Magda Danciu, Delia Maria Radu,
Scrutinizing Cultural Territories:
The Kitchen and the Restaurant
Most researches in the fields of anthropology and cultural studies agree upon the fact that
eating is a social situation, it “is always more than just eating” (Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard,
Pierre Mayol, 1998:198), it is “pre-eminently a social, pleasurable sensual activity” (David E.
Sutton, 2001: X), and food is the site of powerful meanings and structures hidden under “the cloak
of the mundane and the quotidian” (3).
Cooking and eating are ranged among the everyday practices of the ordinary life that are
highly accessible and common to any kind of societal formation and at any social level, as LeviStrauss explained it , food eating is compared to loving and doing-cooking to love making (see
Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, 1998:196); they are cultural practices forming an
assemblage of elements that are concrete and identifiable (e.g. a gourmet menu), they can have an
ideological support (e.g. religious, political), or may come from a tradition (e.g. family, social
groups). Theorists acknowledge the idea that a practice is decisive for the identity of “a dweller or
group” (9), so food studies, by foregrounding “the modalities of action, formalities of practices and
types of operations specified by the ways of operating” (XXIII), could render the identity of
consumers.
Eating or ‘reading’ food
They state that one eats what one can get or likes, what is available for supplies or
affordable in terms of price, what can be assimilated through digestion, what is authorized by one’s
culture and valorized by a certain social organization. Levi-Strauss thinks that cuisine forms a
language in which each society codes messages which allow it to signify a part at least of what it is
and through which that society reveals its structure. (apud Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre
Mayol, 1998:180); the question if how much of the original messages are preserved when food
“flies” from their birth places and spread elsewhere, since it is a fact that every regional cuisine
loses its internal coherence due to borrowings, spectatorship, travel, and change of cooking style of
the society, leading to a deregionalization of culinary practices (178).
Exemplification can be made with reference to the famous pizza, a national food turned into
an international phenomenon. Its Americanized version might look/taste like that prepared by Dr.
Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Officer in Virginia, Patricia Cornwell’s chosen protagonist, in PostMortem (1990), indulging herself in doing-cooking in a kitchen in Florida:
“I finished rinsing green peppers, mushrooms and onions, patted them dry and placed them
on the cutting board. Simmering on the stove was sauce made last summer from fresh Hanover
tomatoes, basil, oregano and several cloves of crushed garlic (…) Luganega sausage was draining
on paper towels of brown lean beef. High-gluten dough was on the counter rising beneath a damp
dish towel, and crumbled in a bowl was whole-milk mozzarella imported from New York “(Patricia
Cornwell, 1990:116).
Here it was her Italian ancestry somehow speaking for her actions, a sort of “embodied
apprenticeship” (David E. Sutton, 2001:126), materialized in gestures, knowledge of cooking, as
well as tastes and smells that cross years of one’s life as true cultural mnemonics, as in Esquivel’s
book where each chapter begins with a traditional Mexican food recipe for each month in turn,
providing recipes for home remedies, highly influential for the economy of the narrative. The
intimate association of recipes with the protagonist’s experiences, memories, and thoughts provides
the main chronological and causal basis for the construction of her character, while the seasonal
Mexican dishes in the background establish a historical sense of national tradition and culture,
unlike Sergeant Martin’s war service memories in Europe rambling on the French “cassoulet de
Toulouse” and “the poulard en vessu he had eaten in a modest hotel in the Ardesh” (P. D. James,
1962: 145).
Eating serves to maintain biological machinery of the body, to make concrete one of the
specific modes of relation between a person and the world, forming a fundamental landmark in
space-time (see Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, 1998: 183), as to be noticed in
Inspector Rebus’s gestures and behaviour on his road trip in Scotland: “He stopped in Pert and
bought some supplies –– apples, chocolate, a half bottle of whisky, chewing gum, a box of dates, a
pint of milk… You never knew what might not be available further north (…) In Blairegowrie he
stopped for fish and chips, which he ate at a Formica-topped table in the chip shop. Lashings of salt,
vinegar and brown sauce on the chips. Two slices of white pan bread thinly spread with margarine.
And a cup of dark-brown tea. The haddock was covered in batter, which Rebus picked off, eating it
first before starting on the fish (…) He looked at the list of delights printed above the counter. Red,
white and black puddings, haggis, smoked sausage, sausage in batter, steak pie, mince pie,
chicken… with pickled onions or pickled eggs on the side. Rebus couldn’t resist. He bought another
bag of chips to eat while he drove” (Ian Rankin, 1992: 113-4). Food becomes a veritable discourse
of the past, a nostalgic narrative about the country, region, city, village where one was born, that is
Scotland, “a small country, yet so various” (113).
Food involves a primary need and pleasure and constitutes an immediate reality. (Michel de
Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, 1998: 168), as seen in the afternoon tea habit of Sam Bocock,
one of P. D. James’s characters, a countryman of traditional practices, living alone yet not lonely, as
his table was ready for hosting anyone for a cup of the popular beverage:
“There had been a loaf of crusty bread, a pot of jam supporting its spoon, an ornate glass jar
of sliced beetroot and one of spring onions, and a cucumber stuck precariously in a small jug. In the
middle of the table a bowl of lettuce disputed with a large and obviously home-baked cake for pride
of place (…), probably a recent offering of filial duty” (P. D. James, 1962: 147).
Culinary virtuosities establishing a linguistic plurality emerging from stratified histories,
multiple relationships between enjoyment and manipulation, as “fundamental languages spelled out
in everyday details” (see Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, 1998:3), seem to permeate
among the characters in Kate Muir’s book Left Bank (2006) as they gradually discover
sophistication in the French cuisine as opposed to the American plain or fast food, paralleling the
evolution of a love affair and the dissolution of a family life. Anna Ayer and Olivier Malin’s flirt
debut is accompanied by “a ceviche of salmon and lime (…), guinea fowl stuffed with pine nuts,
ceps and girolles (…) the dessert… maybe some pots de crème with whatever soft fruit is best
today” (Kate Muir, 2006: 32).
Their furtive date is in an ordinary restaurant where they ask for energizing food, “jambonne
de Bayonne and garlic saucisson, and some little gherkins. And lots of bread. And beer” (135),
which, together with coffee, are the most democratizing beverages in the almost entire world due to
“their cheapness, ubiquity, homogeneity” (David E. Sutton, 2001: 3); their first hotel afternoon sex
is followed by “A steak with a pat of thyme butter, a pichet of house red, a double espresso and a
square of dark chocolate (…) crème brullée” (162), and their moving together is marked by Anna’s
complete lack of concern for dietary issues and cooking, “not an area of expertise of hers” (288),
and Olivier’s total reliance on ”the hideously expensive traiteur in the street with its ready-stuffed
scallops, onion tartlets and pommes dauphinoise” (288).
His wife’s Madison’s tastes are discriminating during her solid marriage and movie stardom,
she prefers organic food – “Nothing like fresh farm eggs” (244), “The Leek: A Green Goddess”, the
Noirmoutier potato – and dislikes red meat – “I hate all game” (244)-, and later, when her career
and husband become history, she turns into an eater, ignoring the former restrictions and prejudices:
she orders “a dozen Fines de Claires oysters” which she eats, the juice dripping “down her chin”,
displaying a huge pleasure, now that the “world has become a gastronomic paradise” (271) by
default.
Basic eating practices
We eat to satisfy the energy needs of a living organism, and to ensure the maintenance of
good health and protection against cold or infectious agents. We eat to ensure the capacity to sustain
steady physical activity (see Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, 1998:165), and Jonathan
Kellerman’s characters, Robin and Alex, can testify for it when they drove to “an Indian buffet in
Santa Monica that was open all afternoon. Rice and lentils, kulcha bread stuffed with onions,
curried spinach with soft cheese, spicy eggplant, hot milky tea” (Jonathan Kellerman, 1999: 74), on
their way to a crime scene.
Ordinary life has been reshaped in terms of the appropriation of private space (home,
kitchen) and the use of public spaces (restaurant, pub). The preparation of meals has changed with
the proliferation of semi prepared products and ready-made meals to be reheated. Saving and
spending behaviours, as well as individual consumption practices are different now because of the
new economic, social context (Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, 1998: XL). The
traditional cook Mrs. Piggott decided for adjusting her menu according to the new offers of supply,
even if the basic features of the meals have been altered:
“…packages ingredients… exclude lumps. She had experimented with flavours and today’s
mixture of tomato (orange) and oxtail (reddish brown), thick enough to support the spoon unaided
(…) mutton chops nestling artistically against a mound of potato and flanked with tinned peas
larger and shinier than any peas which had ever seen pod. They tasted of soya flour. A green dye
which bore little resemblance to the colour of any known vegetable seeped from them and mingled
disagreeably with the gravy. An apple and blackcurrant pie had followed in which neither of the
fruits had met each other not the pastry until they had been arranged on the plate (…) and liberally
blanketed with synthetic custard.“ (P. D. James, 1962: 145)
Single people, especially in the urban areas, simplify the practice of cooking and the kitchen
activity by reducing meals to basic elements or to one-dish varieties or takeaways, as in the example
of Kate Muir’s character, Luiza who has a tiny kitchen, with a small refrigerator containing some
“tubs of fromage blanc (…) some mangetout, some iffy carrots, a chicken breast and the rice from
last might’s Chinese takeaway” (Kate Muir, 2006: 72).
Food customs from a given society in a given time are linked by internal coherences,
invisible but real and everything happens as if a specific alimentary diet expressed a world order or
postulated in its very act the possible inscription for such and order on the world. In world of speed
and ready-mades, living in a consumerist culture in which authorship, originality and authenticity
are highly questionable (Marshall McLuhan, 1975: 220), operations of buying food from
supermarkets and eating it in a proper combination are rather common: Kate Branningan in Val
McDermid’s Blue Genes (1999) does her shopping while crossing Chinatown – “I popped into one
of the supermarkets and picked some dried mushrooms, five spice powder and a big bottle of soy
sauce. There were prawns and char siu pork in the fridge already and I’d stop off to some fresh
vegetables later. I couldn’t think of a better way to deal with my frustration that chopping and
slicing the ingredients for hot and sour soup and sing chow vermicelli” (Val McDermid, 1999: 73).
It is a proof that culinary joys represent “a reconstruction of a silent legend, rewriting,
recipes, ritualization of gestures, a way of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard,
Pierre Mayol, 1998:154), replayed by the same character in another book of McDermid’s, Clean
Break (1997): “My stomach was churning, so I brewed some coffee and made myself a sandwich of
ciabatta, tuna, olives and plum tomatoes” (McDermid, 1997: 93)
We also eat our social representation of health, what we assume to be good for us and what
correspond to our standard of living, our degree of education, our rate of urbanization and social
rank. (see Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, 1998:184)
Experts mention that every alimentary custom embodies a text of competing histories, that
is, the natural history of a society (the available animal and vegetable species, the nature of the
cultivated land, the climatic conditions), the material and technical history (techniques of farming,
range of plants) (see Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, 1998:171), a good example
being the display of raw food waiting for preparation and consumption in a home in Carcassona, in
July 1209, witnessed by Alais, the protagonist of Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth (2005): “Capons, lentils
and cabbage in sealed earthenware jars stood to be cooked on the big table in the centre of the room,
together with pots containing salt mullet, eel and pike. At one end were fogaca puddings in cloth
bags, goose pate and slabs of salted pork. At the other, trays of raisins, quinces, figs and cherries
(…) the pan de blat, wheat bread, was already standing on the table to cool” (Kate Mosse, 2005:
31).
Food is about “identity creation and maintenance” (David E. Sutton, 2001:5), as suggested
by Mosse’s description of a traditional ritual in the Great Hall of the Chateau in the celebration of
the hero Pelletier: “The chamber was filled with a hushed but expectant silence. (…) Long trestle
tables had been set out, unclothed, in rows running from north to south across the room. Candles
flickered dimly in the centre of each table. In the high wall sconces, the torches were already
burning fiercely, setting the shadows dancing and flickering. (…) servants came in and out, carrying
dishes (…) Hart, venison, chicken drumsticks with capsicum, earthenware bowls filled with beans
and sausage and freshly baked white bread, purple plums stewed in honey, rose-coloured wine from
the vineyard of the Corbieres and pitchers of ale for those with weaker heads.” (96).
We are reminded by anthropologists that only bread and wine accompany the meals from
beginning to end and are indispensable (see Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol,
1998:85), bread symbolizing the hardship of life and work, being the carrier of the memory of a
better standard of living acquired the hard way. It can be regarded as a basic cultural symbol,
“almost sacred, a memorial” (86), an object of “an almost unconscious precaution” (no to dry out);
it bears a social writing requiring knowledge of how to read it correctly, it is perceived as “the
necessary foundation for all food” (87), it is a “stable, fixed point”. (88). Wine contains the
possibility of a drift, it can be the origin of “a journey from which one does not return” (88), and it
can do no harm if natural.
Cultural territories: the kitchen and the restaurant/pub
Our living spaces turn invisible or present in our memories and dreams and journey with us.
In the centre of this dream there is often the kitchen, this warm room where the family gathers, a
theatre of operations for the practical arts and nourishing art (see Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard,
Pierre Mayol, 1998:148), whether it goes back to medieval days, as in Kate Mosse’s example,
“The kitchen was alive with hustle and bustle. Great billows of steam were already rising
from the huge payrola, the cauldron, hanging on a hook over the open fire. An older servant took
the water from the scullion, emptied it into a pot, and then shoved the barrel back at him without
saying a word. (…) Next to the hearth, the brushwood was burning fiercely inside the dome-shaped
bread oven” (Kate Mosse, 2005: 31),
or it is deeply rooted and molded by our hyper/consumerist environment when the temptations of
the affluence of food stands turns kitchens into a territory of experiencing the preparation of a meal
as furnishing the joy of producing something oneself, of finishing a fragment of reality, of knowing
the joys of demiurgic miniaturization.
The kitchen is generally interpreted as the ideal locus of female identity formation and
communal solidarity among women, where cooking turns into a powerful language of selfrepresentation and transgression. „Tita's domain was the kitchen (...) This explains the sixth sense
that she developed about everything concerning food (...) for Tita the joy of living was wrapped up
in the delights of food. (...) everything on the kitchen side of that door, on through the door leading
to the patio and the kitchen and herb gardens was completely hers – it was Tita's realm” (Laura
Esquivel, 1993:11).
Tita, the main character in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate (198), “redefines the
devaluated space of the kitchen and turns it into a productive and liberating feminine terrain”. Being
bound to the kitchen from the moment of her emblematic birth in this very same room, Tita gets
committed to waiting upon her mother and sister for the rest of her life, being confined to the
kitchen finds a way to overcome the status of a Cinderella first by turning cooking from punishment
into the only medium through which she can express herself, give herself a voice and secondly by
declaring the kitchen “a zone of transformation…. In other words, although Tita finds herself in the
traditional site of the kitchen, where women have been domestically relegated, she sets up her own
territoriality.” (Anne L. Bower, 2004: 67)
We may notice that foods bought from the shopkeeper remain within a random distribution
as long as they have not been ordered by the organization of the meal whereas in the kitchen they
become a succession unfolding according to a preexisting canonical order: appetizer, main course,
salad, cheese, dessert. Culinary preparation imposes a coercive series inside of which the various
elements can no longer be rearranged, yet the culinary work consisting of chronological sequence
like planning, organizing, shopping, preparing, serving, clearing, putting away, tidying up (see
Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, 1998:158), lost its original repetitiveness and
humbleness, simplicity and ordinariness, even privacy, in favour of more creativity, freedom of
combinations, a playful search for new flavours and smells and tastes, so that one might say that
choosing, matching, preparing foods have become city gestures for “when you already have
enough” (175).
Similarly, the traditional association of kitchen and cooking to women has changed as the
space and practice have become common to male chefs who author recipes and strategies,
shattering traditional spicing and mixing elements, revolutionizing forms and means in huge
restaurants cook-rooms, colonized by the media through their chroniclers and reporters, raising
culinary practices from the rather rudimentary level to a highly respected and sophisticated one.
The restaurant is a cultural text, with a proper semiotics, that can be read in terms of its
historical determination, that has a certain author and is based on community practices that have
produced the material objects/signs of a restaurant (the building, the furniture, the notices, etc.), it
can be articulated in terms of “distinction between nature and culture”, as Levi-Strauss put it,
“making meaning in and for culture” (apud John Fiske, 1989: 44). The cultural challenge appears
when owners and customers differ, as in McDermid’s example of juxtaposing Swiss tradition to
Mancunian travellers: ”Inside, it was the traditional Swiss chalet, wood everywhere, walls
decorated with huge posters of Alpine scenery, a blazing fire in a central stone fireplace. The room
was crammed with tables (…) A waitress dressed in traditional costume (…) said something in
German (…) Turner was tucking into a steaming bowl of soup, a stein of beer beside him (…) I
ordered Tiroler grostl, a mixture of potatoes, onions and ham with a fried egg on top” (McDermid,
1997: 155).
She uses the same characters against an Italian background: “…a cheerless dining room
which resembled a school dining room with tablecloths. The sole waitress (…) looked as if she’d
last laughed somewhere around 1974 (…) We started with a platter of mixed meats, most of which
looked and tasted like they’d made their getaway from the local cobbler. The pasta that followed
was al dente enough to be a threat to dentistry. The sauce was so sparing that the only way we could
identify it as pesto was by the colour.” (162).
Going to pubs or restaurants is a practice that is included in the larger frame of
neighbourhood convention, collective, unwritten, legible to all dwellers “through the codes of
language and behaviour” (see Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, 1998: 16), implying
the dominance of the social and of propriety, that is, “the rite of the neighbourhood” (19), that
reality principle that socializes through a controlled behaviour; an example of the kind is to be
found in Sara Paretsky’s Warshawski story, Toxic Shock (1988), when four mates enter decide to
have a meal: “Fratesi’s Restaurant was still where I remembered it, on the corner of Ninety-seventh
and Ewing. Gabriella had disapproved of them because they cooked southern Italian instead of her
familiar dishes of the Piedmont, but the food was good and it used to be a place to go for special
occasions. Today there wasn’t much of lunchtime crowd. The decorations around the fountain in
the middle of the floor, which used to enchant me as a child, had been allowed to decay. I
recognized old Mrs. Fratesi behind the counter, but felt the place had grown too sad for me to
identify myself to her. I ate a salad made of iceberg lettuce and an old tomato and a frittata that was
surprisingly light and carefully seasoned. (…) I didn’t look fabulous, but maybe that suited the
neighbourhood better.” (Sara Paretsky, 1988: 58-59).
Discussions

Communication is a cuisine of gestures, words, ideas, information (see Michel de Certeau,
Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, 1998: 254).

Nowadays everyday practices have shifted from necessity to pleasure, they have become
hedonistic instances, food is to be savoured peacefully, slowly, with the awareness of their
ethical and medical effects, in a permanent attempt to defeat the threats of hyper
consumerist, screen-biased society – cholesterol, obesity, heart diseases, nervous
breakdowns (see Gilles Lipovetsky, Jean Serroy, 2008: 195)

The homogenization of both people and habits generated by schooling and education is
inseparably connected to the taste for consumer goods, material comfort, pleasures and
leisure (Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, 1998:283).
Bibliography
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