Recipes for Empire

 

• Imperial armies marched on their stomachs …
• Anglo-Indian memsahibs learnt to cook kedgeree alongside Indian cooks …
• Chicken tikka massala became Britain’s national dish …
• The history of British India was “not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment” (Salman Rushdie) …

Recipes for Empire provides the opportunity to explore the multiple ways in which food, cookbooks, and recipes reveal the dense and complex relationships established under the aegis of empire, particularly, but not exclusively, the nineteenth-century British Empire. What was the influence of Britain upon colonial cuisines and culinary practices, and what traces of the colonial can we see in British food and food writing? What is the relationship between the ingredients and method of practical cooking, and the rules and procedures of imperial governance? Can we read for methodology and ideology across Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management and Thomas Macauley’s Minute on Indian Education?

This interdisciplinary conference is jointly convened by the University of Tasmania’s Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath, the School of English, Journalism and European Languages at the University of Tasmania; and the Department of English, Mar Ivanios College, Kerala. It will be held at Mar Ivanios College, Kerala.

Please send 250-word abstracts for 20 minute conference papers to <caia@utas.edu.au> by 30 September 2008.