Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence

Book Description

Renowned food scholar Carole Counihan serves up a delicious narrative about family and food in twentieth-century Florence. By looking at how family, and especially gender relations, have changed in Florence since the ending of World War II and continuing on to an examination of current food practices today, Around the Tuscan Table offers a portrait of the changing nature of modern life as exemplified through food. How food is produced, distributed, and consumed speaks volumes about a given culture, and this compelling and artfully narrated book aims to preserve, propagate, and interpret Florentines' world-renowned cuisine and culture.

At the market, in the kitchen, and around the table, Counihan gives readers a taste of everyday life in this region of Italy: how eating together unites the family; how the production of food is gendered; how food is a key tool of socialization, and how culture forms aesthetic tastes.

With more than 20 illustrations and age-old family recipes, this is a treat for the senses and the intellect.

Customer Reviews:

What's Happening to Food, Gender and Family in Italy.......2007-08-01

Around the Tuscan Table addresses one of the fundamental questions in the anthropology of food, as for example raised by Sidney Mintz in his work Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: how do food cultures change over time and come to incorporate completely novel foods while giving up other habits of centuries? It also addresses one of the fundamental questions in the sociology of food: how do traditional agrarian food systems come to be displaced by modern food provisioning systems that are less healthy and more ecologically destructive?

What is remarkable about this work is that it really illustrates the intimate relation between a regional economy and a regional culture of food, and how the two change together through a social history of agrarian change and the emergence of modern foodways. And the pivot on which this relation turns is the question of women's and men's roles in productive and reproductive labor, and the centrality of food to drawing gendered distinctions in work, status, and power. The book presents a very nuanced picture of how the different forms of work performed by men and women, and the different economic opportunities available to them, shape the patterns and styles of cooking, the temporalities of shopping and the timing of meals, and the overall foodways of an entire regional culture.

Prof. Counihan has a wonderful grasp of the subtleties of the reproduction of subordination. Rather than depicting a timeless culture of macho men and sacrificing women, she shows us exactly how both men and women together reproduce those patterns over time, much as Paul Willis showed in his Learning to Labor how working class kids get working class jobs. This might be subtitled, how Italian women get Italian husbands and sons, and end up cooking and cleaning for them. But she also shows us how the struggle to shift gendered positions produces shifts in food cultures, as women first are isolated in the private home in the process of transition from an agrarian to an urban economy, and then come to enter the waged workforce while still bearing the burden of domestic work. And in so doing the power of the woman as family cook, and the traditions of Tuscan food culture, are both eroded by new forms of shopping, cooking and eating. Women make certain gains, but they also lose a great deal.

We see modernization here as a real two-edged sword, bringing an abundance of food but taking away the time and the capacity to cook it and to savor it. We feel a real sense of loss for the old foodways, and even for the period of hunger and poverty that shaped the early to mid-twentieth century, as a time when food really was dreamed of and desired, special dishes were cooked only on special occasions, and food had a seasonality and stronger flavors linked to the land. The Slow Food movement has reinvented some of the attention to quality, flavor and locality that were simply taken for granted in the past.

Why we love Florence and Tuscany.......2004-11-16

Have you ever wandered through a Florentine neighborhood before lunch, smelling indescribably good scents wafting through open windows, hearing families talk to each other, and wondering what it is they are doing, and what they are eating? If you have, this book is for you. Around the Tuscan Table is an endlessly interesting and very readable saga of how modern Florentine families and Florentine food have changed in the last few decades, rendering the mysterious stone streets and people of Florence infinitely more real for the traveler and Italophile. And this ethnography also provides great recipes for simple, tasty Florentine food; the straccoto recipe has become a family favorite. Straccoto is Italian pot roast, with the sauce served over pasta as a first course. It is delicious.

This book is a marvelous antidote to the endless up-market mythologizing of Tuscany. It seems that we simply can't get away from `Tuscany as the promised land' - a place where rich Brits and Americans can buy a farmhouse and pretend, a la Marie Antoinette, to be earth-grimed farmers - of artisanal olive oils. Tuscany has become a kind of iconic play-land for the wealthy and bored cosmopolitan. But what of the Tuscan people? As a frequent traveler to Tuscany, I am thrilled that this book has been published. For too long the writing of all things Tuscan has been from the perspective of the expatriate - the émigré viewing a mythologized culture viewing the émigré, with the Tuscan landscape and people somehow magically preserved in a state of 19th century splendor, or squalor, depending on the purse of the observing expat and the state of the `villa' she or he has purchased. Dr. Counihan's book provides us with a welcome picture of how Florentines live and eat - as well as some of the best and simplest recipes for home cooked Tuscan meals available.

Rather than assuming an unchanging social and physical landscape, Dr. Counihan chronicles the changes in place, attitudes, habits, and social relations over decades among the family of her ex-husband. Her training is in anthropology, and she is a well-known and highly-respected scholar of food and identity, so it is inevitable that her book should focus on food as a metaphor for social change through time. However, this is no dry anthropological tome, it is readable, interesting, and highly informative. By relying on the many years that she lived in Italy, married to an Italian, she is able to give us a picture of Italian life not available to many Americans. She also teaches us about food change - how prosperity has altered Italian habits and attitudes, and how Italians feel about the many changes their country has undergone since World War II. We, as outsiders and traveling Americans, often view the Italian people as somehow unchanging, unmoving in culture and tradition. This book changes that perspective, allowing us to view the dynamism and modernity of Florentine families - and to have a much better understanding of why the streets of Florence smell so good at lunchtime... and why the mystique of Tuscan food and livelihoods is so compelling to Americans.

Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Century (Modern Jewish History)

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Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Century (Modern Jewish History)

Manufacturer: Syracuse University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0815629419

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An in-depth and widely ranging exploration of Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire and in modern Turkey.

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Recent work on the cultural history of modern Italy has radically challenged received opinion about the relationship of state and culture during the twentieth century. In this rich interdisciplinary book the complex interactions and negotiations of control arising from this state-culture connection are elucidated by way of case studies of major authors, filmmakers and artists and their encounters with censorship, patronage and other forms of direct state intervention; analytical surveys of different periods, media and culture industries; and through an examination of such key issues as Fascist censorship, the Resistance and its imprint in the collective memory, the introduction of television in the 1950s, and 1970's terrorism.

The Force of Labour: The Western European Labour Movement and the Working Class in the Twentieth Century

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The Force of Labour: The Western European Labour Movement and the Working Class in the Twentieth Century

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This innovative text aims to provide a comprehensive overview and comparative analysis of European labour movements from 1900 to 1990. The authors examine the links between workers and organized labour in seven European countries - Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden and The Netherlands - and focus on areas such as the role of the state, labour markets, and occupation and class. Previous works have analysed more limited periods and this has resulted in a compartmentalised approach to the subject. The broad timeframe adopted by the distinguished contributors will provide readers with fresh insights and will prompt a re-examination of currently accepted frameworks.A welcome companion to Dick Geary's 'Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe before 1914', this book will be widely used by students and scholars of modern European History and Politics.

Population Politics in Twentieth Century Europe: Fascist Dictatorships and Liberal Democracies (Historical Connections)

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Population Politics in Twentieth Century Europe: Fascist Dictatorships and Liberal Democracies (Historical Connections)
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Twentieth Century Italy: A Social History

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Putting the politics back into social history, this important new account presents Italian society and its development during the twentieth century against a background of struggle for full democracy and national consciousness. B> Taking a chronological approach the book considers such key questions as the north/south divide, the limited social and political emancipation of the masses, the development of organized crime, often in league with organs of the state, the narrowness of the political class, the centralized bureaucracy of administration and law and what this has meant for real life in the provinces. The author also looks at the surprising continuities of Italian life throughout the liberal, fascist and postwar periods and the economic boom in Italy (or parts of it) which seems to belie the country's notorious combination of political instability with political stasis. Fot readers interested in Italy.

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This digital document is an article from The Journal of African American History, published by Thomson Gale on September 22, 2006. The length of the article is 3926 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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Title: Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Lecturers, 2006-2007.(Association for the Study of African American Life and History)
Author: Gale Reference Team
Publication: The Journal of African American History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 91 Issue: 4 Page: 500(11)

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Papers of Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1915-1950 (Black Studies Research Sources)

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Papers of Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1915-1950 (Black Studies Research Sources)

Manufacturer: Univ Pubns of Amer
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Concise and easy to follow, this book explains the implementation of Good Laboratory Practices. The second edition of a standard reference, GLP Essentials identifies and describes the required elements of managing a scientific study including its planning, performance, reporting, and monitoring. A brief, informative discussion of the historical development of GLPs and the rationale for establishing these requirements in the rapidly expanding scientific research and regulatory environment are also included. Written especially for readers involved in ensuring the integrity of their scientific documentation, this book is useful for group and individual training needs.

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Glp Essentials: A Concise Guide to Good Laboratory Practice .......2005-08-05

For the cost of this book, I expected something of value. This skinny little notebook is an example of pay-by-the-word. If you are looking for explanation of regulatory intent, critical inputs, and examples of methodology, this is not the book for you.

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"This original and innovative book presents the research findings and conceptualizations of an international group of talented scholars who explore the interrelationship between development, environmentalism, and social movements in the Caribbean. This book will be an important addition to the literature on the Caribbean in the world system that will be used in college classrooms and cited by scholars for its valuable contributions to the field."—Pedro Cabán, author of Constructing a Colonial People: Puerto Rico and the United States 1898-1932 Filtered through the lens of the North American and European media, the Caribbean appears to be a series of idyllic landscapes—sanctuaries designed for sailing, diving, and basking in the sun on endless white sandy beaches. Conservation literature paints a similarly enticing portrait, describing the region as a habitat for endangered coral reefs and their denizens, parrots, butterflies, turtles, snails, and a myriad of plant species.

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