Finding a Narrative

While I read for my bibliographies, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I actually want my dissertation to be about. Of course, in a broad sense, it’s about Storyville and the race-class-gender intersection ubiquitous in historical archaeology lately, but I have yet to find an actual story in the sea of theory and data I’ve considering. Two books I’ve been reading this week are The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation, edited by Sarah R. Graff and Enrique Rodriguez-Alegria, and Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, by Melissa Gira Grant. Both of these books have been engaging and inspirational, especially (oddly enough) together. In the introduction to the The Menial Art of Cooking (2012:1-18), Graff and Rodriguez-Alegria offer a brief history of why cooking has been largely absent in archaeological studies about food until recently; the short answer is that it’s assumed to be “women’s work,” which automatically reduces its relevance in the present and recently past capitalist political climate. Grant proposes the concept of the “‘prostitute imaginary’—the ways in which we conceptualize and make arguments about prostitution” (2014:4). At the end of the 19^th century, when prostitution had evolved from earlier forms as a product of capitalism, the common image of a person working in the sex trade was overwhelmingly female. In essence, cooking and sex are both implicitly women’s work in popular imagination, whether or not the work was actually gender-specific in historical context.

 

I don’t know yet if there’s a narrative here, but I think that I’m starting to muddle out how to make a connection between foodways and brothel landscapes for my dissertation proposal. Deconstructing the assumptions of women’s work, asking the right initial research questions, and explicitly defining the relevance of such topics in archaeological research is a necessary and important step. Indeed, cooking and sex work are both complex social behaviors that defy a simple dichotomy like women’s/men’s work, and beg more nuanced analyses of how and why.

 

            

 

Words Cited:

 

Grant, Melissa Gira. 2012. Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work. Verso, New York, New York.

 

Graff, Sarah R. and Enrique Rodriguez-Alegria, eds. 2012. The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation. The University of Colorado Press, Boulder, Colorado.

Cooking with Bone Charcoal

When conducting zooarchaeological analysis, I often come across bone fragments that have been heavily charred or even calcined—burned so badly they become a chalky white or gray with varying degrees of distortion.  To calcine a bone, it must be heated repeatedly at high temperatures.  I usually interpret this in 19^th century contexts to mean that the household was disposing of their animal remains from meals in their stoves.  Bone grease not only provided extra fuel, but by burning off the remainder of the flesh and marrow before putting bones in the trash, housekeepers greatly reduced the smell.  In large cities where people lived close together, trash pits were in close proximity to residences for easy of disposal before municipal trash removal became a common service.  Naturally, people in the past would want to reduce the smell of their trash as much as possible, as we do today with covered trash bins and plastic bags, so they would burn it, bury it, or throw it in the privy.  However, I’ve never been fully satisfied with this answer.  It leaves too many unanswered questions, such as why wouldn’t burying the trash be sufficient to reduce the smell in most cases and why leave the bones in the stove long enough to become calcined?

Archaeologically, this doesn’t tell us a whole lot about foodways beyond a basic human practicality.  I know I haven’t given it more than a passing thought in my previous projects.  Food studies today have progressed far beyond subsistence, nutrition, and disposal into the realm of identity and cultural meaning.  Old animal bones can tell us quite a bit more than just what people had to eat, and this is what I was thinking about when I opened today’s news from Mother Jones and clicked on an article about sexism in the field of haute cuisine.  What struck me what not the fact that women are being trapped under a glass ceiling in the chef profession (old news, honestly), but that the restaurant Blue Hill in New York is using pork bone charcoal to add a special smoke flavor to certain dishes.

I may be late to the party on this, but the idea of bone charcoal to me opens a door into foodways of the past.  Regular charcoal briquettes that we use in our grills today are charred and compressed carbon matter, which turn white or gray when burned.  Bone charcoal made today is heated twice, once when created, and again when used as fuel, which would be sufficient to turn charring into calcination.  In the 19^th century people must have been using some kind of fuel to cook, but the question of where they were getting it is important.  I’ve never made the connection before, but this is the exact same process that produces the calcined bones that we find in archaeological contexts.  I’ve already mentioned the use of bones as fuel, but it is possible that burning bones was not always an exercise in practicality, but rather a deliberate choice in taste.  If we consider taste, which is a combination of biology, learned behavior, and aesthetics, those burned bones suddenly become a lot more interesting.  The problem now is how to link current practices with the archaeological evidence.  Personal documents might be one line of evidence, as well as experimental archaeology to tease out further answers to questions of disposal and historic techniques for making charcoal.  Origins, cultural meaning, gender, and many other factors could have been involved in developing such a cooking technique in addition to taste.  Likely, there is no single answer and each instance will have to be interpreted according to historical context.  And one final question to consider in terms of taste: what else were people using to make charcoal and how were they making it?

If any of my readers have thoughts or information about bone charcoal from any time period, I would love to read them!