Recipes for Russia: Food and Nationhood under the Tsars

by Alison K. Smith

Overview

Alison K. Smith examines changing attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs about the production and consumption of food in Russia from the late eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. She focuses on the way that competing ideas based either in "traditional" Russian practice or in new practices from the "rational" West became the basis for Russians' understanding of themselves and their society. The Russians who participated in the process of self-definition were variously private authors and reformers or public servants of the Russian imperial state. Some had great success in creating a sense of themselves as ultimate authorities on a given topic. For example, a series of cookbook authors developed a system of writing Russian cookbooks in ways that borrowed from, but were still quite different from, foreign sources. Others found the process of mediating these ideas more difficult; agricultural reformers, in particular, sometimes found traditional practices, now deemed irrational, hard to eliminate. Recipes for Russia looks at the process of nation-building within the framework of the modern world—that is, it looks at the way individuals sought to define their nationality not only against outside influences but also by incorporating those outside influences into some coherent, yet national, whole. While Smith looks at food as part of Russian culture, she also connects it with the social, legal, and economic background that formed the culture, while examining the pre-reform period in significant detail. As a result, Recipes for Russia illuminates the great changes of this period, both in the food habits of Russians and in their views of themselves and of their nation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780875803814
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	02/26/2008
Series:	NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Edition description:	1
Pages:	269
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alison K. Smith is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

Illustrations     vii
Preface     ix
Introduction     3
Authority and Material Concerns
Ensuring Sustenance-The State and the Starving Peasant     13
Making Cabbage Healthy-Dietetics and Public Health as a National Concern     44
Describing the Russian Diet-Ethnography, History, and Cultural Definition     72
Production and Consumption from Theory to Practice
Searching for an Authority-Encyclopedists and the Art of Translation     101
Who Is Responsible?-Master Chefs, Gentlemen Farmers, and Progressive Patriotism     122
Audiences and Authorities-Russian Housewives and European Gastronomes     147
Conclusion     177
Glossary     181
Notes     189
Selected Bibliography     237
Index     255