Session II: Fond of Food: The Essence of Culture through Sauce

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In this session (in which my paper was presented), there were four papers that considered the role of sauces and condiments as ways of preserving, asserting or negotiating culture.


"To Change the Sauce would be little short of Heresy": Spain and the Culinary Legacy of Convivencia
April Najjaj, of Mount Olive College and I considered the adaptation of many sauces from the Arab period (711-1492) in Spain, by looking through medieval Islamic cookbooks and their contemporary cookbooks in Cataluyna and Andalucia (up to the 17th century). Many of the techniques (escabeche in particular) were introduced to Spain, we can clearly see them incorporated into non-Islamic or Andalucian cookbooks, therefore becoming part of the court of the Catholic kings. These recipes, however, were no longer seen as "Islamic" (as part of their descriptive title) thus being thoroughly co-opted within the Catholic-Spanish identity at the very moment when Muslims were being expelled.


From Bacon and Greens to Sweetbread Ragout: Dissecting the Philosophical Bill of Fare: 1748-1785
India Mandelkern, PhD Candidate at UC Berkely investigated 38 years of menus that were offered to members of "The Thursday's Club called the Royal Philosophers," an elite dining club that met weekly in 18th century London. While the typical English rhetoric saw French sauces and ragouts to be suspect (at the least) and possibly even to be blamed for "popery," the philosopher-gastronomes justified their consumption of the specialized dishes as an act of gustatory education, thus shifting the meaning of these dishes. By doing so, these taste-makers also changed the very meaning of eating itself.

Steamed, Sealed, Delivered: How Canning Revolutionized, Unified, and Globalized Italian Cuisine
Teagan Lehrmann, a student of the history of science at Harvard University argued that it was the technology of canning, specifically tomatoes, that allowed a cohesive symbol of Italian-Americans to retain their strong ethnic identity, as well as become a national identity, rather than a regional identity, to both insiders and outsiders.

Je sauce donc je suis: An Examination of the Professional and Creative Identity of Chefs though the Sauces They Make
Anne McBride, PhD Candidate at NYU (and employee of the CIA!) traces the development of the role of the chef as a skilled professional based on the ability to make sauce. By looking at three seminal works -- Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire, our own The Professional Chef, and the more recent Modernist Cuisine by Nathan Myhrvold, McBride argues that the role of chef has expanded beyond repetition to the scientific ability to manipulate, and through complex mother sauces, to light, fond-based sauce, to the ephemeral foams of the Avant-Garde.