin: Biederstein. Klötzer, W. (1990), Zu Gast im alten Frankfurt, Munich: Hugendubel. Köster, B. (1964), Berliner Gaststätten von der Jahrhundertwende bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, Phil. Diss. Technische Hochschule, Berlin. Kollmer, L., and Rohr, C. (eds) (2000), Mahl und Repräsentation: Der Kult ums Essen, Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich: Schöningh. Krueger, H., and Tenius, G. (1917), Die Massenspeisungen, Berlin. Krieger, B. (1923), Berlin im Wandel, Berlin-Grunewald. Lerner, F. (1976), Ein Jahrhundert Frankfurter Hof 1876–1976, Frankfurt a. M.: Steigenberger-Hotel Frankfurter Hof. Malortie, E. von (1883), Das Menu - eine culinarische Studie, 3rd edn, Hanover. Marenco, C. (1992), Manières de table, modèles de moeurs 17e–20e siècle, Paris: Ed. de l’E.N.S.-Cachan. Maurer, E. (1981), 6000 Jahre Gastronomie: Geschichte der feinen Kochkunst, Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Fachverlag. Mendel, J. (1931), ‘Gastpflege und Kochkunst in ihrer Bedeutung für die Ernährung’, Zeitschrift für Ernährung, 1: 166–71. Mennell, S. (1985), All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ‘Moderne Riesenküchen: Bilder aus dem Bereich der Weltstadtrestaurants’, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, 22/51: 1017–19. – 297 –

Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg Müller, E. (1903), Die Gast- und Schankwirtschaftspolizei in Preußen [. . .], rev. edn, Halle/S. Ostini, F. von (1904–5), ‘Wie München ißt und trinkt’, Velhagen & Clasings Monatshefte, 19/1: 161–74. Ottomeyer, H. (1993), ‘Tischgerät und Tafelbräuche’, in A. Wierlacher, G. Neumann and H. J. Teuteberg (eds), Kulturthema Essen: Ansichten und Problemfelder, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 177–86. Peyer, H. C. (1987), Gastfreundschaft, Taverne und Gasthaus im Mittelalter, 2nd edn, Munich: Oldenbourg. Pini, U. (1987), Zu Gast im alten Hamburg: Erinnerungen an Hotels, Gaststätten, Ausflugslokale, Ballhäuser, Kneipen, Cafés und Varietés, Munich: Hugendubel. Pitte, J.-R. (1991), Gastronomie française et géographie d’une passion, Paris: Fayard. Potthoff, O. D., and Kossenhaschen, G. (1932), Kulturgeschichte der deutschen Gaststätte umfassend Deutschland, Österreich, Schweiz und Deutschböhmen, Berlin. Pracht, E. (1994), Kempinkski & Co., ed. by Historische Kommission zu Berlin, Berlin: Nicolai. Rath, C. D. (1984), Reste der Tafelrunde: Das Abenteuer der Eßkultur, Reinbek: Rowohlt. Rauers, F. (1942), Kulturgeschichte der Gaststätte, 2nd edn, 2 vols, Berlin. Revel, J.-F. (1997), ‘Über den Begriff der “kulinarischen Revolution”’, in P. Beusen, S. Ebert-Schifferer and E. Mai (eds), L’art gourmand: Stilleben für Auge, Kochkunst und Gourmets von Aertsen bis van Gogh, Essen: Verlag Glückauf, 237–77. Richter, M. (1925), Menu und Speisekarte: Leitfaden die Zusammenstellung von Mahlzeiten jeder Art und für jede Gelegenheit. Mit zahlreichen Mustermenus und Speisekarten, 2nd rev. edn, Nordhausen. Rubner, M. (1930), Deutschlands Volksernährung, Berlin. Rumohr, C. F. von (1978), Geist der Kochkunst, Frankfurt a. M., 2nd new ed. by Wolfgang Koeppen, Munich: Insel-Verlag (orig. 1832). Schuftan, G. (1903), Studien über die gewerbliche Entwicklung des Gastund Schankwirtschaftswesens in Deutschland, Iur. Diss., Breslau. Sombart, W. (1922), Liebe, Luxus und Kapitalismus, 2nd edn, Munich and Leipzig; reprint Munich, 1967. Spang, R. L. (1993), A Confusion of Appetites: The Emergence of Paris Restaurant Culture, 1740–1848, New York. Stehle, J. (1929), Der Hotel-, Restaurations- und Kaffeehausbetrieb: Ein Handbuch für Hotelleiter, Hotelsekretäre, Oberkellner, Küchenschefs sowie alle Gasthaus- und Küchenangestellten, 2 vols, Nordhausen. – 298 –

The Rising Popularity of Dining Out in Germany Tenius, G. (ed.) (1898), Die Gast- und Schankwirtschaften in den deutschen Gemeinden mit mehr als 15 000 Einwohnern nach dem Stande vom November 1898: Auf Grund von amtlichen Angaben der zuständigen Behörden, Dortmund. Teuteberg, H.-J. (1981), ‘Wie ernährten sich Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?’, in W. Conze and U. Engelhardt (eds), Arbeiterexistenz im 19. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 57–73. Teuteberg, H.-J. (1997), ‘Die Rationalisierung der Küche am Beispiel des Elektroherdes seit dem späten 19. Jahrhundert’, in H. J. Gerhard (ed.), Struktur und Dimension: Festschrift für Karl Heinrich Kaufhold zum 65. Geburtstag, vol. 2, Stuttgart: Steiner, 456–76. Teuteberg, H.-J. and Lesniczak, P. (2001), ‘Alte ländliche Festtagsmahlzeiten in der Phase sich intensivierender Verbürgerlichung’, Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 46: 319–54. Triebel, A. (1991), Zwei Klassen und die Vielfalt des Konsums. Haushaltsbudgetierung bei abhängigen Erwerbstätigen in Deutschland im ersten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts, Phil. Diss., 2 vols, Berlin. Vaerst, E. von (1975), Gastrosophie oder die Lehren von den Freuden der Tafel, 2 vols, Leipzig; reprint Munich: Rogner und Bernhard [orig. 1851]. Visser, M. (1991), The Rise of Dinner: Origins, Evolution. Eccentrics and Meanings of Table Manners, London. Wagner, C. (1995), Fast schon Food: Die Geschichte des schnellen Essens, Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Campus Verlag. Weber-Kellermann, I. (1987), Landleben im 19. Jahrhundert, Munich: Beck. Zeitschrift Kochkunst und Tafelwesen. Illustrierte Monatsschrift des Internationalen Verbandes der Köche (1901ff.), Frankfurt a. M. Zischka, U., Ottomeyer, H., and Bäumler, S. (eds) (1993), Die anständige Lust: Von Kultur und Tafelsitten, Munich: Spangenberger. Zobeltitz, H. von (1901/2), ‘Hinter den Coulissen eines Riesenrestaurants’, Velhagen & Clasings Monatshefte, 16: 81–96.

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–18– Eating without Effort: The Rise of the Fast-food Industry in Twentieth-century Britain Derek J. Oddy

The traditional perception of fast food in Britain has been one of disdain. While the origins of early forms of fast food – such as street eating – are somewhat obscure, the generally accepted view is that such food was provided for a working-class market and often concealed in its presentation food materials of dubious quality. Despite its low-status origins, fast food became widely accepted as a normal part of everyday life in the twentieth century and had a considerable impact on the nutritional status of the population in the second half of the century. Exploring the development of fast-food provision needs clearly defined limits: if ‘fast’ is significant, do all pre-prepared foods qualify as fast food, and should a food such as bread be included in this category because it is sold ready to eat? Do sweets, confectionery and ice-cream count as fast food because they can be eaten in the street walking away from the shop? Although fast food is often eaten in the street, it is evident that some is consumed in specially provided accommodation. It may be necessary to ask whether this differentiation is significant. Indeed, if consumers go to eating places where food is prepared or heated on the premises, the question arises as to how long it might take for the food to be supplied before it is appropriate to talk in terms of restaurant service rather than fast-food provision. One way of defining the subject of fast food is to follow the usage adopted by the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF) in its 1985 conference. This applied the term fast food ‘more to a marketing method than to a system of catering’; in effect, it is not what you sell but the way that you sell it. As a definition, this is inadequate, but the limited range of foods within the menus offered by fast-food outlets suggests a further qualification: that fast food relies on ‘a choice of convenience foodstuffs which are in a form ready for rapid regeneration into an attractive product’.1 Tim

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Derek J. Oddy Lobstein took a similar view of fast food by considering it to be a range of products from the ‘well-known chains of high street restaurants that offer a limited list of foods with quick service to the take-away foods which the smaller independent restaurants sell’. A common but not exclusive feature of the foods and meals within that range is the counterservice method of purchase. This includes ‘the main foods sold in fish and chip shops, hamburger bars and fried chicken stores’.2 Sandwich bars, pizzerias and some ethnic foods might be included in the range of meals studied, as also should restaurant chains offering standardized meals for travellers at the roadside or in motorway service areas. Where and how food is eaten is important: fast food has been categorized as ‘a product image that has been projected from the product delivery systems onto the behaviour of the consumers’. Much fast food is eaten with the fingers and consumed quickly. So the hamburger, ‘which epitomizes fast food, typically offers a warm filling in a bun; the filling being macerated and formed beef, i.e. beef that is mechanically pre-chewed for the consumer’.3 Prechewed food sounds unquestionably like eating without effort. Indeed, eating without effort is one additional characteristic of fast food, namely its availability at short notice without shopping for raw materials or preparation in the kitchen, including cooking and serving it. Fast food comes without any of the traditional work that previously went into meal preparation and has hitherto universally formed part of food culture. The importance of the fast-food market in contemporary Britain should not be underestimated. By 1980, one leading food-science consultant assessed its impact as follows: Increasingly, manufactured food products are reaching the consumer through the catering channel. There has been a rapid growth in food prepared outside the home, whether in the form of eating out or takeaway food. The most dramatic feature of this has been the rapid growth of the fast food outlets. The biggest US chains are here and multiplying; and many UK food manufacturers, retailers and hotel groups, realizing that this will be partly at the expense of food products distributed in other ways, have themselves been hurrying into the fast food catering field, directly, or by franchise or by joint ventures with major US fast food chains.4

During the last third of the twentieth century, the fast-food industry, both manufacturing and catering, was remarkably successful by its recognition of the changing tastes and lifestyles of consumers. It adopted new food technology, notably the ‘chill-chain’ system, to enhance its products and incorporated the food extrusion technology developed during the 1970s

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Eating without Effort and 1980s, which created the modern snack-products industry. The fastfood industry has offered attractive and palatable meals, whether as an occasion to eat out or to take home, which have met the changing patterns of work and leisure in the United Kingdom.

Fast Food before 1950 Some aspects of fast food date from the late nineteenth century. Cafés, teashops and fish-and-chip shops were already providing fast food, as it was then understood, before 1900. Coffee-houses, tea-shops and railwaystation refreshment rooms had grown up around middle-class work and leisure practices and were to be found in the commercial and shopping centres of large towns, particularly London, where the scale of urban development made long journeys increasingly normal. In Edwardian Britain, urban entertainment centres were well supplied with eating outlets. At Blackpool, a seaside town of some 50,000 residents when not swollen by summer visitors, the list of places supplying food in 1906 included 182 sweet-shops, 129 ice-cream dealers, 79 fish, chip and tripe shops and 58 restaurants.5 By 1914, fish-and-chip shops were almost universal in Britain: ‘hardly any market town or substantial village is without at least one fish-and-chip shop’ or else, possibly, a mobile van selling fish and chips. Even areas that had little waged work for women outside the home supported fish-andchip shops. Most were small-scale operations, either single shops or, less likely, shops with one or two branches. There were some small chains of fish-and-chip shops before 1914, but multiple outlets did not develop in the inter-war years. A substantial number were run by women, and the general view that entry-costs were low meant that fish-and-chip shops were seen as a lucrative venture for ‘penny capitalists’, despite the interwar economic depression in some manufacturing districts.6 Whilst the eating-in trade was mainly at midday and during the early evenings, fishand-chip shops also sold for consumption outside the shop, supplying food wrapped up in paper, usually with an outer wrapping of newspaper as insulation. In poorer districts fish-and-chip shops catered only for a take-away trade. While purchasers might take their fish-and-chips home, or along a promenade by the sea, or into a park to eat, much was eaten out of the open paper wrappings while walking along the street. After public houses closed, at 10.30 p.m., there was a late demand for fish-and-chips to eat in the streets, particularly at the weekend, though the likelihood that any fish-and-chip shops would be open on Sundays was remote.7

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Derek J. Oddy Although the fish-and-chip shop was attracting day-trippers, cinemagoers, motorists and women shoppers by the 1930s, the tea-shop appealed to the more ‘respectable’ members of the working classes and lower middle classes for whom the temperance influence of the late Victorian period remained strong. During the 1920s, J. Lyons and Co. Ltd had 250 teashops as well as three multi-floored Corner Houses in central London, which could each seat up to 3,000 people.8 Office workers took a quick ‘lunch’ at Lyons or the ABC (Aerated Bread Company) or Express Dairy tea-shops but it was also possible to eat breakfast and high tea in Lyons. Although Lyons had an advertising slogan ‘Where’s George? Gone to Lyonch’ to attract office workers, the midday meal was more substantial than what would be regarded as lunch in the second half of the twentieth century. Before World War II the midday dinner was still regarded by many as the main meal of the day. Although not fast food as it is understood at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Lyons’ catering was certainly fast: the speed and efficiency of their service led to Lyons’ waitresses being known as ‘Nippies’. Standardized portions, including cooked food, were supplied from a centralized base at Cadby Hall, Hammersmith, in west London. Strict price and portion control meant that a midday meal of roast beef and two vegetables was available for 10d (£0.04). At that price profit margins were almost negligible, and the profitability of Lyons’ teashops declined during the 1930s. Catering for large entertainment events, such as the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924, which was visited by 17 million people, was another aspect of Lyons’ quick-service operations that might be termed fast food. From 1918 onwards, an expansion in refrigeration facilities brought a new dimension to fast-food consumption following the surge in ice-cream production. Ice-cream was a new fashion and began to be sold in cafés and tea-shops in the 1920s alongside soft drinks from soda-fountains. This strengthened the position of the food manufacturers and processors in the fast-food market. By 1923, Lyons’ output of ice-cream at Cadby Hall reached a mass-production scale.9 Wall’s, as sausage makers, also turned to ice-cream in 1922 to make up for slack trade in meat products during the summer months. As a result, ice-cream was the first frozen food to enter working-class diets, particularly following the invention of the ‘Stop-me-and-buy-one’ tricycle by Wall’s in the 1920s.10 As movingpictures became mass entertainment in the inter-war years, cinema-going became an occasion for the consumption of ice-cream. In the 1930s, Lyons obtained a contract to supply the Odeon chain and produced icecream ‘tubs’ for cinema-goers. In 1939, Lyons produced 3.5 million gallons (159 million litres) of ice-cream for sale. Their competitor, Wall’s, – 304 –

Eating without Effort began to hire out refrigerators to cinemas and sweet-shops, while operating 8,500 tricycles on the streets and a network of 136 depots from which to supply them. By 1939, the scale of Wall’s ice-cream business was such that it had a turnover of about £1.5 million and supplied 15,000 shops.11 The Forte family catering business began opening ‘ice-cream parlours’ early in the 1930s, with an initial success at Weston-super-Mare leading to further ventures at seaside holiday centres on the south coast of England – Weymouth, Bournemouth and Brighton. Taking notice of the success of Hugh Macintosh’s first Black and White milk bar in Fleet Street, Charles Forte opened the Meadow Milk Bar, in Regent Street, London, in 1935. By the outbreak of war in 1939, there were fourteen Black and White milk bars and five of Forte’s milk bars in London and south-east England.12 Initially, the Black and Whites were ‘remarkably bare’ and sold only milk drinks, ice-cream but ‘no sundaes and no other food’. Charles Forte’s staff made soups, ice-cream, cut sandwiches and baked cakes in the basement of a warehouse in Percy Street, in London’s West End, from which all his branches were supplied. Woolworth installed its first milk bar in 1935 in a new Oxford Street store, and Moo Cow, Laughing Cow and City Milk Bars began to spread through London. Edinburgh had United Milk Bars and Liverpool Milk Cocktail Bars. London had the largest number – over 127 by the end of 1936 – but department stores in the provinces were quick to follow. There were 27 milk bars open in Britain by the end of 1935, 587 by the end of 1936 and 1,010 by the end of 1937. Of these, 384 were milk bars operating solely to sell milk products, such as the Milk Marketing Board’s recipes for Sicilian Shakes, Chocolate Banana Creams, Hollywood Shakes and Mint Juleps.13 At the outbreak of war in 1939, the biggest chain was in Woolworth’s shops, followed by British Home Stores. In effect, chilled milk and ice-cream had begun to replace the sodafountains of the 1920s as the newest fashion of the inter-war years. One field of marked growth in the inter-war years was branded confectionery. Although Cadbury’s Dairy Milk brand dated from 1905 and its Bournville plain chocolate brand was introduced in 1908, the introduction of brands proliferated in the inter-war years. Milk Tray, which had been introduced in 1915 in bulk packages for shopkeepers, became available in half-pound (227 g) and pound (454 g) boxes. Cadbury produced its Flake (1920), Crème Eggs (1923), Fruit and Nut (1928), Crunchie (1929), Whole Nut (1933) and Roses Chocolates (1938). Cadbury Brothers Ltd merged with J. S. Fry & Sons, a Bristol chocolate producer whose product lines included Fry’s Chocolate Cream and Fry’s Turkish Delight. Rowntree’s Kit Kat – still the biggest selling line in chocolate snacks at the end of the twentieth century – was introduced in 1937. The falling costs of raw – 305 –

Derek J. Oddy materials, transport and production in the inter-war years coupled with extensive advertising brought prices down. Chocolate bars, chocolate biscuits and snack biscuits became generally available for eating out on journeys, for picnics and on holidays – occasions when eating was for pleasure and enjoyment rather than of necessity – as well as special treats such as Christmas boxes of chocolates and Easter eggs.14

The Global Phase of Fast Food, 1950–2000 As food began to be de-rationed at the end of the 1940s, the milk bars and cafeterias that had survived the war began to attract the new class of teenagers. A landmark in the return to peacetime ways was the Festival of Britain in 1951. Catering concessions for visitors were awarded to ABC and Forte. Forte ran a cafeteria operation that could serve thirty-two people per minute with snack meals, soft drinks and beverages. Forte’s followed this with catering for the new leisure development in Battersea Park, though ‘rowdies and Teddy boys’ led to the termination of the licence after three years.15 However, during the 1950s, the coffee bar replaced the milk bar as the fashionable leisure centre in the high streets. The modern fast-food age began when James McLamore and David Edgerton opened their first Burger King fast-food outlet in the United States in 1954, a year before Ray Kroc began franchising McDonald’s eating places. By the end of the twentieth century, fast food had become a global industry. Burger King had some 10,000 outlets worldwide, 400 of which were in the United Kingdom. Its total sales in 1999 amounted to £6.6 billion a year. In 2000, Burger King sold 1.6 billion Whoppers a year and served 13 million customers a day. On an even larger scale, at the end of December 1999, McDonald’s operated 26,800 outlets in 118 countries serving 41 million customers a day with a revenue of $38.4 billion.16 Although Burger King began in the USA and still has 75 per cent of its outlets there, it has been British-owned since 1989, when it was bought by Grand Metropolitan Hotels (later Diageo), and has been managed in the United Kingdom as a franchised operation.17 The initial growth of the global fast-food firms in Britain occurred in the early 1950s even before Burger King and McDonald’s were in existence. The concept of hamburger restaurants suited a Britain emerging from meat rationing and which had come into contact with many US servicemen during the 1940s.18 Wimpy’s American founder, Eddie Gold, offered 2 oz (56 g) hamburgers to Lyons on a trial basis in 1953. Lyons opened a Wimpy counter, which also sold Whippsy milk shakes, in its

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Eating without Effort Coventry Street Corner House in London. In the following year Lyons ran a hamburger bar at the 1954 Ideal Home Exhibition, which sold 10,000 burgers in a week, and by May 1955 it was supplying 42,000 customers a week from the Wimpy Bar in the Coventry Street Corner House. Wimpy restaurants were introduced in the Oxford Street Corner House in September 1958 and in one or two tea-shops, but a subsidiary company, Pleasure Foods Ltd, was formed in 1957 to franchise out Wimpy Bars. By contrast with the ‘fast-food’ concept, the Wimpy restaurant in the Coventry Street Corner House had full waitress service from 1968. By 1969, Lyons had opened 461 Wimpy restaurants and bars in the United Kingdom and one thousand abroad.19 For Lyons, it proved to be a more profitable line than the traditional tea-shops. Lyons later sold the UK Wimpy business to United Biscuits Ltd in December 1976 for £7 million, under whose management counter service was developed.20 In 1989, United Biscuits sold Wimpy to Grand Metropolitan Hotels.21 Over the thirty-year period from the 1950s to the 1980s, Wimpy had grown to more than 430 outlets, but a management buy-out retained 200 table-service restaurants and the trading name. By 1998, Wimpy’s franchisees were operating 280 counterservice outlets.22 After Wimpy, there was a gap before the next American fast-food concept arrived in Britain. This was Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), which opened in Preston, Lancashire, in 1965, and had nearly 400 outlets by 1987.23 KFC was a highly successful brand and was bought by the American soft-drinks firm PepsiCo in 1986. This led to KFC being operated in Britain as a joint venture between Trusthouse Forte and PepsiCo, since PepsiCo needed Forte’s experience of quick-service catering to develop KFC as a profitable concern. PepsiCo’s only directly managed operation in Britain was its Taco Bell Tex-Mex food, which did not attract the British consumer.24 McDonald’s first British unit opened in Woolwich, London, in 1974. Its growth from the first restaurant was dramatic. At the end of 1999, it had over 1,000 outlets in the UK, of which 302 were run by franchisees. McDonald’s employed over 48,000 people; a further 16,500 worked in its franchises. The total sales from both its companyowned restaurants and its franchised outlets reached £400 million and it catered for 2.5 million people a day.25 By the end of the twentieth century, McDonald’s logo was no longer confined to the high streets but extended to leisure centres and retail parks as well as airports and cross-Channel ferries. The growth of fast-food chains was not confined to meat products. Pizza Express opened its first restaurant in 1965 but, in contradiction to its name, aimed to provide restaurant service rather than fast food. Pizza – 307 –

Derek J. Oddy Hut, a company formed in the USA in 1958, entered the UK market in 1973, opening its first outlet in Islington just prior to McDonald’s arrival. By 1986, Pizza Hut had 200 sites and employed almost 15,000 workers; in 1998, there were 400 Pizza Huts employing 12,000 in the UK.26 The total UK sales of fast-food meals in 1987 came to £1.5 billion of which fish-and-chips was still the largest category. However, the sales of burgers, fried chicken and pizzas, in total, were already greater than sales of fishand-chips.27 The expansion of car ownership during the 1950s and motoring holidays from the 1960s onwards led to a demand for roadside catering as the motorway system evolved. The Ministry of Transport planned for service areas 25 miles (40 km) apart that would provide 24-hour catering for motorists, including transport cafés selling lower-priced food and drinks to lorry drivers. The first two were established on the M1 motorway when it opened in 1959. Forte’s catering facilities opened in August 1960 at Newport Pagnell, followed a month later by Blue Boar’s Watford Gap, though sandwiches had been sold from specially installed ‘garden sheds’ earlier. Forte’s later restaurants on the M6 in 1963 led to the brand name ‘Motorchef’ being adopted. Other leisure groups became interested, with Top Rank Motor Inns opening on the M2 and M6 in 1963, Granada on the M1 (1965), M5 (1966) and M4 (1968), and Ross Group, the frozen-foods producer, opening the last of the ‘bridge restaurants’ on the M1 in 1966. As sites proliferated, motorway service areas became ‘part of the ritual of going away; for children a chance to have food and treats not normally allowed’.28 Additional facilities on other main roads were offered by Forte’s Little Chef chain, which grew from two sites in 1963 to 41 in 1986, the year that Forte acquired the 73-outlet chain of Happy Eater restaurants.29 Television advertising stimulated the demand for fast food from roadside catering outlets and high street chains alike. Within a year of its arrival in Britain, McDonald’s was advertising in cinemas and a year later, in 1976, on television. Advertising was aimed primarily at young people and especially children. Providing special menus for children, together with other facilities such as play areas, had become standard practice amongst the roadside café chains and motorway service areas. Frozen-food materials provide the complete basis of many ‘children’s menu’ meals – fishfingers or burgers, with peas and chips, followed by ice-cream – easily recognized and familiarly presented food that would allay even the most suspicious juvenile palate. In the mid-1980s, the high street chains introduced various blandishments to attract parents holding children’s parties. McDonald’s and Wimpy offered personal appearances of the characters from their television advertisement, ‘Ronald McDonald’ and ‘Mr Wimpy’. – 308 –

Eating without Effort Kentucky Fried Chicken offered a ‘Little Colonel’s Meal’ in a carton decorated with cartoons and puzzles; Pizza Hut provided a ‘Care Bear Party’ for special occasions; and Pizzaland’s ‘Party Time’ included party hats, balloons and colouring sheets.30

Eating Out in the Late Twentieth Century Eating out in Britain underwent a transition in the 1970s. One aspect which declined sharply was eating in an institutional setting. Fewer people ate in factory canteens and the consumption of school meals decreased. From 1975 to 1984, the average number of meals eaten outside the home fell at a rate of 1.5 per cent per year though, by contrast, meals purchased in purely commercial venues – restaurants, public houses, fast-food outlets, ethnic food outlets and fish-and-chip shops – were increasing.31 Take-away meals grew from 14 per cent to 27 per cent of all meals eaten between 1975 and 1984: ‘Amongst the lower social classes one in three purchase a take-away meal and eat it at home at least once a week, much of this being associated with watching videos.’32 The growth of a ‘snacking lifestyle’ in the last quarter of the twentieth century was facilitated by the rapid development of new products in confectionery and packaged drinks. Chocolate confectionery and snack foods became widely available in Britain in the 1990s, being sold in over 150,000 retail outlets. Sales occurred in supermarkets, retail confectioners and tobacconists (the ‘corner shops’ that have now generally widened their range of products in their attempt to compete with supermarkets), pubs, sports centres, petrol stations and motorway service areas. From the 1980s, extrusion technology made new products possible. Cadbury’s expanded its range of snack-food products by introducing the Double Decker (1976), Wispa (1983), Boost (1985), Twirl (1987), Spira (1989) and Time Out (1992). Coupled with the intensive and compelling television advertising that began in the 1960s, confectionery became a growing market. Producers realized that ‘[c]onfectionery is half-way between food and fashion so innovation is the key to success, providing excitement and variety for consumers’. Total confectionery sales in Britain rose from 663,000 tons in 1981 to 803,000 tons in 1990. During the same decade, weekly consumption of confectionery per head in Britain rose from 226 g to 270 g. Sales of the leading chocolate brands – Rowntree’s Kit Kat (now owned by Nestlé) and Mars Bars – were in excess of £100 million each in 1990.33 While the fast-food market was buoyant during the 1980s and 1990s, expenditure on all forms of eating out increased in Britain. In fact, it is

– 309 –

Derek J. Oddy difficult to separate fast-food consumption from eating out in restaurants. The growing importance of eating out led the National Food Survey to take special account of it from 1994 onwards. Prior to that, only food and drink consumed in domestic households had been included in the Survey. By 1999, eating-out expenditure had reached a total of £7.08 per person per week, and was growing at 5.2 per cent per year. Of this amount, £1.45 per person per week was spent on alcoholic drinks consumed outside the home.34 Although expenditure on foods eaten out has risen, consumption has remained more or less stable in the major categories, notably meat and meat products (109 g per head per week), and potatoes (119 g per head per week). Consumption of ethnic foods, mainly Indian and Chinese, has continued to rise steadily since 1995 and totalled 46 g per head per week in 1999. Rice, pasta and noodles have shown a similar trend, reaching 28 g per head per week in 1999. These figures conceal a number of regional variations. Expenditure was highest in London and significantly lower in Scotland and Yorkshire and north-east England. Londoners consumed more ethnic meals, fish, fruit, sandwiches, ice-cream, desserts, biscuits and cakes than any other region of Britain in 1999, whereas Scotland consumed more soup, rolls, soft drinks, rice, pasta, noodles and bread than any other area.35 Eating out was most extensive in London, where average spending on food and drink amounted to £10.34 per head per week in 1999. By contrast, the lowest expenditure was found in the East Midlands (£6.03), Yorkshire and Humberside (£6.06) and Scotland (£6.08). London also showed the highest expenditure on alcoholic drink (£1.94) compared with a low of £1.17 per head per week in Scotland. Notable items of consumption in London were 420 ml of beverages bought each week and 454 ml of soft drinks (including milk). Consumption of ethnic meals reached 90 g per week in London compared with only 17 g in Yorkshire and Humberside. Londoners also consumed more meat products and potatoes than any other region. Other notable characteristics of eating out were that men spent more money than women, and that eating out has greater significance as income rises. In 1999, income group A1 spent £17.01 per week compared to group D’s expenditure of £3.97. The foods bought did not change from one income group to another; merely more money was spent, though it was possible that better-quality foods were introduced as expenditure rose. The only item not to show increasing consumption with rising income occurred as demand for biscuits, crisps, nuts and snacks slackened in the highest income group. Age was a major factor in choice of foods eaten out. The eating of burgers and kebabs made the 15 to 24 years age group the highest consumers of – 310 –

Eating without Effort meat and meat products, soft drinks and confectionery but the lowest eaters of fruit in 1999. The highest consumption of potatoes was by 5–14 year olds, which emphasized their liking for potato chips. The biggest consumption of sandwiches, rolls and beverages was in the 25–54 years age group, which reflects the snack-eating patterns of the working population. Beyond 55 years, the consumption of all food and drink eaten out tailed off; expenditure by pensionable age groups is limited. In families with four or more children or in single-parent households, expenditure is also low and the foods eaten out reflect that which mollifies or satisfies children’s tastes – a high consumption of potatoes, meat products (especially burgers and sausages) and soft drinks.36 Even so, the conundrum remains. Britons are becoming increasingly overweight and even obese at a time when energy intakes are falling. As Table 18.1 shows, a recent assessment estimated that the proportion of obese men and women in Britain reached 17 per cent and 21 per cent, respectively, in 1998 and there is no evidence to suggest any reversal in the trend since then.37 The progressive rise in obesity that has taken place since 1980 is creating a major health problem in society. In effect, the sedentary nature of life in modern Britain is such that for many people, energy intake exceeds energy expenditure by a substantial amount; the British are eating without effort – in both senses of the word – and their waistlines show it. Perhaps the British in the twenty-first century should heed a sixteenth-century warning on the consequences of over-eating: Fat paunches have lean pates; and dainty bits Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 1, Scene 1

Table 18.1 Population aged 16–64 defined as obese in England, 1980–98 Date

Men (%)

Women (%)

1980

6

8

1986

7

12

1993

13

16

1998

17

21

Source: NAO, 2001

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Derek J. Oddy

Notes This chapter draws on material to be published in D. J. Oddy, From Plain Fare to Fusion Food: British Diet from the 1890s to the 1990s, Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2003. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

Cottrell, 1987, 25. Lobstein, 1988, 15. Lyons and Wood, 1990, 9. Blanchfield, 1983, 97. Winstanley, 1983, 41. In 1919, Blackpool had over 300,000 summer visitors, according to Graves and Hodge, 1971, 30. Walton, 1992, 37, 148. Somewhat surprisingly, the fish-and-chip trade in Scotland was almost entirely in the hands of Italian immigrants. Walton, 1992, 84–6. Throughout the inter-war years fish friers pressed for Sunday closing to lessen their working hours. From 1937, fishand-chip shops were closed on Sundays except for those in holiday resorts during the summer season. See Richardson, 1976, 161–72. Bird, 2000, 144–5. Wilson, 1954, vol. I, 274–5. Dr W. J. Reader noted that the first tricycles were used in Acton in 1922 to distribute the output from a small ice-cream plant imported from the USA earlier that year. See MMC, 1979, para. 63. The tricycles had an insulated box in front of the rider chilled by dry ice (solid CO2). This account is drawn from Oddy and Oddy, 1998, 291. MMC, 1979, para. 64. Forte, 1986, 30–40. Public Record Office, Milk Marketing Board, JV7/116, includes annual progress reports of the growth of milk bars. Cadbury Ltd, 1997b. Forte, 1986, 68–70. McDonald’s Restaurants Ltd, 2000, 12. A recent book by Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (2001), has only a limited account of the global scale of the fast-food industry. See The Times, 23 June 2000, 27. Diageo (created in 1997 by the merger of Guinness and Grand Metropolitan Hotels) owned Burger King in 2000. The American Red Cross ran Rainbow Corner, the American Servicemen’s Club in Shaftesbury Avenue, in a requisitioned Maison Lyons restaurant. See Forte, 1986, 57–8; also Bird, 2000, 106. – 312 –

Eating without Effort 19. Bird, 2000, 194–6. Wimpy hamburgers were introduced into the UK by Eddie Gold in 1953. Gold opened his first outlet in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1934, named after the ‘Wimpy’ character in Popeye (1931) – J Wellington Wimpy – who was always stuffing himself with hamburgers. In 1957 Lyons and Eddie Gold set up Wimpy International Inc. in the USA. Lyons held 51 per cent of the capital and UK rights to sell Wimpy’s hamburgers. Lyons’ integrated supply system meant the meat was produced by Henry Telfer (a Lyons subsidiary from 1964), the buns were baked in its own bakeries, while Whippsy milk shakes were supplied by Lyons Maid. 20. Bird, 2000, 201. 21. ‘40th anniversary for Wimpy’, Business Franchise, no date, material supplied by Wimpy International Ltd. 22. ‘Wimpy develops new taste for acquisitions’, Franchise World, July/ August 1998: 33–5. 23. KFC GB Ltd, Customer Information leaflet. 24. Tricon Global Restaurants, 1998. 25. McDonald’s Restaurants Ltd, 2000, 5, 10. 26. In 1977 Pizza Hut was bought by PepsiCo. From 1982, the Pizza Hut chain was operated jointly by PepsiCo and Whitbread. Since 1997, Pizza Hut has been managed by Tricorn Global Restaurants in conjunction with Whitbread plc. 27. Lobstein, 1988, 78. 28. Lawrence, 1999, 19–32. 29. Forte Holdings (formed 1962) became Trusthouse Forte (THF) in 1971 by merging with Trust Houses Ltd. The purchase from Hanson of the Imperial Group’s range of outlets (Welcome Break service areas, Happy Eaters and Harvester pub-restaurants) led to a major expansion in roadside sites which made Forte’s Public Catering Division its fastest growth area in the 1980s. 30. Lobstein, 1988, 85. 31. Pascoe et al., 1987, 98. 32. Heald, 1987, 75. 33. Cadbury Ltd, 1997a. 34. MAFF, 2000, 38. 35. MAFF, 2000, 41. 36. MAFF, 2000, Table 4.6, also 44. 37. NAO, 2001, Executive Summary, 1.

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Derek J. Oddy

References Bird, P. (2000), The First Food Empire: A History of J Lyons & Co, Chichester: Phillimore. Blanchfield, J. R. (1983), ‘Technological change in food manufacturing and distribution’, in J. Burns, J. McInerny, and A. Swinbank (eds), The Food Industry, London: Heinemann, 81–100. Cadbury Ltd (1997a), New Product Development, Birmingham: Cadbury Ltd. Cadbury Ltd (1997b), The Story of Cadbury Limited, Birmingham: Cadbury Ltd. Cottrell, R. (ed.) (1987), Nutrition in Catering: Proceedings of the Seventh British Nutrition Foundation Annual Conference, Carnforth: Parthenon. Forte, C. (1986), Forte: The Autobiography of Charles Forte, London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Graves, R., and Hodge, A. (1971), The Long Week-end, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Heald, G. (1987), ‘Trends in eating out’, in R. Cottrell (ed.), Nutrition in Catering: Proceedings of the Seventh British Nutrition Foundation Annual Conference, Carnforth: Parthenon, 75–96. Lawrence, D. (1999), Always a Welcome, Twickenham: Between Books. Lobstein, T. (1988), Fast Food Facts, London: Camden Press. Lyons, H. M., and Wood, L. M. C. (1990), Fast Food Prospects for the 1990s, Bradford: Horton. McDonald’s Restaurants Ltd (2000), McDonald’s Fact File 2000, London. Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) (2000), National Food Survey 1999, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) (1979), Ice Cream and Water Ices (Cmnd 7632), London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. National Audit Office (NAO) (2001), Tackling Obesity in England, Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, HC220, Session 2000–1, London: Stationery Office. Oddy, D. J., and Oddy, J. R. (1998), ‘The iceman cometh: the effect of low-temperature technology on the British diet’, in M. R. Schärer and A. Fenton (eds), Food and Material Culture, East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 287–309. Pascoe, J. M., Dockerty. J., and Ryley, J. (1987), ‘Fast foods’, in R. Cottrell (ed.), Nutrition in Catering: Proceedings of the Seventh British Nutrition Foundation Annual Conference, Carnforth: Parthenon, 97–109.

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Eating without Effort Richardson, D. J. (1976), ‘J. Lyons and Co. Ltd: caterers and food manufacturers, 1894–1939’, in D. J. Oddy and D. S. Miller (eds), The Making of the Modern British Diet, London: Croom Helm, 161–72. Schlosser, E. (2001), Fast Food Nation, London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press. Tricon Global Restaurants (1998), 1998 Annual Report, Louisville, KY: Tricon Global Restaurants Inc. Walton, J. K. (1992), Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, 1870– 1940, Leicester: Leicester University Press. Wilson, C. (1954), The History of Unilever, 2 vols, London: Cassell. Winstanley, M. J. (1983), The Shopkeeper’s World 1830–1914, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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–19– Snacks and Snack Culture in the Rise of Eating Out in the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Anneke H. van Otterloo

In the 1970s market research was undertaken in the Netherlands to answer the question whether, in the near future, the Dutch were likely to become enthusiastic consumers of fast food. For this investigation fast food was defined as that consumed in fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s. The outcome of the inquiry was, ‘No, not by any manner or means.’ According to the research, an important reason for this negative conclusion was to be found in the historical development of Dutch meal patterns and eating habits, which included eating a hot meal once a day at home, having a large breakfast and taking lunch from home to work in the morning. The unemotional Dutch attitude to food was thought to be another factor. According to this reasoning, meals in the Netherlands were looked upon just as nourishment and not as pleasure.1 Be this as it may, we know from other sources that cafeterias and snack bars at the time of the inquiry (1977) already numbered about 4,500.2 Rising numbers has remained the trend ever since, notably in the case of the fast-food chains. At the very end of the twentieth century the habit of eating out, especially of the consumption of snacks, had become much more common in the Netherlands.3 Why, then, were the market researchers wrong? Forecasting consumption is undoubtedly difficult, but in retrospect we can see that the market research took place in a period of very rapid socio-economic and cultural changes, and just when Dutch consumers’ spending in catering establishments was beginning to rise.4 Furthermore, market research could only make a general survey rather than a long-term analysis of eating out in the Netherlands. Such an analysis would have shown the multi-faceted character of developments in eating out and how they affect the present. This chapter makes a start with the long-term study of an unknown, but – 317 –

Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Anneke H. van Otterloo important, aspect of eating out: the rise of the Dutch consumption of snacks and fast food. Snacks and fast food may be characterized as the icons of the modern industrial trend to eat quickly and easily. These qualifications refer to both preparation and consumption.5 Although eating out in restaurants always implies the ease of prepared and served food, the consumption of snacks and fast food adds to this the dimension of ‘quick, cheap and informal’. The increasing popularity of this trend in the long run has even blurred the fixed boundaries between snacks, fast food (meals) and regular meals. The times and places of meals and dishes eaten at breakfast, lunch and dinner have changed. The frequency of ‘eating moments’ has increased and the pattern of three meals a day has shifted partly towards a pattern known as ‘grazing’.6 This means eating informally at individually chosen times and places whether out or at home. Upon the discovery of grazing in the 1990s, many nutritional scientists worried about the consequence for health of this irregular consumer behaviour.7 Grazing in the 1990s was preceded by an increase of eating out in the 1970s and 1980s, a trend also new to the Dutch, who preferred to eat dinner at home.8 In 1960 84 per cent of the population were said rarely or never to eat in a restaurant. By 1980 the percentage had dropped to 26.9 A third important and long-term development, which had started already in the nineteenth century, consisted of the arrival of many new, industrially produced foods, including snacks. The versatile and long-term processes of industrialization and urbanization were (and still are) favourable conditions for the rise and development of a professional food-chain (including industrial food production, distribution and catering), withdrawing ever more food provision tasks from household and crafts.10 The industrial production and distribution of sweet and savoury snacks played a leading part in the new and changing eating scene.11 Designers, processors, traders, distributors and caterers took up the challenge, largely unseen by consumers and food researchers.12 Eating out in restaurants for pleasure was not a Dutch habit before the 1960s,13 though having a croquette from the automatiek was already common before World War II. In this chapter we will argue that both types of eating habits – eating out, and consuming snacks and fast food – are characterized by their own outlets and foods, but must not be separated from each other. Conversely, both became intertwined and, at different times, became part of overall Dutch food and meal patterns in the twentieth century. We show that the rise of eating out in restaurants from the 1960s was preceded by a popular culture of eating snacks and titbits outside the home. In doing so we concentrate on the increase and development of the outside consumption of snacks and fast food between 1920 – 318 –

Snacks and Snack Culture in the Netherlands and 1980.14 In the second section some data on eating out in restaurants in this period are given and we introduce the snack culture of the Netherlands. The long-term development of the distribution, preparation and consumption of snacks is elaborated in the third and fourth sections. Finally, we summarize our findings on the relationship between snacks and fast-food consumption, eating in restaurants, the food-chain and changing meal patterns, and draw some conclusions.

Eating Out and the Development of a Snack Culture In the Netherlands, the innovation of eating and drinking outside the household was related to the upsurge of industrialization and urbanization after the 1890s. City centres assumed new administrative, educational and shopping functions, requiring new buildings, like offices and department stores. The provision of new services implied catering as well.15 All the same, eating at home remained the normal pattern. In the country, the villages and the towns, hot meals were almost exclusively eaten in this way. This situation changed from the mid-1960s, when eating out became more common, as shown in Figure 19.1. The aggregated data on expenditure in hotels and restaurants do not differentiate between types of consumption, e.g. meals, drinks, snacks or fast food. We consider this to be an omission, the origins of which will be addressed in the third section below.

18,000

16,000

14,000

12,000

Potatoes, vegetables and fruit Meat and meat products Textiles and clothing

10,000

8,000

Expenses/restaurants/ hotels/cafés Entertainment services

6,000

4,000

Consumption in rest of world

2,000

0 1925

1930

1935

1940

1945

1950

1955

1960

1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

Figure 19.1 Private final consumption expenditure (million guilders), 1925–85 Source: van Driel and Boon, 1991

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Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Anneke H. van Otterloo The consumption of snacks in the Netherlands has a long tradition. Sandwich bars, for instance, with their liver and salt-beef sandwiches (broodje halfom), had already emerged in Amsterdam around 1850. The bars and their sandwiches became famous, and their success was followed rapidly in other cities. The spread of sandwich bars, however, was restricted to the western part of the country; in other regions they hardly existed until the 1950s. Something similar happened with the consumption of baked and salted potato chips, in French patates frites. Patates frites spread via markets and fairs from Belgium to the southern part of the Netherlands in the 1920s and 1930s but, until the early 1950s, patat or friet remained an unknown snack north of the big rivers – Rhine, Waal and Meuse. These diffusion patterns illustrate the local variety in producing and consuming snacks that lasted until the late1950s. From that period Dutch outdoor snack consumption gradually became more widespread. In the process the rapid growth and diffusion of the kleincafetaria was important. This consists of a small snack bar, frequently with an adjacent automat consisting of a case set in a wall, having a series of little glass, heated hatches containing snacks. Customers can open the hatches by inserting coins, while they can be kept filled from the back by attendants. Here French fries and typical Dutch snacks like croquettes (rissoles) and frikadellen (minced-meat hot dogs) are sold. The type of outlet and the snacks being sold there became known as ‘eating from the wall’ (see Figure 19.2). In Table 19.1 the rise of the klein-cafetaria is shown amidst other types of eating places. Table 19.1 The number of food outlets, 1951–81 1951 Restaurants

1956

1961

1966

1971

1976

1981

19

111

207

307

746

1570

2982

1,168 106

1,330 97

1,905 101

2,048 98

2,027 116

2,379 –

2,898 –

Cafeteria

105

102

145

226

362

502

515

Sandwich bar Lunchroom

104 502

79 507

62 376

50 282

68 208

74 137

– –

Automatiek

109

249

385

481

594

409

134

Patates-frites restaurant Klein-cafetaria

580 197

408 903

145 2,219

76 2,705

43 3,261

17 3,666

Cafe-restaurant Station restaurant

– –

Traiteur

11

37

30

23

21

20

20

Poffertjes bakery Crêperie

18 –

10 –

7 –

13 –

22 –

31 –

– 111

Source: Catering Branch Annual Reports, Poolen, 1993, 21–2

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Snacks and Snack Culture in the Netherlands

Figure 19.2 The automatiek, narrow hatches between a fast-food kitchen and the street, played a crucial role in Dutch streets during the 1960s. They not only offered new, cheap possibilities for eating out, but they also were meeting places for youngsters. Source: © Spaarnestad Fotoarchief; Haarlem, 2263–6n

From these incomplete data it can be concluded that until the mid1950s, cafeterias, lunchrooms, sandwich bars and French-fries stalls were places where cheap snacks could be consumed quickly in an informal setting. From the mid-1950s the klein-cafetaria expanded rapidly at the expense of other outlets. The development, distribution and consumption of snacks in the Netherlands started as an urban phenomenon from which it was dispersed to the towns and villages in the countryside. Starting in – 321 –

Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Anneke H. van Otterloo the western cities, various businesses were actively supplying refreshments and bites-to-eat. In the course of the twentieth century at least five types of entrepreneurial activity and eating outlets can be discerned: a) local bakers, confectioners and butchers selling pastries, confections, sausages, sausage rolls and filled sandwiches; b) local fish dealers, selling, among other things, pickled and salted herring at fish shops and from fish carts; c) local confectioners and ice-cream makers selling ices in the summer and patates frites in the winter; d) local entrepreneurs developing sandwich bars, coffee-houses, corporate canteens, lunchrooms, milk bars, poffertjes (tiny pancakes) stands, cafeterias and automat-cafeterias; e) large companies in the food sector entering the snack business since the 1960s by taking over local food processors and developing new products on behalf of two separate but mutually dependent markets, caterers (eating out) and households (eating at home). Over the course of time the technical context, product range and markets of these businesses coalesced, resulting in the development of new types of eating outlets, such as fast-food restaurants, offering new types of snacks like hamburgers. Within the overall pattern of development from local activities up to large-scale industrial production and distribution, two periods may be discerned: first, a formative period (1920–60) in which consumption of snacks became embedded socially;16 and, second, a period of consolidation and expansion (1960–80), in which snack foods and their consumption became commonplace within the daily routine.

The Formative Years (1920–60) In this period a broad gamut of small enterprises developed where the common man or woman could buy and consume different kinds of snacks from a variety of stalls and shops. Sometimes these entrepreneurs were members of the Dutch Hotel and Catering branch organization Bedrijfsgroep Hotel-, Cafe-, Restaurant-, Pension- en aanverwante bedrijven, but more often they were not. In the magazine Horeca, mouthpiece of this organization since 1942, little information is given about small-scale caterers. About the outlets where sweet and salty snacks were available rather than complete meals at set tables with full service, we found almost nothing. From searching this magazine (see note 14), we obtained a clear impression that members of the Dutch Hotel and Catering organization felt – 322 –

Snacks and Snack Culture in the Netherlands superior to providers of mass public eating and looked down upon ordinary and shabby, often mobile, enterprises, thus neglecting their existence. This attitude may be seen as part of a struggle to achieve an acceptable professional position, involving competition between and amongst the small and large caterers in the developing food-chain (see note 10). In this context it was asserted in Horeca that snack outlets would disappear sooner or later, that they would not affect gastronomic traditions and quality, and that titbit consumers would probably never visit ‘real’ restaurants. The Dutch Hotel and Catering organizations did not collect data on the number of snack outlets, their customers and annual turnovers. As a result, conclusive data could not be included in the consumption expenditure figures compiled by the Dutch Statistical Bureau (CBS). Therefore, in the graph above (Figure 19.1) no figures on snack bars are included. Taking into consideration the popularity of these establishments, for instance the number of automatieks and cafeterias increased between 1953 and 1959 by 110 per cent and 232 per cent, respectively,17 it may be assumed reasonably that their total turnover must have been considerable. The ordinary urban citizen was thus likely to become accustomed to titbits and snacks and learned to integrate their consumption into the habit of eating three meals a day, which by that time had become universal. In addition, town-dwellers developed ambitions to enrich their daily meals with bourgeois luxury items and tasty morsels. Snack culture was, we maintain, being developed ever since the early twentieth century, and reached maturity from the 1960s onwards, when many people could attain more luxurious eating habits. Already from the 1920s and 1930s snacks and snack outlets became joined. One of the linking mechanisms was the expansion of trade as a result of competition. Local bakers, confectioners and butchers sold croquettes and filled sandwiches. Product competition resulted in a new kind of trade, the sandwich bar, frequently run by butchers and bakers selling their own hand-made products. Sandwich shops immediately became a success and developed into a popular urban phenomenon where, in addition to filled sandwiches, hot coffee, tea, milk, soup, salads, croquettes and meatballs could be consumed. They were sometimes called quick-lunch bars (snelbuffet) to indicate that they served foodstuffs quickly to hurried customers – travellers, office workers and visitors to movies and theatres. Sandwich bars were often located near stations, office buildings, cafés and theatres. Their customers were socially heterogeneous,18 ranging from workers to theatre- and opera-goers. The expansion of activities in the titbit trade could also be noticed elsewhere, as urban dairies began to operate milk bars, where milk, filled – 323 –

Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Anneke H. van Otterloo sandwiches and ice-cream were available. In the wake of the 1929 law regulating ice-cream, urban dairy shops started the industrial production of ice-cream in the summer.19 Besides sandwich and milk bars, the coffeeshop had become part of the urban scene since the late nineteenth century. The Volksbond tegen drankmisbruik (The People’s Union against Excessive Drinking) at the time had promoted this type of outlet. In coffeeshops, workers could consume coffee, milk, chocolate, broth, soup and lemonade while eating their lunch of sliced and filled bread or the warm meal brought by their wives and mothers. Coffee-shops located near factories and on the outskirts of cities became social meeting spots for workers, errand-boys, carrier-bicycle riders and truck drivers. Based upon its coffee-shop experience, large industrial firms asked the Volksbond in the inter-war period to set up and operate corporate canteens. This sideline very soon became its principal activity, stimulated by the 1934 legal requirement that firms employing more than twenty people ought to have canteens.20 The urban diffusion of eating out cheaply, quickly and informally received impetus with the emergence of lunchrooms in the 1920s. Modelled after American, English and German examples in the ‘roaring twenties’, lunchrooms addressed the mass market of the common people who were looking for entertainment and fun. Lunchrooms fitted perfectly to these ambitions and desires. With their quick service, modest menus, low prices and in combining music and eating, the lunchrooms of Rutten’s and Heck’s quickly spread through Dutch cities.21 Even the distinguished Dutch Hotel and Catering organization could not deny the success of the lunchroom. The magazine Horeca wrote: ‘It has to be admitted that the lunchroom has indeed succeeded in getting the plain folk to visit the cheap eating and drinking houses in the day time and in the evenings [. . .] even the simple housewives with their children could come, a thing that up to that moment had been fairly non-existent in other establishments.’22 The economic crisis in the 1930s, however, abruptly ended the booming lunchroom business. The number of customers and turnover rates declined drastically. In order not to lose the mass market, lunchroom owners Rutten and Heck were forced to consider alternatives. The first alternative they developed was the cafeteria. The cafeteria could be described as a very simple and rudimentary lunchroom with much glass, tiles, flags and chromium ornaments, containing a buffet (sometimes selfservice), where simple and cheap snacks could be ordered and consumed, while standing or sitting on simple chairs. The clientele was socially heterogeneous and – like sandwich bar customers – consisted of travellers in a hurry to catch public transport, office workers, visitors to movies and – 324 –

Snacks and Snack Culture in the Netherlands theatres, and people going shopping.23 Besides the cafeteria, Heck’s (renamed Ruteck’s in 1960, when Rutten and Heck amalgamated) also introduced the automat-cafeteria, klein-cafetaria or automatiek, already described in the previous section. These were open to the street on several sides though partly covered. Customers could also order a snack at the accompanying desk. Eating on the spot, in the street or taking snacks at home were options, of which the first two occurred most frequently. Automatieks began to spread in busy shopping streets in the big cities and in station halls from the 1930s.24 Cafeterias and automatieks received social impetus from the selling of French fries. Baked and salted potato-sticks had already spread from Belgium to the southern part of the Netherlands in the 1920s and 1930s. Southern cities like Eindhoven, Breda, Den Bosch and Tilburg already had patates frites restaurants in the 1930s. But in the northern part of the country patat or friet remained an unknown delicacy until the late 1940s. Again via markets and fairs patates frites diffused from south to north. Northern cafeteria-owners were already used to frying snacks like croquettes but ice-cream makers also included patates frites amongst their wares. Friet became a big success.25 In the 1950s and 1960s patat became a craze among the youth. Cafeterias became meeting points for youngsters, in public eyes chiefly nozems (rowdies), whose behaviour was frowned upon by the public authorities.26 In the long run, however, the combination of cheap patates frites and a croquette or frikadel was increasingly perceived as food that could replace one of the daily three meals.27 The 1930s also witnessed the introduction of restaurants for the small Chinese maritime community in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.28 Before World War II a combined total of six Chinese restaurants existed in both cities. Nevertheless, the oriental kitchen only served a niche market. This changed rapidly after 1945, when the former colony Indonesia became an independent state and about 300,000 repatriates and soldiers arrived in the Netherlands. Chinese restaurants started serving Indonesian dishes like babi pangang, sateh, nasi goreng and gado gado. This led to the birth of the Chinese-Indonesian kitchen, which the Dutch quickly appreciated.29

Consolidation and Expansion (1960–80) From the 1960s the Dutch snack world was transformed from a set of local activities into a modern branch of the catering industry. This transformation started immediately after World War II, as the number of sandwich

– 325 –

Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Anneke H. van Otterloo shops, cafeterias, lunchrooms and coffee-shops increased rapidly. To regulate the severe competition between snack producers and guarantee the quality of snacks and the professional skills of snack-bar owners, they formed the Unie van Ijsbereiders en Patates-Frites Bakkers (The Union of Ice-cream Makers and Patates Frites Bakers) in 1951.30 Organizing the trade, however, did not create a modern association responsive to expanding market requirements. It was the adoption of technological innovations that would set the scene for reordering the Dutch snack world. From the 1960s the character of producing and distributing snacks changed. Until that time, snack production had been largely hand-made by butchers and bakers, with local markets and local variety in kinds of snacks. With the growing popularity and diffusion of cafeteria snacks (especially patates frites), the snack market boomed. An increasing number of local snack-bar owners started using new appliances and technologies, like the gas-fuelled deep-frying ovens. With these ovens more snacks could be deep-fried and various snacks could be deep-fried simultaneously. This evoked a range of other developments, like the designing of new types of snacks and the development of electrically heated hatches in automatieks to keep the fried snacks warm. The increasing volume of snacks also required appropriate preservation techniques to warrant quality. Cooling and freezing technology, introduced elsewhere in the food industry, appeared to meet this requirement.31 The production of snacks changed as large-scale production and distribution turned out to be more economical than local small-scale production. In the 1960s the industrial production of patates frites started. Potatoes were processed into sliced, pre-baked, packed and deep-frozen patates frites that were delivered to cafeterias, snack bars and restaurants by refrigeration trucks.32 Snack bars, cafeterias, sandwich shops as well as lunchrooms operated by large department stores (Hema, Bijenkorf, V&D) were quick to adopt industrial catering systems, in which production, calculation, transport, distribution and advertisement were based upon modern industrial methods.33 Owners of snack bars, cafeterias, sandwich bars, lunchrooms, and the like, who wanted to survive in an expanding and increasingly concentrated market, had to equip their facilities with technically modern kitchen apparatus, huge cooling installations and large stocks. Other branches of the snack market became very innovative. For instance, corporate canteens and canteens of sporting organizations – frequently operated by former coffee-shop owners like the Volksbond (against excessive drinking) – became important diffusion and test markets for new snacks and snack food. Corporate canteens, for instance, became the first niche markets for frozen pre-cooked meals, long before ‘real restaurants’ – 326 –

Snacks and Snack Culture in the Netherlands incorporated industrially produced, pre-cooked and frozen foodstuffs into their cooking practices.34 The net effect was the integration of snacks in daily life. Snacks were being consumed in between the traditional meals, as part of meals (patates frites), and could be bought in all kinds of cafeterias, restaurants, canteens and from mobile outlets. The diffusion of snacks and snack consumption paved the way for a new kind of restaurant, combining the characteristics of a cafeteria and a real restaurant: the fast-food or quick-service restaurant. In 1963 the Dutch grocery concern Albert Heijn started the first Wimpy Bar in co-operation with the British catering chain Lyons. The Wimpy Bar introduced the hamburger, a new snack that was slow to gain success until the late 1970s. The Dutch seemed to prefer their own snacks, such as croquettes, frikadellen and fried chicken. In an attempt to meet market demands, Albert Heijn and McDonald’s in 1971 started a joint venture fast-food restaurant, Family Food, where patates frites, applesauce and fried chicken were served. In 1974 McDonald’s started its own American restaurants, which only developed from the late 1970s and 1980s. Then McDonald’s outlets moved from the suburbs into the city centres, where the old cafeterias had continued to prosper over the years.35 Besides the snack and fast-food restaurant another type of cheap and informal restaurant rose rapidly in popularity: between 1959 and 1962 the number of Chinese-Indonesian restaurants increased by 59 per cent. The catering-industry journal Horecaf considered the Chinese restaurants as illegal amateurs, neglecting all rules, traditions and legislation, and with their origins in ‘musty harbour quarters.’36 Yet these restaurants attracted many people who considered Dutch restaurants too expensive, too chic, too stuffy and too stingy. Chinese-Indonesian restaurants, with their option of take-away meals (afhaalmenu’s), and the new habit of travelling to Mediterranean countries made the Dutch more curious about foreign cuisines. New immigrant groups, for instance from Italy and Greece, established their own eating places, soon shared by the Dutch. The number of Italian and Greek restaurants grew steadily in the 1970s and 1980s, and going ‘ethnic’ was to become a popular way of eating out.37 The figures in Tables 19.2 and 19.3 b express some of the developments just described. Table 19.2 shows the frequency of take-away meals from Chinese restaurants or snack bars in the late 1970s by a sample of Dutch households. This type of meal provision occurred quite often: more than half of the households sometimes took a meal home or consumed something at a Chinese restaurant, and a third did so at the snack bar. The snack bar continued to be in demand: ‘in 36 per cent of households people take something home from the snack bar or frites stall more than two or three – 327 –

Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Anneke H. van Otterloo Table 19.2 The frequency of take-away meals from Chinese restaurants or snack bars, or of eating at snack bars, by households in 1979/80 (per cent; N = 1,844) No occurrence

Occurrence

Total of households

Take-aways from Chinese-Indonesian restaurant

42

58

100

Take-aways from snack bar/cafeteria of frites stall

67

33

100

72

28

100

Eating at snack bar/ cafeteria or frites stall Source: Cebuco, 1981, 47

times a month, and in 19 per cent of the households people visit the snack bar or frites stall more than two or three times [a month] to eat something on the spot’.38 Table 19.3 surveys the extent of eating out in restaurants in the late 1970s. From Table 19.3 it appears that Chinese-Indonesian restaurants must have been important in developing the trend of eating out from the middle of the 1960s (see Figure19.1). Other types of ethnic restaurants were increasingly visited in the late 1970s, but the Dutch had not yet become accustomed to them to the same extent. Most frequently visited at that time was, however, the ‘Dutch restaurant’, without further specification. In the last decades of the twentieth century the culinary landscape of snacks and fast food expanded rapidly. Several trends sketched here continued to develop. In the process, the boundaries between the several types of snacks, outlets and consumption became ever more blurred. The same was true for ethnic restaurants, from which popular side-dishes such as lumpias, kroepoek and sateh achieved an established position in the Dutch snack world. Table 19.3 Eating out in the Netherlands, 1979/80 (per cent N = 1,644) No occurrence

Occurrence

Total of households

Chinese-Indonesian restaurant

45

55

100

Other type of foreign restaurant

82

18

100

Dutch restaurant

35

65

100

Source: Cebuco, 1981, 47

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Snacks and Snack Culture in the Netherlands

Conclusions The rise of snack consumption in the Netherlands is part of a wide-ranging and changing social pattern of national and international food habits. Up to the 1960s, the meal and food patterns of the Dutch were integrated socially and regionally.39 However, many aspects of modernization are intimately connected with reducing differences in food consumption, which forms part of the democratization of eating habits. This process may be understood as a counterpart of one other important social development, introduced in the opening section, but not extensively dealt with for sake of space. We allude to the rise of a technologically and organizationally complex food-chain. No levelling process could have been possible without the industrial mass production and distribution of cheap food products. From the 1960s new differentiation processes developed which took the direction of individualization, informalization and a shift from eating at home to eating out. Here, the expanding food-chain is again an important factor. Cooling and freezing techniques, for instance, shaped a far-reaching socio-technical catering chain, including outlets, product varieties and eating cultures.40 The omnipresence of snacks and fast-food products reshaped the general phases in the food-chain by blurring the boundaries between at least primary and secondary production and distribution.41 At the beginning of the twenty-first century these types of products have become self-evident as parts of the food supply in an affluent society. It further appears that the conspicuous increase in the consumption of snacks and fast food has been developing ever since the 1920s and 1930s. This long trend experienced both top-down and bottom-up social dynamics. The very successful and typical Dutch croquette, for instance, passed through a process of democratization (top down) and after handmade goods from the bakers and butchers, and the automatiek became available at a variety of small and large eating places. The snack outlets themselves became more respectable and even in vogue for everybody – a bottom-up process. Typical Dutch snack enterprises were snack bars, cafeterias and frying cabins for patates frites. Once the habit of eating snacks had become accepted, the small-scale snack entrepreneurs invented new snacks, like the frikadel, often inspired by products from abroad.42 Thus, in the long run, the way was paved for the arrival and cultural acceptance of fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s. Established in the Netherlands since 1971, it was only in the 1980s, however, that this American company broke through Dutch resistance. In this chapter we have tried to show that the culture of snack consumption has made an important contribution to the increasing popularity of – 329 –

Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Anneke H. van Otterloo eating hot meals in restaurants since the 1960s. Snack culture has also influenced the ways to do business, adding several new types to the existing gamut of food outlets. Steakhouses, self-service restaurants, pancakehouses, croissanteries and canteens, often operating with a very luxury assortment of products, are examples. In short, ‘the mass public went eating out increasingly in small and often cheap places and simple mealdistributing enterprises.’43 Eating out became fashionable, but there was more. The development of the snack culture also influenced eating habits and meal patterns at home.44 The increasing supply of industrially produced and deep-fried snacks, available from the 1970s in supermarkets, stimulated the preparation and consumption at home of traditional wall snacks from the automatiek, and this had far-reaching consequences. Homebaked cafeteria snacks were increasingly consumed partially to replace and partially to supplement the traditional three meals a day. The success of the deep-fried supermarket snacks can be attributed largely to the test markets of cafeterias and (corporate and private sport) canteens. It may be concluded that the growth of eating out in the Netherlands cannot be attributed exclusively to the rise of the average income or to increasing of leisure time since the 1960s. We have shown that, culturally and historically, the upsurge of eating out has been a process accomplished by means of many small, cheap and non-luxurious eating places during the twentieth century. This development may be seen as typically Dutch, in that the Dutch like cheap, but filling, simple food in an informal setting.45 The hot meal at home resisted change the longest; lunch succumbed much earlier. The role of snacks in the development of eating out in the Netherlands has never received serious attention. One reason is the negation and underestimation of the low-status snack scene by the high-status catering industry. The idea that the Dutch did not eat out before the 1970s and, compared to other European countries, even now lag behind in visiting restaurants is based on the persistence of this social construction. This dominant view needs to be revised urgently.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Zuiderveld, 1999, 6. Poolen, 1993, 21–2. Hulshof, 1999. 25 Jaar sociale verandering, 1998, 710. – 330 –

Snacks and Snack Culture in the Netherlands 5. van Otterloo, 1991. 6. Wolf, 1989. 7. van der Hoff, and de Graaf, 1993, 20–25; Dam et al., 1994; Stafleu and Kuilman, 1998, 19–23; Stafleu et al., 1998, 19–23. 8. den Hartog, 1989, 282–96, 311–15. 9. Bos, et al., 1989, 119. 10. See for the development of different phases and links in the food chain: van Otterloo, 2000b, 236–40. 11. Albert de la Bruhèze, 2000, 353–67. 12. For the various groups related to the food-chain, see Tansey and Worsley, 1999. 13. Montijn, 1991, 109. 14. The sources used consist of trade journals in the hotel, restaurant, café and boarding-house business (1942–68, and by sampling every five years from 1969 to 1993, RA Gelderland Arnhem) and trade journals representing the snacks and cafeteria branch (1948–78, Archives Horeca Nederland, Saan Utrecht). In addition, various data on consumption were collected and secondary materials were consulted. 15. Reinders and Wijsenbeek, 1994, 127–48; Miellet, 2001, 203–314. 16. For the elaboration of the concept of ‘societal embedding’, see Schot et al., 1998. 17. ‘Automatieken en cafetaria’s nemen snel toe’, De Conservator. Officieel Orgaan van de Bond van Ijsbereiders en Patates Fritesbakkers, 28/11, 1 June 1960: 545. 18. ‘Nieuw snelbuffet “Tunnel-Expresse” te Rotterdam’, Horeca, Orgaan der [. . .], 1/4, 24 October 1942: 44; ‘Gesprekken uit en over de praktijk: De Broodjeswinkel’, Horeca, Orgaan der [. . .], 2/10, 13 March 1943, 90; ‘Het broodje met . . .’, Horeca, Orgaan der [. . .], 9/ 28, 9 February 1951: 877–9. 19. Reinders, 1999. 20. ‘Gesprekken uit en over de praktijk – De Consumptietent’, Horeca, Orgaan der [. . .], 2/6, 13 February 1943: van Druenen, 1989. 21. During the Olympic Games in Amsterdam in 1928 Heck’s had succeeded in renting all the buffets. As a result the lunchroom became a national craze. 22. ‘De Lunchroom als maatschappelijk bedrijf’, Horeca, Orgaan der [. . .], 2/3, 23 January 1943: 27. This article describes the pre-war situation. 23. ‘De cafetaria: Bedrijfstechnisch en als bron van bijvoeding’, Horeca, Orgaan der [. . .], 1/9, 28 November 1942: 99–100; ‘De Lunchroom als maatschappelijk bedrijf’ (see note 22). – 331 –

Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Anneke H. van Otterloo 24. Shuldener, 1998; Zuiderveld, 1995, 25–8, 51–6. 25. ‘Patates-frites heeft Nederland ook boven de rivieren stormenderhand veroverd’, De Conservator, Officieel Orgaan [. . .], 20/11, 1 June 1953: 140. 26. ‘Jeugd en Ijs’, De Conservator, Officieel Orgaan [. . .], 15/9, 1 May 1948: 3. 27. Zuiderveld, 1999. 28. van Otterloo, 1987. 29. Andersson Toussaint, Chinees in Nederland, Het Bierblad, 12 (2000), 8, 36–8. 30. 1929–1959, 1959. 31. ‘Het broodje met . . .’ (see note 18). 32. Veldman et al., 1999. 33. ‘Geklapt uit de keuken van de Hema’, Misset’s Horeca. Het onafhankelijke vakblad voor het Hotel-, Cafe-, Restaurant-, en Pensionbedrijf, 8/2, 8 January 1960: 158. 34. van Druenen, 37–69. 35. Zuiderveld, 1995, 69–70, 85–6. 36. Bos et al., 1989, 73, 102. 37. Andersson Toussaint, 2000, 36–8, van Otterloo, 1987, 131–5. 38. Cebuco, 1981, 47. 39. Jobse-van Putten, 1995; van Otterloo, 2000b, 282–95. 40. Buiter, 2000, 339–52. 41. Schlosser, 2001. 42. Zuiderveld, 1999, 58–92. 43. Bos et al., 1989, 103. 44. Albert de la Bruhèze, 2000, 358–63; van Otterloo, 1991, 84–5. 45. van Otterloo, 2000a.

References 1929–1959. Nederlandsche Bond van Consumptie-IJsbereiders en Patates Fritesbakkers: Gedenkboek ter gelegenheid van het dertigjarig bestaan (1959), Amsterdam: Hoofdbestuur NBC. 25 Jaar sociale verandering. Sociaal Cultureel Rapport 1998 (1998), Rijswijk: SCP. Albert de la Bruhèze, A. A. (2000), ‘Snacks’, in J. W. Schot, H. W. Lintsen, A. Rip and A. Albert de la Bruhèze (eds), Techniek in Nederland in de Twintigste Eeuw, vol. III: Landbouw en Voeding, Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 353–67.

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Snacks and Snack Culture in the Netherlands Andersson Toussaint, P. (2000), ‘Chinees in Nederland’, Het Bierblad, 12/ 8: 36–8. Bos, N., Jansen, G. J., and Sterk, H. (1989), 100 jaar Horecaf, 1890–1990: Geschiedenis van het Nederlandse Verbond van Werkgevers in Hotel-, Restaurant-, Cafe- en aanverwante bedrijven, The Hague: Horecaf. Buiter, H. (2000), ‘Koelen en vriezen’, in J. W. Schot, H. W. Lintsen, A. Rip and A. Albert de la Bruhèze (eds), Techniek in Nederland in de Twintigste Eeuw, vol. III: Landbouw en Voeding, Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 339–52. Cebuco (1981), Levensmiddelenrapport. Menucensus 1979/1980, Amsterdam: Cebuco. Driel, J. van, and Boon, M. (1991), Private Consumption Expenditure and Price Index Numbers for the Netherlands, 1921–1939 and 1948–1988, Voorburg: CBS. Dam, Y. K. van, Hoog, C. de, and Ophem, J. A. C. van (eds) (1994), Eten in de jaren negentig. Reflecties op voeding, Delft: Eburon. Druenen, P. van (1989), Van Koffiehuis tot catering: Honderd jaar restauratieve dienstverlening 1889–1989, Rotterdam: Waterstad. Hartog, A.P. den (1989), ‘Eten buitenshuis: ontwikkelingen van voedingsgewoonten buiten het huishouden’, Voeding, 50/10: 282–96, 311–15. Hoff, T. van der, and Graaf, C. de (1993), ‘Gemaksvoedsel niet zonder meer ongezond’, Voeding, 54/10: 20–5. Hulshof, K. (1999), Trends in het gebruik van gemaksvoeding, gegevens van drie Voedselconsumptiepeilingen: VCP 1987–1988, 1992–1993 en 1997–1998 (Congrespaper ‘Gemak siert de Voeding’), Ede-Wageningen. Jobse-van Putten, J. (1995), Eenvoudig maar voedzaam. Cultuurgeschiedenis van de dagelijkse maaltijd in Nederland, Nijmegen: Sun. Miellet, R. (2001), Winkelen in Weelde. Warenhuizen in West-Europa 1860–2000, Zutphen: Walburg Pers. Montijn, I. (1999), Aan tafel! Vijftig jaar eten in Nederland, Utrecht and Antwerp: Kosmos. Otterloo, A. H. van (2000b), ‘Voeding in verandering’, in J. W. Schot, H. W. Lintsen, A. Rip and A. Albert de la Bruhèze (eds), Techniek in Nederland in de Twintigste Eeuw, vol. III, Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 236–40. Otterloo, A. H. van (2000a), ‘The Low Countries’, in K. F. Kiple and K. C. Ormelas (eds), The Cambridge World History of Food, vol. II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1232–40. Otterloo, A. H. van (1991), ‘Kroketten en frikadellen: snackcultuur en verlenging van interdependentieketens’, Etnofoor, 4/1, 79–88. Otterloo, A. H. van (1987), ‘Foreign immigrants and the Dutch at table: bridging or widening the gap?’, The Netherland’s Journal of Sociology, 23/2: 126–44. – 333 –

Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Anneke H. van Otterloo Poolen, W. J. (1991), Snackbar of de dualiteit van het vet, unpublished MA thesis in Sociology, University of Amsterdam. Reinders, P. (1999), Een Coupe speciaal: De Wereldgeschiedenis van het consumptie-ijs, Amsterdam and Rotterdam: Unilever, 425–45. Reinders, P. and Wijsenbeek, T., et al. (1994), Koffie in Nederland: Vier eeuwen cultuurgeschiedenis, Zutphen: Walburg Pers. Schlosser, E. (2001), Fast Food Nation. What the All-American Meal is Doing to the World, London and New York: The Penguin Press. Schot, J. W., Lintsen, H. W., and.Rip, A. (1998), ‘Betwiste modernisering’, in: J. W. Schot, H. W. Lintsen, A. Rip and A. Albert de la Bruhèze (eds), Techniek in Nederland in de Twintigste Eeuw, vol. I , Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 17–51. Shuldener, A. (1998), ‘From automatic restaurants to automatieks: a comparison of the American and Dutch uses of the automat’, paper presented at the Society for the History of Technology Conference, Kansas City, 21–5 October. Stafleu, A., and Kuilman, M. (1998), ‘Een trend met positieve en negatieve gezondheidsaspecten’, Voeding, 59/6, 19–23. Stafleu, A., Kuilman, M., and den Breejen, J. H.( 1998), ‘Consumptie van tussendoortjes: op vele punten verschillen’, Voeding, 59/7–8: 19–23. Tansey, G., and Worsley,T. (1999), The Food System: A Guide, London: Earthsran. Veldman, H., Royen, E. van, and Veraart, F. (1999), Een machtige schakel in de Nederlandse land- en tuinbouw: De geschiedenis van CebecoHandelsraad, 1899–1999, Eindhoven: SHT/Cebecogroep, 193–210. Wolf, E. M. de (1989), ‘De graastrend doet ook in Nederland haar intrede’, Voedingsmiddelentechnologie (VMT), 26: 20–1. Zuiderveld, U. (1999), Snacks & ijs: Snelle happen in de lage landen Doetinchem and Winterswijk: Dubbel U Uitgevers. Zuiderveld, U. (1995), Snelle hap: De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse cafetaria- en fastfoodsector, Doetinchem: Misset Uitgeverij B. V.

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Diffusing Public Places of Discipline: Canteens and Cafeterias

–20 – Eating Out during the Workday Consumption and Working Habits among Urban Labourers in France in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Anne Lhuissier

In the nineteenth century, the social life of workers followed the rhythm of labour. Thus, the investigation of the meals eaten during the workday closely follows the entire spectrum of consumption and working habits among labourers. Such an approach avoids the reduction of workers’ culture to their after-work drinking habits, on which French historiography has hitherto mainly focused.1 The analysis of eating out during the working day appears closely tied to the workers’ way of living: the qualitative study of eating-out habits suggests that urban workers in the second half of the nineteenth century attributed many social functions to taverns, cafés and cheap working-class restaurants. This raises the question of the ways in which labourers participated in eating-out practices even, or perhaps mainly, during working hours. This focus leads to the identification of three consumption patterns. These may be described as ‘prodigality’, ‘overwork’ and ‘frugality’. They are based on the allocation of the household budget between domestic production and market purchases. The main point here is that eating out, especially during the working day, is a good marker of social stratification among urban workers. This chapter rests on a qualitative and comparative analysis of some forty French urban workers’ families, within the eighty-two French monographs written by Frédéric Le Play and his followers during the second half of the nineteenth century. The monographs cover the years from 1842 to 1908 and span different industrial sectors. The interviewers recorded two types of information related to eating out. In the Observations préliminaires, they noted indications connected with the places, the schedules and the contents of food taken by the workers outside the home. In the household ‘budget’, the eating-out expenditure is split between two headings: the ‘food prepared and consumed outside the – 337 –

Anne Lhuissier household’,2 and the ‘expenses related to moral needs, recreation, and health’.3 The distinction rests on a binary classification of working-class social time, the reference point of which remains work: the working day and the time spent outside work. Indeed, the monographs provide very detailed data that lend themselves well to empirical analysis.4

The Prodigality Pattern Within the prodigality pattern, eating out may be considered as an opportunity for social interaction. These interactions occurred with acquaintances, friends, relatives, neighbours or co-workers, depending on circumstances. The families best described by this pattern are characterized by behaviours that may be qualified as ‘prodigal’. Moreover, the interviewers used the term ‘prodigality’ in several monographs. For them, it is a synonym of ostentation. They considered prodigality as a practice to be condemned when it led to a level of expenditure that was unsuited to the working class and caused them to live beyond their means. The comments of Adolphe Focillon, a close collaborator of Le Play, towards the Tailor from Paris provide a good illustration of it. He was described as being gifted with a great skill, which conferred on him good earnings, but also ‘extremely debauched behaviour’. According to Focillon, ‘savings are perceived by this type of workman as a feature of avarice. The more skilful they are, the more they show, by their prodigality, the status they have earned by their talent.’5 Nevertheless, I will use the term ‘prodigality’ with a different meaning: to denote generous behaviour. The Glover from Grenoble and the Tailor from Paris provide good examples of such behaviour towards food consumption. First, they had something in common: both workmen were chefs d’industrie and their wives contributed to their respective household incomes. The families had obviously decided to enjoy a certain level of well-being, and from this point of view, prodigality may be considered as a way of living. This involved sustaining friendly relations strongly supported by wine, and a practice of eating out that could be qualified as ‘service-oriented’. These elements stress a certain ease, a characteristic of which was the daily consumption of wine. Indeed, Frédéric Le Play underlined that ‘the working class can get fermented drinks only after having provided for the more pressing needs; the regular use or the deprivation of this kind of beverage is one of the best indications to appreciate the well-being or the poverty of a family’.6 The regular attendance of commercial establishments like taverns, wine merchants and restaurants expressed such ease as well.

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Eating Out in France during the Workday The family of the Glover is one that most closely matches the description of ‘prodigal’. The interviewer comments that the Glover is ‘one of those who would rather attend taverns and meeting places than evensong in church. He likes to have fun and does not conceal it [. . .]. Generous, he does not care very much about expenditure.’7 The Glover maintained many social interactions in a variety of locations, and the investigator stressed this feature of the Glover’s way of living, focused on interrelations. These relationships were developed at home, where his friends came to visit him while he was working: ‘At any time and almost at every moment, the workman receives visitors and friends who come to talk with him, to take a glass of wine or simply to say him hello [. . .]. He likes to meet his friends, to receive them at home, either during the day or in the evening.’ These relations were also developed at the village tavern, where he read the papers, and at the homes of his neighbours. Moreover, he went once a week to Grenoble to see his manufacturer and bring him the work he had done. The trips included visits to relatives and friends living in the city. On other occasions, he took his meals in restaurants, auberges or cafés. The Glover lived in the countryside in the small village of Biviers, to which his parents and those of his wife belonged. But according to the interviewer, the Glover expressed ‘his fascination with the city rather than the countryside’.7 He therefore moved between two social scenes, his village community (Biviers) and the city (Grenoble). This geographical situation made possible the prodigal behaviour of the Glover. He got various advantages from it: the proximity of his family and that of his wife, both farmers, allowed the circulation of much food, and more particularly the wine they consumed every day. Moreover, the Glover cultivated his garden, which provided him with some resources. The investigator stressed the importance of the village as a narrow space that offered many occasions for social interaction. In addition to this situation of residence, other characteristics constituted to the Glover’s way of living. His ‘fascination with the city’ was related to a desire for upward mobility. Thus, in 1872 he ‘gave up’ the condition of Glover to open a débit de vin (a kind of pub) in Biviers. He enjoyed certain notoriety in the village, and, as a Glover, he took advantage of the services of an apprentice, whose gloves earned him 220 francs each year (or 11 per cent of the annual income of the household). So his social life was both focused on the family group and open to the world of cafés, taverns and restaurants. The Tailor from Paris presents many similar features to that of the Glover: ‘Recreation played a significant role in his life and resulted in considerable expenditure.’8 A substantial consumption of tobacco, attendance at public balls and the theatre, and drinking at the tavern, together featured strongly in his household budget and in his time schedule: – 339 –

Anne Lhuissier Every evening about 5–6 o’clock, he takes his supper in the tavern, and there he finds co-workers with whom he drinks, plays cards, and even sometimes, goes to evil places. Until recently he had been Vice-President of a goguette, a group who sang together in a tavern. He gave up these activities when the police force, suspecting him of certain political goals, put an end to them.9

Each Sunday and each feast day, ‘the family goes for a walk towards 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon, and dine in a suburban tavern’. The skill of the Tailor provided him a high rank and a good income that he preferred to enjoy rather than to save: ‘His expensive habits put him, like all the improvident workmen, in a precarious position. And they prevent him from moving to a better condition, that anyway he is not eager to obtain.’ The family drank wine at every meal. The Tailor worked at home in the employ of a manufacturer but he also maintained his own customers. That is the reason why the interviewer qualified the Tailor as a chef d’industrie. Like the Glover, he worked with the assistance of an apprentice. The investigator deplored what he judged to be ‘independence’ and ‘improvidence’: though he had legally acknowledged his two children, the Tailor was not married to the woman with whom he was living, and he was not affiliated to any provident society. His relations were rather based on emotional and friendly ties, as well on a professional basis. The Tailor circulated indeed between the two groups of relationships. The first was professional and represented the strong solidarity between tailors, based on the exchange of specialized work. The second was rooted in friendship, and it was this that led him to become Vice-President of a goguette.10 Three main features thus characterize the prodigality pattern: the multiplicity of social spheres, independence and the level of resources (economic or other). Within this pattern, eating out took a major place in the organization of social relations and in a family’s way of life.

The Overwork Pattern The overwork pattern places the focus squarely on work, which determined how social and home life was organized. Eating out was integrated in the rhythms and forms of labour and was closely tied to them. In the prodigality pattern, the tavern was a support for social or business relations. In the overwork pattern, going to taverns, restaurants and cafés was an integral part of work. Commercial eating places played two essential roles. The first was as a ‘service’, since eating out was the result of an economic calculation by the household, which privileges working time and the

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Eating Out in France during the Workday income expected from work, rather than time spent preparing meals at home. The investigators often mentioned families that, ‘in a hurry’, purchased their meals at a local tavern. The second role of these commercial establishments was as a place of business, where deals were made and information gathered. The family of the Cabinet-maker from Paris gives a good example of ‘service’ consumption.11 The workman was the son of a laundress and of a merchant of wood established at La Villette, in the Paris suburbs. He was a highly skilled labourer and worked in famous shops. His wife, the daughter of a small manufacturer, worked on her own account as a dressmaker and was highly reputed. All of the couple’s activity was focused on labour and social success. In addition to his work, the Cabinet-maker, by his reputation, was engaged in public activities. He was an influential member of the trade-union chamber (Chambre Syndicale). Through his connections, he was nominated by the headquarters of Paris police as a member of the local ‘Commission of the Surveillance of the Apprentices of His District’ (Commission locale de surveillance du travail des apprentis de son quartier). Moreover, he was the secretary of two associations, a political one, and a provident society, which entrusted their files to him. Since he had to give up working on his own account, the Cabinet-maker shifted his ambition to his children. In particular he expected his daughter to become a midwife.12 The way the daily life of the Cabinet-maker’s family was organized directly affected household organization and eating habits. He purchased all his workday meals (morning, noon and at 4 o’clock in the afternoon) at the tavern: in the morning, he bought his bread there; at lunchtime, in addition to the meat that he brought from home, he also purchased some bread, wine, coffee and brandy; at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, he again consumed wine at the tavern for le coup de 4.13 In addition, his wife often fetched her own meals from a local restaurant. Instead of privileging home cooking, they preferred to organize their time around their work and the expected income. Their eating-out habits continued out of working hours. The Cabinet-maker drank wine on Saturday evenings with friends. He and his family also made picnics and visited friends living in the suburbs. These activities involved many occasions of eating out and increased the family’s social contacts. This example corresponds partly to the previous pattern and underlines the porosity of the boundaries between each of the three patterns. The overwork pattern also includes workers who had to eat their lunch away from home because their workplace was at a distance. This was the case for two carpenters whose workplaces were more than an hour from

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Anne Lhuissier home. Here again, the profiles are contrasted. Whereas the carpenters did not appear to care how much they spent, the Paris labourer preferred to do without. These families took divergent paths. According to the investigators, the two carpenters expected upward mobility, one by setting up his own business, and the other by becoming an influential member of a political party; whereas the Paris labourer had less and less support to earn his numerous family’s living. The carpenters considered taking their meals at the tavern as symbolic of the social rank to which they aspired and that they had already partially attained: one enjoyed a high reputation in his work and people came to ask him for advice, and the other occupied an important political position. They regularly spent about 30 and 26 per cent of their respective budget on their midday meals, whereas the labourer spent only 11 per cent. But the relationship between labour and meals eaten in the tavern may be even more general when the tavern is a backdrop for business and a glass of wine represents additional income. In the case of the Second-hand Goods Dealer from Paris, the débit de vin may be considered as an extension of the shop: ‘in the morning, when he opens his shop, the workman goes to the local tavern, and there, with some other dealers ready to leave for their round, he takes a glass of brandy in winter, a glass of white wine in summer. This so-called goutte was sometimes the occasion of significant business.’14 Certain traders, such as second-hand goods dealer, laundryman or ragman, needed to keep informed to find new outlets for their trade. And for some, meals taken in the tavern were sometimes extra income, provided as a gratuity. This was the case for water carriers and barbers. The Water-carrier from Paris, for example, received a glass of wine as a tip, but he was not the only one: Didier Nourrisson quotes the exemplary case of hairdressers, ‘who have to accept the glass that the customer offers to them as a tip’.15

The Frugality Pattern In the frugality pattern, behaviour connected with eating out is often completely opposed to that mentioned above. The expense of eating out is systematically avoided by recourse to home cooking.16 Such behaviour is mainly related to managing the budget with a view to savings. The investigators considered these families as virtuous. Families spent a large share of their time on household work and prepared all their own meals. They invested their savings in livestock and farmland or placed them in a savings account. They were minimally open to outside contacts. Similarly,

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Eating Out in France during the Workday they attempted to replace food purchased on traditional markets with home-produced food. They also went outside the formal markets (e.g. outside the town’s or the country’s frontier) to buy at lower cost. It should be mentioned that most families who privileged saving over expense were quite religious.17 There are various situations within the frugality pattern. Let us quote a first group whose workers authorized themselves to have some consumption: the Weaver from Mamers (Sarthe) lived a life based on restrictions, and he took ‘from time to time, a small glass of cider at the tavern when the bread price is low and when work is secure’.18 This drink was determined by two strictly economic conditions: the impact of the price of bread on the household budget, and whether the income was sufficient. Moreover, the drink concerned was neither wine nor spirits, but a glass of cider: a beverage from Normandy, which was famous for its low price. Three other family heads visited the tavern from time to time, always in particular circumstances. The only expenditure of the Earthenware-maker from Nevers (Nièvre) consisted of wine consumed after the meetings held with ‘the members of St François-Xavier’, a small provident society.19 The Employee of the Paper Factory from Angoulême (Charentes) ‘drank sparingly after playing cards with friends’,20 and the Spinner from Valsles-Bois (Marne) had an occasional drink with the other members of a Christian association of workers.21 In these three cases, labourers attended the tavern to drink rather than to take solid foods. Moreover, they went to these establishments in precise circumstances: the drink closed a meeting between friends or members of the same association, and the rhythm of these meetings punctuated that of consumption outside the home. A second group of families totally avoided this kind of expenditure. For the midday meal or for meals during leisure, they systematically substituted home cooking for meals in ‘restaurants’ or canteens. The Miner from Auvergne, the Steelworker from Herimoncourt and his son, and the Typesetter from Paris never went to the tavern. They brought their noon meal from home and ate it at work. The Cartwright from Montataire Forges (Oise) went back home for his midday meal instead of eating at the canteen, and he and the investigator deemed this habit to be more economical.22 He attended neither the balls nor the taverns. If he went in a tavern to drink a ‘small glass with a comrade’, it was with a precise goal: to increase the customers of wheel-barrows that he constructed and repaired on his own account, outside of his normal working hours.23 There were at least two reasons why the Typographer avoided the tavern: the investigator indicated that he was ‘sober because of his sense of duty and because he had no taste for it’. His sobriety was partly tied to his religious – 343 –

Anne Lhuissier education. He had been intending to take religious orders before deafness in adolescence led him to abandon this ambition. But especially, the Typographer, whose life was based on a ‘virtue of charity’, privileged saving rather than expenditure. At 55 years of age, he put money in the savings bank (he had at the time of the investigation 3,612 francs). In addition to the ‘retirement pension from the typographical company’, his savings would help him and his wife to provide against any ‘infirmities which would prevent them from working’.24 Lastly, three women: the Worker from Paris, the one from Limoges (Haute-Vienne) and the Corsetmaker from Le Raincy (Seine), together with their children, stayed resolutely far away from the tavern and any other eating-out establishments. In contrast to the very poor Linen Maid from Lille, these three women managed to earn their respective families’ living. Thus, the rigorous management of their household budget was the main feature of their ‘success’. The Worker from Paris had placed her sons in workshops close to her home to avoid ‘the considerable expenditure of food taken outside and, at the same time, the fascination of the tavern’.25 Moreover, the families within this pattern shared another common feature: they attempted to avoid the traditional market and privileged instead domestic food production. Let us examine the case of the Steelworker from Hérimoncourt and his son. The former incurred a nonrecurring expense at the time of the fête patronale26 by inviting the family of his wife to eat. But the investigator underlines that ‘we have to point out that foods left are used to feed the family during most of the following week; on the other hand, the expenditure would certainly increase if the worker and the brothers of his wife [. . .] celebrated feasts at the tavern’.27 The father managed to profit from real estate, and to help his son, he rented to him the first floor of his own house. The women of the two households formed together an ‘entreprise collective’. They cultivated a large garden next to the house. In addition, the Steelworker’s wife cultivated two fields (rented annually), each of which was located two kilometres away. The harvest of these fields was impressive: 27 bags of potatoes, 500 cabbages, a large quantity of beans and several other vegetables and fruits. The two housewives pooled their resources and that led to many forms of exchange between the families: the father sold his son the pig he had bred during the year, and gave in addition fresh fruits from his garden; in return the father received from his son dry fruits and some wine. The Steelworker’s family tried to avoid the market. The wife cultivated fields and bred pigs at the same time as her husband purchased food products at low prices outside the town.

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Eating Out in France during the Workday

Conclusion These three patterns raise several questions with regard to the connection between consumption, way of living and the social stratification within the urban working class. First, the evidence collected in this chapter shows that we can hardly reduce working-class culture to a ‘drinking culture’. The transverse analysis of meals eaten outside the home during the workday shows close ties to the labourers’ way of living. Placing the socially differentiated eating-out practices in this perspective leads to a stress upon the multiple concurrent social functions with which taverns and other commercial establishments were invested by the workers during working hours. Peter Scholliers thus underlines the increasing place of cheap restaurants and ready-made meals in the labourers’ diet and insists on a so-called ‘law’ ‘concerning the connection between income level and time spent in cooking and eating: the higher the income, the less time in shopping, cooking, and cleaning up after meals, and more time spent in eating’.28 Furthermore, the patterns mentioned above lead us to examine the concept of the standard of living and its evaluation. The first two patterns, compared with that of frugality, indicate that consumption is not perhaps the most relevant indicator in estimating the standard of living. How do families decide to allocate their resources to savings rather than to consumption? How do they choose between saving and its anticipated profits, compared to the pleasure of the present time? These examples reveal different systems of value to those of standards of living. Alain Cottereau proposes a way out by suggesting that we carry out an interpretation of both consumption and work habits in terms of arts de vivre and take into account three criteria: the efficiency of work, the allocation of goods between saving and well-being, and the family’s circumstances.29 These criteria would probably help us to comprehend determinants of workingclass consumption in greater depth. This topic raises a third remark that deals with the question of the allocation of time by working-class families between food-supply and eating-out habits. We saw that families considered one or the other according to their preference towards either home cooking (and saving) or purchase of meals. Such a distinction is important for the interpretation of families’ consumption habits.

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Anne Lhuissier

Notes I would like to thank Martin Bruegel for his advice and Stéphane Baciocchi for his helpful comments and suggestions on the original French version of the text. 1. See, for instance: Graveleau, 1992; Langle, 1990; Nourrisson, 1990; Ross, 1986. Jacques Rougerie disagrees with this point of view. He shows that the political socialization of workers in the second half of the nineteenth century took place less at taverns than in provident societies. See Rougerie, 1994 2. ‘Les aliments préparés et consommés en dehors du ménage’. 3. ‘Les dépenses concernant les besoins moraux, les récréations et le service de santé’. 4. In spite of their normative character, the monographs lend themselves well to the study of workers’ consumption habits. Indeed, beyond their moral considerations, the interviewers provided very detailed data and reconstituted the families’ histories in a way that allows a relevant analysis of the workers’ ways of living. With regard to the methodological approach of normative sources, see, for instance, Cottereau, 1980, 7–103; Lhuissier, 2002, Chapter 3. 5. Focillon, 1858, 168. 6. Le Play, 1855, 35. 7. de Toytot, 1887a, 469, 479–80, 467. 8. Focillon, 1858, 163. 9. Focillon, 1858. A goguette was an association of workers whose main goal was to sing and to drink in meetings held at the tavern. Invitations to sing were issued at the start of the meeting, and then each was called when it was his turn. For further details, see Focillon, 1858, 164. 10. Focillon explains that ‘The Tailor held a goguette at Clignancourt (Paris); the name of this association was “les enfants du Désert”; he was also the Vice-President of another association of the same kind, that of “des enfants du sans-soucis”. Each member of the head of the association received a bottle to drink in the evening, but he never had enough.’ Focillon, 1858, 164. 11. du Maroussem, 1895a, 53–100. 12. He took this decision according to the advice of a friend of his wife, a former midwife who became a doctor. 13. The coup de 4 was a usual practice of the carpenters, who had a rest pause at the tavern at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. – 346 –

Eating Out in France during the Workday 14. Gautier, 1862, 291. 15. Nourrisson notices that this kind of ‘remuneration was widespread in the countryside. In particular, in addition to their wages, the dayemployed washerwomen used three times a day to have some coffee delivered with brandy, and a litre to be carried out.’ See Nourrisson, 1990, 138. 16. In the second half of the nineteenth century, most families were integrated into the market economy, because of the general monetization of life, and the increase both in working time and in distance between home and work (Mennell, 1985, 226; Scholliers, 1996, 246– 7). 17. Dion, 1967 18. de Saint-Léger, 1855, 201. 19. de Toytot, 1887b. 20. Guérin, 1895, 286. 21. Guérin, 1899, 97. 22. However, aside from price considerations, manufactory canteens may have lost favour because of their unpleasant atmosphere (promiscuity and sometimes assigned tables and even seats) and the fact that they did not correspond to the workers’culture of lunchboxes. See Saunier, 1978, 191; Chombart de Lauwe, 1977, 178. 23. Bertheault, 1887. 24. Badier, 1862, 258. 25. du Maroussem, 1895b, 188. 26. The Peugeot Company director organized this feast each year in Hérimoncourt and in four other villages. 27. Robert, 1887a, 296. 28. Scholliers, 1996, 256. 29. From a comparison between two family’s budgets (Mélougas and Belescabiett), Alain Cottereau shows that, in spite of a similar level of consumption, the families spent their budgets in very different ways: ‘the difference is due to the conjunction of two elements of action: a much greater effectiveness of the family activity of Belescabiett, combined with a concern for well-being. [. . .] So that effectiveness is not devoted to an addition of landed properties or saving, but to their well-being. Thus, the Belescabietts have a level of consumption comparable with that of their neighbours, but with less tiredness, a different quality, enjoying their social appearance’ (Cottereau, 1999, 26–7).

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Anne Lhuissier

References Badier, A.-F. (1862), ‘Compositeur-typographe de Paris’, in Les Ouvriers des deux Mondes, 1st series, vol. 4, Paris: Société d’Economie Sociale, 241–82. Bertheault, W. (1887), ‘Charron des forges et fonderies de Montataire’, Les Ouvriers des deux mondes, 2nd series, vol. 1, Paris: Firmin Didiot, 133–76. Chombart de Lauwe, P.-H. (1977), La vie quotidienne des familles ouvrières, Paris: CNRS. Cottereau, A. (1980), Étude préalable, in D. Poulot, Le Sublime, ou le travailleur comme il est en 1870 et ce qu’il peut être. Réimpression [1st edn 1870], Paris: Maspero, 7–103. Cottereau, A. (1999), ‘Précarité, économies familiales et projets de vie’, in A. Cottereau and M. Gribaudi, Précarités, cheminements et formes de cohérence sociale au XIXe siècle, Paris: Rapport scientifique à la Mire, 1–85. Dion, M. (1967), ‘Science sociale et religion chez Frédéric Le Play’, Archives de sociologie des religions, 24: 83–104. Focillon, A. (1858), ‘Tailleur d’habits de Paris’, in Les Ouvriers des deux Mondes, 1st series, vol. 2, Paris: Société d’Économie Sociale, 387–441. Gautier, F. (1862), ‘Auvergnat-brocanteur en boutique à Paris (SeineFrance)’, in Les Ouvriers des deux mondes, 1st series, vol. 4, Paris: Société d’Économie Sociale, 283–330. Graveleau, N. (1992), Les cafés comme lieux de sociabilité à Paris et en banlieue, 1905–1913, Paris: FEN, Cahiers du centre fédéral. Guérin, U. (1895), ‘Ouvrier-employé de la fabrique coopérative de papiers d’Angoulême’, in Les Ouvriers des deux Mondes, 2nd series, vol. 4, Paris: Firmin Didot, 273–322. Guérin, U. (1899), ‘Fileur en peigné et régleur de métier du Vals-desBois’, in Les Ouvriers des deux Mondes, 2nd series, vol. 5, Paris: Firmin Didot, 145–200. Langle, H.-M. de (1990), Le petit monde des cafés et débits parisiens au XIXe siècle: Évolution de la sociabilité citadine, Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises. Le Play, F. (1855), Les Ouvriers Européens: Études sur les travaux, la vie domestique et la condition morale des populations ouvrières de l’Europe, précédées d’un exposé de la méthode d’observation, Paris: Imprimerie impériale. Lhuissier, A. (2002), Réforme sociale et alimentation populaire (1850– 1914): Pour une sociologie des pratiques alimentaires, Ph.D. in sociology, Paris (EHESS) – 348 –

Eating Out in France during the Workday Maroussem, P. du (1895a), ‘Ebéniste parisien de haut-luxe’, in Les Ouvriers des deux Mondes, 2nd series, vol. 4, Paris: Firmin Didot, 53–100. Maroussem, P. du (1895b) ‘Ouvrière-mouleuse en cartonnage d’une fabrique collective de jouets parisiens (Seine-France)’, in Les Ouvriers des deux Mondes, 2nd series, vol. 4, Paris: Firmin-Didot, 173–224. Mennell, S. (1985), All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, Oxford: Blackwell. Nourrisson, D. (1990), Le buveur du XIXe siècle, Paris: Albin Michel. Robert, C. (1858a), ‘Monteur d’outils en acier de la fabrique d’Hérimoncourt (Doubs-France)’, in Les Ouvriers des deux Mondes, 1st series, vol. 2, Paris: Société d’Economie Sociale, 285–320. Robert, C. (1858b), ‘Décapeur d’outils en acier de la fabrique d’Hérimoncourt (Doubs-France)’, in Les Ouvriers des deux Mondes, 1st series, vol. 2, Paris: Société d’Economie Sociale, 233–84. Ross, E. (1986), ‘The sociability of workers and the working class in comparative perspective’, International Labour and Working-class History, 29: 102–8. Rougerie, J. (1994), ‘Le mouvement associatif populaire comme facteur d’acculturation politique à Paris de la révolution aux années 1840: continuité, discontinuités’, Annales historiques de la révolution française, 3: 493–516. Saint-Léger, A. de (1855), ‘Tisserand de la fabrique urbaine collective de Mamers (Sarthe)’, in F. Le Play, Les Ouvriers Européens, Paris: Imprimerie Impériale. Saunier, P. (1978), ‘L’expansion de la restauration collective: un développement qu’il ne faut pas surestimer’, Cahiers de nutrition et de diététique, 13/3: 191–94. Scholliers, P. (1996), ‘Workers’ time for cooking and eating in nineteenthand twentieth-century Western Europe’, Food and Foodways, 6/3–4: 243–60. Toytot, E. de (1887a), ‘Gantier de Grenoble’, in Les Ouvriers des deux Mondes, 2nd series, vol. 1, Paris: Firmin Didot, 465–520. Toytot, E. de (1887b), ‘Faïenciers de Nevers’, Les Ouvriers des deux Mondes, 2nd series, vol. 1, Paris: Firmin Didot, 177–228.

– 349 –

–21– Industrial Canteens in Germany, 1850–1950 Ulrike Thoms

The separation of home life and work has been characterized as one of the most important elements of industrialization. An important consequence of this separation in the past was that the worker could not simply take a short break to have lunch with his wife and children. He was instead forced to eat out at work. Companies and factory owners invested large sums of money in building eating rooms and canteens, and repeatedly drew attention to their beneficence on behalf of their employees. Thus a very complex bundle of socio-economic and cultural issues came together within the rationalization of industrial production. Rationalization of the ‘human factor’ was one such, concerning the comparison or paralleling of the working of machines and human bodies. When nutritional science emerged, it tended to use a machine metaphor to explain the bodily functions and the mechanism of human nutrition. Conversely, physiology is broadly used for the description and explanation of economical and social processes.1 In the realm of industrial work, ‘people’s rational feeding’ (Rationelle Volksernährung) was the concept which related biological, social and economic matters.2 Together with this issue a number of practical questions were raised: Which nutrients and how much of them does the worker need? How can we make sure that he eats enough of them to be able to work? How can we provide a healthy diet in the cheapest way? The provision of canteens seemed to be the best solution, and as discipline was seen as the counterpart of rationalization (Weber), they were a means of disciplining the worker, who was expected to match his bodily needs and functions to those of the industrial process. This chapter tries to show how canteens took over this function at the end of the nineteenth century. It concentrates on the beginnings, and then traces the further development up to the twentieth century. It examines the history of the term ‘canteen’, and investigates why and when a need for institutionally provided food was noticed and what resulted from this. – 351 –

Ulrike Thoms There follows a discussion of the concept of Rationelle Volksernährung, which emerged in the 1850s, and its impact on social policy, the creation of factory canteens and their relationship to nutrition education. Lastly, the chapter looks at the shift from physiological to psychological factors through the rationalization movement from the 1920s onwards. The sources used are very scattered and of varying origin. Most important are the reports of the Prussian factory inspectors who were instructed to promote canteens and to report on their progress. Other sources include the archives of industrial enterprises (especially the Krupp Archive in Essen), the various books describing the factories’ impact on charity and social policy (which have been published by different associations or by single entrepreneurs), company and occasional reports in different periodicals, and the special journals for canteen owners or managers, which appeared after the turn to the twentieth century.

The Term ‘Canteen’ and its History The German term Kantine is of military origin. Originally it meant an inn for soldiers in a fortress, where only alcoholic drinks were sold, namely beer and wine.3 Dictionaries mention Menage (tied accommodation) or Speiseanstalt, in the sense of provision of complete meals, from the 1820s, and they were clearly associated with the purpose of saving money by housekeeping together with others.4 The term and concept were taken over by industry from the 1850s. Consequently, the conception was one of canteen food specifically meant for young, strong and healthy men doing hard physical labour. In fact there were differing systems of organization and provision. Some institutions only sold drinks, others sold sandwiches and sausages, and about a third of them offered a choice of warm dishes. In some cases the canteens were leased out and run like an inn, and in other cases the factory itself organized everything. I will concentrate on institutions which were directly run by the factories themselves, selling hot lunch meals, and deal with them under the modern term ‘canteen’, which is not overburdened with all the different connections to poor relief.

The Perception of a Need for Institutionally Provided Food around 1850 Historically, there have always been facilities for providing hot meals for people in institutions, or on voyages, or who lack a kitchen of their own, – 352 –

Industrial Canteens in Germany or during times of need.5 But the ‘normal’ place for a meal was with one’s own family or the one within which a servant or unmarried craftsman lived. However, the profound socio-economic and cultural changes brought about by industrialization created a need to take care of the unmarried who had migrated from the rural areas to new industrial centres.6 In particular, the mining, iron and mechanical engineering industries, as well as the sugar industry and the brickworks, became aware of this necessity because they were situated in the countryside or in new suburbs with no infrastructure at all. Since the 1850s, factory and mine owners, sometimes even the church or charitable associations, had been founding homes for the unmarried (Ledigenheime), which offered accommodation and food. An inquiry in 1876 by the Ministery of Commerce, Trade and Public Works (Ministerium für Handel, Gewerbe und öffentliche Arbeiten) counted 1,516 of these institutions in 555 factories with 34,407 sleeping places.7 The meals included breakfast, lunch and dinner, sometimes even a snack in the afternoon. The character of the food was rather simple. In the north-west of Germany, the Ruhr Area, the lunch consisted of hot-pots made from potatoes and meat, combined with sauerkraut, barley, beans or rice. In the evening potatoes with herrings were served (Table 21.1). Table 21.1 Ingredients of midday meals in the canteen of Funcke & Hueck, March 1858 Date

Foodstuff

g per portion per day

16

Potatoes Beef Peeled barley Salt

437 50 65 12.5

17

Potatoes Bacon Sauerkraut Flour

437 37.5 250 6

18

Potatoes Bacon White beans Flour

437 40 200 13

19

Potatoes Beef Rice

437 56 69

20

Potatoes Beef Butter Flour

865 44 6 13

Source: Staatsarchiv Münster, Regierung Arnsberg, B, Nr 52

– 353 –

Ulrike Thoms Life in such a Menage was like that of a soldier: the occupants had to follow a discipline by obeying a strict time schedule; and the food was rough and rather simple. So it is no wonder that the workers did not like these lodgings at all. They preferred to rent a room or simply a bed with a private family. In consequence, the Menages became less frequented after the 1870s.8 Having invested a good deal of money in the buildings and their equipment, the factory owners tried to halt this process by authoritarian means and by giving some advantages to the inhabitants of menages. Nevertheless, success was limited.9 Clearly, these facilities were not simply the welfare institutions the factory owners loved to declare them in public to be. They also served to provide the workers with lodgings, so that the companies were supplied with enough manpower as an important aspect of the first phase of industrialization. It was also expected that canteens and Menages would bind the workers to their factory and build ‘a good old stock’ of workers, as Alfred Krupp expressed it.10 But married workers were expected to go home and to have lunch with their families, even if this shortenend the time for resting. Coming from a bourgeois background, social reformers welcomed this behaviour. According to their moral economy, this was the indispensable emotional and material base for a hard-working labourer and a safeguard against dangerous social democratism/communism, the longing for higher wages, and alcoholism.11 Therefore it was accepted until the 1890s that whole families would come to the factories. Women or children brought the meal to the factory in a tin container, called the Henkelmann, and had lunch together with the men.12 But as urbanization progressed and the distance between the home and the workplace increased there was a greater separation between the domestic and the working sphere. The number of commuters rose, and as early as 1886 a third of the workers needed twenty-five minutes and more to reach their work,13 so that it became impossible for them to go home for lunch.

The Rationalization of the Nutritional Process: The Concept of People’s Rational Feeding (Rationelle Volksernährung) It is clear that the financial commitment of the factory owners had a number of reasons, one of which was the success of the machine metaphor. As the machine metaphor entered the discourse of different sciences it was popularized broadly in works on nutrition, especially by men like Justus von Liebig (1803–73) and Jacob Moleschott (1822–93).14 From the 1850s it was an accepted fact that the human body needed fuel like any – 354 –

Industrial Canteens in Germany machine.15 The attraction of this model stems from its ability to bring together the spheres of the human body and of industrial work, as both were explained by the same energetic principle of thermodynamics,16 and could be understood by workers as well as owners in relation to their daily background. The underlying idea was efficiency, which was then transferred to the conception of nutitrition. Entrepreneurs and social reformers were eager to find means of supplying workers with cheap nutrition, which at the same time ensured health and physical strength.17 In a second step they tried to popularize this knowledge through household schools or courses.18 Rationalization of work and rationalization of diet went in parallel and both were furthered by disciplinary processes, which were part of the rationalization of society as Max Weber and Foucault have analysed it. First, they were directed against the old pre-industrial temporal regime, dominated by an organic understanding of time, which was understood as ‘holy order’, sacrosanct.19 During industrialization this order was replaced by time and money as organizing principles and labourers became a production factor among others, all of which had to be exploited in the most efficient way. The disciplinary process paralleled the matching of machines and humans: factory regulations fixed the beginning and end of work and times of rest more and more precisely, central clocks were installed and disciplinary measures introduced. The factory inspectors noted a clear trend towards the introduction of the so-called ‘English working time’ as early as 1879.20 The reduction of the lunch break from one-anda-half hours to between thirty and sixty minutes and the abolition of the afternoon break was first introduced for white-collar workers in the administration offices and later for workers in the workshops. Around 1890 the new industrial time arrangement had succeeded (see Table 21.2).21 Table 21.2 Times for work and times for breaks at Siemens and Halske, Berlin, Charlottenburg workshop, 1847–1900 Year

1847–73 1873–82 1883–4 1885–8 1889–94 1895–99 Since 1900

Working time in the workshops (hours a day) 10 9 9 10 9.5 9 8

Breakfast 15 15 15 15 15 – 15

Source: Deutschmann, 1985, 142, 251

– 355 –

Breaks (minutes a day) Lunch Tea (Vesper) 90 120 60 90 30 30–45 30

15 15 15 15 15 – –

Ulrike Thoms

Figure 21.1 The Speisetransportwagen, created by factories as a lunch-transport system around 1890. Source: Hansa-Bund, 1913, 427

Non-working family members, at first allowed to enter the factory, were more and more excluded, because they disturbed the new working discipline. First, they were forbidden to enter the workshops; then they were restricted to entering only certain (eating) rooms to meet their relatives. Finally they were completely forbidden to enter the factory area.22 As this meant that workers lost the opportunity to have their meal brought to them, a number of factories created lunch transport from the family home to the factory (see Figure 21.1) or set up facilities for warming up meals taken from home in the morning.23 Another problem was malnourishment of the workers due to a lack of nutritional knowledge. The industrial enterprises were not willing to increase wages, so they tried to rationalize the diet to increase the worker’s physical strength and his working capacity, indirectly by providing household instruction for the workers’ wives and daughters or directly by setting up canteens.24 It was freely conceded that the physical well-being of the workers would always be advantageous to the factory owner as well.25 But the workers were rather reluctant to accept these efforts and did not like being regulated at all, and as a result factory inspectors often – 356 –

Industrial Canteens in Germany reported on the closure of canteens.26 In fact, there were major differences. Some canteens were visited by nearly all, and others only by a small percentage of the staff. As Table 21.3 shows, price was the most important factor: low prices meant high frequency of use and high prices the opposite. Table 21.3 The frequency of use of different canteens, 1890–1913 (per cent of staff) Year

Enterprise

Frequency (per cent)

Price per portion (Pfennig)

1876

Firma Kühne Fabrik Reichenheim Fabrik Wallach & Herz Siegersdorfer Thonwarenfabrik Factory in Freiburg Mechanische Weberei Auerhammer

13.3 15.3 33.8 42.8 55 Up to 40

100

Knopffabrik Risler & Co., Freiburg Fabrik Max Krause, Berlin Anilinfarbenfabrik Casella & Co. Hamburger Wollspinnere Mechanische Weberei, Linden Eisenhüttenwerke der Gebr. Stumm Anilinfabenfabrik Casella & Co. Anilinfarbenfabrik Casella & Co. Seidenfabrik Gütermann Knopffabrik Risler & Co. Chemische Fabrik von Heyden

20.0 27.3 44 5 5.3 7.8 44 60 5.4 20 35

Bleiproduktenfabrik Lindgens & Söhne Siemens-Schuckert-Werke Aachener Hüttenverein Rote Erde Glashütte Minden Chemische Fabrik Bergius Kakao-Kompagnie Th. Reichardt Fabrik Franz Doms, Ratibor Zinnwalzwerke E. Ohles Erben Chemische Fabrik Mainkur Chemische Fabrik Merck

60 20 6 40 9 90 86 17.5 25 White-collar workers: 72.5 Workers: 40 40

1879 1882 1890 1895

1897 1898 1899

1903 1906 1907 1912

1913

Villeroy & Boch

Men 33 Women 25

16.7

16.7 16.7

White-collar workers: 27 Workers: 80 25 20 5 Free

40–100

Sources: Frief, 1876, 130; Amtliche Mittheilungen, 1879, 238; ibid., 1882, 421; Post and Albrecht, 1893, 355; Arbeiterfreund, 1889, 187ff.; ibid., 1895, 275f.; ibid., 1897, 283; ibid., 1898, 307, 417ff.; ibid., 1899, 187ff.; Jahresberichte, 1890, 29; ibid., 1895, 415; ibid., 1901, 307; ibid., 1903, 78; ibid., 1907, 328; ibid., 1912, 186, 231, 284, 455; Schlenther, 1904, 517–27; Hansa-Bund, 1913, 242, 397

– 357 –

Ulrike Thoms In theory the price the workers paid should have financed the canteens. Unfortunately, food prices rose at the end of the nineteenth century, so that the costs increased. As raising the meal prices meant risking a decline in the frequency of visits, the bigger companies decided to subsidize the meals. The sums spent on this have to be interpreted as a voluntary wage subsidy, which was of use for the factory as well. As Figure 21.2 shows, there was less need to subsidize meals when a higher number of portions was sold, so it was clearly in the entrepreneur’s interest to make the canteens as attractive as possible and to find out why workers hesitated to eat there. One inhibiting factor was the workers’ bad experiences with the truck system in the beginning of the period of industrialization. Within this system, workers did not get their wages in money but in goods by means of special metal coins that could be exchanged at specific shops. These shops often belonged to the factory owners and charged excessive prices. In effect, workers got less for their work. As late as 1890, the factory inspectors reported some cases of abuse within sugar factories and brickworks,27 and the workers’ associations suspected that the canteens were set up to bring some money back into the pockets of the employers.28 To convince the workers of their selfless aims, the factory owners stressed their financial efforts and subsidies or gave over the canteen’s administration to executive bodies of self-government.29

Portions 1,200,000.00

Mark 0.20 0.18 0.16 0.14 0.12 0.10 0.08 0.06 0.04 0.02 0.00

1,000,000.00 800,000.00 600,000.00 400,000.00 200,000.00 0.00

1900/1 1902/3 1904/5 1906/7 1908/9 1910/11 1912/13 19014/15

Lunch portions Portions Lunch

Dinner portions Portions Diner

Subsidy per per Portion portion Subsidy

Figure 21.2 Subsidy per portion (in pfennig) and number of sold portions in the cast iron works of Friedrich Krupp, Essen, 1900–14. Source: HA Krupp WA 153 V 1183

– 358 –

Industrial Canteens in Germany Secondly, the factory owners had to realize that the prices in the canteens were low only in their own mind, for in fact the expenditures caused severe gaps within the budget. The owners realized this and adjusted the meal prices to the differing levels of wages of the different industries. The textile industry, for example, which employed many women, had the lowest wages and also the lowest prices for lunch meals (Table 21.4).

Table 21.4 Average prices for lunch in 205 canteens of different industries (Pfennig per portion) Industry Mining Brickworks Chemical Metal producing and processing Food Paper Leather producing and processing Textile

Up to 1870

1871–80

1881–90

1891– 1900

1901–13

Average

– – 25 20

25 80 12.5 16.5

26 – 23.3 27.2

24.3 30 17.5 30.7

33.3 20.2 32 35.7

27.1 43.4 22.6 20

– – –

– 8 –

24.2 20 34

21 25 21.5

23 15 25

22.7 22 26.8

–

15

5.5

11.5

24

14

Source: Amtliche Mittheilungen, 1874ff.; Jahres-Berichte der Fabrik-Inspektoren, 1876–8; Amtliche Mittheilungen, 1879ff.; Jahresberichte, 1888ff.; Concordia, 1, 1893ff.; Soziale Praxis, 1, 1890ff.; Arbeiterfreund, 1, 1862f; Staatsarchiv Münster, Reg. Arnsberg B Nr 52; ibid., Nr 53; Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen, 1883; Singer, 1885; Frief, 1876; Schmidt, 1894; ‘Harms’, 1895; Die Einrichtungen, 1876; Frief, 1876; Post and Albrecht, 1893; Albrecht, 1914; Hoffmann and Simon, 1902; Mieck, 1904; Schlenther, 1904; Becker, 1907; HansaBund, 1913; Czwalina, 1914; Däbritz, 1934; Bacmeister, 1937; Hansen, 1942; Zieger, 1956; Decker, 1965; Puppke, 1966; Borgmann, 1981.

Besides this, the organizers were well aware of the quality aspect of meals. It is clear that the menus were simple and monotonous, even if one has to concede that the worker’s menu at home was not much different. But quality of food can be interpreted in more ways than one. With the factory owners it can be understood in terms of nutrients, and in terms of custom, taste and enjoyment. In fact, the simple and cheap meals resembled the food provided in poorhouses and were not accepted by workers in the long run. The problem was that the factory owners defined what was appropriate for the workers and set up nutritional programmes to get them used to what they felt was ‘right’. This programme clearly had disciplinary functions and was embedded in a wider context, which included the idea – 359 –

Ulrike Thoms of mediating the needs and customs of culture through the welfare institutions.30 The canteens, in fact, reacted to major changes in the nature of the worker’s food consumption by increasingly serving more varied menus instead of hot-pots (Table 21.5). According to calculations based on the menu plans of the Menage of Krupp in Essen from 1883 to 1914, there was a clear trend towards increased consumption of all animal products and vegetables other than potatoes and a decrease in cereals and potatoes. This is confirmed by the numbers given in the consumption statistics of this institution (Tables 21.5–9).31

Table 21.5 Meal types offered in German canteens during the nineteenth century Year

Number of canteens serving Hotpot

Until 1870

Menu

All

Average price (Pfennigs) Hotpot

Menu

–

4

–

4

1871–80

10

–

10

15.5

1881–90

18

8

26

18

32.8

1891–1900

22

24

46

21.2

32.5

14.2

36.5

1901–13 Total

5

19

24

59

51

110

Source: See Table 21.4

Table 21.6 Menu plan for the Menage of the cast iron works of Friedrich Krupp, Essen, 1883 Day

Lunch

Dinner

Sunday

Potato soup with beef

Rice soup

Monday

Peas with sausage

Potato soup

Tuesday

Beans with beef

Soup from peeled barley

Wednesday

Peas with bacon

Potato soup

Thursday

Potato soup with beef

Flour soup

Friday

Beans with sausage

Soup from peeled barley

Saturday

Peas with bacon

Potato soup

Source: Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen, 1883, 95ff.

– 360 –

Industrial Canteens in Germany Table 21.7 Menu plan for the Menage of the cast iron works of Friedrich Krupp, Essen, 1914 Day

Lunch

Dinner

Sunday

Meat soup, potatoes, vegetable, beef

Milk rice, liver-sausage

Monday

Pea soup, potatoes, sauce, Bologna sausage

Soup from peeled barley with potatoes, liver-sausage

Tuesday

Meat soup, potatoes, sauce, beef

Potatoes, sauce, blood sausage

Wednesday

Lentil soup, potatoes, frankfurter

Milk rice, liver-sausage

Thursday

Meat soup, potatoes, sauce, beef

Potatoes, sauce, blood sausage

Friday

Soup from white beans with potatoes, beef

Jacket potatoes, marinated herring

Saturday

Green beans, potatoes, bacon, stewed preserved fruit

Potato soup, liver-sausage

Sources: Hausarchiv Krupp, WA 153 V 1183

Table 21.8 The consumption of single foodstuffs according to the menu plans of the cast iron works of Friedrich Krupp, Essen, 1883–1902 (kg per capita and year) Foodstuff

Per capita and year 1883 1891 1902

1883

Cereals

22.9

20.8

19.5

45

Potatoes

Per portion 1891 1902 33.0

28

694.5

746.2

668.2

953.5

1025

918

Pulses

52

49.4

42.1

72

68

49

Vegetables

12.5

53.6

39

17.1

52

38

Beef

20.8

31.2

31.2

29

43

43

Bacon

20.8

20.1

21.3

29

28

29

Suet

–

2.3

2.3

–

3

3

Sausage

–

18.2

46.8

36

38

32

Herring

–

5.2

5.2

7.1

7.1

7.1

33.8

15.6

15.6

0.05

0.02

0.2

Milk

Sources: Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen, 1883, 95ff.; ibid., 1891, vol. 2, 151ff.; Hausarchiv Krupp, WA 153 V 1183

– 361 –

Ulrike Thoms Table 21.9 The consumption of single foodstuffs according to the consumption statistics of the cast iron works of Friedrich Krupp, Essen, 1901–10 (g per portion) Foodstuff Cereals Potatoes

1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 19

31

24

1,157 1,217 1,026

18

16

1907 1908

1909 1910

14

13

11

11

10

993 1,138 1,029

1,000

910

1,073

943

Pulses

79

42

54

49

45

46

46

36

33

35

Vegetables

39

79

56

35

39

40

63

38

35

77

Beef

61

57

54

55

56

58

58

60

61

59

Bacon

39

35

23

25

26

24

20

23

21

18

Sausage

64

68

61

58

54

51

51

51

51

50

Herring

3

28

45

43

36

2

3

2

3

–

Milk

18

21

32

28

17

16

35

13

9

7

Butter

20

19

19

13

10

14

13

12

12

12

Source: Hausarchiv Krupp, WA V 1183

From the Body to the Brain: The Shift towards Psychological Factors As I have argued above, the early canteens were meant to be an instrument of welfare policy. But with ongoing industrialization, real wages and the quality of the worker’s food increased, so that this function lost importance, especially as hard physical work was more and more taken over by machines. In consequence the pressing need for calories decreased. In the 1930s it was clear ‘that industrial feeding, where it shall be implemented, cannot be reduced to cheap food, rich in calories, but has to offer what is asked for’.32 Nutritionists claimed there was a need for differentiation, and for a high degree of individualization in regard to the differentiation between physical or mental work or old and young people, and also to differences in appetite and food preferences.33 In the 1930s there was discussion about the need for special diets for workers, especially those suffering from a sensitive stomach.34 Special diets were introduced in the 1950s.35 By splitting the meal into components that the visitors could freely choose, it was made easier to serve different needs. This meant that the kind of nutrition that was accorded greatest importance was for those working in the factory’s administration or in offices. Since the 1890s, eating facilities even for white-collar workers had been established. What they offered to their customers differed sharply from the meals offered to the manual workers. ‘Distinction’, in Bourdieu’s sense, – 362 –

Industrial Canteens in Germany marked the social borders between the employed staff, and industry captains used and created it for their own purpose. Having realized that his white-collar workers could hardly afford a living which corresponded to their social status, Friedrich Krupp erected ‘homes for the better-off’ in 1891, ‘to build a contrast between the more educated and not-educated elements of the unmarried workers’.36 According to his first plans, the boarding houses for them should offer simple bourgeois meals, consisting of soup, meat, vegetables and potatoes.37 White-collar workers did not get hot-pots at all, but they even had desserts on Sundays, which were unknown in the ‘normal’ canteens at this time (Table 21.10).

Table 21.10 Menu in the ‘homes for the better-off’ at the cast iron works of Friedrich Krupp, Essen, 13–20 October 1894 Sunday:

Meat soup, potatoes, cauliflower, roast veal, compote

Monday:

Grit flour soup, potatoes, savoy, roast beef

Tuesday:

Meat soup, potatoes and apples, fried sausage

Wednesday:

Beer soup, potatoes, carrots, chops.

Thursday:

Meat soup, potatoes, kohlrabi, horse meat

Friday:

Bread soup, potatoes, red cabbage, fried sausage

Sunday:

Flour soup, cauliflower, potatoes, chops.

Source: Hausarchiv Krupp, WA 41/3 607

There were divergences in preparation techniques, too. Workers only got cooked meat, whereas officials had fried meat of higher quality every day.38 This is partly due to differences in kitchen equipment as kitchens for the workers contained only big pots for mass feeding, whereas for the officials the kitchen equipment was more restaurant-like and bourgeois. Even dining rooms looked different: officials sat at laid tables with tablecloth, porcelain and cutlery and chairs, while the workers had wooden tables and simple benches.39 In the light of his mission to mediate ‘culture’, the bourgeois entrepreneur stressed the need to turn this uncomfortable location into a friendly one for moral reasons. It was said that the worker declined morally if he had neither a convenient room nor sufficient time for his meal, ‘because outward neglect easily leads to inner neglect’.40 Psychotechnics, which developed in the 1920s, demonstrated the importance of subjective moments, psychological and emotional factors. It viewed perpetual acceleration – 363 –

Ulrike Thoms as a disturbing element.41 This met the anxieties of conservatives, who valued Gemütlichkeit, this very German form of cosiness as an important factor of recreation within the canteens.42 The discussions of the 1930s stressed the importance of satisfying even the sense of beauty instead of experiencing an atmosphere of poverty.43 Photographs from the 1950s show smaller eating rooms and tables, well lit with newly designed tableware.44 By this time, the canteens had changed into modern factory restaurants and had completely lost their function of helping the labouring poor to make their living. Before World War I, people saw canteens as a stopgap, organized and visited out of necessity. This was even more true during the difficulties of the 1914–18 war, when they gained importance because the administration issued bigger rations for hard-working labourers, and companies bought whatever they could get to improve the small food rations. So in the case of Krupp, participation rose from 2.4 per cent of all workers in 1914 to 31.2 per cent in 1920.45 But soon after the end of war it sank again, to move upwards in the 1920s, as documented in an account of the Bosch canteen in Stuttgart, thus allowing the canteen’s administration to charge higher prices. In consequence, the meals were sold for more money than was spent on the purchase of raw foods. A second factor may be the increase in the number of civil servants. As Sigfried Kracauer has shown, they had a certain lifestyle and eating out was common among them as a social event.46 What happened during World War II cannot be discussed in depth. Like other forms of common provisioning, canteens were promoted massively by the Nazis, who understood them as a symbol of the coming Volksgemeinschaft (unity of the people) and coined the term Gemeinschaftsverpflegung for the provision of groups. This term, stressing the feeling of belonging together, is still in use.47 After the war, the number of canteens again increased and so did the percentage of people eating there, moving up to 60 per cent of the working population in the Federal Republic of Germany,48 and so fuelling the supposition that this form of eating would be the standard for the future.49 However, despite the fact that the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ernährung supported feeding by institutions through a special advisory committee at least from 1955, this dream has not been fulfilled,50 although, the situation in the former GDR has been completely different. Directly after the war, Order 234 of the Soviet Military Administration introduced the obligatory provision of canteens to workers again, both to enable women to work by taking away the burden of housekeeping, and to improve the nutritional standard in general. Nevertheless, only a third of all workers made use of the offer.51 – 364 –

Industrial Canteens in Germany This is a surprising fact, standing in sharp contrast to the development of the restaurant, which has become a part of the modern lifestyle. Eating in specific restaurants and knowing the different national cuisines is seen as a proof of cultural competence.52 Canteens have tried to take up these impulses as well by serving dishes from different national cuisines. But it would seem that eaters are still resisting rationalization of nutrition, and refusing to be pressed into a straitjacket of time- and taste-patterns.

Notes 1. Sarasin and Tanner, 1998, 30ff. 2. Tanner (1999) studies canteens as a starting point for a broader investigation of nutrition and diet in the industrial society of Switzerland, due to the fact that nutritional history is an integrative topic which can bring together the most divergent aspects of human life. But even if the general background of a more or less international scientific discussion on nutrition is a common feature, there are a number of important differences betwen the development in Switzerland and Germany, especially the fact that the Swiss canteens investigated by Tanner were run and centrally adminstrated by the Swiss Association People’s Service (Schweizer Verband Volksdienst), whereas my chapter looks at the canteens set up by private initiative. 3. ‘Kantine’, 1873, 348. 4. ‘Menage’, 1820, 345. 5. See Paczensky and Dünnebier, 1994, 125ff.; Wagner, 2001. 6. Köllmann, 1974. 7. Die Einrichtungen für die Wohlfahrt der Arbeiter, 1876. 8. See the numbers in: 1891, vol. 1, 23; Hausarchiv Krupp, WA 41/3613, Bl. 50, letter from 17 December 1909. 9. See, e.g., the Orders no. 12, 7 June 1884 and no. 24, 27 September 1884, in: Hausarchiv Krupp, Friedrich Krupp Aktiengesellschaft, Zirkulare, 1915. 10. Historisches Archiv Friedrich Krupp AG, F.A.H. II F. 11. Tappe, 1994; Roberts, 1984. 12. Jahresberichte, 1891, 131; Lüdtke, 1980. 13. Berthold, 1886, 216. 14. Moleschott, 1859; Kamminga, 1995. – 365 –

Ulrike Thoms 15. For the question of popularization of scientific knowledge in Germany, see Daum, 1998; for the popularization of physiology, Sarasin and Tanner, 1998. 16. See Moleschott, 1859. 17. Thoms, 2001. See, e.g., the efforts in Schneitler, 1855. 18. See Schlegel-Matthies, 1995; Allen, 2002. 19. Thompson, 1967; Nahrstedt, 1972, especially 84ff., 102ff. 20. Amtliche Mittheilungen, 1879, 204; ibid., 1887, 88; ibid., 1888, 113. 21. Deutschmann, 1985, 76ff. Differences between the different branches (industries) were left. 22. Lüdtke, 1980, 110; HA Krupp, WA 41/3-627. 23. Albrecht, 1914, 219; Frief, 1876, 190, 183, 209; Schmidt, 1894, 383. 24. See Post and Albrecht, 1893; Frevert, 1985. Sometimes, both were linked together: see Prausnitz, 1892. 25. Staatsarchiv Münster, Regierung Arnsberg, B, Nr 52; ibid., Nr 53. 26. In 1890 five out of the fifteen canteens in the Trier district had been closed down, and even in the district of Sigmaringen a third were given up in 1908: see Jahresberichte, 1890, 282; Jahresberichte, 1908, 490. 27. Jahresberichte, 1890, passim; Amtliche Mittheilungen, 1890, passim. 28. Jahresbericht des Großherzoglich Badischen Fabrikinspektors für das Jahr 1889, 1890, 70; ibid., 1891, 74. 29. For example at Farbwerke Hoechst in Düsseldorf. See, e.g., Bäumler, 1963, 269; Jahresberichte, 1894. 30. Jahresbericht des Großherzoglich Badischen Fabrikinspektors für das Jahr 1891, 1892, 59. 31. For the problem of normative sources see Thoms, 2001. 32. Gerbis, 1930, 25. 33. Diesch, 1934, 197; Gedicke, 1956. 34. Gerbis, 1930, 25. 35. Lintzel, 1955. 36. Letter from Friedrich Krupp to Gussmann, 7 October 1891, in: Hausarchiv Krupp WA 41/3-608. 37. Letter from Friedrich Krupp to Dünkelberg, 2 December 1873, in: Hausarchiv Krupp WA 41/3-608. 38. Albrecht, 1914, 239, 248; Hansa-Bund, 1913, 397. 39. Hansa-Bund, 1913, 338*. 40. Singer, 1885, 96. 41. Weber, 2001. 42. Gerbis, 1930, 27. 43. ‘Diskussion’, 1930, 60. – 366 –

Industrial Canteens in Germany 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

See the photographs in the Kantinen-Zeitung from this time. For this see Wagner, 1921, esp. 56ff.; Pilgrim, 1920. Kracauer, 1959. See Hirschfelder, 2001, 230–2. On the political and social meaning of Eintopf (hot-pot) and sitting around one big table, see Köstlin, 1986. But Köstlin is wrong in stating that the term Eintopf was invented by the Nazis, as its history is much older. Kantinen-Anzeiger, 1960, H. 4, 8,9. For an enthusiastic prognosis of the coming developments, see Neugebauer, 1972. Cremer and Schielicke, 1955. Zobel, 1971, 161. Tschofen, 1993, 137ff.; Bourdieu, 1986.

References Archival Sources Staatsarchiv Münster, Regierung Arnsberg B, Nr 52, Nr 53. Hausarchiv Krupp, F. A. H. II F (Charakteristische Äuerßungen Alfred Krupps aus den 1860er bis 1880er Jahren). Hausarchiv Krupp, Friedrich Krupp Aktiengesellschaft, Zirkulare und Bestimmungen allgemeineren Inhalts bis 30. Juni 1914, Essen 1915. Hausarchiv Krupp, WA 41/3 607. Hausarchiv Krupp WA 41/3-608. Hausarchiv Krupp, WA 41/3-613. Hausarchiv Krupp, WA 41/3-627. Hausarchiv Krupp, WA 153 V 1183. Historisches Archiv der Firma Bosch, Statistik III, angefangen 2.1.19 beendet am 31.12.30.

Printed Literature – Periodicals Allgemeine Kantinenzeitung, 7, 1915ff. Amtliche Mittheilungen aus den Jahres-Berichten der mit Beaufsichtigung der Fabriken betrauten Beamten, 1874ff. Arbeiterfreund, 1, 1862ff. Concordia, 1, 1893ff. Deutscher Kantinen-Anzeiger,1925ff. Deutsche Kantinen-Zeitung, 22, 1931ff. – 367 –

Ulrike Thoms Jahres-Berichte der Fabriken-Inspektoren, hg. im Ministerium für Handel, Gewerbe und öffentliche Arbeiten, Berlin 1876–8. Jahresbericht des Großherzoglich Badischen Fabrikinspektors für das Jahr 1889 (1890), ed. on order of Großherzogliches Ministerium des Innern, Karlsruhe: Thiergarten & Raupp. Jahresbericht des Großherzoglich Badischen Fabrikinspektors für das Jahr 1891 (1892), ed. on order of Großherzogliches Ministerium des Innern, Karlsruhe: Thiergarten & Raupp. Jahresberichte der Königlich Preußischen Gewerbeaufsichtsbeamten und Bergbehörden, hg. im Ministerium für Handel und Gewerbe, Berlin, 1888f. Soziale Praxis, 1, 1890ff.

Others Albrecht, H. (1914), ‘Praktische Maßnahmen zur Förderung der Volksinsbesondere der Arbeiterernährung’, Der Arbeiterfreund, 52: 123– 263. Allen, K. (2002), Hungrige Metropole: Essen, Wohlfahrt und Kommerz in Berlin, Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag. Bacmeister, W. (1937), Louis Baare: Ein westfälischer Wirtschaftsführer aus der Bismarckzeit, Essen: W. Bacmeister. Bäumler, E. (1963), Ein Jahrhundert Chemie: Festschrift zum hundertjährigen Jubiläum der Farbwerke Hoechst AG, Düsseldorf: Econ. Becker, J. (1907), Das deutsche Manchestertum: Eine Studie zur Geschichte der wirtschaftspolitischen Individualismus, Karlsruhe/B.: Braun. Berthold, G. (1886), Die Wohnverhältnisse in Berlin, insbesondere die der ärmeren Klassen in deutschen Großstädten und Vorschläge zu deren Abhülfe, vol. 2, Leipzig (= Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik, 31). Borgmann, M. (1981), Betriebsführung, Arbeitsbedingungen und die soziale Frage, Frankfurt a.M.: Lang. Bourdieu, P. (1986), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge. Cremer, H. D., and Schielicke, R. (1955), ‘Vollwertige Ernährung in der Großverpflegung’, Ernährungs-Umschau 2: 88–90. Czwalina, R. (1914), Die wirtschaftliche und soziale Lage der technischen Privatangestellten in der deutschen Elektroindustrie, Berlin: Springer. Däbritz, W. (1934), Bochumer Verein für Bergbau und Gußstahlfabrikation in Bochum: 9 Jahrzehnte seiner Geschichte im Rahmen der Wirtschaft des Ruhrbezirks, Bochum: Stahleisen.

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Industrial Canteens in Germany Decker, F. (1965), Die betriebliche Sozialordnung der Dürener Industrie im 19. Jahrhundert, Diss., Cologne: Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv. Deutschmann, C. (1985), Der Weg zum Normalarbeitstag. Die Entwicklung des Arbeitstages in der deutschen Industrie bis 1918, Frankfurt a.M.: Campus. Die Einrichtungen für die Wohlfahrt der Arbeiter der größeren gewerblichen Anlagen im Preußischen Staate, bearb. im Auftrage des Ministers für Handel, Gewerbe und öffentliche Arbeiten (1876), 3 vols, Berlin. Diesch, T. (1934), ‘Der Küchenzettel in der Massenernährung’, Zeitschrift für Volksernährung, 9: 197–9. ‘Diskussion über das Thema “Die Fabrikspeisung” auf der IV. Jahreshauptversammlung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Gewerbehygiene in Heidelberg am 18. September 1929’ (1930), in E. Gottschlich, H. Gerbis and K. Reutti (eds), Fabrikspeisung, Berlin (=Beihefte zum Zentralblatt für Gewerbehygiene und Unfallverhütung, Beih. 16), 53– 61. Frevert, U. (1985), ‘“Hygienische Belagerung”: Hygienebewegung und Arbeiterfrauen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 11: 420–46. Frief (1876), Die wirtschaftliche Lage der Fabrikarbeiter in Schlesien und die zum Besten derselben bestehenden Einrichtungen, Breslau. Gedicke, K. (1956), ‘Ernährungsfehler der Werktätigen’, ErnährungsUmschau, 3: 101–2. Gerbis, H. (1930), ‘Ärztliche Probleme zur Frage der Fabrikspeisung’, in E. Gottschlich, H. Gerbis and K. Reutti (eds), Fabrikspeisung, Berlin (= Beihefte zum Zentralblatt für Gewerbehygiene und Unfallverhütung, Beih. 16), 19–38. Hansa-Bund für Gewerbe, Handel und Industrie (eds) (1913), Die freiwilligen sozialen Fürsorge- und Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen in Gewerbe, Handel und Industrie im Deutschen Reiche, Halle a.S: Marhold. Hansen, J. (ed.) (1942), Rheinische Briefe und Akten: Zur Geschichte der politischen Bewegung 1830–1850, 2 vols, part 1, Bonn, 141ff. Harms, Praktische Maßnahmen zur Erleichterung, Verbesserung und Verbilligung der Ernährung der Ernährung des Volkes’, in Schriften der Centralstelle für Arbeiter-Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen 7, 1895, 245–307. Hirschfelder, G. (2001), Europäische Eßkultur: Geschichte der Ernährung von der Steinzeit bis heute, Frankfurt a.M.: Campus. Hoffmann, A., and Simon, H. (1902), Wohlfahrtspflege in den Provinzen Rheinland, Westfalen, dem Reigerungsbezirk Wiesbaden, den Städten Offenbach und Hanau, Düsseldorf: Wolfrum. – 369 –

Ulrike Thoms Kamminga, H. (1995), ‘Nutrition for the people, or the fate of Jacob Moleschott’s contest for a humanist science’, in H. Kamminga and A. Cunningham (eds), The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840–1940, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 15–47. ‘Kantine’ (1873), in J. Grimm and W. Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 5 , Leipzig, 176. Köllmann, W. (1974), Bevölkerung in der industriellen Revolution, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Köstlin, K. (1986), ‘Der Eintopf der Deutschen: Das Zusammengekochte als Kultessen’, in U. Jeggle, G. Korff, M. Scharfe and B.-J. Warneken (eds), Tübinger Beiträge zur Volkskultur, Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 220–41. Kracauer, S. (1959), Die Angestellten: Eine Schrift vom Ende der Weimarer Republik, 3rd unrevised edn, Allensbach and Bonn: Verlag für Demoskopie. Lintzel, W. (1955), ‘Schonkost in der Betriebsküche’, Deutscher KantinenAnzeiger, 32/1: 20–1. Lüdtke, A. (1980), ‘Arbeitsbeginn, Arbeitspausen, Arbeitsende: Skizzen zu Bedürfnisbefriedigung und Industriarbeit im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, in G. Huck (ed.), Sozialgeschichte der Freizeit, Wuppertal: Hammer, 95–112. ‘Menage’ (1820), in T. Heinsius, Volksthümliches Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache mit Bezeichnung der Aussprache und Betonung für die Geschäfts- und Lesewelt, vol. 3, Hanover. Mieck, P. (1904), Die seitens der Industriellen Rheinland-Westfalens getroffenen Arbeiterwohlfahrts-Einrichtungen in den preußischen Provinzen Rheinland und Westfalen und ihre volkswirtschaftliche und soziale Bedeutung, Berlin: J. Belling. Moleschott, J. (1859), Physiologie der Nahrungsmittel. Ein Handbuch der Diätetik, 2nd rev. edn, Giessen: Ferber’sche Universitäts-Buchhandlung. Nahrstedt, W. (1972), Die Entstehung der Freizeit, dargestellt am Beispiel Hamburgs: Ein Beitrag zur Strukturgeschichte und zur strukturgeschichtlichen Grundlegung der Freizeitpädagogik, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Neugebauer, G. (1972), Entwicklung und zukünftige Bedeutung der Gemeinschaftsverpflegung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Gutachten, erstellt im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Ernährung, Landwirtschaft und Forsten, Würzburg and Ottobrunn. Paczensky, G. von and Dünnebier, A. (1994), Kulturgeschichte des Essens und Trinkens, Munich: Orbis. Pilgrim, A. (1920), ‘Die Massenspeisung bei Krupp’, Kruppsche Monatshefte, 1: 41ff. – 370 –

Industrial Canteens in Germany Post, J., and Albrecht, H. (1893), Musterstätten persönlicher Fürsorge von Arbeitgebern für ihre Geschäftsangehörigen, vol. 2, Berlin. Prausnitz, W. (1892), ‘Die Kost der Haushaltungsschule und der Menage der Fried: Krupp’schen Gussstahlfabrik in Essen’, Archiv für Hygiene, 15: 387–408. Puppke Sozialpolitik und soziale Anschauungen frühindustrieller Unternehmer in Rheinland-Westfalen (1966), Cologne: Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv. Roberts, J. S. (1984), Drink, Temperance and the Working Class in NineteenthCentury Germany, Boston, London and Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Sarasin, P., and Tanner, J. (eds) (1998), Physiologie und industrielle Gesellschaft: Studien zur Verwissenschaftlichung des Körpers im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Schlegel-Matthies, K. (1995), Im Haus und am Herd: Der Wandel des Hausfrauenbildes und der Hausarbeit 1880–1930, Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag. Schlenther, C. (1904), ‘Die Arbeiterwohlfahrtseinrichtungen der Firma Gebr. Stumm in Neunkirchen’, Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, 3. Folge 83: 515–33. Schmidt, P. (1894), ‘Maßregeln zur Erzielungn einer besseren Ernährung der Fabrikarbeiter’, Der Arbeiterfreund, 32: 372–99. Schneitler (1855), ‘Ueber Kochanstalten und Brodfabriken’, Mittheilüngen des Centralvereins für das Wohl der arbeitenden Klassen, 5: 268–78. Singer, I. (1885), Untersuchungen über die socialen Zustände in den Fabrikbezirken des nordöstlichen Böhmens: Ein Beitrag zur Methode sozialstatistischer Beobachtung, Leipzig. Tanner, J. (1999), Fabrikmahlzeit: Ernährungswissenschaft, Industriearbeit und Volksernährung in der Schweiz 1890–1930, Zurich: Chronos. Tappe, H. (1994), Auf dem Weg zur modernen Alkoholkultur: Alkoholproduktion, Trinkverhalten und Temperenzbewegung in Deutschland vom frühen 19. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag. Thompson, E. P. (1967), ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’, Past and Present, 38: 56–97. Thoms, U. (2001), Anstaltskost im Rationalisierungsprozeß: Die Ernährung in Krankenhäusern und Gefängnissen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, Diss. Münster, ms. Tschofen, B. (1993), ‘Nahrungsforschung und Multikultur: Eine Wiener Skizze’, Österreiche Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 96: 125–43. Wagner, C. (2001), Fast schon Food: Die Geschichte des schnellen Essens, Bergisch-Gladbach: Bastei-Lübbe. – 371 –

Ulrike Thoms Wagner, H. (1921), ‘Unsre Speisehalle in Feuerbach’, Bosch-Zünder, 55–8. Weber, R. (2001), ‘“Der rechte Mann am rechten Platz”: Psychotechnische Eignungsprüfungen und Rationalisierung der Arbeit bei Osram in den 20er-Jahren’, Technikgeschichte, 68: 21–51. Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen der Friedrich Kruppschen Gußstahlfabrik zu Essen zum Besten ihrer Arbeiter und Beamten (1883), [Essen]: Baedecker. Wohlfahrts-Einrichtungen der Gusstahlfabrik von Friedrich Krupp zu Essen a.d. Ruhr (1891), 2nd edn, 3 vols, Essen and Ruhr. Zieger, H. (1956), Wohlfahrtspflege der Industriebetriebe im Koelner Wirtschaftsraum, phil Diss., Cologne. Zobel, M. (1971), ‘Die Gemeinschaftsverpflegung als Träger der Volksernährung’, Ernährungsforschung, 16: 161–83.

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–22– Eating at School in France An Anthropological Analysis of the Dynamics and Issues Involved in Implementing Public Policy, 1970–2001

Isabelle Téchoueyres

Food crises have been in the limelight lately, and many people involved in food matters seek to understand consumers’ attitudes, particularly from the viewpoint of social science. Anthropologists specializing in food matters, for instance, are now frequently asked to take part in debates involving representatives of various types of institutions. This observation leads me to reflect upon my own experience. I was recently asked to participate in a project on the topic of school restaurants organized by the Training Centre of the Regional School Authority in Bordeaux. It involved several managers of school restaurants as well as cooks in the region of Aquitaine. The main question was how to improve the situation. That is, how to make the food and the eating areas more attractive and how to educate young people in better and healthier ways of eating. This agenda led to several issues. In the first place, health, not least because it is noticeable today that food is a matter of great concern, not due to its scarcity but rather as a result of all the worries that arise from the tremendous choice available. Yet, the fear of losing a common identity with food, a shared meaning, is undeniable. Food ways are evolving, and many people in France wonder and doubt, fearing foreign invasions of new food habits (at least of what they consider ‘foreign’): ‘traditional’ meals are not what they used to be. Food has always been a special vector for the transmission of cultural values and the reproduction of both life and society. Therefore food education, particularly towards the young, generates many debates within the Republic’s institutions and requires action, especially from those in charge of school restaurants.

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Isabelle Téchoueyres In the second place, I was also facing a paradox, because, on the one hand, according to everyone I interviewed, the matter of feeding children within schools is by and large neglected. I must admit that I was surprised, when looking for photographic material on school restaurants and the central kitchens of Bordeaux, to find so few documents. There are only a handful of pictures in the archives of the regional newspaper. Many of the people directly involved (administrators, kitchen staff members, dietitians, school doctors) expressed their feeling of being neglected by the authorities and consider that they are under-valued; yet, on the other hand, school restaurant issues are many, and stand at the crossroads of the interests of various protagonists. The debates concerning these issues take many forms and go deep into the foundations of French society.1 The Republic’s school must be a model, a reference point, and must offer equal opportunities to all. It also has a mission to feed pupils with the aim of reducing social inequalities and discrimination, and favouring the development of health and personality. As such, school restaurants are the object of much public attention in the form of reports, the updating of legal texts, hygiene regulations, food quality and nutritional balance of meals, manifestos from parents’ associations, and so on. All these statements play their part in the evolution of school restaurants.

A Long History The Beginnings of the Republic’s School Meals Programme The history of providing food at school is a very long one. The three main reasons which first motivated the existence of canteens in schools were pauperism, working mothers and the distance between school and home. By the law of March 1882, school attendance became compulsory and free (Minister J. Ferry). The role of canteens was then not only a service but also a social charity. Yet it quickly became a necessary appendage to the school. Born out of private initiatives or associations, often from town councils, canteens were designed at first to provide hot food for schoolchildren. Very early on, having a meal at school was recognized as an appropriate method of educating children in hygiene and rational diet, thus reaching into families. From the early beginnings to the ‘children’s restaurants’ invented by Raymond Paumier in the 1950s, the ideal of fraternity and the abolishment of poverty2 have guided the political foundations of French society. Raymond Paumier was a pioneer, immediately after the war, in advocating children’s restaurants, serving proper – 374 –

Eating at School in France food in a pleasant environment, including tablecloth, napkins, flowers, etc. Parents were not always ready to understand the grounds for such sophistication. Yet this experiment was used as a model all over France and admired by international visitors. The School of Dietetics in Paris was created during that period. The vocabulary changed: from canteen to restaurant, from rationnaire to ‘guest’. One can therefore measure the importance of political choices in the matter of school restaurants: collective meal taking as a tool for socialization, as a generous offer helping the fight against poverty and to give existence to what is called the social link. It is in fact the history of a love– hate relationship between ministries, local administrations, and hygienists, parents and educators. All along, up to the present day, discourses have been paradoxical; many things are said but little means are provided. The government has always expressed concern about the necessity and importance of feeding children well, as a matter of public health and education. Yet although much pressure has come from doctors, hygienists and dieticians, very few official texts have dealt with the organizing and control of school restaurants in a satisfactory way. It took over 100 years from the beginning of compulsory school attendance until 1975 for the Ministry of Education to set out that feeding young people, particularly in the lunch break, is part of the educational mission of the school. July 1951 saw one of the first official texts on the subject concerning practical matters: the United Nations Recommendation stating the required level of calories for children and that menus should educate children, open their taste to unknown foods, as well as educate families. The recognition that meals play an important part for communication between their participants led to the recommendation that a family atmosphere be established. The long-awaited inter-ministerial circular of June 1971, published in the Journal Officiel, established quantitative norms for school lunches, which made it a real tool for the professionals. As a rule, lunch had to provide half the nutritional daily needs. The application of these recommendations proved to be unsatisfactory because many texts and demands have been produced since; yet what they demonstrate is really the overcomplication of matters and the multiplication of experts involved.

Debate within the Republic: From Talk to Cacophony In 1972, the Ligue de l’Enseignement3 submitted a manifesto to the government asking for the establishment of an official status for school restaurants, which would give definitions for dining room’s, and kitchen’s

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Isabelle Téchoueyres requirements, organize staff responsibilities and establish a commission for control, and require menus to be designed by qualified persons. Yet the Secretary of State at the time asserted that the purpose of school was primarily teaching; therefore food and transportation should go under the jurisdiction of social welfare. In consequence, since the main family meal tended to be the evening one, sandwiches were deemed sufficient for lunch. In November 1975 a ministerial order set up a commission to counsel each local prefecture in its task of promoting nutritional education, hygiene and efficient management of school restaurants. In March 1978, a circular explained the previous order. School restaurants were at once educational communities and centres for nutritional education. The circular advocated agreeable surroundings, a secure and caring atmosphere, the presence of educators, and balanced menus according to hygienic rules, all for a reasonable cost. Moreover, educational yet relaxing activities were recommended before and after the meal during the lunch break. In 1983, following demands from the Ligue, in the Bulletin Officiel, the Minister of Education stated that lunch breaks must be part of the educational project because they favour socialization, the development of responsibility, conviviality and communication. He recommended less noise; the improvement of food quality, including variety, balance and taste; the education of taste and the discovery of new foods; as well as training for the staff. The application of this was unsatisfactory, and in 1992 the Ligue renewed its proposals, adding recommendations concerning food quality, equipment, restaurant space, staff qualifications and educational value. In a few school authority districts, the schools inspector is also in charge of school restaurants, yet school breaks do not seem to attract much concern except for the aspect of conformity to the law, in order to avoid responsibility in case of any problems. The Ministry of the Interior has still not defined the status of the administrator, and qualifications vary from case to case. Although the importance of nutritional education is widely recognized, this field is left to individual interpretation by unqualified persons. Only ten professional dietitians were working at school restaurants in France in 1994. Statistics are lacking that might give real information about what is going on. In May 1999, the Minister for Employment and Solidarity and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Welfare commissioned the Haut Comité de la Santé Publique (HCSP) to make a global study of the situation. The report, ‘Towards a Nutritional Policy for Public Health in France’, including several recommendations, was presented to the Secretary of State for Health and the Handicapped in June 2000. It stated that little – 376 –

Eating at School in France research was available and that the official text from 1971, ‘School Health and Nutrition of School Children’, badly needed revision. It reported that those in charge complain about having to rely on a text written in 1997 (the recommendations from the Conseil National de l’Alimentation) which indicated quantities and types of foods, and, in addition, the recommendations made by the Permanent Group of Market Studies of Food Commodities in 1999, which suggested ways towards balanced meals, while respecting local or regional culinary preferences. The overall conclusions of the report found that meals were still unbalanced, with too much fat and a deficiency of iron and calcium; dairy products, vegetables and fruit were still lacking. Yet it was impossible to bring about results on a national scale. Following this report, a text from the Ministry of Education was published in the Bulletin Officiel in November 2000, stating that school restaurants should be included in each school educational plan. A month later, the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, announced the launching of a programme, the PNNS (Programme National Nutrition-Santé) or National Programme for Nutrition and Health, involving several Ministries (Agriculture and Fisheries, Research, Youth and Sports, Consumption and particularly Education). France pushed nutrition as a priority during its presidency of the European Union. A resolution on this theme was approved at the Council of European Ministers on 14 December 2000. In July 2001, an official text was published in the Bulletin Officiel centred on three issues: nutritional needs of children and teenagers; taste education; and food safety. All educative material circulated by agribusiness and the food industries should conform to the PNNS. On another level, the CAFA Aquitaine (Regional Centre for School Staff Training) organized a day conference in May 2001 for all persons in charge of food in schools: managers, cooks, administrators, etc. It focused on the question: ‘How to integrate a diet for young people in the school educational plan?’. Scientists were called upon to discuss issues such as youth biorhythms, children’s nutritional needs, school architecture and anthropological aspects of young consumers’ behaviour.

Major Changes What are the underlying reasons for the transformation of school restaurants? One of them is to meet the needs of the Republic: to have healthy and productive citizens, while controlling public health spending. Yet throughout the history of school restaurants, choices have been made, and

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Isabelle Téchoueyres shifts in discourses have been apparent. Today things are made more complex because of the increasing number of actors involved. For one thing, school restaurants are not a unified system; the service falls under the responsibility of different organizations according to the type of school. Primary and nursery schools are within municipal jurisdiction, while the local authority (département) organizes secondary schools. The regional authority is responsible for high schools.

An Economic Incentive Among school children, out of the three times 365 meals each year, about 140 are taken at school. This has led to competition between catering companies and the development of youth-targeted products. The education sector is a very important economic market: 3.05 billion meals each year in France are served by collective restaurants in the social sector (including health, justice, army and other departments and companies), over 1 billion of which are for schools. The ratio of school children eating at school has risen from 30 to 40 per cent. The economic factor is an important one, although production costs must be kept low. It requires much effort to inform and convince parents: they want their children to eat well but they want to pay little. Small towns have a single fee for school meals, but differential prices according to family income operate in 63 per cent of schools (mostly in large cities). One also needs to be aware of the current debate between private catering companies hired by public schools, who argue that they know their trade best, and their detractors, who claim that school restaurants are a public service, and should not be subject to commercial competition.

Technological Evolution What has also changed is the technology for the preparation of meals, as well as hygienic norms. According to the Direction Générale de l’Alimentation in 1989, there were 1,666 municipal central kitchens in France, 90 per cent of which were ‘hot link’.4 Between 1978 and 1989, according to a report published by the Ministry of Interior based on information collected from 259 towns,5 the number of centralized kitchens increased from 56 per cent to 85 per cent, the majority (77 per cent) of which were hot link; those operating the ‘cold link’ system (23 per cent) were mostly in cities. In towns, over 70 per cent cook their own school meals, but only 8 per cent of high schools have their own kitchens; 20 per cent of schools – 378 –

Eating at School in France hire private companies to provide their meals. The majority of menus are established by the administrator (78 per cent), with 18 per cent by commissions including parent delegates.

Nutritional Changes An examination of changes in dietary messages is revealing. At the beginning of the twentieth century, meat was forbidden for children under 5. The most common drinks brought to school were wine and coffee. In 1922, these were officially forbidden for children in nursery schools. Daily meals consisted of boiled meat, beans, potatoes, split peas, and sometimes rice. Bread, drinks and dessert were brought from home. All children had their own glass yet only older ones had a fork. Hygienists of the time complained that no green vegetables or pork was served; vegetables were mashed and meat was minced. Greens appeared only once a week in primary schools. Milk, salads and fruit were totally lacking, while fish and eggs were scarce: it was customary usage versus scientific knowledge. A 1935 text recommended hot vegetable soup for breakfast; meat for all children as early as the age of 2, grilled rather than boiled, ham (as meat) and more fish, greens especially in soup for digestive reasons, cheese; drinks to be of water and herb tea; and an afternoon snack in the form of bread and milk. A survey conducted in 1947 revealed a general rejection of fish, milk and cheese (perceived as bad for digestion), raw vegetables (the same), and distaste for green vegetables. Wine was still present in some rural areas. Raymond Paumier’s post-war school restaurant, La Roseraie, in Montgeron (Département of Seine et Oise), was the first to provide complete menus (according to the current French model): a starter in the form of vegetable soup or salad, fish or meat and vegetables, and dessert. Quantitative norms for school lunches as defined in an inter-ministerial circular were published for the first time in the Journal Officiel in 1971. As a rule, each meal had to include raw vegetables or fruit, animal proteins (part of which was milk or cheese), cooked green vegetables twice a week, and potatoes, pasta, rice or dried vegetables every other day. Fat in seasoning and bread (brought by children) would cover calorific needs. Lunch was to provide half-daily nutritional needs. According to a contemporary survey, family meals at home offered insufficient breakfast, too few milk products and a monotonous diet in rural areas with too much bread and cured pork, while at school, untrained persons composed menus. However, fish began to appear, along with fruit for dessert instead of chocolate bars and jam. – 379 –

Isabelle Téchoueyres Another survey established comparisons of menus between 1962 and 1977: more variety became apparent, with meat, poultry and fish on a regular basis; six different types of cheese were served; butter and sunflower oil were replacing margarine; fresh vegetables were more varied; and salads and frozen foods appeared in 1967. Within fifteen years, school children ate one-third fewer potatoes, and less bread and meat, while chicken increased threefold, fresh vegetables doubled (yet not fruit) and new foods were also introduced. However, fat intake was still too high, while calcium was deficient. A report on the evolution of school restaurants between 1978 and 1987 was published in 1990 following a general inspection. It claimed that less starchy food, more greens and raw vegetables were served and improvements were noticeable in the decoration of restaurant areas. In the Bulletin Officiel of 2000, meat, fish, fresh vegetables, fruit and cheese were still central and essential, though quantities had to be adapted for age; bread played only a complementary role in menus. Lunch was to supply 40 per cent of daily energy intake (the remainder being 20 per cent at breakfast, 10 per cent in the afternoon and 30 per cent at supper). While it was recommended that schools should provide breakfast (milk, bread, fruit and yoghurt), only a few localized initiatives were reported. Emphasis was placed on the importance of time organization for meals: thirty minutes being the minimum length for meals; and school timetables were to integrate lunch breaks. Variability of needs and appetite from one child to the next was to be taken into account. It was also recognized that there are multiplicities of ways to cover biological needs. This could be left to the creativity of administrators to allow for taste education and recognition of diverse cultures. The text repeated the emphasis on the socializing role and relaxing quality of lunch breaks. Activities were to be developed around taste and culinary heritage, including taste vocabulary, recipes, specialities, spices and flavours. Parent and staff participation was to be encouraged. Water fountains were to have priority over soft sugary drinks. Basic hygiene, such as washing and drying hands, was to be stressed.

The Example of Bordeaux Formerly, the département of Gironde was top of the list with the highest number of school restaurants, while Bordeaux, one of the leading cities in the provision of school meals, has been responsible for primary and nursery school restaurants since 1945, with centralized kitchens serving 10,459 meals every weekday in 1978, rising to 13,500 in 2000.

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A Dietitian’s Job I interviewed Michèle Cabanel, the first dietitian to be hired by a city in France. This occurred in Bordeaux in 1970 under the administration of J. Chaban-Delmas as Prime Minister. Mrs Cabanel remained in post until 2000. Prior to 1970, an administrator without any particular training was in charge and many parents were complaining. There were ninety-two nursery and elementary schools, each one with its own restaurant, under the management of the City Council. The central kitchens were then situated next to the slaughterhouse; according to Mrs Cabanel, it was dirty and disgusting, yet the kitchen staff did a good job considering the lack of means they had, and delivered meals on time. They cooked every day between 5 and 7 a.m. before delivering to schools. Dishes had to remain hot, so they could only cook at the last minute. Yet even if they cooked well, pasta which was cooked at 8 a.m. was not at its best after a few hours in boxes. Meat or fish came almost cold on to the plate. Transport techniques were the major problem. At Mrs Cabanel’s suggestion, a new kitchen was built in 1976, equipped for ‘cold link’. Yet staff chose to continue to start work at 5 a.m., which was felt to result in a better taste, especially where freshly cut vegetables and minced meats were concerned. When they made their own pastries, like cream puffs, they had to start at midnight to have them fresh at noon. Bread was not then provided with the meal. Some children brought it from home, but many did not, with the result that some school caretakers had made a small business out of providing it. Mrs Cabanel decided that each school had to get bread from a neighbouring baker’s shop and children had to bring their own napkins. The city has been distributing milk to nursery schools since the early 1970s. When the new kitchen opened, Mrs Cabanel had to hold information meetings for school teachers and parents: to many people, ‘cold link’ meant re-heated leftovers, so they needed reassurance; then she gave staff some training during lunch breaks about nutrition, taste education and autonomy for children. She was also asked to provide education around healthy breakfasts. Many meetings were organized with staff at the beginning of each school year, mostly on nutrition and child development. Mrs Cabanel was in charge of menus while the production manager was in charge of production: food had to taste good and be ready on time. The administrator was himself a cook who was highly appreciated. Mrs Cabanel complains that too often, ‘administrators know nothing about cooking, have law diplomas, but it’s not enough; they need to know something about nutrition, calcium, iron, etc.’. She had to prepare four – 381 –

Isabelle Téchoueyres different menus: since children of two-and-a-half were allowed at nursery school, they had to be dissociated from elementary schools, because such young children were not able to eat everything. At the beginning there were about thirty children eating in each school; today there are 100 and sometimes 300 in some schools. Little by little, people have gained a better opinion of school meals, a process that has been assisted by Mrs Cabanel’s initiative of organizing visits to the city kitchens.6 The city of Bordeaux began by cooking 7,000 meals a day, with this figure rapidly increasing to 9,000, then progressively to 13,000, and latterly to 13,500. Nine out of ten primary-school children in Bordeaux eat at school, while the national ratio is 66 per cent. Now there is more control to limit attendance: parents must both be employed in order to have their children accepted, or they must show proof that they are unemployed and seeking employment. In Bordeaux, school restaurants have always been under the Social Action Commission, like old people’s homes, thus enabling parents to pay according to their income. Quantities are based on the needs of those where school lunch is the main meal of the day: Mrs Cabanel had observed children who were suffering from hunger in Bordeaux because of serious lack of income and unemployment; some admitted getting only bread and water for supper.

New Ways Many changes occurred over thirty years. Besides the tremendous increase in number of meals eaten and the development of centralized kitchens with the ‘cold link’, there was also the beginning of self-service, favoured by Mrs Cabanel so long as children could take their time. Nevertheless she expected them to taste whatever was offered for the sake of taste education. Of course, menus were fixed: the choice was among two or three starters and desserts because young children cannot yet decide for themselves according to taste and appetite; ideally self-service offers the possibility for the child to negotiate with the persons who serve him or her. Innovations in technology; greater attention to hygiene; prepared foods like pre-cooked potatoes; peeled vegetables; turkey meat;7 fresh freezedrying; industrial fresh vacuum-packed ready-made dishes; ready-cut meat – all this was new. Previously whole animals had to be bought; shares are now regular and it is cheaper. Although all the food can now be bought pre-cooked, requiring only reheating,8 Mrs Cabanel prefers more input from her staff. In order to sustain motivation in the kitchen, she also enticed her team to take part in the ‘Week of Taste’, a national event: every

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Eating at School in France

Figure 22.1 Menu des élémentaires (‘primary school menu’), Bordeaux, April 2002. Source: Author’s collection

year they organize special meals with local products. They also started organizing thematic meals – Italian, Greek – and taste-related activities, and the team loved it. Technology has changed again, so a new kitchen is currently being designed: still in ‘cold link’ but with vacuum-sealed devices. Technology enables time to be gained: ingredients can be left to cook overnight, to simmer in the same pot, meaning fewer manipulations therefore fewer people. – 383 –

Isabelle Téchoueyres

A Dietitian’s Judgement There has not been much change in the nutritional discourse concerning children over thirty years, although there is now proof of the dramatic lack in calcium and excessive fats (Mrs Cabanel’s team were trained to use as little fat as they could). The composition of meals was the eternal problem: they lacked fruit, fresh vegetables and cheese; this has not changed. Again, according to Mrs Cabanel, it seems that because there is no education of taste, children do not like either vegetables or fruit unless these are peeled and cut; they are not trained young enough. As for cheese, ‘they need to be taught how to eat it properly with bread’. It is Mrs Cabanel’s opinion that the major change seems to be that children are more difficult; some cannot chew in nursery schools because mothers tend to feed them with soft foods. Food tends to become very monotonous on the whole, which is strange when so much variety is available. Mrs Cabanel explains this paradox with the fact that mothers do not have time: they want to treat their children with foods they think they like best (sweets and ‘junk’ foods) and do not know where to set the limits. Mrs Cabanel also deplores the fact that school staff are still not specifically trained. Nowadays parents seem to worry more: in the 1970s, it was about the ‘cold link’; in the 1980s, food poisoning; now, after a relatively quiet period, it is mostly about genetically modified foods, especially on the part of a few Green Party environmentalists. With regard to ‘mad cow’ disease, only a handful of parents reacted: the City forbade all beef products for a couple of months, which Mrs Cabanel considered a mistake.

New Grounds for Concern Over the past fifteen years, as was illustrated by Mrs Cabanel’s testimony, the school meals’ sector has known tremendous technological changes along with changes in feeding practices, which have come to alter and condition food preparation and the distribution of work, involving the whole agribusiness chain. These technological transformations have consequences for public health, the future of French gastronomy and the transmission of a culinary heritage. A vast majority of people are directly concerned: municipal teams, delegates, parents, veterinarians, the media, and so on. In this context the PNNS seeks harmonization and states that ‘a balanced diet [meaning varied foods and a satisfying distribution of ingested quantities] allows for the preservation of health and quality of life. The general objective is to improve health among the general public by acting upon one of its major determinants: nutrition.’ – 384 –

Eating at School in France

Health Hygiene and risk must be completely under control for state credibility. Health injunctions bear upon food consumption. Childhood and youth are determining stages in the acquisition of food behaviour favouring health and physical activity development. At school and outside, as school complements family, coherence must be developed and sufficient nutrition offered. Specific nutritional objectives have been set: to increase the consumption of fruit and vegetables, calcium (dairy products), carbohydrates (particularly fibre), iron and vitamin D; and to reduce the consumption of lipids (fats) and simple sugar (sweets, soda). This national programme includes precise public health actions aimed at prevention in anticipation of adulthood. Targets are the reduction of overweight and obesity, cardiovascular diseases, cancers, cholesterol, blood pressure, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, etc. Nutrition therefore should be part of the curriculum and take into account the rapid evolution in food behaviour. Contents of school manuals on that matter should be updated and be coherent with the PNNS objectives, according to the Apports Nutritionnels Conseillés (ANC or Recommended Nutritional Intake), published in February 2001. A group of experts will advise the national council for school programmes. Nutrition will also be included in the training programmes for schoolteachers. Multi-media guides adapted to different ages will be distributed both in schools and other institutions dealing with children.

Taste as Heritage The cultural aspect of meals, accompanied by identity claims, also plays an important part in motivations. The French President, Jacques Chirac, said: ‘France bears a food model based on taste, variety and table pleasures, a model which was forged over the centuries and which is always enriched by a mixture of innovation and tradition. This model belongs to the identity and the culture of our country. At the same time, it contributes heavily to its economic vitality.’9 School restaurants attempt, within their means, to maintain the French culinary tradition with the consumption of Terroir produce,10 while developing better knowledge in the field of food and social interaction. Recently, considerable changes in social life have necessitated taking into account children’s time organization, particularly the lunch break. The main fears are the disintegration of the family model, the ‘Americanization’ of youth feeding habits, the influence of advertising, and the fear of a standardization of diet, thus eroding cultural roots. Consumers want to be free in – 385 –

Isabelle Téchoueyres their choices, refusing a flavourless and odourless collective food. They wish to keep meals as convivial breaks in pleasant surroundings, respecting nutritional factors and individual well-being. Pleasure is now one of the main key words: meal-taking ‘is in France a moment of pleasure’ (cf. PNNS). ‘Education of taste is a means to lead children to consume with pleasure, in secure surroundings, quality and varied foods.’11 It is advised to avoid serving hamburgers or kebabs, to serve water rather than sodas; dishes should all be prepared in the kitchen with little use of commodity foods. Everything can be controlled: Children’s growth, the harmony of their physical development as well as their mental development, their learning capacities as well as prevention from diseases developed later in life such as osteoporosis, cardio-vascular diseases, cancers . . . [. . .] It is necessary to educate particularly the younger ones in order to arouse as early as possible the taste for ‘eating well’ [bien manger] and create an environment favourable to the expression of their freedom of choice.12

Moreover, as future responsible citizens and consumers, children must be educated in order to be capable of judgement when facing such a wide range of goods. ‘Individual food choice is a free choice; it must be guided by valid, understandable and independent information’ (PNNS).

Conclusion Lunch break in France is a special, almost sacred, event, the existence of which has never been questioned. School schedules are organized around and according to this necessity. The educational aspect of the event is deeply felt; educators think of the social development of the child, the acquisition of some knowledge concerning nutrition and taste; politicians think in terms of public health, of favouring equality, in transmitting a Republican heritage and preserving a culinary culture, to maintain France as a leading model in terms of gastronomy. In October 2000 the French government made it clear that feeding children is one of schools’ responsibilities. Yet the ‘educational community’, i.e. the teachers, do not consider it as their duty. At the same time the staff directly involved in the preparation and serving of food are removed from all educational dialogue and decision: there is a clear problem of mutual recognition and this is reflected in the young consumers. Analysing their perception of what meals at school should consist of is the starting point of a further study, for eating is a very intimate act: it is not only ingesting nutrients, it is also ingesting symbols. As a social act, it is made more complex within the institution. – 386 –

Eating at School in France Nevertheless, as a concluding note, a survey has been conducted by the Institut Aquitain du Goût (the Institute for Taste in Aquitaine) in different high schools in the five départements of Aquitaine during the ‘Week of Taste’ in October 2001: according to the wide and varied list of favourite dishes mentioned, it indicated that young French people express a very developed sense of taste and appreciation and display culinary knowledge, particularly of regional products.

Notes 1. It is inseparable from the political debate concerning solidarity and education. Jean-Paul Delevoye, President of the Association of the Mayors of France, writes in the preface to Marcel Chachignon’s book Bon appétit les enfants!: ‘It is the will of our Republic to fight ignorance, poverty, to define limits between solidarity and responsibility, between public intervention and private initiative’ (Chachignon, 1993, 5). 2. One can refer to the ‘Guernesey dinners’ with Victor Hugo commenting on fraternity and the abolition of poverty (Chachignon, 1993, 76–7). 3. The Ligue de l’Enseignement was founded in 1866 by Jean Macé to promote popular education and fight social inequalities. It widened its scope in 1925 by adding the sub-title: Confédération Générale des Oeuvres Laïques scolaires, postscolaires, d’éducation et de solidarités sociales (General Confederation for Public School Works, Post-school, Education and Social Solidarity). With the Front Populaire it became a powerful left-wing anti-clerical lobby group as the development of leisure occurred. Although the Ligue was dissolved during the Vichy Government, it soon reappeared, reaffirming its Republican principles, and was enlarged by the creation of the Parents’ Federation (FCPE). The year 1968 marked a shift from the myth of school as sole liberating force to socio-cultural action. The Ligue stood for freedom of thought, citizenship and solidarity as institutional rights and petitioned the new Republic (1970) for free, non-religious and compulsory state education. Today it is spread over the whole French territory with 102 departmental federations, 22 regional unions, 33,000 affiliated associations and 2,400,000 members. – 387 –

Isabelle Téchoueyres 4. ‘Hot link’ means that the food cooked in the central kitchen is delivered hot and served as soon as possible in the same state (often meaning only lukewarm). A more recent technique is called ‘cold link’: all food prepared and cooked in the central kitchen is deepfrozen; it is then delivered to schools, where the school technical team reheat dishes just before they are served. 5. The disparity of sources shows how difficult it is to obtain coherent overall data. 6. ‘With food, you must not hide anything, otherwise people suspect and imagine many things’ (M. Cabanel, July 2001). 7. ‘In my youth, turkey was roasted for Christmas; now it is found under every shape and preparation. It’s almost become like pork, except it is tasteless [. . .] I suppressed sweet desserts like biscuits and jam; I replaced soup by raw vegetables; seasoning is lighter’ (ibid.). 8. ‘Then you don’t need cooks anymore, just somebody with a pair of scissors and a can opener’ (ibid.). 9. Excerpt from the opening speech by President Jacques Chirac, Salon de l’Innovation Alimentaire, 1998. 10. Terroir is an ambiguous yet fashionable term today. Basically it applies to locally produced foods yet, more than this, it is full of the idea of tradition and heritage: such products are invested with regional recognition linked to local history. 11. Mrs Plawinski, new dietitian in charge of Bordeaux primary school restaurants, Bordeaux Magazine, Autumn 2001. 12. Ibid.

References Bulletin Officiel de l’Éducation Nationale (2001), Spécial no. 9, 28 June. Chachignon, M. (1993), Bon appétit les enfants!, Paris : UPRM. Hebert, C. (1999), Les Enjeux de la restauration scolaire municipale, Mémoire DESS. Programme National Nutrition-Santé (PNNS) (2001), Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité, Secrétariat d’État à la Santé et aux Handicapés.

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Notes on Contributors Virginie Amilien is a researcher in cultural studies. After obtaining her Ph.D. in Scandinavian Culture at the University of Sorbonne-Paris IV, France, in 1994, she did research and teaching at Blindern, University of Oslo, Institute for Cultural Studies. She has worked as a researcher at the National Institute for Consumer Research, Norway, since 1999, on a project considering Norwegian food culture, local identity and food system in tourism. She is now studying the tension between global and local food culture in the restaurants context ([email protected]). Adri Albert de la Bruhèze is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Studies of Science, Technology and Society (WMW-FWT), University of Twente, the Netherlands. His Ph.D. was on the history of radioactive waste management in the USA. Since 1994 he has been a researcher, editorial secretary and member of the editorial board of the national research programme ‘Technology in the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century’ (‘TIN-20’). Since August 1998 he has co-ordinated a research project on the emergence of the consumer society in the Netherlands in the twentieth century, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Together with Onno de Wit, he is the chief editor of a forthcoming book, The Negotiated Emergence of the Dutch Consumer Society in the Twentieth Century (A.A.delaBruheze@ wmw.utwente.nl). Karin Becker obtained her Ph.D. from Münster University in 1991, and her Habilitation from the same university in 1999 (with the title Der Gourmand, der Bourgeois und der Romancier: Die französische Esskultur in Literatur und Gesellschaft des Bürgerlichen Zeitalters). This work was published in 2000 (Frankfurt a. M.). She has worked and published on French and Italian literature from the Middle Ages up to the twentieth century. She has taught at the universities of Münster, Freiburg, Berlin, Luxembourg, and is currently with the university of Stuttgart (karin. [email protected]). John Burnett is Emeritus Professor of Social History, Brunel University, West London, where he was Pro-Vice Chancellor (1980–3). From 1985 – 389 –

Notes on Contributors to 1990 he was chairman of the Social History Society of the United Kingdom. He is the author of ten books, including Plenty and Want: A Social History of Food in England from 1815 to the Present (3rd edition, London, 1989). In addition to food history, his research interests are in the history of housing, the cost and standard of living, unemployment and working-class autobiographical history. In 2000 he was awarded the André Simon Memorial Prize for Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain (London, 1999). He is currently writing a social history of eating out in England. Julia Csergo is maître de conférences from the Université Lyon 2, and chargée de mission for the Enseignement supérieur pour l’Institut Européen d’histoire de l’alimentation. She studies social and cultural history of the modern period and representations of urban and rural scenes in France from the late eighteenth century onward. In particular, she deals with hygiene, health, leisure, food and sociability. Her publications include ‘L’émergence des cuisines régionales – France’, in J. L. Flandrin and M. Montanari (eds), Histoire de l’Alimentation (Paris, 1996); and ‘La modernité alimentaire au XIXe siècle’, in B. Girveau (ed.), A Table au XIXe siècle (Paris, 2001) ([email protected]). Alain Drouard is Senior Researcher with the National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris. He has specialized in the history and sociology of education and of the social sciences. He devoted many years of research to the history of eugenics before moving to his present field of research, the history of food in France and in Europe. He published Cuisiniers en France aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris, 2003) ([email protected]). Alexander Fenton, Professor Emeritus, is the Director of the European Ethnological Research Centre, c/o the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh. His main research area is Scottish ethnology, with special reference to cultivation and land use, harvesting, livestock, vernacular buildings, food processing and consumption patterns (from the field to the stomach). He is the Editor of The Review of Scottish Culture and General Editor of the ‘Flashbacks’ series (oral histories), ‘Sources in Local History’ series, and of the thirteen-volume Compendium of Scottish Ethnology. He is author of The Northern Isles: Orkney and Shetland (East Linton, reprint 1997) ([email protected]) Maja Godina-Golija studied ethnology and philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and undertook postgraduate studies at the University – 390 –

Notes on Contributors of Ljubljana and the Westfälische Wilhelms Universität Münster. She worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Slovenian Ethnology. Her research fields are urban ethnology, food culture, history of ethnology, and she has published, among others, Prehrana v Mariboru v dvajsetih in tridesetih Leith 20. stoletja [Food culture in Maribor in the 1920s and 1930s], (Maribor, 1996) ([email protected]). Christoph Guggenbühl studied jurisprudence and general history at the University of Zurich with degrees at both faculties. He was a researcher at the Centre of Legal History in Zurich. His Ph.D., Zensur und Pressefreiheit. Kommunikationskontrolle in Zürich an der Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert, was published in 1996. He has published in the field of modern Swiss history, legal history and the history of press and social communication. He was a grammar school teacher and lecturer at the University of Zurich in the field of legal history. He holds a fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation for the research project Das Wirtshaus. Studien zu einem soziokulturellen Komplex in der Schweiz im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert ([email protected]). Oliver Haid studied European ethnology at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and Irish Folklore at the University College Dublin (Ireland). A lecturing assistant at the Institute of European Ethnology/Folklore at the University of Innsbruck, he is the author of various articles and books on ethnological food research, folk-narrative and association-studies. He is a contributor for folklore at the Encyclopaedia of Germanic Antiquities of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences (Germany). His publications include ‘Frontier Smuggling of Sugar and Saccharine between North, East and South Tyrol: An Exploration of the Impact of the Availability of Sweetener from a Neighbouring State on the Nutritional Habits and Behaviour of Cross-border Travellers 1919–1970’, in P. Lysaght (ed.), Food and the Traveller: Migration, Immigration, Tourism and Ethnic Food (Nicosia, 1998) ([email protected]). Adel P. den Hartog, Associate Professor in Social Nutrition from Wageningen University, the Netherlands, is a specialist in food habits and the history of food and nutrition. He has published various articles and books on food habits in developing countries, and on the history of food and nutritional sciences in the Netherlands. He edited Food Technology, Science and Marketing: European Diet in the Twentieth Century (East Linton, 1995) and De voeding van Nederland in de twintigste eeuw (Wageningen, 2001) ([email protected]). – 391 –

Notes on Contributors Marc Jacobs studied history at the University of Ghent, the European University Institute in Florence and the Free University of Brussels, where he obtained a Ph.D. in history in 1998 with a dissertation on patronage networks and culture in seventeenth-century Franche-Comté and the Spanish Netherlands. Since 1999 he has been the Director of the Flemish Centre for the Study of Popular Culture (www.vcv.be), a research centre in the cultural heritage field in Flanders (Belgium). He has worked on charivari in Europe, popular culture, early-modern and contemporary cultural history, cyberculture and the history of communication. At present he is focusing on issues of cultural policy, on the cultural heritage paradigm and on methods of cultural brokerage. He has recently published, together with Hilde Schoefs, a history of the representation of embryos and foetuses since the Middle Ages: Inside Out: het ongeboren leven in beeld (Brussels, 2002) ([email protected]). Eszter Kisbán, Professor in the Department of European Ethnology, University of Pécs, Hungary, is a specialist in food history in Hungary and neighbouring regions. She is the author of numerous articles on food and related subjects, and a major contributor on ‘food culture’ in Magyar Néprajz IV [Hungarian Ethnology IV] (Budapest, 1997), and to the sections on food in the Hungarian Ethnological Atlas (VI–VII. Budapest 1989–1992). She is also the author of Népi kultúra, közkultúra, jelkép: a gulyás, pörkölt, paprikás [Goulash: a popular food item that became a national symbol] (Budapest, 1989) ([email protected]). Beat Kümin, formerly a Research Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation, is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick. His current research interests focus on social centres in pre-modern local communities, with a particular emphasis on England and the German-speaking lands. His publications include studies on the parish in the Age of the Reformation and the socio-cultural role of public houses. Most recently, he has co-edited The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2002) ([email protected]). Anne Lhuissier, sociologist, is researcher at the Laboratoire de recherche sur la consommation, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, Paris, France. She obtained her Ph.D. at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Current research includes the sociology of working-class food habits and the social reformers’ action towards the workers’ diet in the second half of the nineteenth century. Future research will deal with contemporary food and poverty. She published ‘Alexis de – 392 –

Notes on Contributors Tocqueville et l’économie sociale chrétienne: Sociétés alimentaires et classes ouvrières’, Genèses, no. 37, December 1999 ([email protected]). Stephen Mennell is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the National University of Ireland, Dublin. He was a student at Cambridge and Harvard Universities, and took his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam. His All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (London, 1985) was the first book in English to win the Grand prix international de littérature gastronomique. He has been strongly influenced by the work of Norbert Elias, and his other books include Norbert Elias: An Introduction (Oxford, 1989) and, with Johan Goudsblom, two edited selections from Elias’s work, Norbert Elias on Civilisation, Power and Knowledge and The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection, both published in 1998 (Cambridge and Oxford, respectively) (stephen. [email protected]). Derek J. Oddy is Emeritus Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Westminster, where he taught from 1977 to 1996. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics and has undertaken research in the history of food consumption, nutrition and business history. He was previously a Research Fellow in the Department of Nutrition, King’s College, London, during which time he worked briefly in Africa, as part of the International Biological Programme. A former member of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Economic and Social History and Social Affairs Committees in the United Kingdom, he started a Business History Seminar in 1974 and convened its meetings as an ESRC Seminar Group until 1993. He was Founding President of the Association of Business Historians in Britain. He is the author of From Plain Fare to Fusion Food: British Diet from the 1890s to the 1990s (Woodbridge and Rochester, 2003) ([email protected]). Anneke H. van Otterloo teaches sociology and history in the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam. As a researcher she is attached to the Amsterdam School of Research into the Social Sciences (ASSR). Her research fields include the sociology and history of food and lifestyles, medicine, religion and world-view. She is a member of the editing team, headed by Johan Schot, responsible for a series of volumes on Geschiedenis van de Techniek in de Twintigste Eeuw. Volume III, on agriculture and food, appeared in 2000. With Stephen Mennell and Anne Murcott she co-authored The Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet and Culture, London/Delhi, (1992) ([email protected]). – 393 –

Notes on Contributors Peter Scholliers is Professor at the History Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. He teaches social and economic history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and he is studying the history of labour and labour relations, wages, food and material culture. In the field of food history he has published Arm en rijk aan tafel. Tweehonderd jaar eetcultuur in België [The Rich and the Poor at the Table: Two Hundred Years of Food Culture in Belgium] (Antwerp, 1993), and edited Food, Drink and Identity. Cooking, Eating and Drinking since the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2001). He is currently President of the International Commission for Research into European Food History (ICREFH) ([email protected]). Isabelle Téchouyeres is a doctorate student in social and cultural anthropology at the Université Bordeaux 2, under the direction of Annie Hubert. She studies the making of a regional cuisine and the significance of local produces (produits du terroir), with the example of south-west France. She is currently the Treasurer of the International Committee for the Anthropology of Food – France. She published ‘La “vraie” cuisine du terroir’, Bastidiana, nos 31–2, 2000, and Terroir and cultural patrimony: reflections on regional cuisines in Aquitaine on the webpages of Anthropology of Food (www.icafood.org) ([email protected]). Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg lectured on modern social and economic history at the History Department of the University of Münster from 1974 until his retirement in 1995. After he published Der Wandel der Nahrungsgewohnheiten unter dem Einfluss der Industrialisierung, written together with the founding father of German food ethnology, Günter Wiegelmann (Göttingen, 1972), he became head of the new ‘Food and Social Sciences’ division of the German Society of Nutrition (DGE). He then founded the interdisciplinary ‘Working Group on Food Behaviour’ (AGEV e.V.), and was chosen as the first president of the International Commission for Research into European Food History (ICREFH). With numerous publications in different languages, he has tried to encourage research on the past of European culinary culture in close co-operation with ethnologists ([email protected]). Ulrike Thoms studied modern history, German and communication sciences. From 1990 to 1994 she studied the history of food during the transition to modern mass consumption (1880–1930), and in 2000 she obtained her Ph.D. on the feeding in hospitals and prisons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since 2001 she has been involved in a research project on Expertise und Öffentlichkeit. Frühe klinische Versuche an – 394 –

Notes on Contributors Charité-Patienten in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunders at the Institute for the History of Medicine in Berlin. Publications include ‘Between medical ideals and financial restraints: standards of German hospital food in the 19th and early 20th centuries’, in Alexander Fenton (ed.), Order and Disorder: The Health Implications of Eating and Drinking in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (East Linton, 2000) (ulrike.thoms@medizin. fu-berlin.de). Alan Warde is Professor of Sociology and Co-director of the ESRC Centre for Innovation and Competition at the University of Manchester, UK. His research interests include economic sociology and the sociology of consumption, with special reference to food. A monograph, with coauthor Lydia Martens, Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption and Pleasure, was published in 2000 ([email protected]).

– 395 –

Name Index

Name Index Adorno, T. 105 Ainsworth, J. 230, 237, 239 Amilien, V. 2, 7, 11 Anne of Austria 145 Antin 143 Appert, N. 269 Argand, A. 265 Arni the Sailor 182 Arnoux 205 Bachelard 204 Baden-Powell, R. 31 Balzac, H. de 199–214 passim Banzer, M. 286 Baudelaire, C. 250 Baudrillard, J. 254 Becker, K. 8–9 Beeton 32, 151 Berchoux, J. 247 Bernard, E. 286 Bertulf 72–3, 76 Birdseye, C. 272 Bize 221 Blake, R. 251–2 Bloch, O. 141 Bocuse, P. 10, 179, 223–5 Borel 205 Boucher 143 Bougeant, G.-H. 248 Boulanger 71 Bourdieu, P. 5 Bourgeois, M. 221 Boyer, R. 180 Bräker, U. 7, 74 Bras, M. 225 Brazier, E. 221 Brennan, T. 93 Bridau, Ph. 205 Brillat-Savarin, J. 190, 256 Brimi, Arne 186, 189

Brumoy, P. 248 Bruyer, A. 148 Bulcroft, K. 170 Bulcroft, R. 170 Burke, P. 4, 6 Burnett, J. 2–3, 12 Cabanel, M. 381–4 Caird, J. 22 Caraffa 248 Carême, M.-A. 286 Carle, M. 153 Carton, F. 221 Casanova, G. 76, 79 Castan, N. 168 Chaban-Delmas, J. 381 Chacignon, M. 387 Charles IX 145 Chartier, R. 6 Chesterfield 32 Chirac, J. 385, 388 Cobbett, W. 22 Coon, E. 119 Cottereau, A. 345, 347 Coxe, W. 73 Csergo, J. 2, 3, 7 Curnonsky (Maurice-Edmond Sailland) 9, 252, 254, 258 Daumier, H. 206 De Beatis, A. 72 de Gesvres (Duchess) 248 de la Bruhèze, A.A. 3, 8, 13 De la Platière, R. 74 De la Reynière, Grimod 9, 71, 150–1, 256–7 de Médici, C. 145 de Soubise (Marshal) 248 Decubber, C. 172 Delaveyne, J. 223

– 397 –

Name Index Delevoye, J.-P. 387 Den Hartog, A. 8, 10, 14 Desalleurs, Count 248 D’Hocquincourt 143 Dickens, C. 30 Diderot, D. 143 DiMaggio 232 Disraeli, B. 251 Dreher, A. 115–16 Driessens, C. 218, 227n8 Driver, C. 236–7, 257 Drouard, A. 8, 10 Dryden 249 Dubois, U. 218, 286 Dumaine, A. 221 Dunlop, J.B. 32 Duroy, G. 204

Gencé, Countess of 152 Gercken, P. 73–4 Giddens, A. 165, 174 Girardet, F. 227 Girdlestone, C. 24 Godina-Golija, M. 2, 4 Goethe 75 Gold, E. 306, 313 Gonzales Turmo, I. 110 Gotthelf, J. 94 Gourevitch, A. 182 Graf, K. 116 Grey, E. 34n10 Grimod, see de la Reynière Guérard, M. 224 Guggenbühl, C. 2, 4 Guillot, A. 224

Ebel, J. 74 Edgerton, D. 306 Egger, A. 98, 100 Elias, N. 247 Elizabeth I 32 Elizabeth II 33 Embla 188–9 Escoffier, A. 10, 215, 219, 227n10, 286, 293n19 Everard 143

Habermas, J. 245–60 passim Haid, O. 2, 4 Halbwachs, M. 97 Hamsun, K. 183 Heck 324 Hellstrom 181 Hellwig, H. 116 Hengstenberg, R. 113 Henneveu, J.-B. 73 Höcht, J. 77 Homais 207 Horkheimer, M. 105 Hugo, V. 387 Humblet, T. 12 Huysmans, J.-K. 266

Fabre, D. 168–9 Fargue, L.P. 143 Favre, J. 219, 227n11 Fenton, A. 2, 5–6, 64 Ferry, J. 374 Festetics 60 Finkelstein, J. 184, 186, 253 Fischler, C. 186 Flaubert, G. 143, 148, 199–214 passim Fligstein, N. 232 Focillon, A. 338, 346 Forestier, M. 210 Forte, C. 305 Foucault, M. 355 Fuchs, J. 111–14, 116 Furetière 141 Gabriel, Y. 238–9 Galbraith, J. 253 Gault 9

Jacobs, M. 2, 5 Jaine 239, 242 Jospin, L. 377 Juteau, F. 224 Karr, A. 142 Kempinski, B. 285 Kimber, H.D. 254–5 Kisbán, E. 2, 5–6 Kofler, J. 107 Kornhauser, W. 253 Köstlin, K. 370 Kracauer, S. 364 Kräuter, J. 111 Kroc, R. 306

– 398 –

Name Index Napoleon 227n14 Negri, F. 182, 191n10 Nissenbaum, S. 164 Noë, H. 116 Notaker, H. 183 Nourrissson, D. 342, 347

Krupp, A. 354 Krupp, F. 358, 363, 366 Kümin, B. 2, 4, 7, 9 La Bruyère, J. de 141 La Mère, F. 221 La Mère, G. 221 Lancret 145 Lang, T. 238–9 Langeais, C. 223 Lantier, C. 202, 205, 207 Lantier, É. 201 Layton 25, 34n17 Le Play, F. 143 Lees 29 Lewald, A. 107 Lewis, C. 140 Lhuissier, A. 3–4, 8, 13 Liebig, J. von 354 Lobstein, T. 301–2 Loiseau, B. 225 Louis XIV 32 Luby, W. 25

Oddy, D. 3, 8, 13 Oliver, R. 223 Ott 81n18

MacCarthy, T. 246 MacLamore, J. 306 Malin 29 Manet, E. 139, 151 Marcuse, H. 254 Marelle, C. de 208, 210 Marin 248 Master, J. 227 Maupassant, G. de 139, 199–214 passim Mauss, M. 94 Mayhew, H. 26–8 Meiners, C. 79 Mennell, S. 7–10, 83, 231 Mesmer, J. 93 Meusnier de Querlon, A,-G, 249 Millau, C. 9, 223 Moleschott, J. 354 Monet, C. 139 Montagu, J. 41 Montaigne, J. 255, 257 Moonen, R. 179 Moquin-Tandon, A. 148 Moryson, F. 75, 78 Moss, D. 163 Mourier, L. 221

Pacaud, B. 225 Paumier, R. 374–9 Pearson, A. 31 Peeters, S. 171 Pepys, S. 83n46 Piette, A. 173 Plawinski, Mrs A. 250, 388 Play, F. Le 337–8 Postgate, R. 229, 232–4, 236–7, 239 Prince Hakon 181 Prince Philip 33 Princep, V. 139 Proust, M. 155–6n62 Putnam, R. 256 Rao, H. 232 Reader, W. 312n10 Rechenmacher, M. 111 Regimbart 205, 207 Rey, A. 144 Reynière, G. de la 247, 250–1 Riesman, D. 253 Ritzer, G. 186 Roberts, R. 29 Robuchon, J. 224 Rogan, B. 183, 191n9 Ronay, E. 255 Rougerie, J. 346 Roussel, R. 223 Roux 239 Rowley, A. 201 Roze de Chantoiseau, M. 71 Rubenpré, L. de 203 Rubner, M. 290 Rutten 324 Sailland, M.-E.(see Curnonsky) Saint-Simon, H. de 145

– 399 –

Name Index Samuelsson, M. 179 Sand, G. 143 Saurin, W. 224–5 Schlosser, E. 312 Schöck, S. 118 Scholliers, P. 345 Schwarz, M. 111 Schwarz, W. 111 Schweiggl, J.V. 107 Senderens 224 Shakespeare, W. 311 Simmel, G. 250, 254 Simon, A. 231, 254 Sims, G. 30 Siporin, S. 164 Smeins, L. 171 Smith, E. 237 Smith, E. 22 Soyer, A. 29 Spencer, P. 273 Spitkò, L. 114 Staffe 151–2 Stevenson, R. 149 Tanner 365 Tappeiner, F. 111 Téchouyeres, I. 8, 14 Teuteberg, H.-J. 4, 8–11 Thompson, E.P. 6–7, 165 Thoms, U. 3, 8, 14 Tissot, J.J. 139 Tocqueville, A. de 256 Tolksdorf, U. 134 Traimond, B. 169

Traugott, S. 98–9 Trollope 149 Trond Moi 188–9 Tuleja, T. 163, 173 Twain, M. 149 Uffelmann, A. 76 Vallette, G. 93 Van der Esch, W. 171 Van Gennep, A. 161 Van Otterloo, A. 3, 8, 13 Van Wagenberg-ter Hoeven, A. 162 Vernet 145 Vits, G, 171 Von Dürningsfeld, I. 110, 116 Von Erlach 76 Von Hartungen, C. 118 Von Hörmann, L. 109–10 Von Wartburg, W. 141 Wallnöfer, J. 111 Warde, A. 8–10, 258 Weber, M. 258, 351, 355 Weller, S. 28, 33 Whyte, W. 253 Wilhelm I 286 Wilk, R. 183 Wordsworth, D. 150 Wright, T. 26, 30 Wyttenbach, J. 75 Zola, E. 139–40, 147, 199–214 passim Zweig, S. 128

– 400 –

Place Index

Place Index Bombay 115 Bordeaux 373–4, 380–2 Bougival 223 Bournemouth 305 Bozen 107, 111, 114 Brabant 171 Breda 325 Bremen 287 Brighton 31, 305 Bristol 305 Brixen 107 Burgstall 107

Aarburg 74 Aberdeenshire 39, 40, 47–8 Abernyte 40 Altstetten 92 Amsterdam 266–8, 325, 331n21 Andalusia 110 Andermatt 74 Angoulême 343 Angus 41, 46 Aquitaine 373 Argentine 269 Ascot 33 Asselt 173 Auvergne 343 Ayrshire 39, 44 Baden-Baden 287 Badensia 283 Balmoral 32 Banffshire 44, 47 Basle 91, 93 Bavaria 4, 72, 77–8, 106, 283 Bayonne 150 Béarn 167, 169 Beauvais 225 Bedfordshire 24 Belgium 2, 170, 271, 320, 325 Bennecourt 203, 206 Berlin 115, 283–91 Bern 4, 72–3, 75–6, 78, 812n20, 91, 93, 99 Berwickshire 40–1, 44–6 Beverlo 168 Bex 79 Biel 82n22 Billingsgate 27 Biviers 339 Blackpool 31, 303, 312n5 Bloomington 313n19 Blumau 111, 114, 116 Bologna 146

Cambridgeshire 24 Cannes 293n19 Carinthia 132 Celje 134 Champagne 150 Charentes 343 Charonne 148 Chicago 112 Clicgnancourt 346 Cologne 287 Cornwall 23 Cremorne 30 Cullen 44 Cyprus 146 Dachau 82n19 Den Bosch 325 Detroit 273 Deurle 171 Devon 24 Dull 44 Dumfriesshire 44 Dunfermline 44 Düsseldorf 287, 366 East Anglia 22 East Midlands 310 Edinburgh 231, 305

– 401 –

Place Index Eindhoven 325 Eisden 168 England 2, 21–37, 245, 249, 251, 254–5, 266, 269–270, 271, see also Great Britain Erps-Kwerps 167 Essen 352, 360–3 Fife 44 Flanders 163, 170 Flemish Ardennes 172 Forst 111–14, 116 France 2, 173–87, 191n27, 199–214, 215–28, 245, 250–2, 255, 263, 266, 283, 337–49, 373–88 Frankfurt am Main 219, 283, 286–8 Frontinghen 150 Galloway 48 Geneva 74, 93 Gentilly 143 Germany 266, 271, 281–99, 351–72 Gestringen 169 Gironde 169 Goldrain 107 Great Britain 186, 229–43, 263, 301–15, see also England Greece 327 Grenoble 338–9 Groningen 270 Hall 107 Hamburg 115, 283, 286–8 Hampstead Heath 30 Harpenden 22 Haute-Vienne 344 Havamal 182 Heidelberg 287 Hérimoncourt 343 Hertfordshire 22 Hindelbank (Bern) 81n11 Humberside 310 Hungary 2, 53–68 Indonesia 325 Innsbruck 114, 116 Islington 308 Italy 2, 132, 327 Ivry 144

Jegenstorf 75 Jurançon 150 Kilconquhar 44 Kirkwall 47 Kitzbühel 75, 82n26 Klausen 107 Koroska 128 Kristiania 183 Kulmbach 114 La Villette 341 Laguiole 225 Lake District 32 Lancashire 22, 29 Langholm 44 Languedoc 168 Latsch 111 Le Raincy 344 Leeds 231 Leiden 266, 269 Leskovec 133 Leukerbad 73 Liberton 45 Lieferingen 172 Liège 267 Lille 344 Limoges 344 Lippe 81 Liverpool 305 Ljubljana 133–4 London 28–9, 32, 84n46, 231, 234, 238, 293n19, 303–8, 310 Louise-Marie 167 Lucerne 74, 92 Lyons 221 Malaga 150 Mamers 343 Manchester 25 Mantès 202 Marburg 130 Margate 31 Maribor 133–4 Marne 343 Massachusetts 164, 273 Mater 172–3 Mayence 150 Medoc 169

– 402 –

Place Index Roxburgh 45–6 Ruhr 353

Melton-Mowbray 31 Meran 4, 105–24 Meudon 148 Midlothian 45 Montataire Forges 343 Montgeron 379 Montmorency 149 Munich 114, 119, 283, 286, 288 Muttenz 93 Nederokkerzeel 167 Netherlands 2, 263, 267, 270–1, 275, 277, 317–34 Nevers 343 New York 115, 179 Newburgh 44 Newport Pagnell 308 Newton 40 Nièvre 343 Nizza 293n19 Normandy 343 Norway 2, 179–93 Nukerke 172 Nurenberg 78 Obergesteln 75 Obermais 108, 114 Oerlikon 92 Oise 343 Orkney 47 Oslo 183–4, 186, 189 Oxfordshire 24 Paris 8, 79–80, 115, 143, 147–9, 153, 199–214, 215–28, 246, 248–51, 266, 282, 292–4, 338–9, 341–4, 346, 375 Partschins 116 Perthshire 40–1, 45–6 Piedmont 275 Pilsen 114 Preston 307 Primorska 128 Prussia 283 Ramsgate 31 Romainville 148 Rothiemay 40 Rotterdam 325 Rouen 203

Saint-Cloud 148 Saint Gall 98, 100 Saint-Germain en Laye 147 Salzburg 75, 109, 118 Sarthe 343 Saulieu 221 Schorisse 172 Schwechat 115 Scotland 2, 39–52, 310, 312n6 Seine 344 Sèvres 148 s-Gravenwezel 168 Sigmaringen 366 Sion 75 Slovenia 2, 125–35 Sombeke – Waasmunster 173 Somerset 23 Spiez 76 Staffordshire 23 Stekene 171 Sterrebeek 167 Sterzing 107 Straubing 77 Stuttgart 287, 364 Styria 128 Swalmen 173 Switzerland 2, 71–87, 89–104, 365 Talloires 221 Thun 76 Thurgau 92, 99 Ticino 92 Tilburg 325 Tollembeek 169 Tolna 59 Trento 107 Trier 366 Trieste 125 Tyrol 106, 111, 119 United States 163, 167, 270–3, 275, 306 Untermais 108,114, 116 Unterseen 73 Valais 73, 75 Vals-les-Bois 343

– 403 –

Place Index Versailles 148 Vevey 81 Vienna 125, 127, 129 Villeneuve-Loubec 293 Villingen 82n22 Vilpian 111, 114, 116 Vinschgau 112 Walloon provinces of Belgium 170 Waterloo 32 Wembley 304 Weston-super-Mare 305 Weymouth 305

Wiedlisbach 73, 74 Wieze 170 Woolwich 307 Worb 81 Württemberg 283 Yorkshire 310 Yugoslavia 132 Zonhoven 169 Zoutleeuw 169 Zurich 73, 76, 81, 92, 100 Zutphen 271

– 404 –

Food and Drink Index

Food and Drink Index absinthe 131 alcohol 91, 98, 218 ale 23, 40, 45, 48–9, 149 apple 23, 363 apple compot 285 apple pie 129 apple sauce 327 apricot dumpling 129 asparagus 129–31, 206 babi pangang 325 bacon 22–3, 47, 113, 360–2 baked potatoe chips 27, 320 bannocks 35n36, 41, 43 barley 47, 78, 353 barley bread 41–2 barley porridge 131 bean-meal 41 beans 62–3, 128, 170, 353, 360, 379 beef 23, 28, 32, 62, 269, 302, 360–2, 384 beef goulash 127 beef soup 127 beef stew 147 beef tenderloin 129 beef tongue 28, 129, 146, 150 beefsteak 132, 206, 285 beer 1, 13, 23–24, 33, 40, 42–6, 49–50, 77, 80, 83n39, 99, 105–25, 128, 131, 133, 166–71, 173, 182–3, 282 bere-meal 41 bige 132 birds 82n23 biscuit 150, 306, 310, 388 biscuit covered with aniseed 128 black pudding 25, 128–9, 132 blood sausage 361 boar 131 boiled egg 27, 285 boiled pudding 27 Bologna sausage 361

boned fowl 147 boned pullet paté 150 bouillon 71, 76 brains 127, 129 brandy 77, 81, 83, 131, 341 bread 1, 22–3, 25, 28, 31–3, 35n36, 40, 42, 44–5, 48, 50, 56, 59, 61, 72, 75, 81n 9, 132, 148, 167, 180–83, 204, 206, 310, 379–81, 384 bread dumpling 131 bread soup 363 breid 41 broccoli 74 broiled sucking pigs 132 brose 48 broth 48–9, 324 brownies 189 buckwheat 62 buckwheat flour 171 bun 28, 31, 313 bun dumplings 128 butter 22–3, 28, 31, 40–1, 47, 50, 61–2, 172, 230, 362, 380 cabbage 128, 344 cabbage (stewed, in wine or tomato sauce) 129 cabbage lettuce 128 Cabinet Pudding 32 cake 27, 31, 41, 75, 128, 131–3, 310 calf stew 127 calf’s head 32 candy 163, 170 capon 76, 128 carp 82n22 carps 79 carrots 187, 383 cauliflower soup 127, 129, 131, 363 caviar 284, 287, 298 cereals 47, 180, 360–1

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Food and Drink Index cevapcici 132–3 Chambertin 147 Champagne 33, 154 chaud-froid of quails 33 cheese 11, 22–3, 25, 32–3, 40, 47, 60–1, 74, 81, 129–31, 150, 180, 379–80, 384 cheese and nut pies 132 cheese pie 129 cheeseburger 11 cheese-cake 32, 129 cherry pie 129 cherry water 83n36 chicken 151–2, 285, 380 chicken and rice 207 chicken fricassee 150 chicken pie 75 chicken stew 127 chickenburger 11 chicory 27 chips 308 chocolate 129, 154, 305–6, 324, 379 chopped omelette 128 chops 363 cider 23–4, 343 claret 33 cocoa 23, 25 cod 131, 179 coffee 23, 28, 40, 77–8, 81, 83n37, 131, 150, 179, 187, 323–4, 341, 379 cognac 131 cola 33 cold roast turkey 150 compote 128, 363 confectionery 74, 301, 311, 322 cooked beef 129 cooked fruit 131 cooked green vegetables 379 cooked rice 128 crab 75, 128 crab salad 33 crayfish 82, 284 cream 230 cream puffs 381 cream soup 127 crème à la vanille glacée 207 crisps 310 croquette 270, 318, 320, 323, 325, 327, 329 crumpet 27

cucumber 56, 167 curds 59, 63 cured pork 379 curried prawns 33 dabs 27 dandelion 131 deer 131 dough 171 doughnuts 128 dove 75 dove-pie 75 dried fruit 62 duck 32, 76, 128, 131, 189 dumpling with a filling of meat 23 Easter egg 306 eels 26 egg 27, 32, 58, 76, 129, 133, 285, 379 factory fries 271 faggot 25 filled bread 324 fillet 129, 206 fish 23, 25, 27–8, 72, 74–6, 82, 128, 131–2, 180, 182–3, 187, 284, 310, 379–80 fish balls 180 fish pie 75 fish-and-chips 303, 308 fish-fingers 308 flancati 128 flounders 27 flour bread 41 flour dumplings 23 flour pudding 183 flour soup 81n9, 360, 363 foie gras 33, 76 foie gras pâté with truffles 154 fowl 32, 74 frangipane tart 150 frankfurter 129, 133, 269, 271, 361 French fries, see patates frites fried brains 129 fried calf’s head 130 fried chicken 128–9, 131, 308, 327 fried crescent-shaped rolls 131 fried eggs 76, 129 fried fish 3, 29

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Food and Drink Index fried kid 131 fried liver 127 fried peas 127 fried plaice 27 fried potato rolls 128 fried potatoes 29, 128, 131 fried sausage 363 fries 270 friet 325 frikadel (minced-meat hot dog) 320, 325, 327, 329 frogs’ legs 131 fruit 25–7, 32, 72, 131, 145, 150, 274, 310, 344, 377, 379, 384–5 fruit brandy 131 gado gado 325 galantine of beef tongue 150 galantine of chicken 33 galantine of rabbit 150 game 2, 82n23, 131, 183, 187 garlic 132 gibanica 129 gin 77, 171 ginger beer 31 gingerbread 27 goat cheese 75 golden syrup 47 goose 74, 128 goulash 127, 132 grain 60 green beans 270, 361 green peas 269–70 green vegetables 379 greens 23 grilled meat 132 grits pudding with icing 129 groats 127

hasty pudding 45 hazelnut soufflé 129 herb tea 379 herbs 23 herring 28, 353, 361 honey 48 honey-ale 48 honey cakes 128 horse meat 133, 363 hot pudding 128 hulaburger 11 hussar fritters cake 128 ice-cream 27, 131, 133, 274, 301, 304–5, 308, 310, 322, 324 innards in sauce 127 jacket potatoes 128, 361 jam 23, 40–1, 50, 74, 145, 150, 180, 379, 388 janezevi upognjenci 128 jugged duck with oysters 33 kabobs 35n36 kaizer smorn 128 kaszàslé 58 kebab 310, 386 Kit Kat (chocolate) 305 kohlrabi 129, 131, 363 kroepoek 328

haddock 27 hairst scones 47 ham 3, 27–8, 129, 145, 150, 379 ham pie 33 hamburger 1, 33, 187, 197, 270, 273–4, 302, 307–8, 310–13, 386 hare 131 haricots au jus 207 harrist broth 48 haslet 25

lamb 32, 74 lamb’s lettuce 128 lambs steaks with parsley pesto and Spanish butter-beans 237 Lancashire Hot-Pot 33 lard 56–7, 62–3, 65, n. 3 larded vegetables 131 lark paté 33 larks 150 lemonade 33, 131, 324 lentil soup 361 lentils 61–2 lettuce 131 liqueur 91, 131, 133, 150 liver 127–8 liver and salt-beef sandwich 320 liver dumplings 127 liver sausage 131, 361

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Food and Drink Index oatmeal 23–4, 47 oatmeal porridge 45 oatmeal pottage 46 olives 75 omelette 130, 206 onion 22–3, 56, 59, 63, 129 oranges 31, 266 oysters 28, 284–5, 287

loaf 40 loaf bread 41 lobster mayonnaise 33 lobster Parisienne 183 lobsters 32, 284, 287 lumpia 328 lungs in sauce 127 macaroons 150 maize 62 margarine 172, 230, 380 marinated herring 361 marmot meat 75, 82n24 mashed potatoes 128 meat 22–23, 25, 27, 35n36, 57, 59, 61–3, 72, 74, 127–9, 145, 180, 182, 187, 266, 310, 313, 353, 380 meat broth 72 meat in brine 128 meat patties 133 meat soup 361, 363 meatballs 180–1, 187, 269, 323 meat-pies 31 Médoc 154 melon 183 met 78, 83n39 mezrle 132 milk 40, 45–6, 48, 56, 58, 81, 100, 310, 323–4, 361–2, 379, 381 milk powder 271 milk rice 361 milk shake 313, 323 millet 62–3 mortadella 74, 146 muffin 27, 189 mussels 237 mustard 84n47 mutton 28, 58, 62, 74, 80, 266 mutton chops 40 nasi goreng 325 noodles 58, 62–4, 217, 310 Norwegian Rissoles on Vacation in China 189 nugget 11 nut 74, 129, 310 nut crescent-shaped rolls 128 oatcakes 41, 43, 48

pancakes 47, 128, 171–2 pap sausages 129 paprika 56, 58 Parisian schnitzel 128–9 parsley 23, 132 partridge 128 pasta 187, 274, 310, 379, 381 pastries 31, 128–9, 131, 145, 322 patates frites 12, 270, 320, 322, 325–7, 329 paté 152 pâtés de Rouget 147 patisserie 274 patties 132 pea and onion beef stew 127 pea soup 26, 29, 289, 361 peaches 150 peas 62, 129, 308, 360 pease 45 pease-meal 41 peeled vegetables 382 pepper 146 pepper cake 81n9 perch 131 petit fours 150 pheasant 128, 131 pickle 33 pickled and salted herring 322 pickled cabbage 131 pickled liver 23 pickled pork 23 pickled tongue 129 pickled whelks 26 pies 25, 28, 128, 230 pig 29, 131 pigeon pie 33 pike 82n22, 131 pineapple 270 pizza 33, 180–1, 187, 270, 308 plaice with Hollandaise sauce 183

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Food and Drink Index pleskavice 132 Ploughman’s Lunch 33 plover’s eggs 33 plovers’ pudding 33 plum brandy 131 plum duff 27 plum dumpling 129 plum pudding 32 poffertjes (tiny pancakes) 322 pohanec 129 pokalica 131 polenta 237 poppy-seed rolls 129 pork 23, 58, 128–9, 131, 379, 388 pork goulash 127 pork meat 183, 187 porridge 23, 42, 45, 47–9, 58, 63–4, 72 potato soup with beef 360–361 potatoes 3, 22–3, 27, 29, 48, 50, 58, 63–4, 79, 128, 131, 180–3, 187, 285, 310–311, 320, 326, 344, 353, 360–2, 379–80, 382 poultry 75, 128, 131, 380 preserved fruit 128 prosciutto 146 prosek 131 pudding 25, 27, 32–3, 45, 128–9, 132, 183 puff pastries 224 pulses 361–2 pumpkin 129 punch 32 pyramid cakes 287 quail 150, 237 rabbit 150 rabbit-pie 33 raspberry juice 131 raznjici 133 red cabbage 363 reindeer 187 ribana kasa 127 rice 28, 128–9, 131–2, 180, 187, 207, 310, 353, 360–1, 379 rice pudding 129 rice soup 360 rich een 48 rissoles 320

roast 65, 75–6, 129, 131–2, 148, 274 roast beef 32, 129, 304, 363 roast capon 129 roast chicken 74, 128 roast duck 183 roast pig 75 roast pork 75, 128–9 roast quail with wild mushrooms and polenta 237 roast turkey 128 roast veal 74, 129, 363 roasted shewered meat 133 roll 46, 128, 132, 285, 310 Roquefort 150 roux 224 sabesa 131 sajtlé 58 salad 74–5, 127, 129, 131, 147–8, 150, 189, 323, 379 salami 128, 146 salmon 74, 131 salmon salad 33 salt 23, 46, 61–2, 146 salt fish 72 salt water 285 salted potato chips 320 salted snacks 322 sandwich 3, 11, 24, 27–8, 40–1, 47, 50, 133, 180, 285, 308, 310, 322–4 sardines 154, 270 sarma 132 sateh 325, 328 sauerkraut 62, 74, 80, 82, 353 sausage 25, 33, 74–5, 82, 113, 128–9, 131, 133, 204, 206, 230, 269, 283, 289, 311, 322, 360–2 sausage rolls 322 savoy 363 Savoy cake 150 scone 32, 41–3 seafood 132 shearers’ bannock 46–7 shearers’ bap 46–7, 49 shearers’ bread 46–7 shearers’ bun 46–7 shearers’ rowe 46 sheath-fish 131 sheep feet 27

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Food and Drink Index sherry 33 skewered meat 132 skewers 35n36 skimmed milk 45 skrei (high-quality cod) 179 sliced bread 324 slicing peas 269 smoked ham 132 smoked meat 61, 128 soda 131, 385–6 soft drinks 304, 310–11 soft dumplings pancakes 129 sole 27–8, solnograski zlicniki 129 soufflé 129 soup 23, 25–6, 29, 57–8, 61, 63, 74–6, 127, 129, 131, 170, 183, 269, 289, 305, 310, 323–4, 360, 363, 379, 388 soup from peeled barley 360–361 soup from white beans with potatoes 361 sour cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and minced meat 132 sour cakes 23 sour cream 62 sour milk 56, 59 sour soup made of chicken gizzards 127 spaghetti 180 spinach 76, 269 spinach omelette 130 spinach soup 127 spirits 56, 77, 99, 101, 110, 133 split peas 379 sponge cake with sugar icing 128 spring lettuce 128 sprouts 129 steamed mussels with curry spices and coriander 237 stew 23, 74 stewed apples 76 stewed rice 128, 131, 361 stewed vegetables 131 stews 84n47 stokfis 131 strawberries 74, 150 struklji 132 stuffed veal breast 129 suet 361

sugar 22–3, 25, 64 sunflower oil 380 sweet snacks 322 sweets 74, 163, 301, 380, 385 szalonna 57 taco 270 tagliolini with ceps and creme fraiche 237 tart 27 tartare sauce 130 tea 23–5, 30–1, 40–5, 47, 173, 288, 323 tenderloin 128 timbale of partridge 150 tomato 33, 64, 131 tomato soup 127 top rib wrapped in membrane 131 tournedos 129 treacle 48 tripe 127 trout 79, 82, 131, 206 turkey 131, 382, 388 turnip 131 turtle soup 183 vanilla crescent-shaped rolls 128 vanilla soufflé 129 veal 128–9 veal pie 33 vegetable broth 72 vegetables 23, 25–6, 58, 71, 127, 129–31, 187, 269, 274, 304, 344, 361–2, 377, 379–80, 382, 385, 388 venison 129, 131 vermouth 131 vinegar 59, 63, 285 vinsku konfet 128 vlivanci 127 vol-au-vent 207, 224 waffles 172–3 water 59, 119, 128, 131, 167, 379, 386 wheat 40, 78 wheat flour 47 wheaten bread 41–50, passim whey 59 white ersatz coffee 32 white loaf 44 white pudding 128

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Food and Drink Index whiting 27 Wiener schnitzel 127–9 wild goose 131 wine 33, 59–61, 72, 75, 78, 80, 83n39, 96, 99, 105–25, 128, 131, 133, 143,

146–8, 150, 154, 187, 234, 282, 285, 340–2, 379 woodcock pie 33 yoghurt 380

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Food and Drink Index

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