Olonial Food

Food Culture in Colonial Asia

Presenting a social history of colonial food practices in India, Malaysia and Singapore, this book discusses the contribution that Asian domestic servants made towards the development of this cuisine between 1858 and 1963. Domestic cookbooks, household management manuals, memoirs, diaries and travelogues are used to investigate the culinary practices in the colonial household, as well as in clubs, hill stations, hotels and restaurants. Challenging accepted ideas about colonial cuisine, the book argues that a distinctive cuisine emerged as a result of negotiation and collaboration between the expatriate British and local people, and included dishes such as curries, mulligatawny, kedgeree, country captain and pish pash. The cuisine evolved over time, with the indigenous servants preparing both local and European foods. The book highlights both the role and representation of domestic servants in the colonies. It is an important contribution for students and scholars of food history and colonial history, as well as Asian Studies.

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

In the wake of the First World War, in which France suffered severe food shortages, colonial produce became an increasingly important element of the French diet. The colonial lobby seized upon these foodstuffs as powerful symbols of the importance of the colonial project to the life of the French nation. But how was colonial food really received by the French public? And what does this tell us about the place of empire in French society? In Colonial Food in Interwar Paris, Lauren Janes disputes the claim that empire was central to French history and identity, arguing that the distrust of colonial food reflected a wider disinterest in the empire. From Indochinese rice to North African grains and tropical fruit to curry powder, this book offers an intriguing and original challenge to current orthodoxy about the centrality of empire to modern France by examining the place of colonial foods in the nation's capital.

Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute