FROM MEDIEVAL ROYAL KITCHEN TO THE IMPERIAL TABLE: BRITISH CULINARY TEXTS AS A SOURCE FROM THE HISTORY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26661//zhv-2024-9-61-16Keywords:
material culture, social history, gastronomic tradition, royal court, medieval culture, history of everyday life, recipes and cookbooks, culinary texts, British cuisineAbstract
The article analyzes British culinary texts from the Middle Ages to the Vic-torian era as an important source for the history of everyday life. It reveals how recipe collections, royal menus, and printed cookbooks reflected social hierarchy, notions of status and power, gender roles, and the moral economy of food. The authors demonstrate that culinary texts were not merely practi-cal guides to food preparation but also cultural narratives that captured the evolution of tastes, values, and consumption models within British society. The development of gastronomic culture is traced from the medieval royal kitchen – where food symbolized both sacred and political order – to the imperial table of the nineteenth century, which mirrored social stratification, urbanization, and colonial influences.
The analysis of sources makes it possible to reconstruct the dynamics of the British culinary tradition, the impact of European gastronomic models (par-ticularly French and Italian), and the processes of adapting colonial products and spices. Considerable attention is paid to the social aspect of culinary liter
ature: the distinction between books intended for the aristocracy, the middle class, and the working classes, as well as the reflection of medical, domestic, and moral-educational notions of the era. The study shows that culinary texts served as a medium of communication between classes, an indicator of social well-being, and a repository of collective memory.
The authors conclude that British cookbooks constitute a full-fledged his-torical source that allows the study of everyday life, material culture, and cultural identity in Britain over the long term – from the Middle Ages to the age of empire. They represent the process of forming a gastronomic culture as part of a broader European cultural exchange. Further exploration of this topic opens up prospects for interdisciplinary studies of everyday life history.
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