European Empires on a Plate

c. 1750–Today

Ilaria Berti, Stefano Magagnoli, Peter Scholliers, Peter J. Atkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040398951
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book uses food to explore the uneven and multifaceted encounters between European imperial societies and their colonies, examining the cultural, social, political and economic forces behind European empires.

Food is a key focus of current transdisciplinary and border research, and these chapters uncover hidden aspects of imperial dynamics and the search for food in European expansion. Containing contributions from a mix of established food historians and young researchers in the field, the collection utilizes a range of sources including colonial government records, trademark and patent records, cookery books, agronomic and botanical treaties, television shows, newspaper and magazine articles and advertisements. While the book discusses empires' influence on the colonies and their foodways, it also reveals inter-imperial connections and interdependence by highlighting the effect of colonial foods on the metropoles.

European Empires on a Plate is a valuable resource for scholars in the fields of food history, food studies and food culture, as well as social and cultural historians.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• ICREFH’s (almost) four decades of existence
• ICREFH symposia
• ICREFH publications
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Exoticism in Italian cuisine: travel and science in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• 3 When the tropics came North: how exotic fruits conquered Finnish plates in the time of empires
• 4 A multicultural history of Hungarian confectionery in 19th-century Habsburg central Europe
• 5 The twofold path of the last European empire: how Italy reacted to globalization and new alcohol-related trends
• 6 Grimod de La Reynière’s Empire of Taste: gastronomic judgement and taste under the First French Empire (1804–1815)
• 7 Russian character of the Siberian pelmeni: imaginary remapping of empire in Russian and Soviet cuisine
• 8 In the shadow of the Eastern Empire? Soviet–Czech relationships in gastronomy from 1945 to 1970
• 9 Catering to empire’s taste: a historical analysis of the colonial hybrid cuisine in Malaysia
• 10 The adaptable, hardworking and creative US women and the lazy, hypocrites and dirty cooks: Cuba between the Spanish and the US empires (1880s–1910s)
• 11 Congolese culinary traces in Belgium between 1885 and 1940
• 12 For a plate of couscous: food narratives, in-between spaces and ethnic identities in the Italian colony of Libya
• 13 Eating the empire: the gloom of colonialism, racism, and sexism in food advertising in Italy, 1930s to 1970s
• 14 Menus in political banquets: French gastronomy and Brazilian food (1889–1930)
• 15 Art and anthropophagy: postcolonial reinterpretations of cannibalism in modern and contemporary Brazilian art
• Index