Culinary Concoctions of Austrian Cultural Identity in the Long Nineteenth Century

The building at Fleischmarkt 7 in Vienna belonged to Julius Meinl, one of the largest fine-food traders and coffee importers in the Habsburg monarchy. The façade shows the coats of arms of the cities of Hamburg, Trieste and London – the hubs of trade in colonial goods – and highlights the way the monarchy was tied into global trading networks – through its cuisine.

In 1897, Marie von Rokitansky published “Die Österreichische Küche” (the Austrian Cuisine), a collection of several hundred recipes all of which she had herself tried out in her kitchen in Innsbruck. There were raving reviews, as the pundit felt the volume contained the best dishes that the land of the Habsburg monarchs had to offer: alongside the schnitzel and strudel recipes you would expect to find, there were also unusual soup recipes from Qatar and Indian curry. Including these dishes in a book on Austrian cuisine attests to an image of Austria that was not trammelled by narrow nationalist definitions or the Imperial borders of the Empire; rather it was interwoven with a global network of ideas and tastes.

Historian Amy Millet takes precisely this fact as the starting point of her Ph.D. project. In it, she shows the international history of Austria’s modernization in the long 19th century quite literally at the kitchen table and explores the question of how cuisine fostered and represented a national identity. To date, studies of Austrian identity have tended to foreground the nationalistic ideologies of the day or the cultural and political institutions on which the Habsburg monarchy relied in order to secure the loyalty of its citizens. Put differently: they have focused on the interaction between individual and state. By contrast, Amy Millet starts her analysis not with associations, ideologies, or schools, but with people’s everyday lives in Vienna and Graz, and goes on to ask what contribution in Habsburg Austria did culinary practises such as cooking, shopping and going out for meals make to developing notions of an Austrian identity in the 19th century. To what extent does consumer behaviour strengthen or undermine nationalist feelings? Did consumer patterns express other identification characteristics that were more influential than belonging to a nation, such as class consciousness, imperial and/or cosmopolitan ambitions or gender solidarity?

Cover of the 1910 edition of Marie von Rokitansky’s cookbook “Die Österreichische Küche” (first edition: 1897)
Description of the first “Kochkunst-Ausstellung” in Vienna in 1884 in the magazine “Das interessante Blatt” of Jan. 10, 1884.

The historian concentrates on the period between the early 19th century and the First World War, when the shortages caused by the war fundamentally changed cooking practices and the public discourse on nutrition. By contrast, the decades prior to the outbreak of the war were shaped by advances in transportation and food production as a result of which countless foods became available for the first time – including a surprising number of so-called “colonial goods”. Because although the Habsburg Empire did not itself have any overseas colonies, in the form of Trieste it had one of the largest European ports of the day handling imports.

Starting with cookbooks, company inventories, newspapers, and magazines, but also government documents such as lists of imports and customs tariffs, Amy Millet reconstructs the everyday transactions that underpinned Austrian consumer behaviour. In this way, she shows how Austrians of both sexes found a place in the world through their eating habits – from visiting the market (which enabled women to act in a sphere otherwise dominated by men) and to create pre-political organized structures, through to prestigious international cookery festivals destined to promote the glory of Habsburg Austria.

Millet’s nascent monograph will contribute to understanding identity formation in a period of rapid urbanization and industrialization in Central Europe.

Grant holder

Amy Millet, Lawrence (Kansas, USA)

Support

The Gerda Henkel Foundation is supporting the project by providing a PhD scholarship and covering the costs of travel and materials.

This project was documented in spring 2023.