Diplomats and the Rise of “Foodism” in the 1960s and 1970s

For some years, I’ve thought about posting an intermittent series of blog posts under the heading “questions and wild speculations.”  As long as wild speculation is acknowledged for what it is, it can be quite helpful in history. Wild speculation can spark new avenues of inquiry.  Some pan out, some don’t.

Background to the questions and wild speculations of this post. 

When I was coming of age as a cook in the 1960s and 1970s, the number of British and to a lesser extent Americans with family connections to the diplomatic service (broadly conceived) who published cookbooks was way out of proportion to their number in the population at large. Or so it seemed to me.

Here’s just a short list off the top of my head.

Alan Davidson.  British Ambassador to Laos.  Author of Seafish of Tunisia (1963) many books on fish cookery around the world, co-founder of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and of the journal Petits Propos Culinaires.

Julia Child. OSS, married Paul Child, also OSS, later US Foreign Service.  Author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and television cooking show host.

Nika Hazelton. Daughter of a German diplomat. After growing up in Rome and studying in England, she moved to the US. Author of numerous cookbooks, including The Swiss Cookbook (1967), The Cooking of Germany, Classic Scandinavian Cooking.

Elizabeth David. OK, this is a bit of a stretch. In WW II, she set up a library in Cairo for the British Ministry of Information. The circles she moved in in Egypt and India crossed from the rebellious and artistic to the diplomatic and military.  Author of A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950), French Provincial Cooking and many other articles and books.

Elisabeth Luard. Stepdaughter of a British diplomat with postings in Uruguay, Spain, and Mexico. Author of European Peasant Cookery (1986), numerous other cookbooks and other writings. Currently Chair of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz. Married to a Mexican diplomat. Author of the Complete Book of Mexican Cooking (1967) and others on the cooking of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Japan.

Josceline Dimbleby. Stepdaughter of the British Ambassador to Syria, Peru, Switzerland and Denmark. Author of seventeen cookbooks and longtime cookery correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph.

There may well be others, particularly if you throw in the military.  There may be equivalents in other countries.  I’d love to know. Two candidates of mine: Patience Gray and Theodora Fitzgibbon.

Questions and Wild Speculations: Why was this happening?

Food and cooking, particularly of non Anglo-cuisines, were not common interests of diplomats and their families until post World War II, though they had a long tradition of occupying their spare time with intellectual and cultural pursuits (history of science, studies of language, sketching).

With rare exceptions, cookbooks dealing with countries ‘abroad’ (France excepted) tended to be manuals on how to cook Anglo or blended Anglo/local cuisine in foreign settings.

In the 60s and 70s, by contrast, these diplomacy-connected authors were pumping out books dedicated to the simple, tasty rural dishes of Europe, to the cuisines of other parts of Europe and even Mexico, as well as to high French cuisine.

Clearly the authors now had the means, motive and opportunity. 

The means because the authors had been able to travel long before the post-War tourist boom. 

The motives because they were genuinely enthused about the cuisines they described.  Was this connected to a change in attitude to local peoples as empires began to break up? In some cases, the authors also needed to earn money when private incomes dried up, or marriages broke up, or other such life changes.

Edit. Xenia Morin suggests the disappearance of servants. Diplomat’s wives and children now had to cook for themselves. Some discovered they enjoyed it, they were good at it, and they could even make money at it.

The opportunity because their education, hard work, and connections gave them access to editors and publishers of national papers, magazines, and books.

Moreover, there was an audience tired of the privations of the War years and without access that we are now accustomed to to dozens of restaurants offering cuisines from around the world.  Those weren’t to come for another decade or so.  This audience was just beginning to be able to travel and discovered they loved these publications as guides to a fuller life.

Questions and speculations: What difference did these authors make? 

Diplomats as part of their work gave dinner parties, scaled down versions of formal state dinners.  Were the books by these authors dedicated to what to serve guests at dinner (French high cuisine or, for the trendy, French provincial/country cooking) one of the reasons why the dinner party became the aspiring middle class way of entertaining in both Britain and the US in the 70s and 80s?

Were the glowing descriptions of rural cuisines, with no mention of near starvation of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, in part responsible for the turn away from relief at having industrialized food to a yearning for a romantic, back to nature food that occurred between the end of World War II and the late 20^th century?

Finally, did the social position and confidence of many of these authors contribute to the growth of foodie culture that Paul Levy and Ann Barr detailed in The Official Foodie Handbook (1984)?

Three final comments 

This, I realize, is ancient history for many readers of this blog.   I hope it helps explain a bit about today. 

For readers of my generation, I hope you share a my admiration for these smart, entrepreneurial authors who did so much to spread a broader knowledge of food. And please correct me where I have misspoken.

And for everyone, how far we have come. In the 60s and 70s there was a hunger for information about cuisines beyond the Anglo world. Translators and intermediaries were needed. Appropriation was way in the future.

Readers’ comments

One of the things that I miss about former blogging days are the discussions in the comments. These now get spread out across the blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and email. Since there were some interesting substantive ones, I’ve grouped them here.

1). On other examples of diplomatic connections. From Lucey Bowen. Gourmet’s earliest essayists on South Asia, British: military man on assignment. Thailand, wife of diplomat. And remember that New York’s Wellesley Chinese crew expat Nationalists came as wives of diplomats. And Emily Hahn married her British spy lover. First to write about Vietnamese, Tao Kim Hai, delegated by the French to the UN. His wife wrote about Korean food when he was sent there as a UN observer. I do go on!

From Joanne Hollows. Really interesting. I looked at some columns (I’ll check the name) Shirley Conran did in The Observer in the 1960s about great hosts (cosmopolitan ‘It’ people) and their recipes. Some of these were diplomats I think. Conran’s columns were called ‘Cook-Hostess in Action’ and ‘Cook’s Tour of Europe’. I’m 95% sure there was a Portuguese diplomat in London in my sample (but I only sampled approx 1/3 and there may well be more who I don’t remember). More wild speculation: might some of the anonymous ranks of clearly well traveled cookery columnists from the period be diplomatic spouses etc?

2) On extending the analysis.

From Linda Civitello. Thank you for perceiving and pointing out this pattern. Was this a shift in empire, from Britain to the U.S., the major cookbook market? An increase in curiosity about the world because Americans felt safe in it as the major colonial power and police force?

RL. I think it happened simultaneously in Britain and America. I rather doubt the safety explanation but I don’t have a good one.

From Krishnendu Ray. Excellent points. I might stress:(a) coming from the affluent world their capacity to aestheticize what looked like necessities even to local elites;(b) informed outsiders who could generalize what insiders could not dare. Those still operate.

RL. Absolutely.

From Anny Gaul. Intrigued by this post! It also brought to mind @harrykashdan’s work on cookbook authors writing on Mediterranean cuisine (incl Elizabeth David) and the kinds of mobility that enabled their access to various different cultures around the sea.

RL. I’d missed this. Off to read it it.

From Dr Xenia Morin (whose parents were in the British diplomatic service). Have you considered Julia Child’s influence and ground breaking work on this foodism? How she made others see this was possible?

Also, prewar, many diplomats had the income to have servants who took care of the food. Reduced budgets with the same expectations changed the need.

RL. Bingo on the lack of servants. Why, given how much I’ve written about servants, didn’t I think of that? Thanks Xenia.

Julia Child was crucial in the US, a bit late to the game in Britain, I think. But I’m open to discussion.

3). On other early cross-cultural culinary translators

RL. I did not include these, not because they are not important, but because at least in Britain the diplomatic connection seemed the earliest and strongest. I’m surprised no one made more of military connections.

From Macrakis. Perhaps this is obvious, but another group that wrote cookbooks was journalists. In common with diplomats, and unlike tourists, they spent enough time abroad to learn to cook local foods….

A very unscientific sample comes from Time-Life’s “Foods of the World” (1968-76). This is a biased sample in the sense that Time-Life naturally was in touch with many journalists, but most of them were *not* Time-Life staff:
Linda Wolfe — Caribbean — she did work for Time-Life
Emily Hahn — China — writer and journalist
Nika Hazelton — journalist in the 30s before turning to food full-time
Waverly Root — Italy
Rafael Steinberg — Japan, Pacific and Southeast Asian
Joseph Wechsberg — Vienna’s Empire
Jonathan Norton Leonard — Latin America — science editor of Time

Then there are “plus one’s”. For example, Ellen Schrecker, the author of Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook (1976) was in China with her husband John. Both she and he are academics, but her specialty is not China. She learned Szechuan cooking from their cook in China.

From 박지영. I noticed the diplomat connection when I was a teenager and first started reading cookbooks that were published in the 1970s. There are also the wives of writers who got jobs in countries like Morocco (Paula Wolfert) or Mexico (Diana Kennedy). Followed by PoC who come from affluent to rich families who had servants, though they conveniently disappear in the cookbooks (Madhur Jaffrey). I also find a lot of truth stretching in cookbooks. Authors who probably got recipes from previous texts who claim that they travelled to get them or got them from a random restaurant owner or family friend. Lots of claims that the recipes are family recipes. I read an English language Korean cookbook like that. What kind of Korean family makes ALL those dishes? I’ve also read claims of Korean fried chicken recipes from someone’s Korean grandmother that’s been in the family for decades. What utter nonsense.

From Brian Ogilvie. My mother-in-law Berys Heuer wrote _South East Asian dishes for New Zealand_, published in 1970, which was the first book on the subject published in NZ. She had learned to cook southeast Asian dishes as a M.A. student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and then during a six-month stay in Taiwan with her American husband to improve their Mandarin. I wonder whether there were other exchange students who also wrote cookbooks.

RL. I think exchange students were another really important group in facilitating knowledge of other cuisines. Anthropologists too. I wish I had known about your mother’s work when I was at the University of Hawaii.

• ← The State of American Food
• On Quitting Academia as Full Professors →