Jean Duruz

Eating at the Borders: Culinary Journeys

In this paper I examine intersections of food, identity, and place within the imagined ‘regions’ of everyday practices, stories, and memories. As such, I continue traditions of writing in cultural geography exemplified by David Bell and Gill Valentines [1997 Consuming Geographies (Routledge, London)] focus on connecting cultures of food and place, Jon Mays (1996a, “‘A little taste of something more exotic’” Geography 81 57–64; 1996b, “Globalization and the politics of place” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 21 194–215) nuanced explorations of ‘exotic’ eating in North London, and by Ian Cook, Phil Crang, and Mark Thorpes [1999, “Eating into Britishness”, in Practising Identities Eds S Roseneil, J Seymour (Macmillan, London) pp 223–248] reflections on British culinary imaginaries and their ‘multicultural’ inscriptions. Specifically, this paper is concerned with ways that conceptions of ethnicity delineate and divide everyday spaces: how meanings of Britishness and Australianness, based in the primacy of ‘tradition’, ‘the West’, and Anglo-Celtic belongings, permeate everyday life in London and Sydney and shape their food cultures. The paper traces moments in the culinary biographies of two women, one English and one Australian of British descent, living in London and Sydney, respectively, and close to shopping streets known for the diversity of their ‘ethnic’ communities. The womens narratives are instructive in their continuities, as much as in their disjunctions. The argument follows some of these, including unexpected engagements with ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ and ‘cosmopolitan identity’. Resonances from these engagements contribute to a more complex and ambivalent sense of belonging than first supposed. This is still the region of ‘mainstream’, ‘Anglo’-identity, yet it is one marked by constant spatial redefinition and by occasional porosity of boundary.

Food as nostalgia: Eating the fifties and sixties∗

This article traces examples of remembered food cultures of the 1950s and 1960s in Australia, as starting points for addressing their mythic re-inscription in the 1990s. Analysing iconic images from cookbooks, positioned against fragments of womens remembering, the article suggests the need for more complex narratives than those of nostalgic returns to secure suburban pasts or of thankful culinary escapes towards multiculturalism and cosmopolitan identity.

Geographies of food: 'Afters'

This third and final ‘Geographies of food’ review is based on an online blog conversation provoked by the first and second reviews in the series (Cook et al., 2006; 2008a). Authors of the work featured in these reviews — plus others whose work was not but should have been featured — were invited to respond to them, to talk about their own and other people’s work, and to enter into conversations about — and in the process review — other/new work within and beyond what could be called ‘food geographies’. These conversations were coded, edited, arranged, discussed and rearranged to produce a fragmentary, multi-authored text aiming to convey the rich and multi-stranded content, breadth and character of ongoing food studies research within and beyond geography.

Tastes of hybrid belonging: Following the laksa trail in Katong, Singapore

This article builds on previous research tracing the introduction of laksa to the ‘Mediterranean’ city of Adelaide, Australia in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Almost thirty years later, with laksa normalized as one of Australias ‘borrowed’ foodways, the article allows the adopted culture a sentimental return to a mythical point of origin. The search for laksa, together with other nostalgic flavours of Peranakan and Eurasian communities, is now mapped on to the streets of Katong, one of Singapores ‘ethnic’ villages. Collectively, these ‘little’ spaces resonate, in the discourse of urban planning, culinary tourism, and popular memory, with nuances of uniqueness and difference. Taking a walking tour through Katongs sensuous landscapes, the article charts a meditative excursion through arguments that address ‘authenticity’, touristic reinvention, and cross-cultural encounters through food within the ‘mixed’ spaces and contradictory imperatives of postcolonial cities. In particular, the article revisits debates of ‘vernacular’ cosmopolitanism (Werbner 2006) to reflect on the following: how does laksa, returned to its place of origin, become transformed as the ‘homely-exotic’ for touring ‘locals’ and ‘others’ alike?; do its complex flavours and multiple forms acknowledge both its hybrid history and its potential future as the taste of commensality and (differential) belonging?

Rewriting the village: geographies of food and belonging in Clovelly, Australia

This essay focuses on intersecting meanings of food and femininity, place and time, as an excavation of their ‘secret geographies’. Drawing on women’s narratives of mundane rituals and practices associated with food shopping, cooking, eating and ‘eating out’, the article traces moments of looking backwards and of looking forwards towards remembered and imagined landscapes of consumption. In the process, the ‘village’ of Burnie Street, Clovelly (a beachside suburb in Sydney, Australia) becomes a spatial metaphor for examples of ‘local’ changes in domestic food cultures and their material structures since the mid-1940s. This image of the village also allows the argument to chart some intriguing shifts in social relations (particularly of gender, class and ethnicity). The article concludes that useful public narratives for tracing geographies of the urban are not necessarily to be found in attempts to rework the past or the present in mythic terms, as either bad times or good. Instead, subtle rewritings of the village vested in everyday belongings hint at more productive analytical directions.

Living in Singapore, travelling to Hong Kong, remembering Australia: Intersections of food and place

A collection of narrative fragments, remembered moments of food shopping, cooking and eating in Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia, from conversations with an Anglo-Celtic Australian woman who now calls Singapore home is presented. It is viewed from a less usual vantage point than one that celebrates Australias cultural and culinary diversity, which is frequently attributed to patterns of migration and settlement, and to cross-cultural encounters.

The Travels of Kitty’s Love Cake: A Tale of Spices, “Asian” Flavors, and Cuisine Sans Frontières?

Visiting her Aunt Connie in London in 1979, Charmaine Solomon carried a sentimental gift. This was a traditional Sri Lankan love cake, made according to her mother’s exacting recipe (semolina, zest of lime, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, nutmeg, rosewater, brandy, honey …) (Solomon 1998, 241). However, while cakes and other sweet treats might be imagined as significant motifs for a life story of baking, Char-maine’s reputation as a food journalist and cookbook writer hardly rests on these. Acknowledged as a much-celebrated home cook who, in the second half of the twentieth century, substantially changed Australia’s culinary landscapes, Solomon occupies a distinctive position within this history (Karnikowski 2010). With the publication of The Complete Asian Cookbook (1976), Charmaine Solomon achieved iconic status. Popularly hailed as “Australia’s Spice Queen” and “the Queen of Asian cooking in Australia” (Harris 2001, 212; O’Meara 2008), Solomon was to receive, in 2007, the award of the prestigious Medal of the Order of Australia “for service to the food media, particularly as the author of Asian cookery books” (Australian Government Honours 2007, my emphasis).