Drinking and dining out has long been neglected by sociological as well as historical research, but has been studied more thoroughly since the 1990s. During the last two decades a quite extensive literature not only on the history of food, but also on eating out has evolved.1 What is still widely missing in this field of research is a long-term perspective as well as international and interregional comparisons. The recent workshop at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC on “Public Eating, Public Drinking. Places of Consumption from Early Modern to Postmodern Times”, organized by Marc Forster (Connecticut College) and Maren Möhring (University of Zurich/University of Cologne) and sponsored by the GHI, brought together American and European scholars of early modern and modern history to discuss the phenomenon of drinking and eating out from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century.
The workshop focussed on the spatial dimensions of places of consumption, with the participants’ papers ranging from discussions of early modern inns to the French-style restaurant of the nineteenth century to today’s ethnic restaurants. Taking the material, the social, and the imaginary aspects of these places into consideration 2, the papers demonstrated the value of a comparative approach in historical as well as regional terms. This perspective allows for comparisons of issues of furnishing and interior design, as well as an understanding of the images and discourses surrounding these places and their social functions. The various places of consumption, with their distinct histories, legal regulations and economic constraints, functioned not only as providers of food and drink, but also as important meeting-places and sites of social interaction. All of them included and excluded specific individuals and social groups, often along the lines of race, class and/or gender. Therefore, processes of social closure were a recurring theme of the workshop.
The first panel on early modern public houses in Germany stressed the different social functions of village and city taverns. MARC FORSTER pointed out that in rural regions members of all social classes and women as well as men frequented the taverns, whereas ANN TLUSTY demonstrated that urban public houses were predominantly male preserves and populated, above all, by middling classes. Both papers stressed the importance of drinking together as a social ritual that could have severe consequences. Accepting someone else’s tab implied reciprocation and meant that an agreement of some kind had been reached. Central in Forster’s and Tlusty’s papers was the question of the drinkers’ honor and reputation. For women, drinking in village taverns did not necessarily imply that their sexual honor was called into question, at least not when they were accompanied by a male relative. Male honor, although sometimes including sexual trespassing as in cases of adultery, was mostly defined as a man’s reliability, above all in economic terms. Not being allowed to visit public houses, as was the case with the poorest members of society, or being excluded from taverns as the result of repeated misbehaviour, meant serious stigmatization and implied the exclusion from important social and economic transactions for which the public houses were essential sites.
The taverns’ significant position in early modern society was also stressed by BEAT KÜMIN, who concentrated on the visual evidence of these places of consumption. By differentiating the pictorial material on taverns and inns into generic representations with the purpose of identification, orientation and promotion and symbolic representations, comprising moral and political as well as religious symbolism, Kümin revealed the complexity of visual evidence and also highlighted the importance of public houses as spatial orientation markers as when they appeared on road atlases and maps. At a time with very limited street signs, these places structured the geography of early modern towns and villages and helped the traveller to find particular locations.
In his comment on the papers presented in the first session, GERD SCHWERHOFF pointed out that not only rural or urban contexts shaped the public houses and their functions, but that regional differences, especially between Catholic and Protestant areas, were of utmost importance, too. Furthermore, he drew attention to the fact that the early modern public houses had almost exclusively been analyzed in respect to drinking, whereas food had hardly been addressed. In the discussion it became apparent that this was partly the effect of the early modern source material that focuses more on (the regulation of) drinking than on eating; some substances like beer, however, were considered both: drink and – in a lower alcohol version – also as food.
Although drinking still forms an important aspect of eating out in modern times, all the following panels of the workshop on modern places of consumption focussed mainly on food and eating, with the second section discussing the modern institution of the restaurant, arguably developed in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century.3 PETER SCHOLLIERS demonstrated how the model of the French (especially the Parisian) restaurant was adopted in Belgium in the nineteenth century. Labour migration of chefs, waiters and waitresses as well as kitchen personnel was an important component of this culinary transfer. In his analysis of restaurant names and their allusions, Scholliers convincingly integrated the economic aspects of the French cuisine’s diffusion in Europe in that he pointed to the strategic choice of a particular restaurant name as an attempt at self-branding, as a way of finding or defining a new niche in the market.
ANDREW P. HALEY took a different approach to the history of restaurant dining by addressing the importance of children (and the family) as consumers. Children who used to eat in separate rooms during the nineteenth century were increasingly included in the dining experience and became a target group of their own in the course of the twentieth century. With their inclusion into the restaurant, children transformed these places and contributed to further differentiations between various types of restaurants, the ethnic restaurant being among the first places that became family restaurants. Furthermore, by analyzing children’s cookbooks, Haley pointed to the link between restaurant dining and dining at home, between public and private eating (and cooking) and the significance of this link for a history of consumption.
In his comment, UWE SPIEKERMANN took a passionate stand for not neglecting the economic dimension of consumerism and sparked a discussion on the relation of cultural and economic history. Both approaches were seen as indispensable to any analysis of places of consumption, and the participants stressed the mutual interdependencies of what is considered as economy and what is labelled as culture as it had already become apparent e.g. in Scholliers discussion of the gastronomic niches in Belgium. Economic studies, however, that do not take the cultural embeddedness of the phenomenon analyzed into account, seemed to most participants of limited use for a history of (places of) consumption.
Dining at a nineteenth century restaurant in Belgium meant spending quite some time to enjoy the many courses of a French-style dinner, whereas other modern places of consumption like the canteen and the “Automatenrestaurant” offered a less expensive alternative to restaurant dining and can be considered as prototypes for today’s time-saving fast food restaurants. The workshop’s third panel on rationalized eating-places that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thus pointed to the fact that space and time are closely linked, for every place of consumption does not only have its own spatial, but also its own temporal order and suggests a specific rhythm to having a drink or a meal. The history of the canteen with its preset eating hours is, as UTE THOMS demonstrated, closely linked to the disciplining of the worker and his or her body, to the hygienic movement as well as the nutrition sciences. Scientifically informed ‘rational’ mass feeding, based on the concept of the body machine with its measurable needs for calorie intake, did, however, not mean that all employees of a firm or a plant received the same amount and kind of food in a common lunchroom. The workers’ canteen was a completely different, much more basic place than the white-collar workers’ lunchroom that in its rich decoration and furnishing resembled the contemporary restaurant. The aspect of standardization that became more and more important in the history of the canteen, leading to the introduction of the Gastro-Norm, a system of containers in fixed measures, in West-Germany in 1964, is also a key feature of the so-called “Automatenrestaurant” discussed by ANGELIKA EPPLE. She traces the invention of this type of self-service restaurant back to the 1891 “Bar automatique” that sold soda from automatic fountains at Montmartre and to the automatic buffet presented at the Berlin trade exhibition in 1896 in particular. This automatic buffet combined several vending machines behind a single counter and enabled the customer to see his or her dish before choosing and buying it. The dimension of immediate (visual) consumption as well as the potentially anonymous form of eating (alone) makes the “Automatenrestaurant” a modern place par excellence. It promised and, to a certain degree, in fact offered a public eating space for all social classes and men and women alike; at the same time, the unequal labour relations on which the working of this place was based were hidden from the eye of the customers.
The preparation, presentation and delivery of food which were defined by canteens and Automatenrestaurants in new ways were of prime interest to another area of rationalized eating in the twentieth century as well: Dining in the air, the topic of ANKE ORTLEPP’s paper, depended heavily on inventions in the field of food technology. Only with the introduction of aluminium cans in the late 1950s did carbonated drinks that, in glass bottles, had been at risk of exploding with the dropping of atmospheric pressure become available on board. Other food items like sponge cake collapsed at high altitudes. United was the first airline that established its own inflight kitchen in 1936 to experiment with the changing qualities of foods served in the air. While until the late 1960s the foodservice on board had clearly imitated the French restaurant, this model was only kept in first and business class afterwards. Social differentiation today means that customers in economy class are served less and less food – if they get something to it at all.
In her comment SIMONE DERIX stressed the common features of the three rationalized eating places under discussion and contextualized their emergence with the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and mass society. Derix suggested further considerations of the connections and inherent contradictions of the imperative to self-help in the case of the Automatenrestaurant and the idea of social welfare accompanying the history of the canteen. The different ways of addressing the individual and/or the community at these two places of consumption might offer new insights into the history of modern techniques of the self and of regulating ‘the other’.
One of the recurrent themes of the workshop was the impact of culinary transfers, such as French cuisine in Belgium or on United Airlines flights, or the so-called ethnic cuisine in the U.S. and in Europe – the topic of the last panel of the workshop. LARS AMENDA gave an overview on the history of Chinese restaurants in London, Hamburg and Rotterdam throughout the twentieth century, locating the boom of Chinese cuisine in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. Like with the other ‘foreign’ cuisines discussed in this panel – Italian and Mexican cuisine in the U.S. (DONNA R. GABACCIA and JEFFREY M. PILCHER), Italian cuisine in Germany (MAREN MÖHRING) and Indian cuisine in the U.K. (ELIZABETH BUETTNER) –, Amenda stressed that the first Chinese restaurants mainly catered to compatriots at the beginning, then were visited also by autochthones, often students and bohemians, and became mainstream only in the second half of the twentieth century. With the change of customers, the interior of the restaurants underwent significant transformations, meeting the expectations of the guests by using silken embroidered curtains and draperies as well as miniature landscape settings. According to Amenda, the success of Chinese restaurants relied on the ‘exotic otherness’ ascribed to Chinese people in particular.
Gabaccia and Pilcher took a comparative approach to ethnic cuisines in the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. First, they analyzed the practices of selling and consuming Mexican and Italian foods in their countries of origin and then pointed out the transformations they underwent after their arrival in the U.S. Italian pasta and pizza, consumed as street foods in Naples, quickly moved inside and became restaurant foods in Chicago and New York, whereas Mexican tamales stayed outside as snack foods in Los Angeles as well as in San Antonio. Factors influencing these particular outcomes were certainly the differences between immigrant and colonized minorities, resulting in different perceptions of Mexicans and Italians, but also structural constraints and historical contingency were of importance: Italians who came to North American cities found well-established structures of (immigrant) marketing and consumers familiar with tourism to Italy, both supporting the popularization of the Italian cuisine.
Likewise the success of the Italian cuisine in post-war Germany was at least partly the result of Italy’s popularity as a holiday destination. In her paper Möhring discussed two places of consumption, the Italian ice-cream parlour and the hybrid Pizzeria-Ristorante. Sharing several characteristics, such as a predominantly Italian staff and the use of Italian products, the “gelateria” and the Pizzeria-Ristorante differ not only in respect to the foods they offer, but also in that they represent two distinct types of entrepreneurship and migration projects: temporary migration of trained ice-makers from the North of Italy versus Southern Italian ‘guest-workers’ who often decided to become self-employed in the catering business only after their arrival in Germany. In recent years, the latter became increasingly disapproved of not only by many ice-makers, but also by groups of Italian restauranteurs, most of them professionally trained, who tried to distinguish their eating places from the Pizzeria-Ristorante which was (and is) disparaged as inauthentic. The notions and the politics of authenticity as well as the question of who can claim a position of authority to define the legitimacy of a particular form of cuisine were also at stake in Buettner’s presentation that gave a concise account of the evolution of the “curry house stereotype” in post-war Britain, focussing on the material as well as the discursive dimension of this form of eatery. Those ‘Indian’ restaurants (in fact mainly run by Bangladeshis) that were also patronized by whites had developed a specific repertoire of ‘Indian’ signifiers by the 1980s, including flock wallpaper that soon declined into cliché. The increasingly downmarket image of the curry house that offers cheap food until late at night, mostly prepared by autodidacts, has been countered by a growing number of largely London-based restauranteurs who recruit professional chefs from India and claim to offer (more) authentic food to ‘discerning’ customers. The negotiations about the meanings and the status of ethnic foods are, as Buettner’s paper convincingly demonstrated, always involved in the contemporary social and cultural struggles within multicultural societies, with ethnic food functioning as a vehicle for masking as well as articulating racism(s).
In her comment CORINNA UNGER pointed to the role of the state for processes of transnationalization in the field of consumption, asking for a broader perspective on consumerism that also integrates socialist countries and their systems of food provisioning and dining cultures. Including non-American and non-European places of consumption more fully is certainly necessary to get a more nuanced picture of the phenomenon of drinking and eating out and would also contribute to a deeper understanding of the global interrelatedness of the various places of consumption. Foods and cuisines on the move – and, as all the papers suggested, they are almost always on the move – strongly effect the places where they are consumed; in a way they translocate these locations and point to the various connections of every place of consumption with other places – synchronically and diachronically.
A selection of papers presented at the workshop will be published as a special issue of the interdisciplinary journal Food & History.
Conference overview:
Panel I: Public Houses in Early Modern Germany
Chair and respondent: Gerd Schwerhoff (Technische Universität Dresden)
Beat Kümin (University of Warwick):
The Iconography of the Early Modern Public House
Marc Forster (Connecticut College):
Space, Gender and Honor in Village Taverns
Ann Tlusty (Bucknell University):
Drinking Culture and Boundaries of Identity in the Early Modern German City
Panel II: Restaurant Dining
Chair and respondent: Uwe Spiekermann (GHI Washington)
Peter Scholliers (Vrije Universiteit Brussel):
In Search for Popular Restaurants. Diffusion and Interpretation of Culinary Culture in Europe around 1900
Andrew P. Haley (University of Southern Mississippi):
Playing with Their Food: Children and the Culinary Arts, 1890-1960
Panel III: Rationalized Eating-Places
Chair and respondent: Simone Derix (University Duisburg-Essen)
Angelika Epple (University of Freiburg):
The “Automat” – an “American Institution”? Quick Lunch Rooms in Europe and the U.S.
Ulrike Thoms (Institut für Geschichte der Medizin, Charité Berlin):
Physical Reproduction, Social Differentiation, and Communication in the Workplace. The Lunch Room as a Place of Consumption
Anke Ortlepp (GHI Washington):
Empty Plates in the Crowded Skies: the Rationalization of Airline Food in the Twentieth-Century United States
Panel IV: Transnational Places of Consumption
Chair and respondent: Corinna Unger (GHI Washington)
Lars Amenda (Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte, Hamburg):
Food and Otherness. Chinese Restaurants in West European Cities in the 20th Century
Donna Gabaccia/Jeffrey M. Pilcher (University of Minnesota):
Italian and Mexican Restaurants and Street Foods in the United States in the Early Twentieth century
Maren Möhring (University of Zurich/University of Cologne):
Italian Restaurants and Ice-Cream Parlours in Post-war Germany
Elizabeth Buettner (University of York):
Curry Capitals, Chicken Tikka Masala, and Flock Wallpaper: Loving and Loathing Britain's “Indian” Restaurants
Endnotes:
1 Jacobs, Marc; Scholliers, Peter (Hrsg.), Eating Out in Europe. Picnics, Gourmet Fining and Snacks Since the late Eigteenth Century, Oxford 2003.
2 Cf. Geisthövel, Alexa; Knoch, Habbo (Hrsg.), Orte der Moderne: Erfahrungswelten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main 2005.
3 Spang, Rebecca, The Invention of the Restaurant. Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, Cambridge, MA 2000.