“Eating Daintily”: Food and Social Practices in the Danubian Principalities (1780-1850)

Abstract

This article analyses the relations between food, social status and the circulation of knowledge in south-eastern Europe. During the long eighteenth century, the mobility of people led to the circulation of culinary practices and information regarding the organization of meals and the spread of good manners. With the help of ego-documents, travel narratives and private archives I examine how the Christian elites in the Ottoman Empire adapted to the flux of new practices and fashions diffused through the intermediary of people, objects, gazettes and books. Together with recipes and new sorts of food, a whole set of utensils was borrowed and adapted to meet the new requirements. The civilizing process was long and difficult, and documentary and visual sources capture very well the delay between the circulation of objects and information, on the one hand, and their assimilation in the nineteenth century, through the generation of the revolutions, on the other