Constructing the Culinary Consumer: Transformative and Reflective Processes in Italian Cookbooks

Cappellini, B and Parsons, E (2012), 'Constructing theCulinary Consumer: Transformative and ReflectiveProcesses in Italian Cookbooks', Consumption, Markets andCulture, available online early view, in press.

Benedetta Cappellini, School of Management, Royal Holloway University Benedetta.Cappellini@rhul.ac.uk

Elizabeth Parsons (Corresponding author): KeeleManagement School, Chancellor’s Building, KeeleUniversity, Keele Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, tel.01782733426, e.parsons@mngt.keele.ac.uk

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Abstract

This paper explores how culinary texts operate in bothperformative and transformative senses in relation towider societal norms of gender and cultural capital. Assuch, the paper explores changes to the way in which theculinary consumer is presented in British Italiancookbooks from 1954 to 2005. Across the period we see ashift in the gendered representation of the culinarysubject, from housewife in the period 1954-1974, toworking mother from 1975-1986, and most recently as maleor female cook from 1987-2005. We also see shifts inrepresentation of cultural capital in these same periodsfrom learning new cooking skills, to adapting existingcooking skills to displaying skills in shopping andproduct selection. In charting these changing discourseswe find that whilst reflecting wider culinary culture,these cookbooks also act in a transformative sense topromote (and indeed require) specific enactments ofgender and cultural capital.

Keywords: Cookbooks; consumption; culinary culture; culinary subjects; culinary practices; Italian food.

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Constructing the Culinary Consumer: Transformative and Reflective Processes in British Italian Cookbooks

Introduction

Food is central in the production and (re)production ofcultural and social life. As such its definition,acquisition, preparation and consumption, is a vitalanalytical site for social scientists. Food plays acentral role in the development and communication ofcultural values, meanings and beliefs. These culturalmeanings are not just inherent in the foodstuffsthemselves (i.e. in food choices) but in their mode andmanner of consumption. As Murcott (1982, 203) observes:‘Food has also to be seen as a cultural affair; peopleeat in a socially organized fashion. There are definiteideas about good and bad table-manners, right and wrongways to present dishes, clear understandings about foodappropriate to different occasions.’ Food therefore mightbe seen as the heartbeat of any culture be it local,regional or national there are good arguments for usingfood as a lens through which to observe the operation andperformance of culture in the making.

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In this paper we are interested in the representation offood practices in a specific cultural context. We seeBritish Italian cookbooks as privileged texts withinwhich keys aspects of culinary culture are reflected. Indoing so we explore how culinary texts operate in bothperformative and transformative senses in relation towider societal norms of gender and cultural capital. Weexamine how the culinary consumer has been reconstructedthrough discourses surrounding the domestic consumptionof Italian food.. However in our interpretation of bothfood discourses and culinary practices we see these textsas both performative and transformative in that specificperformances of gender and cultural capital are calledforth. Our focus on both underlying food discourses andpractices marks our study out from previous analysis ofcookbooks as cultural texts. We are concerned to exploreboth the subject oriented dimensions of culinary culture,largely through an appraisal of the intended audience ofthe text, but also changes to the promotion and valuingof particular food cultural ideals and culinarypractices. As such we analyse cookbooks not simply as areproduction of existing cultural tales, but as vital inperpetuating social class (or certain types of culturalcapital) and gender norms (Neuhaus 2003).

Although there is growing interest in understandingeveryday and ordinary food consumption practices takingplace in people’s homes, consumer studies dedicate theirattention to looking at what consumers do and make intheir kitchen. From these ethnographic studies we knowhow people plan and cook their everyday meals (Bugge andAlmås 2006; Chytkova, 2011), how they store their food(Shove and Southerton 2000; Couplan 2005) and how theyeat their meals (Chitakunye and Maclaran 2008). Indeedfrom these studies we also know how gender (Chytkova,2011), social class (Coupland 2005; Bugge and Almås2006), and age (Chitakunye and Maclaran 2008) influencesuch practices. What we know much less about is how sucheveryday, routinised and taken for granted practices are

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both represented and reproduced in media narratives and howthese representations contribute to the re-creation ofthe consumer in terms of gender, social class andlifestyle, but also consumption practices.

Our historical approach to these representations is animportant one. Looking at the ‘cultural history’ of mediarepresentations is particularly relevant for studies ofmarkets and consumption because it tells us how values,meaning and understandings of products, brands andconsumption practices have been shaped and re-shaped overtime. To date little work has been undertaken from anostensibly consumer research perspective whichhistorically charts changes to consumption meanings andpractices (see Arnould and Thompson 2005). We begin byidentifying our specific approach to cookbooks ascultural artefacts, here we explore representations ofthe ‘culinary subject’ in cookbooks with a particularfocus on historical, sociological, feminist and consumerresearch studies. Taking inspiration from these works ouranalysis seeks to understand how Italian cookbooks,addressed to a British audience reconstruct theirreaders. Because our focus is on the identity of theculinary subjects, our analysis also looks at how theconsumption of Italian food has been reconstructed overthe time and how it intersects with the lifestyles,values, culinary norms and conventions of the emergingBritish consumer. We examine how previous work hasexplored changing representations in popular Britishmagazines of domestic consumption practices such ascleaning (Martens and Scott 2005) and cooking (Warde1994; 1997), and we draw inspiration from their approachhere. We then look at the changing food discoursesidentified by scholars within both cookbooks and popularmagazines. After a discussion of methodology we thenexplore each of three periods in the representation ofItalian cooking to a British audience. In this respect weobserve three distinct phases: from 1954 to the earlyseventies: ‘Novel Food for the Affluent Housewife’; fromthe early seventies until the first half of the eighties:

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‘Convenient Food for the Working Mother’ and from thesecond half of the eighties until 2005: ‘Stylish Food forAll’. Our analysis observes changes to both therepresentation of the ‘culinary subject’ in both classand gender terms, but also the valuing of different fooddiscourses and culinary practices. In closing we observethe functioning of cookbooks not only as culturalartefacts but as transformational devices.

Cookbooks as Cultural Artefacts and TransformativeDevices Cookbooks offer us insights into the axis of political,cultural and social context of their making. They havebeen seen by a range of scholars as important historical– cultural resources, examined as cultural artefacts tobe studied in relation to their cultural and socialcontexts (Tobias 1998; McDonagh and Prothero 2005).Considered not simply a collection of food recipes, theyhave been studied as a privileged source in representing‘unusual cultural tales’ and ‘revealing artefact ofculture in the making’ (Appadurai 1988, 22). Forexample, Brownlie and Hewer (2007, 235) highlight howcookbooks offer ‘a way forward for an adequate empiricalstudy of culinary culture and its naturalised forms ofrepresentation in cuisine and commodity cookbooks’. AsNeuhaus (2003,1) observes: ‘Cookbooks contain more thandirections for food preparation. Authors often infusetheir pages with instructions on the best way to liveone’s life –how to shop, lose weight, feed children,combat depression, protect the environment, expand one’shorizons, and make a house a home’. Therefore cookbooksare a privileged site of cultural representation because,as other objects of our everyday life, they are ‘part ofthe process of objectification by which we createourselves’ (Miller 1987, 235). As such cookbooks playboth a performative and transformative role in our lives.

Cookbooks have also been analysed to reveal social aswell as cultural elements, such as social class and

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hierarchy in society (Goody 1982; Inness 2006), and thedivision of domestic work (Neuhaus 1999; Zafar 1999;Inness 2006). Feminist studies emphasise how cookbooksreflect female roles and positions in society (Pilchner1995; Tobias 1998). Indeed Pilchner (1995) and morerecently Hewer and Brownlie (2009) underline howcookbooks are a source of ‘cultural capital’ providinginstructions to women concerning how to ‘do gender’ intheir domestic lives. As such the cookbook represents notonly an instruction manual for cooking practices but canbe seen as a transformative device in telling the readerhow things ought to be, particularly in class and genderterms. Thus they call forth specific performances ofgender and cultural capital and it is through theseperformances that class and gender norms are reproduced.For example, in her analysis of black women’s cookbooks,Zafar (1999, 243) argues that they are a place whereingender identity is reconstructed ‘around the axes offood’. In her study cookbooks are understood as a sitefor the representation of African-American history, whichis characterised by social and cultural refusal andresistance. Similarly, Neuhaus (1999) explores cookbooktexts as a site of women’s repression in late 1950sAmerica. Here the text is seen as taking on an oppressiveand (almost) disciplining role when it comes to femaleidentity, understood as a source of ‘dominant discoursethat positioned cooking and food preparation as anatural, deeply fulfilling activity for all women’(Neuhaus 1999, 547). Indeed in the explorations ofcookbooks from Weimar Germany (Novero 2000) and Italianfascism (Helstosky 2003) it has been underlined thatcookbooks conciliate the dominant political ideology ofthe time with culinary taste and women’s domesticpractices.

Continuing in this vein, a recent study Brownlie andHewer (2007) explores the trend towards a masculinisationof cookery in the UK context in the early 21st century. Intheir visual analysis of one of Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks,they highlight how the representation of men in the

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kitchen does not simply perpetuate gender hierarchies,but rather reframes gender roles and identities byreproducing a very masculine style of doing feminisedwork, such as the cooking and displaying of food. In thiscase the reconstruction of masculine styles of cooking‘draw on stereotypical premeditated notion of a feral,boisterous and untamed heterosexual masculinity, theyalso set in motion gender-blending narratives which testthe shifting limits of masculine discourse when set inthe mediating context of culinary culture’ (Brownlie andHewer 2007, 229-30). This emergence of gender-blendingnarrative might easily be seen as reflective of widercultural currents in the UK towards increasing metro-sexuality amongst British males (Harris and Clayton 2007;Coad 2008).

Finally we find that cookbooks not only play atransformative or reflective role in society, they arealso important as fictive narratives which stimulateaspiration and desire in the consumer. As Murcott (1995,225) points out ‘they are not a straightforwardrepresentation of what actually take place in kitchens,rather they are a representation of imaginary experiencesremote from everyday life’. Indeed Smart (1994, 170)coins the term gastroporn to highlight how cookbooks aresimilar to sex manuals presenting simulations ofpleasure, which undoubtedly will not be completelysatisfactory in their material manifestation. If thepleasure of consuming cookbooks is secondarily related tothe materialisation of the recipe, ‘what appears to bemore important is their role in seducing the eye, inperpetuating the discourse of conveying one’s position,values, and ideas through lifestyle choices around theact of cooking and consuming’ (Brownlie, Hewer, and Horne2005, 16).

Changing Discourses of Food Representation: Continuitiesand Discontinuities

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The socio-historical approach taken in the present studyexplores the continuities and discontinuities throughwhich food has been represented. Previous studies (Warde1994; 1997; Schneider and Davis, 2010; Schneider, David,and Hogg 2010; Sheridan, Baird, Borrett, and Lyndall2002) have used these changing food discourses tounderstand wider cultural and social changes to embracesocial class, femininity, motherhood, and post-modernconsumer anxiety.

Warde identifies eight ‘imperatives or principles ofrecommendation’ through which domestic food consumptionhas been re-constructed; these imperatives represent fourantinomies which are ‘contradictory appeals, representingsocial pressures that operate on food choice’ (1997, 47-8). Novelty-tradition, the first antimony, represents thedichotomy of consuming new dishes and products opposingto the familiar ones, rather the antinomy health-indulgence illustrates the opposition between the self-discipline of consuming healthy food and thegratification derived from eating comfortable food.Economy-extravagance exemplifies the dichotomy betweenordinary and luxury food consumption, and care-convenience presents the duality between family care andthe pressure of saving time and effort in foodconsumption practices.

Although both elements of each antinomy are present inthe sixties and in the nineties, Warde (1997) illustratesa shift in contemporary food representation. Such a shiftis characterised by a decline of novelty, extravaganceand care and a growing attention to health andconvenience. The new emphasis on health and convenienceresults from three more general trends in foodrepresentation, such as the routinisation of the exotic,the rationalisation of food choices and the fragmentationof food representation. The routinisation of the exoticrefers to the declining emphasis on presenting unfamiliarproducts and is seen as an implication of the widerprocesses of globalisation in terms of food discourses

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and circulation of products (see also Cook and Crang1996). Because unfamiliar foods become usual, and becausethe consumer is considered a connoisseur of uncommonproducts, exotic ingredients are not illustrated asextraordinary. In other words the ordinariness of exoticproducts is a result of the global character of Britishconsumers, and the consequent incorporation of suchproducts in their everyday consumption practices.

This trend has also been confirmed in Australia(Schneider and Davis 2010). However Johnston and Baumann(2007) in their study of American gourmet magazines findthat common ingredients are often represented in anexotic way. They observe that common and mundaneproducts, such as the hamburger, are (re)presented in anew light which requires a sophisticated distinction gamefor their correct appraisal. By emphasising qualitiessuch as remote provenance and scant availability inmainstream supermarkets, common products are(re)presented as extravagant and elitist food choices.Thus this apparently “democratic” attempt to includeordinary products and dishes in gourmet magazines hides asubtle social class game wherein only consumers with anadequate cultural capital can “decode” the lists ofapparently common and ordinary ingredients.

For Warde (1997) the reduced emphasis on exotic productsis also related to a new trend in food representation:the rationalisation of food choices. This trend refers tothe growing importance of calculation of time, effort,money and nutritional values in presenting new recipes.Such a trend is also associated with an increasingdominance of recipes saving time and effort in preparingand cooking the dish. Warde (1997) explains theincreasing relevance of convenient food with the growingindividuality in food choices. In particular he arguesthat the increasing emphasis on saving time and effort indomestic food provision is mainly addressed to workingwomen and their juggling lifestyle. Also such arationalisation is related to the individualisation of

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food choices, visible in the growing attention to bodymaintenance and its consequent increasing representationof food described as healthy. Santich (1995) underlineshow this representation describing a diet in terms offat, calories, salt and sugar is part of a wider processof the medicalization of food. Taking a historicalperspective she shows how healthy food recommendationsand their scientific bases have changed constantly overthe last 150 years, generating a heterogeneous body ofshopping, cooking and eating advice. For others(Schneider, David, and Hogg 2010) this recentmedicalization of food is accompanied by a decline infood advertisements depicting mothers and housewivescaring for their families and the consequent increasedrepresentation of single women concerned with theirindividual choices.

The increasing popularity of consumption advicerecommended by popular chefs, as well as doctors andsport celebrities generates a sort of anomy, orgastranomy (Fischler 1979; Schneider and Davis 2010)which consists of an incoherent whole of suggestionsregarding products, recipes, shopping, cooking and otherdomestic food provision practices. These trends in foodrepresentation might be explained by referring to thestylisation of contemporary consumer society (Warde 1997;Brownlie, Hewer, and Horne 2005). Because modern societyis characterised by a process of deregulation of socialstructures and increasing individuality, consumptionbecomes a key instrument though which individuals canexpress their identity. This incoherent and fragmentedrepresentation is largely a result of a postmodernsociety (Featherstone 1991) wherein individuals createtheir consumption style by selecting ingredients, recipesand advice for their consumption practices. However theincreasing availability of different options andrecommendations disorients the consumer and producesanxiety in the face of incoherent and contrastingrepresentations. Indeed we find in our study of cookbooks

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in the recent past a similar fragmentation of culinaryadvice.

Methodology

The current study proposes an interpretive reading of theways in which both consumers and practices surroundingthe UK domestic consumption of Italian food have beenrepresented. We have chosen to look at Italian cookbooksas opposed to say French cookbooks because of theenduring popularity of Italian food and cooking in theUK. It appears that Italian food has retained itspopularity in contemporary British kitchens because it isseen as healthy and simple to prepare (and thusconvenient). This popularity is coupled with a relativelyrecent upsurge in interest in this genre evidenced by aproliferation of Italian restaurant chains (i.e. JamieOliver’s ‘Italian’ chain and Carluccio’s chain), and anincreasing presence of Italian products and brands in thesupermarkets. Our approach follows the tradition ofstudies looking at media discourses in popular magazines(Martens and Scott 2005; Schneider and Davis, 2010;Sheridan, Baird, Borrett, and Lyndall 2002) and cookbooks(Brownlie, Hewer, and Horne 2005; Brownlie and Hewer2007). As others (Brewis and Jack 2005) underline,interpretive readings do not pretend to provide the‘original’ or ‘true’ meaning of the text, but ratheroffer a single interpretation of the text, as they pointout:

We would not wish to argue that what we see in theseadvertisements is what the advertisers intend us to see, orindeed what other consumers would see: ours is only one ofa potential series of interpretations. Instead of someform of ‘authoritative’ or ‘expert’ translation, then,what we aim to provide is a speculative anddeliberately provocative reading of these texts aspopular cultural artefacts (Brewis and Jack 2005, 51)

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Similarly, in our interpretive reading of cookbooks we donot assert that what we have read in the cookbooks iswhat authors intended to communicate, or even whatconsumers would see in these texts. Instead our readingseeks to be ‘a think piece, a broad-brush polemic’(Brewis and Jack 2005, 51) underlining how the values,images and domestic consumption practices surroundingItalian food have been represented from the fifties tothe present. We should note here that one author isItalian, and thus familiar with Italian food culture,Italian ingredients, dishes, domestic consumptionpractices, and mealtime conventions; and one author isEnglish and thus familiar with similar elements ofBritish food culture. This mix of cultural backgroundsenriches our interpretive reading by combining twounderstandings of the examined discourses

This reading does not pretend to offer an exhaustivereading of all cookbooks written in that period, ratherit underlines continuities and discontinuities inrepresentations. As others have done (Martens and Scott2005; Sheridan, Baird, Borrett, and Lyndall 2002;Schneider and Davis 2010) our sample has been selectedusing a chronological perspective. It consists of 8cookbooks from 1954 to 1974, 22 cookbooks from 1975 to1995 and 14 cookbooks from 1996 to 2005 (see table 1).The under representation of the first twenty years is dueto the scarcity of published cookbooks, and theoverrepresentation of texts from the late seventies tothe middle nineties is due to the explosion of cookbookpublications in the late seventies (see Cinotto 2005).Given the abundance of material, selecting our materialhas been a problematic issue, that we resolved byselecting cookbooks written by popular food celebrities,such as Jamie Oliver (2005), popular restaurateurs suchas Aldo Zilli (1998) and Antonio Carluccio (1997), andother less popular cookbooks recommended by thesecelebrities. This is a common strategy where authors seekto over an overview, or capture the spirit of aparticular written genre (see for example Borgerson and

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Schroeder 2006). Particular consideration has been givento two cookbooks, Italian food (1954) by Elizabeth David andJamie’s Italy (2005) by Jamie Oliver which are respectivelythe first and the last examined texts. This is due to theinfluence of the books and their authors in the widermedia. Elizabeth David is often cited as the mostinfluential early author of British Italian cookbooks(Cinotto 2005). In the present day Jamie Oliver’s impacton British food culture has been widely documented (Smith2008), and his cookbooks are already attracting scholarlyinterest (Brownlie and Hewer 2007).

TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE

Our analysis of these texts focused on recipes, products,cooking and shopping practices, as well as descriptionsof Italian culinary culture, and the authors’ travelstories and anecdotes about Italy. While the nostalgicrepresentation of Italy and Italian culture and people isindeed very interesting we have analysed this in aseparate paper (Parsons and Cappellini forthcoming 2012).In the current study we have focused instead on culinarysubjects and practices. We placed a particular focus onidentifying continuities and discontinuities in thesediscourses across the period and relate these changes tothe wider socio-historical context (see Martens and Scott2005). In doing so we find that whilst reflecting widerculinary culture, these cookbooks also act in atransformative sense to promote (and indeed require)specific enactments of gender and cultural capital. Weidentify three distinct periods as discussed below:

From Elizabeth David to Jamie Oliver

We should add here that each of the phases explored belowis not discrete with a clear beginning and end; rathereach phase presents elements of continuities anddiscontinuities with the previous and subsequent phase.However each phase is characterised by a series of

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distinct characteristics in the representation ofculinary subjects and practices.

1954- 1974 Novel Food for the Affluent Housewife

The first period identified begins just at the end ofpostwar rationing in the UK, a time when the productionof British Italian cookbooks is limited. The mostinfluential Italian cookbook of this era is undoubtedlyItalian food by Elizabeth David ([1954] 1963) whose cookbooks“become standard texts for any housewife seeking toentertain with style” (Mennell 1985, 173). During thisperiod cookbooks tended to be authored by women. Thesewomen were not professional chefs, instead they reliedheavily on their broad experiences of travel in Italy astheir source of authority and expertise in recreatingauthentic Italian dishes. They included largely Britishupper middleclass women (David, [1954] 1963; Gould-Marks,1969), as well as a few upper middle class Italianimmigrant women such as Taglienti (1956) and Sorce(1955). This seems to be common at the time, whererecipes and food recommendations in women’s magazines andcookbooks were written by women without any professionalexperience in catering (Mennell 1985). Cookbooks of thisperiod were also addressed exclusively to a femalereadership as Taglienti observes: ‘the purpose of thisbook has been to share with British cook, homemaker andhostess all my knowledge and to initiate her into thenot-so-obscure or difficult mysteries of authenticItalian cooking’ (Taglienti 1956 12).

The intended readership of these cookbooks is usuallyacknowledged in the introductions wherein the authorpresents herself with some autobiographical notes. Thesenotes seem to serve different purposes. They establishthe author’s authority on authentic Italian food throughrecounting privileged experiences of consumption, such asdinner with diplomats and Italian aristocrats oradventurous lunches at village festivals. These talesalso display a high degree of cultural and economiccapital (Bourdieu 1986):

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When my husband was working in Rome, I went to livethere. We shared a flat with a delightful scatter-brained woman. Luckily for me, the services of hermaid were included. Maria was a charming andefficient Florentine, knowledgeable in regionalcooking too, as she has travelled all over Italy.She taught me Italian home cooking in my own,temporary, kitchen. (Gould-Marks 1969, 11)

In the extract below the reader is encouraged to relivesimilar experiences (whether real or imagined). In doingso the author establishes a social class complicitybetween themselves and the reader based on the assumptionthat readers have shared similar consumption experiences.

Do you remember your first meal on the Rome Expressafter you left Modane? Or your first fettuccini atAlfredo's in Rome? Or the caffe' granita at Doney'sin Florence? (Source 1955, 1)

These notes also include practical touristrecommendations which ‘explain a little of how to get thebest of Italian food in whichever province one happens tofind oneself’ (David [1954] 1963, 21). In a ratherobvious evocation of cultural capital David advises thereader to eschew the mass tourist beaten path in favourof (culturally superior) independent travel (seeCaruana, Crane, and Fitchett 2008):

Summer visitors to the Bay of Naples and theSorrento peninsula should not expect too much; it isnot in overgrown seaside villages or tourist-infested islands in the heat of the Mediterraneansummer that gastronomic treats will be found. On theother hand, there is no need to depart from the wellworn pilgrim roads of Italy in the search for goodfood. It can be successfully sought in the small andfamous towns of Tuscany and Umbria. (David [1954]1963, 16)

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Although the author assumes a shared lifestyle withreader, at the same time s/he is rendered as largelyignorant of the principles and practices of Italiancooking. In this sense the authorial tone of many ofthese books is an (often patronizing) educative one,where the author typically takes the moral high ground intheir bid to introduce what they perceive to be asomewhat more sophisticated culinary culture to theBritish kitchen. In this respect travel experiences areoften utilized in constructing an exotic and novelItalian Other for British consumption (Bardhi, Östbergand Bengtsson, 2010)

The pedagogical tones of the sixties and early seventiesare not peculiarities of cookbooks, but seem to be commonin British women’s magazines of the time (Mennell 1985).In his analysis Mennell (1985) underlines how risingstandards of living for all ranks of the populationcoincided with the diffusion of middle class tastes andattitude. Women’s magazines become the arena foreducating women in how to perform their social classthrough serving foreign food while at the same timefeeding their family with convenient food. Although newforms of convenience food, such as frozen meals, werecelebrated by women’s magazines, this food was not new toBritish housewives. Post war rationalization imposed adiet which relied heavily on canned food. As Oddy (2003)underlines, the tin opener was a well used object inBritish kitchens during the fifties, as “few in 1950could live without canned meat, fish or fruit” (169).

‘British magazines of the sixties and seventies celebratethe arrival of new convenience foods such as frozenvegetables, and ready meals such as fish fingers(Mennell, 1985). In doing so they shift attention awayfrom cooking and preparation practices towards shoppingpractices. However, in quite stark contrast, cookbookscontinue to emphasize the importance of learning andmastering cooking skills through ‘cooking from scratch’.

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There is, I know, a school of writers who seem tobelieve that English housewives are weak in the headand must not be exposed to the truth about thecooking of other countries; must not be shocked bythe idea of making a yeast dough, cleaning an ink-fish, adding nutritive value to a soup with oliveoil, cutting the breast off a raw chicken in orderto fry it in butter rather than buying a packet ofsomething called ‘chicken parts’ from the deep-freeze and cooking them in a cheap fat or tastelessoil substitute.[…] I am sure that they (Englishhousewives) are - and rightly so- annoyed andexasperated when recipes for celebrated foreignspecialities dished out to them in books, magazines,and newspapers prove to be false. (David [1954]1963, 25-6)

David’s comment should be read in the context of a risingpopularity of convenience foods amongst the Britishpublic. The rejection of convenience foods in favour ofcooking “from scratch” seems to be relatively radicalwhen we consider that British housewives had been used tocooking with canned food for the previous fifteen totwenty years. This can be explained in three ways.Firstly, as Elizabeth Davis admits, some of her recipeswere intended to act as a pleasurable diversion, sheencourages consumers to “think about them; to escape fromthe deadly boredom of queuing and frustration of buyingthe weekly rations” (1950, 10). Thus these recipes serveto satisfy consumer aspiration and escapism more thantheir need for specific cooking advice. Indeed in hermeditations on a range of food related literature and artforms Martin (2005), observes that theliterature/cookbook dichotomy may well be irrelevant.While cookbooks and magazines are both addressed to afemale readership, they address rather differentreaderships when it comes to social class and lifestyle.While magazines of this period clearly address workingmothers through the promotion of frozen conveniencefoods, cookbooks address women whose main concern is not

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convenience, rather the recipes appear to address thosewith time, energy and money to spend in the kitchen.Finally if British magazines perpetuate the postwar ideathat food preparation requires economy in terms ofeffort, resources and time (Mennell 1985), cookbookspromote a ‘continental’ mode of cooking which involvespleasure, time and skill. Preparing a meal is seen anenjoyable activity and practices surrounding the foodpreparation (shopping, cooking, displaying, and eating)are described as adventurous but demanding.

Recipes in these cookbooks are usually preceded bysections illustrating specific objects and their uses(such as the colander and the grater), techniques ofcooking, and ingredients that are very popular today suchas different types of pasta. The fact that both theingredients and cooking utensils listed were almostunknown and unavailable on a wide scale, as well as beingunaffordable for most British households, further lendsthe appeal of the novel and exotic to these recipes.Shopping advice and practical information for buying theingredients and kitchen appliances is also provided asaddresses of Italian delicatessens in London and othermajor cities are listed.

I always buy cauliflowers called Pisa Points when Ican. [...] My local greengrocer says he has a job tosell them as most of his customers, not beingaccustomed to the look of them, are chary of buyingthem (Gould-Marks 1969, 135)

They [Italians] have a tremendous variety of salamewith quite different flavours. Several of these areobtainable in Soho, and in many large stores anddelicatessen shops (Gould-Marks 1969, 26)

Recipes are presented with the ingredients, usually namedin Italian and accompanied with notes describing adequatesubstitutive ingredients more familiar to Britishreaders. Dishes are categorised using both what is

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defined as the Italian menu, expressed using French termssuch as Hors d’œuvre and the regional provenance of thedishes. The novelty of ingredients and dishes is probablythe most relevant element in this period. Novelty isexpressed both in terms of unfamiliarity withingredients, and unfamiliarity with techniques ofpreparation. Novelty is also visible in the use ofItalian language for indicating products, techniques anddishes. The list of recipes is divided into sectionsrespecting the menu sequence and advice is provided onappropriate consumption, such as how to plan a meal withvarious courses and how to eat them.

Most midday meals in Italy start with some smalldish of antipasti, particularly if the meal is to bewithout pasta. (David [1954] 1963, 63)

One should learn to eat spaghetti or noodlesproperly. They should be never cut with knife, butshould be eaten with a spoon and fork. Take a spoonin the left hand, the fork in the right, twirl thespaghetti round the fork against the spoon and youwill find you have a neat mounthful and will nothave to suck up long strands noisily a' la CharlieChapin. (Gould-Marks 1969, 47)

The process of preparing the dishes is described in avague and undetermined way (see Appendix 1) withoutmentioning the time necessary for preparation andcooking, thus addressing a women who possess a culturalcapital able to “decode” the cooking instructions and/orhave time to experiment with the recipes.

Open leaves of artichokes by pounding it on top.Make a filling of breadcrumbs, cheese, parsley,salt and pepper; stuff between the leaves ofartichokes pressing mixture in with butt of thepalm (Sorce, 1955: 135)

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In an obvious evocation of the leisured class, readersare encouraged to spend their time searching foringredients in specific shops and delicatessens. Thisvague indication of time not only demonstrates that timewas not an element to be optimized in the kitchen and atthe shops, but also that the audience was supposed topossess a cultural capital, a know-how, for judging the‘proper’ cooking time. Assuming that the audience wouldpossess skills and competences for ad hoc judgments, evenin dealing with new products and techniques, impliescomplicity between author and reader in the possession ofa similar cultural capital.

As a form of consumption addressed to middle class womenthis cooking experience is also presented in terms ofindulgence by emphasizing food as a medium of femininematerial care, as mother and wife, in the family context.

I felt that this book would appeal most to theBritish homemaker and her family. (Taglienti1956, 11)

Recipes are described by underlining the indulgence ofthe cooking experience. The pleasurable elements of foodconsumption are also reinforced, as such consumers areexhorted to experiment with exotic ingredients and newcooking techniques often described as ‘tasty’, ‘juicy’,‘delicious’, ‘satisfying’ and ‘perfect’. Interestingly,there are no references to the health qualities of thedishes, such as the level of calories, sugar, salt andfat, indications that will be particularly relevant inthe future. Given the emphasis on novelty, convenience isnot seen to be of relevance in terms of time or money.Economy is clearly not a prerogative in these books. Onthe contrary, women are exhorted to spend both time andmoney exploring the delicatessens and small shops intheir cities in order to discover novel and exoticproducts.

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1975-1986 Convenient Food for the Working Mother

At the end of the Seventies and during the early Eightiesthe numbers of cookbooks really took off (Cinotto 2005).In this period we see an encroaching professionalizationof cookbook authorship (i.e. restauranteurs and chefs)bringing male authors with it for the first time (Mennell1985). However, in the case of Italian cookbooks, themajority of writers remain female. One of the mostpopular is probably the Italian immigrant Marcella Hazan,her cookbook is a celebration of her culinary skillsdevoted to the care of her family. As she highlights inthe introduction: “when I step into my kitchen I am stillthe woman who learned to cook to please her family andher friends” (1986, IX). Thus during this period (aswith the first period) cooking is still viewed largely indomestic, nonpaid and non professional terms. WhilstMarcella Hazan emphasises her role of Italian mother andwife, the majority of cookbooks do not include theauthor’s biographical notes. This is the case withcelebrities like Antonio Carluccio (1986), who, given hispopularity, does not need to emphasise his Italianorigin, but it is also the case with less well knownauthors. In this phase the author’s biographical notesare often left out, and when present they are relegatedto a very short introduction with little or no referenceto the author’s experiences of Italy and its food. Inthese introductions we often find pictures of apicturesque countryside and gastronomic festivals, theirpurpose now becomes aesthetic as opposed to instructive.

Cookbooks in this period are still largely addressed towomen, and the kitchen is still seen as a female preserveas Gioco’s commentary starkly highlights:

When a mother initiates her daughter into the art ofcookery, she generally begins with the preparationof a cake. The choice of the recipes has been madewith this is mind and they should appeal especiallyto young people. (1981, 165)

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In other cases the readership is addressed lessexplicitly. For example, in the case of Hazan whoacknowledges changes to cooking traditions along with thepotential diversity of her readership’s cookingpractices:

There is no question, however, that eating patternsare changing, even in Italy, even in my own home.[…] On occasion, we could even be satisfied withjust one of the more substantial dishes. Any of therecipes in the main body of the book may be used inthis manner. The choice is obviously the reader’s ;therefore no set of menus have been suggested.( Hazan 1986, 25-6).

However elsewhere in the book she does seem to assumesome gender complicity with the reader as she shares heranecdotal experiences of feeding and pleasing the family:

Once, when I had some left over from the previous day, I was at loss to satisfy my husband’s and son’syearning for a different-tasting pasta. (Hazan 1986,120)

However this tale of ‘reusing leftovers’ contrastssignificantly with anecdotes in the previous period oftravel and fine dining. What we see here is a shift awayfrom the novelty of Italian food towards the ordinary andmundane. Along with this shift we see an appeal to aconsuming subject who is still largely female andconcerned with feeding the family, but a new type ofwoman who does not have free time to spend in extravagantand adventurous cooking, she prepares one substantialdish rather than complex menus and she frequently re-usesleftovers. As Mennell (1985, 261) observes of this timeperiod “writers appear no longer to be so consciouslyaddressing housewives of a particular social class; thedifference they bear in mind seems to be that betweenthose who go to work and those who do not.” This is not

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particularly surprising if we consider that between 1951to 1971 the number of married women working more thandoubled from 2.7 to 5.8 million (Oddy 2003). What is moreinteresting is that cookbooks refer only to women inconventional family ménage with a husband and children,when in fact in 1981 only 31% of households consisted ofa married couple with children (Oddy 2003). Thisconservative ideal of the nuclear family is clearly onethat readers are encouraged to aspire to.

While cookbooks in this period contain an overemphasis onthe nuclear family they do nonetheless recognise andreflect the movement of women out of the home and intothe workplace. This redefinition of the audience affectsthe ways recipes and cooking practices are presented. Infact if the key characteristics of the previous periodwere novelty and extravagance, in this period convenienceis the dominant discourse used to describe Italian foodand the practices required to consume it. The term‘convenient’ rarely appears in the description; rather itis usually substituted by the terms ‘easy’, ‘quick’ or‘economic’, emphasising the consumption of Italian foodas a way of economising labour in the kitchen as well asin acquiring the ingredients. Less attention is given toingredients, their descriptions disappear and in mostcases they are simply listed without any advice aboutwhere to find them (see Appendix 2). This is probably dueto the fact that by this time products like pasta andtomato paste had become widely available in supermarketsin both fresh and convenience forms.

Most supermarket carry 2 or 3 brands of frozen bread dough, in packages that make 3 to 5 leaves ofbread. (Hazan 1986, 66)

tomato paste is available everywhere today in jars,cans and tubes. (Santini 1981, 2-3)

Recipes with frozen or canned ingredients must have beenappealing for working women. In fact, as Oddy (2003)illustrates, in the 1970s domestic refrigerator and

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frozen food become essential items, rather than luxuryones. In fact by 1971 69% of households in the UK owned arefrigerator with or without a freezer compartment and by1985 95% owned a refrigerator and 66 % a freezer. Anotherreason behind the gradual disappearance of detailregarding ingredients was the move towards simplificationof recipes. Here difficult to obtain ingredients areomitted and substituted with locally available products.

There are some vegetables mentioned here which arenot generally known in Britain and indeed, in thecase of red chicory, not sold here. Ordinary chicorymay be used, or if the leaves are being used fordecoration, any suitable alternative which appealsmay be used. (Gioco 1981, 141)

Shopping recommendations are followed by commentsregarding the speed of the cooking process, which theauthor often admits to having simplified. In addition thereader is entreated to modify recipes according to theirpreferences and skills.

The above traditional technique still stands andworks wonderfully with imported Italian rice. If wehave time we prefer the traditional, grand method.If we do not have the time, there are still ways tomake risotto in the modern kitchen. There are twoways to go, depending on the cook ware as well asthe rice in the market. (Romagnoli and Romagnoli1980, 135)

I don’t want to be dictatorial about my recipes.You can use them as ideas, and adapt them as youwish. (Carluccio 1986, 11)

Of the thousands of pasta sauces, only a few takemore than 15 to 20 minutes. This sauce formaccheroncini doesn’t take even 1 minute. (Hazan1986, 133)

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Such emphasis on convenience is in stark contrast withthe previous period wherein novelty and extravagance wereemphasised. What we see is an increasing rationalisationof domestic cooking (Warde 1997) involving anoptimisation of all of the practices surrounding theprocess of creating a meal.

While these recipes are simplified in their shopping,preparation and cooking procedures, consumers aresupposed to possess a certain level of know how andunderstanding of the preparation and cooking skills. Thisis not only supposed by the fact that ingredients are nolonger presented, but also by the fact that thedescriptions of the process are addressed to anexperienced cook. For instance Hazan (1986, 16)recommends that ‘no more wine or broth should be usedthan is necessary’ and in presenting a recipe she advisesthe reader to ‘cook until the onion becomes coloured.’

Although representations stress the convenient aspects ofItalian food consumption, care is still taken indescribing the process of preparation and cooking. Infact recurrent are comments on pleasing the family withhome made dishes.

What is about pulses that comforts men? When workgets my husband Victor down, chick- peas will lifthim from his depths. If I should add wild mushrooms,he soars. (Hazan 1986, 80)

Therefore what we see here is not really a dichotomicrelation between care and convenience, as Warde (1997)illustrates in his analysis. Instead cooking convenientfood is presented as a way of caring for the family.Cooking Italian recipes seems to reconcile the caringaspects of preparing meals for loved ones and theoptimisation of the meal preparation. This seemsparticularly relevant if we consider that cookbooks ofthis period are not aimed only at upper and middle classhousewives, but also at working women which, as studies

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suggest, juggle their domestic practices with restrictedbudgets and inflexible time schedules (Thompson 1996).Indeed to working women, who want to serve home madefood, sauces made with canned products and requiring nomore than a minute, represent an ideal solution to theirtime shortage and, maybe, modest cooking skills.

1987-2005 Stylish Food for All

From the end of Eighties Italian cooking becomesincreasingly commodified and begins to move out of thedomestic kitchen. This newly commodified and highlyvisible version of Italian cooking begins to shift awayfrom being seen entirely as a feminine preserve. Here wesee the emergence of the food expert or ‘culinary guru’(Brownlie, Hewer, and Horne 2005). The phenomena of theTV chef is particularly dominant in this period. Whilethe popularity of cookbook writers is not a newphenomenon, as Elizabeth David was well known by herpublic, what is new is that cookbook authors become a‘celebrity brand’ in their own right (Brownlie and Hewer2007) extending their visibility far beyond theircookbooks. Chefs and restaurateurs, such as the ItaliansAldo Zilli and Antonio Carluccio and other celebrities,such as Jamie Oliver, promote their own particular brandof Italian food through their cookbooks but also theirrestaurants, TV programs, magazines, and their ownbranded products, such as ready sauces or kitchenequipment. Here we see the emergence of a strong linkbetween Italian food and ‘consumer lifestyle.’

Through the success of these culinary gurus therepresentation of Italian food becomes heterogeneous, asthese celebrities jostle for a space in the market byemphasising the distinctiveness of their own particulartake on Italian food. Nonetheless a series of thematicsimilarities might be observed between these celebrityrepresentations as well as cookbooks written by lesspopular writers. The intended readership of these

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cookbooks seems to be much less determined in gender andcultural capital terms than in earlier periods. Recipesare not always organised in terms of first course, secondcourse and dessert, as in the previous period, ratherthrough new categories which respect a more globalunderstanding of food and cooking styles. Thus thedivision of recipes in the books is based on keyingredients, such as vegetables, meat or fish, on thelevel of required technical skill, and on the requiredamount of time for cooking and preparation. In fact thereare entire cookbooks for vegetarians and for people whodo not want spend more than 30 minutes cooking.References to husbands to take care of almost disappear,and the reader is no longer defined in gender terms,rather as a working person who does not have time tospend in the kitchen.

there are some delicious meat and fish recipes, too,which can be cooked in 30 minutes, a joy to any busycook who doesn’t want to be chained to the stovewhen the sun is shining outside or after a busy dayat work or with the children (Warde 1998, 8).

The disappearance of explicit references to the nuclearfamily does not only reflect a recognition of theincreasing participation of women in the work force, butalso other social and cultural changes. In the case ofJamie Oliver’s books, for example, the male readers areexplicitly addressed as “lads” who cook for their family,partner or friends. The early idealisation of the nuclearfamily disappears and the culinary subject is assembledmore in terms of a heterogeneity of lifestyles thananything else. Martin views this move as having potentialto break down gender divisions in roles, in hercommentary on food films she observes:

The blurring of the professional kitchen with thedomestic kitchen, of food preparation with itsconsumption, and chefs with cooks has implications

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for the breakdown of gender roles associated withculinary conventions. (2005, 43)

The common characteristic of this heterogeneous audienceseems to be the search for convenience. In factconvenience is still one of the dominant discourses whichis presented mostly in terms of saving time, effort andenergy in the kitchen. As Zilli points out:

My main aim is to give you an insight into Italiancooking, showing you how easy it is to createdelicious dishes. Forget the fuss! Simplicity is thekey […] some of them (recipes) are so quick and easythat they are great for working people who do nothave much time to cook. (Zilli 1998, VIII)

This emphasis on economising time and effort in preparinga meal seems to echo a wider trend within currentconsumer culture defined as an “age of convenience, wherethe supermarket is king and the skills of cooking appearto be in decline” (Brownlie, Hewer, and Horne 2005, 16).This trend is confirmed by Oddy (2003) who denounces thegrowing success of sandwiches, readymade soups andmicrowave ovens, and the increasing consumption of frozenvegetables and meat. Such a trend is acknowledged bycookbooks which however propose a counter-discourseinviting consumers to cook their meal using freshingredients, albeit in a convenient way, rather thanopting for ready meal options.

the recipes in this book have been designed toshow that it is possible to produce delicious,mouth-watering meals in 30 minutes –the same lengthof time that it takes to heat up many ready-mademeals- or even less time, without resorting toconvenience food. (Warde 1998, 8)

However here convenience is presented in a differentlight to previous periods. If previously convenience was

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described as a way of economising work, money and energyin making a meal (from selecting convenient products toreducing the complexity of the preparation). In thisphase convenience is still associated with cookingpractices but shopping becomes a more lengthy anddemanding task. The easiness and rapidity of Italianrecipes only really results from the careful selection ofingredients. Ingredients re-emerge as central to mealpreparation, as they were in the 1950s and 1960s.Although these are not exotic ingredients, but rathercommon ones, consumers are invited to re-discover theirqualities. As the Italian chef Antonio Carluccio (1997,8) underlines ‘the simplicity of the recipes relies onone thing-genuine and excellent products!’ The shoppingeffort is not focused on hunting down difficult to findingredients, rather the ability to appraise and selectcommonplace ingredients.

Some of the cheaper products in our shops andsupermarkets are very poor substitutes for the realthing. Never, for example, buy ready gratedParmesan, instead buy a piece and grate it asrequired (Warde 1998, 8)

Uncommon products like “cavolo nero” and “fiori dizucchini” are widespread in the cookbooks of famousrestaurants, such as The River Café (Gray and Rogers1998), but also in less well known ones. These productsare listed without any translation, possible substitutesor shopping advice. Indeed consumers are seen as expertshoppers and as such little indication is given regardingwhere to shop and how to select less common ingredients.Whilst these narratives reconstruct consumers asexperienced shoppers, they are still not consideredskilled cooks.

Italian is everyone’s favourite food- even if youcan’t boil an egg, it’s a good bet that you cancook pasta, stir a sauce, toss a salad and pour a

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glass of wine. So that’s Italian-you know you loveit, and you can make it. (Franco 2002, 7)

Given consumers’ assumed deficiency in cooking skills,they are guided with detailed descriptions of preparationand cooking processes (see Appendix 3). Level ofdifficulty and cooking and preparation time are usuallyindicated in recipes. Instructions like “steep for 10minutes” and “boil for 20 minutes”, replace the vagueindications found in earlier texts where a certaincooking knowhow of the readership was assumed. This ishow Jamie Oliver instructs the reader to make his EarlyAutumn Minestrone:

Sweat very slowly on a low heat, with the lid justajar, for around 15 to 20 minutes until soft, butnot brown.[…] Add the tomatoes, courgettes and redwine and simmer gently for 15 minutes (Oliver 2005,66)

Finally in this phase the representation of Italian foodas a healthy option become more explicit than in theprevious phases. This emphasis on healthy eating seems tobe resonant with other food representations guidingreaders to analyse their meals in terms of sugar, fat,salt and calories (Warde 1997; Oddy 2003; Schneider,David, and Hogg 2010)

At the time when so many of us are looking formeat alternatives, for healthier foods, and fordiets, lower in fat, the Italian way withvegetables and fruit offers unlimitedpossibilities. (Barrett 1993, 2)

Although health is a dominant theme a counter-discourserecommending readers to indulge themselves is also verypresent. For example this is how Jamie Oliver (2005, 66)ends his Early Autumn Minestrone: ‘Put a block ofParmesan and a grater on the table for everyone to helpthemselves. Heaven!’ Others similarly recommend consumers

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to deviate from the restriction of modern diets andindulge themselves eating pasta with Meat Balls.

Perhaps all you feel like eating is a big bowl ofSpaghetti and Meat Balls for dinner, with justgreen salad on the side. Indulge yourself- thecomfort is indescribable. (O’Connell 1991, 2)

This mixture of contradictory advice seems however toconvey Italian food as a convenient as well as aversatile option for consumers who oscillate betweenextravagant and common ingredients, health concerns andindulgence and saving time in the kitchen without optingfor ready meals. Indeed in this phase there is afragmentation of themes, recommendations and narrativeswhich seem to be addressed to consumers with differentand sometimes contrasting lifestyles.

Gender and Cultural Capital: Processes of Transformation and Reflection

In looking at the continuities and discontinuitiesthrough which Italian food has been represented over timewe have identified three distinct periods. Within eachperiod we observe distinct culinary discourses andpractices which combine to both represent and call forththe culinary subject in both class and gender terms. Wehave summarised these findings in table 2 below.

TABLE 2 HERE

The representation of the gendered culinary subject (table 2,row 2) changed considerably across the period examined.In the fifties and sixties authors represented themselvesas firmly upper- middleclass demonstrating social andcultural capital through both, (what were at the time)exotic travels, and an extensive knowledge of Italiancuisine and culinary traditions. During this periodauthors tended to be exclusively female and their advice,which most often took on a firmly educative tone,

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included cooking, travel and shopping recommendations,was addressed to British middleclass women. These womenwere rendered as largely ignorant both in terms ofcooking skills, but perhaps more interestingly, in theappropriate consumption of exotic and extravagant food.Indeed, readers were encouraged through the developmentof appropriate shopping and cooking skills to accumulateand display their social and cultural capital. A secondkey way in which this audience was addressed was as‘mother’, here, the time the reader was to spend learningnew dishes appeared synonymous with caring for theirfamily.

In the seventies and early eighties the majority ofwriters remain female, however male writers, in the guiseof chefs or restaurateurs, start to appear.Autobiographical notes, historical introductions, travelanecdotes and holiday advice become less common, and assuch the previous pedagogical tone gradually disappears.Also shopping advice and lists of delicatessens toexplore are not included. Although this could be aconsequence of the popularity and availability of Italianproducts, we think that this is also due to a change inthe intended audience. In fact if in the sixties theintended audience consisted of upper middleclass womenwho can afford to spend time learning how to shop andcook, in the seventies and eighties cookbooks areaddressed to working women who are exhorted to save theirscarce time with convenient products and recipes. Thenineties is characterised by an explosion of cookbookswritten by culinary (mostly male) gurus, such as JamieOliver, Antonio Carluccio and Aldo Zilli, who are populartelevision chefs, successful restaurateurs and celebrityendorsers. Although they are popular chefs, they do notpresent themselves as experts who teach their readers howto cook, but rather they entertain their audience withtheir travels or family anecdotes and with reassuringadvice emphasising that cooking their recipes is an easytask. Their advice is not necessarily addressed tomothers or wives, but seems to be directed to male or

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female cooks who prepare food for their families, theirfriends or simply themselves. The recurrent theme ofsaving time in the kitchen is not addressed only toworking mothers, but to a more general audience with adynamic lifestyle.

The changes in culinary subjects are closely related tochanges in the enactment of cultural capital (table 2, row 3).In fact in the first period affluent housewives wereencouraged to spend their time in learning new cookingskills, and techniques as well as in discovering newproducts with their exotic names in cookbooks and inlocal delicatessens. Such an emphasis on learning newskills and products gradually disappears in the secondperiod, wherein recipes are adapted to the localavailability of ingredients and existing skills. IndeedItalian cooking appears as undemanding task in terms of“what to do” (applying commonly understood cookingskills) and “what to use” (using products that are widelyavailable). Descriptions stress the importance ofshopping and in particular sourcing and selectingcommonly available ingredients but with specific (andnew) characteristics. This echoes Martens’ and Scott’s(2005) analysis of changing representations of domesticcleaning in a popular British women’s magazine in theperiod 1951-2001. They observe that cleaning is describedas a complex set of practices which do not simplymaterialise the work of caring for the house; rather theyobjectify ‘the shopping and selection skills of thehousewife’ (2005, 395).

Warde (1997, 61) interprets the decreasing excitement andnovelty associated with new food products from foreigncultures as the routinization of the exotic, this isreflected in the decreasing emphasis on describingproducts and ingredients for recipes. If thisroutinization could be an explanation for the decliningattention to products during the eighties, in thenineties searching for ‘excellent’ ingredients and re-discovering common products became a new trend. Indeed

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most of the products (such as pasta, tomatoes and oliveoil) are not new for British consumers, instead theproduct qualities that are emphasised are new, such asprovenance, seasonality and the methods of production. Inthe same way that Johnston and Baumann (2007) did, weinterpret the emphasis on rediscovering common productsas a re-emergence of a distinction game wherein consumersneed to demonstrate their cultural capital in order tounderstand the content of the cookbooks. If in thesixties cookbooks are instruments of distinction per se –they are in fact openly addressed to a specificreadership- in the last period recipes are apparently foreveryone but consumers need to demonstrate an adequatecultural capital in order to understand the ingredientslisted in the recipes. Such cultural capital is notrelated to technical skills in the kitchen, which areclassified as easy and quick, but rather to shoppingpractice which becomes a central moment of domestic foodconsumption. It is during shopping that consumers need toapply their know how in selecting “excellent” but readilyavailable ingredients.

The current shift from cooking to shopping practices isrelated to wider changes in food discourses (table 2, rows 4and 5). In fact in the fifties and sixties’ emphasis onnovelty, authenticity and extravagance echoes therepresentations of other cuisines (see Warde 1994; 1997).Similarly in the eighties Italian food discourses areresonant with wider food discourses, and henceconvenience and not extravagance, becomes the leitmotivof the era, the saving of time and effort in the kitchenand in the supermarket become paramount. In the ninetiesthe growing importance of healthy eating is used to re-frame Italian food once more. Although Italian recipesare still described as convenient they are also describedas a healthy option requiring effort and cultural capitalin selecting ingredients (some of them very common – seeJohnston and Baumann 2007) with both extravagant andhealthy characteristics. Alongside this focus on healthsits a wider aestheticisation of food and cooking.

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Cookbooks from this period are typically littered withphotographs depicting stylised culinary lifestyles with afocus on informal and casual cooking.

Finally we observe some important connections with theabove changes in the representation of the culinarysubject, practices and discourses with wider British culinaryculture (table 2, row 6). Here we see a broad shift from afocus on distinction and consumer learning in the 1950sand 1960s, to a period of fragmentation and consumerconvenience in the 1970s and 1980s and most recently ademocratisation of consumption and attendant focus onimage, aesthetics and consumer lifestyle. Focusing onthis most recent move, consumers are encouraged to createtheir own diet following recommendations and advice fromculinary gurus, doctors and celebrities (Warde 1994;1997). In the specific case of Italian food thestylisation of consumption starts in the eighties withthe emphasis on re-adapting Italian recipes followingindividual skills and product availability. In contrastwith the sixties when consumers were encouraged to learnhow to cook and shop as a way to express her/hismiddleclassness, in the eighties recommendations areaddressed to help consumers (usually women) in theireveryday life, by proposing convenient eating options. Inthe nineties recommendations become more fragmented notsimply because they are contradictory, but because theyare given by many different experts and addressed to avariety of consumers (mothers, single women, single menand fathers).

We read this trend as a form of democratisation ofculinary discourses, which from being a monopoly ofmiddleclass women (as readers and writers) are todayrepresented by different authorities and addressed todifferent consumers with very different lifestyles.Indeed Martin (2005) views the popularisation of fooddiscourses as demonstrating the breakdown of highculture/low culture distinctions. Others (Warde 1997;Schneider and Davis 2010) highlight how such

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heterogeneous recommendations create anxiety in modernconsumers who are immersed in gastroanomic (Fischler1979) representations. Following their analysis consumersbecome anxious because they cannot decide or evaluatechanging and conflicting advice recommendingcontradictory consumption practices and products.Although our analysis support Warde’s (1997) andSchneider’s and Davis’ (2010) ideas of an increasingfragmentation of advice and recommendation about what andhow to eat, our analysis cannot predict how consumersinterpret, evaluate and materialise such recommendations.As Marshall (1995) and Murcott (1982) remind us we cannotassume that media representations describe what takesplace in consumers’ everyday lives. Indeed we cannotassume that what is described in the cookbooks will takeplace in consumers’ shopping trolleys, kitchens anddining rooms, as such a focus on everyday practice isrequired.

We can reconnect the above discussion to widertheorisation surrounding food preparation andconsumption. Our socio-historic study has captured bothdiscourses and practices in the hope of relating these toparticular forms of subjectivity. We have two keycontributions: our first point is about the value of asocio-historical approach in identifying longer termcontinuities and discontinuities in food representationand linking these to the context of their (re)production.Our second, connected point, relates to the constitutionof, or assembling of, the consuming subject through thesefood and culinary discourses which renders cookbooks notonly as cultural artefacts but as transformationaldevices.

Engaging in more depth with ideas of continuity anddiscontinuity we immediately see the value of a socio-historic approach to food and food discourses. Inparticular we underline the importance of the holisticapproach taken here, one which captures changes toculinary practices (food preparation and cooking in

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particular) but links these to the constitution ofculinary subjects. Locating both practices and subjectswithin their cultural context (as we have done here)reveals food to be a key site of political struggle. Takefor example the discourses relating to food and healthyeating, and food and ‘family time’, these can only befully understood when related to wider social andeconomic issues concerning the availability of time andmoney within households, and access to ingredients (seetable 2, row 1). In addition it should be rememberedthat while these books are indeed ‘cultural artefacts’, areflection of culture in the making, they are alsorequired to some degree to practically to fit in with thevery real everyday constraints of money and time of theirreadership.

Our study has highlighted a series of continuities indiscourses surrounding Italian – British food across thethree periods. The three most enduring discourses arethose of nostalgia, authenticity and convenience, each ofwhich spans the three periods. However, it is importantto note that these discourses take on differingsignificance depending on their socio-cultural context.If we take authenticity as an example we find that in thefirst period (1954 - 1974) authenticity is closely tiedin to a nostalgic view of the Italian ‘good life’(Parsons and Cappellini, forthcoming) which contrastsstarkly with the continued rationing of post-war England.Here authenticity is concerned with consumer learning inthe kitchen and getting the dishes just right in order torecreate the Italian experience. Authenticity as adefining discourse fades in the second period (1975-1986)to be replaced by a concern with convenience as womenmove out of the kitchen and into the workplace. In thefinal and most recent period (1987-2005) authenticity isconcerned not with getting the dishes just right, butwith sourcing the best quality, authentic ingredients. Ifwe return then to Warde’s (1997) antinomies (novelty –tradition, health – indulgence, economy- extravagance andcare-convenience) we see that their meanings shift

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significantly across the period according to the widersocial and economic climate. However, especially when wereflect on the routine and conventional nature of muchfood consumption (Marshall, 2005), we observe that it isthe discontinuities or ruptures within these discoursesthat are most revealing. As discussed above, thedisappearance in the middle period of authenticity andnovelty to be replaced with economy and convenienceundoubtedly a reflection of women’s juggling lifestylesas they split their time between the workplace and thehome.

Perhaps though the larger contribution of the presentstudy lies within our attempts to ‘read off’ the culinarysubject from these texts. As such we view these texts inboth performative and transformative senses. These textscall forth specific performances of gender and culturalcapital and it is through these performances that classand gender norms are reproduced. Again, our socio-historical approach locates such a reading within widersocial and cultural changes in British society,highlighting the changes in discourses of gender, andwhat counts as cultural capital in the three periods.

Turning first to gender, we see during the first period(1954-1974) a rendering of the culinary subject as almostexclusively female. Gender here is synonymous with womenand women here ought to be concerned with both feedingthe family and entertaining with style. The appeal hereis to the educated middle class wife and mother. As womenbegan to move into the workplace in increasing numbers inthe late 1970s and 1980s the gendered representationsshift to the working mother, although again the culinaryconsumer is still rendered largely female. Most recently(in the late 1980s through to 2005) we see a gendereddepiction which clearly encompasses both male and femalereaders. With the rise of the celebrity chef and theincreasing financial valuing of cooking (as cheffing)comes an encroaching masculinisation of the culinaryconsumer. Here concerns of style and aesthetics take

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centre stage and the ‘work’ of cooking previouslypresented as the preserve of the wife and mother beginsto fade away in favour of cooking as leisure and display.

Moving on to look at cultural capital, our study ofkitchen skills and practices embraces more fully a viewof food and cooking as ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1984). Hereit is not only about what you can access (ingredients-wise) but what you do with these ingredients, how yousubsequently transform and display them (stylisation).This practice based approach to analysing cookbooksidentifies their key role as a transformative as well asperformative media. Cookbooks can be viewed then asmanuals on two levels: on the micro level regarding thehow to of cooking, i.e. the correct length of time toboil pasta, the right way to store parmesan and the bestplaces to source ingredients. However underlying theseeveryday practices are quite heavily laden politicaldiscourses observing how life ought to unfold in apractical sense, not just how should ingredients besourced and stored, but who should be performing thiswork.

As discussed in the previous section here we see a stronggender politics emerge from these texts withrepresentations of cultural capital and gender in thekitchen undulating throughout the three periods. Inaddition the reader is strongly entreated in terms oftheir lifestyle. This comes through most strongly in themost recent period where instruction regarding how foodshould be displayed and enjoyed socially is highlystylised often through the inclusion of carefully stagedphotographs of the author eating with family and friendsor cooking in their own gleaming kitchens. Theselifestyles are also largely the preserve of those who canafford them and as such we see the functioning ofcookbooks (across all three periods in fact) asaspirational devices. As we mentioned earlier, thecookbooks we have surveyed exist on a continuum betweenthose intended as the more mundane practical handbooks or

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‘how to’ texts and those more concerned withentertainment and originality. More realistically mostbooks consist of a mixture of the two elements. We shouldnot forget that the ownership and display of these textsthemselves is also significant in re-enacting culturalcapital. Not only individual texts but the assemblage ofbooks on the shelf and the knowledge and skills requiredin navigating the expanding realm of celebrity and lesswell known chefs and cookbook authors both past andpresent.

In this paper we have only touched on ‘representations’giving us little idea as to how these texts are receivedby consumers themselves. Our view is that it is likelythat consumers will be active in their translation ofsuch consumption texts. As such the texts of consumption(in whatever guise) might be seen as living things thatconsumers co-produce and interact with in their widerproject of identity formation. Clearly then theseconsumption texts have both performative andtransformative functions in their reflection and activereproduction of consumption values, lifestyles and genderrelations.

Conclusion

We have explored how culinary texts operate in bothperformative and transformative senses in relation towider societal norms of gender and cultural capital. Wehave shown how the culinary consumer has beenreconstructed through discourses surrounding the domesticconsumption of Italian food. It is important to note thatthese discourses don’t only span the issues of foodchoice but also food preparation (cooking skills),acquisition (shopping) and display (presentation asmeal). Within these practices and discourses specificperformances of gender and cultural capital are calledforth. As such, while consumption texts (such ascookbooks) are sources of enjoyment they are also

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technologies of governance (Beckett, 2012), achievingthis governance through the capacity of the consumer toreflexively absorb and reproduce the gendered and classedorientations they promote.

Across the time period surveyed we see the readerrepresented as housewife (1954-74), this presentationshifts to working mother (1975-1986) and in the mostrecent period (1987-2005) gendered representations aretempered as readers are constructed as both male andfemale and we see an encroaching metrosexuality andmasculinisation of cooking and food practices (Brownlie,Hewer, and Horne 2005; Brownlie and Hewer, 2007). We alsosee shifts in representation of cultural capital in thesesame periods, here capital is to be accrued throughlearning of relatively complex new cooking skills, toadapting recipes existing cooking skills and mostrecently to displaying skills in shopping and productselection. These shifts reflect wider shifts withinconsumer society and culture from a period in the 1950swhere new consumer goods and styles appeared about whichthe consumer was supposedly in need of education,followed by the rise of convenience as consumer productsbegan widely available and women moved out of the homeinto the workplace. Finally, most recently,representations in the cookbooks reflect moves to a postproduction society where image, aesthetics and experiencedominate consumer culture. In this most recent period‘lifestyle’ takes on a renewed significance in particulara highly idealised and heavily stylised lifestyle. Whilecookbooks in all three periods function as fictivenarratives designed to evoke aspiration and desire, thismost recent period intensifies this process withexaggerated representations of the good life. As we haveseen, celebrity chefs ‘as brands’ in their own right playa central role in communicating and intensifying theserepresentations (Brownlie and Hewer, 2007). As such bothcelebrity chefs and cookbooks might be seen as marketingobjects in their own right (Tonner, 2008).

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In closing we’d like to return the above discussion to awider theorisation of consumers and markets. Inparticular we’d like to reflect on the wider relationshipbetween consumption practices and behaviours at the locallevel (i.e. within the household) and the representationsof these consumption practices circulating in the widerdiscursive sphere beyond the home. The question remainsas to how exactly consumers absorb the norms andbehaviours promoted in the wider media (to includediscourses circulating in books and magazines but also onthe television). We prefer a reading which embraceslearning and absorption through practice i.e. the routineand habitual enactment of consumption practices on a dayto day level, while at the same time recognising thatthese consumption behaviours and the meanings consumerattribute to them are also located within a widerconsumptive sphere which promotes particular norms ofgender, social class and cultural capital. This stronglyperformative conception of consumption behavioursrecognises therefore that both the doing of consumptionbehaviours, and wider practises of signification andrepresentation, have import for the creation andmaintenance of consumption meanings.

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Table 1. List of Cookbooks AnalysedAuthor Year Title PublisherDavid, Elizabeth [1954

]1963

Italian Food Penguin Books: Harmondsworth

Sorce Rose Luise 1955 The Complete Italian Cookbook The Cresset Press: LondonTaglienti, Maria Luisa

1956 The Italian Cookbook William Kimber: London

Gould-Marks, Beryl

1969 The Home Book of Italian Cookery Faber and Faber Limited: London

Howe, Robin 1972 The International Wine and Food Society's Guide to Regional Italian Cookery

The International Wine andFood Publishing Company: London

Howells, Marion 1972 Popular Italian Cookery Treasure Press:LondonLoren, Sophia 1972 Eat With Me Michael Jospeph: London Bruni Seldis, Anna

1974 La Dolce Cucina. The Italian Dessert Cookbook

Collier Macmillan Publisher: London

Bond, Jules J. 1977 The Italian Cuisine I Love Leon Amiel: LondonTruax, Carol 1978 The Woman's Day Book of Italian

CookingHoughton Mifflin Company: London

Barker, Alex 1979 Italian Cooking MacDonald Educational: London

Bush, Sheila 1979 Italian Cookery Eyre Methuen: LondonHazan, Marcella 1980 The Classic Italian Cookbook Papermarc: LondonRomagnoli, Margaret and Romagnoli, Franco

1980 The New Italian Cooking An Atlantic Monthly Press Book: London

Gioco Giorgio 1981 Cuisine of Italy W.H. Allen: LondonSantini Amelia 1981 The Italian Commonsense Cookery

BookAngus and Robertson: London

Bianchi Luciana 1982 Easy Italian Cookery Ward Lock limited: LondonBisignano Alphonse

1982 Cooking the Italian Way: Easy Menu Ethnic Cookbooks

Lerner Publications Company: London

Bugialli Giuliano 1985 The Taste of Italy Octopus Conran: LondonBusini Birch Laura

1985 Traditional Italian Food Fontana Paperbacks: London

Biucchi Edwina 1986 Italian Food and Drink Wayland: Hove, East SussexCarluccio Antonio 1986 An Invitation to Italian Cooking Pavilion: LondonGee Margaret 1986 Healthy Italian Cookbook Robert Hale Limited:

LondonHughes, Spike Anna and Robert Charmian

1986 The Pocket Guide to Italian food and Wine

Xanadu, London

Hazan Marcella 1986 Marcella's Kitchen. Marcella Hazan's New Book of Classical Italian Cooking

Macmillan: London

Street, Mark 1987 The Art of Italian Cooking Hamlyn: Middlesexde' Medici Lorenza

1990 The Heritage of Italian Cooking Ebury Press: London

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O' Connell Marzullo Rick

1991 365 Easy Italian Recipes Harper Collins Publisher: London

Barrett Judith 1993 Food From an Italian Garden Michael Joseph: LondonCarluccio Antonio 1997 Carluccios’ Complete Italian Food Quadrille Publishing:

LondonDella Croce Julia 1997 Pasta Dorling Kindersley

Limited: London Gray Rose and Ruth Rogers

1998 River Cafe. Italian Kitchen Ebury Press: London

Warde Fran 1998 30 Minute Italian Hamlyn: LondonZilli Aldo 1998 Aldos' Italian Food for Friends Metro: LondonSaviour, Pirotta 1999 A Flavour of Italy Wayland: Hove, East SussexCavallini Stefano 2000 Cucina Essenziale Pavillon: LondonCapalbo Carla 2001 Perfect Pasta and Pizza, Fabulous Food

the Italian WayLorenz books: London

McCulloch Julie 2001 A World of Recipes,Italy Heinemann: OxfordZilli Aldo 2001 Foolproof Italian cookery BBC: LondonCasillo Tony 2002 An Italian Family Cookbook Carroll & Brown: London Franco Silvana 2002 Buonissimo! : easy modern recipes for

traditional Italian cookingRyland Peters & Small: London

Oliver Jamie 2005 Jamie’s Italy Penguin: London

Table 2 Assembling the Culinary Consumer in British Italian Cookbooks 1954-2005

Novel Foodfor theAffluentHousewife1954-1974

ConvenientFood for the

WorkingMother

1975-1986

Healthy andStylish Food

for All1987-2005

1. British socio-economic context

Risingstandards ofliving spread

ofmiddleclasstastes andlifestyles.

Womenincreasinglymove out ofthe home into

theworkplace.

Encroachingmetro-

sexuality,masculinisation of food and

cooking.

2. Culinary subject: gender

Housewife,cooks for the

family

Workingmother, cooks

for thefamily

Male or femalecook, cooks

for family andfriends

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3. Culinary subject: cultural capital

Culturalcapitalenactedthrough

learning ofrelativelycomplex newcooking

skills andtechniques

Culturalcapitalenactedthroughadapting

recipes toexistingskills asopposed to

learning newones

Focus shiftsfrom enacting

culturalcapitalthroughcooking

competenciesto shoppingskills inproduct

sourcing andselection

4. Defining fooddiscourse

Novelty Convenience Style andleisure

5. Other food discourses

Skill,exoticism,

extravagance,authenticity

Speed, ease,adaptation,economy

Speed, ease,authenticity

6. Wider British culinary culture

Distinctionand consumer

learning

Fragmentationand consumerconvenience

Democratisation,

aestheticisation and

consumerlifestyle

Appendix 1

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Recipes from 1954- 1974: New food for the affluent housewife

Bagna cauda (Taglienti 1956, 30)

A famous sauce of Piemont that literally means “hot bath”because raw vegetables such as celery, carrots, endive, peppers and especially artichoke hearts are dipped or bathed in it whole is hot. The original recipe calls for butter (or half butter and half olive oil), garlic, anchovies and white truffles, but many people in Italy add some double cream or, in summer, even some basil leaves. I have found that this cream version is more popular with gourmets outside Italy. More garlic may be used if desired. Bagna Cauda not only makes a tasty, varied and unusual savoury course, but it also will garner superlatives when served with cocktails or drinks.

½ pound butter 1 tinned withe truffle the size of a walnut, minced (optional)2 large cloves of garlic 1 cup if double cream, scalded 8 anchovy fillets, finely chopped

Place butter and garlic in small saucepan and simmer for 5 minutes. Do not allow garlic or butter to brown. Removegarlic. Add anchovies and mix with a wooden spoon until mixture is well blended. Add truffles and scalded cream. Blend and serve. It is very important to keep sauce hot while it is being served. A small chafing dish over a low flame is ideal. The above recipe is enough for 3 heart of celery; 4 large carrots, sliced lengthwise; 2 endives, 4 artichoke hearts; 2 green or red sweet peppers, cleaned and sliced in thin strips. All vegetables should be crisp. Bread sticks dipped in the hot sauce are also delicious.

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Fondue, Piedmont style (Fonduta alla piemontese) (Taglienti 1956, 37-38)

Fonduta is a delicious Piedmontese soup. The original recipe calls for Fontina, a cheese from Piedmont (exported to this country) but when Fontina is not available Swiss or Muenster cheese can be substituted.

1 pound imported Fontina cheese, diced 1/8 teaspoon white pepper5 eggs yolks 2 tinned white truffles, size of a walnut, minced fine, or sliced paper thin4 tablespoon butter 4 slices of toast, diced

Place cheese in bowl, add enough milk to cover and let stand overnight. Then place cheese and milk in steamer. Water in bottom of streamer should be hot but not boiling. Beat with egg beater or stir vigorously with wooden spoon until cheese is dissolved. Then stir in yolks and pepper and cook for another minute or two, stirring constantly. Fonduta should have the consistency of thick cream. Correct seasoning and serve with diced toast, sprinkled with truffles.

Artichokes calabrese (Carciofi alla calabrese) (Sorce 1955, 135)

4 large artichokes 1 cup breadcrumbs½ cup Parmesan cheese, greeted 1 tsp parsley, chopped¼ cup olive oil ½ cup waterSalt and pepper

Discard stems and outer leaves of artichokes, and trim tips of remaining leaves by cutting across the top of the

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artichokes. Open leaves of artichokes by pounding it on top. Make a filling of breadcrumbs, cheese, parsley, saltand pepper; stuff between the leaves of artichokes pressing mixture in with butt of the palm. Place artichokes in a saucepan, add olive oil and a little water; cover and simmer 1 hour, adding more water if necessary.

Appendix 2

Recipes from 1975-1986 Convenient food for the working mother

Spaghetti with clam sauce (Spaghetti alle vongole) (Santini, 1981: 25) ½ cup olive oil2 cloves garlic crushed2 tablespoon parsley, finely chopped2 tablespoon of tomato paste diluted in a little warm waterPepper1small can preserved baby clams (and the liquid) Salt600 g (1 lb 4 oz) spaghettini

In a medium-sized skillet, heat the oil and saute garlic until just coloured. Add parsley and diluted tomato paste, pepper and clam water. Simmer uncovered for about 10 minutes. Add clams and simmer for another 5 minutes. Taste sauce and add salt if needed. Cook spaghettini in salted water al dente and drain into a serving bowl. Season with clam sauce. No cheese is needed.

Vegetable Risotto (Bianchi 1982, 37)

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150 ml/ ¼ pint olive oil 225 g/8 oz frozen peas1 onion, finely chopped 175/ 6 oz mushrooms, chopped 1 clove garlic, finely chopped 25 g/1 oz canned carrots, chopped1 red pepper, seeded and chopped 225 g/ 8 oz tomatoes, skinned seeded and chopped 1 green pepper, seeded and chopped 40 g/ 1 ½ oz greeted Parmesan or Emmenthal cheese200 g/ 7 oz long-grain riceSalt, paprika. Sugar750 ml/ ¼ pints water

Heat the oil in a pan. Fry the onion, garlic and peppers for 5 minutes until the begin to soften. Add the rice and fry, stirring, for about 3 minutes until it begins tolook transparent. Season with salt, paprika and sugar. Gradually pour in the water. Cover and cook gently over low heat for 20 minutes, until the rice is tender and hasabsorbed all the water. The grains of rice should remain separate, so do not stir, just shake the pan from time totime. Cook the peas separately in boiling salted water for 5 minutes, then drain. Fry the mushroom in the butte,the drain. Add peas, mushrooms, carrots and tomatoes to the rice and heat through. Finally stir in the greeted cheese.

Appendix 3

Recipes from 1987-2005: Stylish food for all

Fusilli with olives (Fusilli alla Sorrentina) (Casillo 2002, 78)

100 ml olive oil500gr tomatoes, peeled, deseeded and diced140 gr black olives, such as Gaeta or Kalamata

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2 garlic cloves chopped1 ½ teaspoon dried oregano 50 gr loosely packed chopped fresh basil 500 gr fusilli150 gr shredded caciotta or mozzarella cheese55 gr greeted Parmesan cheese

Combine the oil, olives, garlic, oregano and basil in a large heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-high heat. Stirtogether and fry 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, set aside.Meanwhile bring a large saucepan of salted water to boil.Add the fusilli, stir, and continue boiling until the fusilli is firm tender accordingly to the package directions. Drain the fusilli, shaking off the liquid. Return the pan of sauce to medium heat and reheat. Stir the pasta into the sauce with cheese, stirring until the cheeses melt. Serve 6.

Tony’s tip

Olive and capersI always choose Kalamata or Greek olives, or Gaeta. Don’tuse those ugly things called black olives that come in acan and have lost their pits. If the olives aren’t pitteddon’t panic. Lay each on a cutting board and hit it withthe heel of your hand or with a flat of a knife if youare dainty. The olive will split and the pit will dropout. You can also buy 2 kinds of capers – one packed in vinegar, the other in salt. The salted ones are preferable to avoid the vinegar when it isn’t wanted. Youcan also soak the salted ones in water or use them directly, remembering to cut back on the salt in the recipe to compensate.

Red wine risotto (Warde 1998, 43)

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Preparation time (5 minutes) Cooking time (20 minutes) total time (25 minutes) Serve 4

60 ml/1 pint chicken stock450 ml/3/4 pint Valpolicella or other red wine1 tablespoon olive oil125 gr/ 4oz butter2 garlic cloves crushed and chopped2 red onions, chopped300 gr/10 oz Arborio rice or Carnaroli rice250 gr/8oz filed mushroom sliced175 gr/6 oz Parmesan cheese freshly greatedSalt and pepper

One. Heat the stock and red wine in a large saucepan to agentle simmer.Two. Heat the olive and 50gr/2 oz of the butter in a heavy based saucepan, add the garlic and the onion and sauté gently for 5 minutes, do not brown.Three. Add the rice and mix well to coat the grains with the butter and oil. Add enough if the hot stock to cover the rice, stir well and simmer gently. Continue to stir as frequently as possible through cooking. As the liquid is absorbed, add more stock by the ladle to just cover the rice, stirring well.Four. When half of the stock has been incorporated add the mushroom and season with salt and pepper. The rice should be stained with colour of the wine, giving a rich dark red colour.Five. When the stock has been added, and the rice is justcooked with a good creamy sauce, add most of the Parmesanand the remaining butter and mix well. Garnish with a little grated Parmesan and serve with the rest of the bottle of red wine.

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