Intro: In this post, OHMA student Eleonora Anedda (2019 -2020 cohort) will give you a taste of the vast British Library Archive by exploring their oral history collection on food, the British kitchen scene, and its radical changes over the course of the last century. She wishes to apologiseapologizees in advance if this post makes you hungry.

If you take the tube to King’s Cross St Pancras, then you take the right onto Euston Road, and you walk past M&S, you’ll find yourself at the British Library. Last year, when I was studying in London, this trip became very familiar to me - despite it being a quiet place, I’d walk in and feel the liveliness of those pensive people. The library is the home of 90,000 recordings - which I had the pleasure of going through during my stay in London, and I have recently re-“visited” in its online version. As a woman who wakes up hungry, the oral history food collection became particularly appealing to me. It contains 2045 items, split between From Source to Salespoint and Tesco: an Oral History [i]. But how does the virtual archive look anyway? Every interview provides a legal and ethical usage disclaimer, and essential metadata - such as date and location of the interview, full names of both interviewer and interviewee, duration, a list of keywords, and call numbers assigned to the shelves in the archive, also known as shelf marks to help users and archivists find items for on-site consultation. The oral history projects come with a mission statement and a summary; most interviews have been indexed, some of them extremely well to the point where one forgets that there is never a transcript available. However, in the few instances where not even a brief summary has been written, it obviously becomes impossible to consult its content at a glance. In any case, it comes without saying that the absence of transcription produces a highly unaccessible inaccessible archive. An oral history archive should aim towards awareness and inclusivity to meet the needs of deaf/HOH people and/or people with learning disabilities. This could take the form of providing a full transcription of the interview or automated live streaming captions, which, at least for videos, have proven to be quite accurate. You will not find a bio of the interviewers, but you will be able to see a list of who sponsored the projects so far, a high five for funding transparency!

As I was browsing in the archive I found some interviews with chefs, and that intrigued me. I was ready to immerse myself in fantastic descriptions of signature dishes without seeing them - if we think about it, we see food, we taste it, but we hardly ever listen to it. The prospect of experiencing food through sound fascinated me. Although,However, as I clicked on the chef’s’ section my focus shifted towards something else, and I rolled my eyes: 10 men and 2 women. I called another food lover in the hope that she could reassure me that women chefs do not come in limited editions. «You have been eating at very refined restaurants since you were little, I remember you telling me stories about Joël Robuchon for example, but please tell me you recall dining at a restaurant where the chef or the sous chef is a woman.»

silence

Chef An.

These are the worrying eight seconds of silence it took her to come up with the name of Helene An, the Vietnameise chef founder of the famous Crustacean restaurants in California.

Three pictures of three different dishes cooked at Crustacean in Beverly Hills. On the right, Langoustine Spring Roll served with roasted peanut bean sauce; in the middle, Tuna Cigars with instant smoke; and on the left, a cocktail of Artichoke Yellowtail.

Photo Credits: Annie Yan

I wondered what the process of selecting the narrators for this project looked like. I know from experience, and from talking to oral historians, that whenever we don’t make it a point to record a diverse audience group we most likely end up having interviewed more privileged individuals. More men than women, in this case. As Iacovetta, Srigley, and Zembrzycki write in Beyond Women’s Words: “egalitarian research methods” are likely to produce egalitarianjust researches [...] generate much subsequent research..”[ii] In other words, if the pool of recorded voices are quite diverse, the findings, the conclusions of the research, will be more representative of the group whose stories are being preserved. Despite having spotted these flaws, I started listening. Maybe it was a coincidence, but I realisedrealized later that I unconsciously played the interviews on my way to grocery shopping.

The Chef’s collection is a remarkable research into the subjectivity of those who devoted their livesfe to cooking. It touches very serious and touching topics, such as sexism in the workplace, illegal abortion, cooking in memory of loved ones - but also lively and jolly conversations, for instance the understandable life decision of chef David Eyre of never “going out with girls who didn’t like food”..[iii] In these recordings, the interviewers, Dr. Polly Russell and Dr. Niamh Dillon, don’t ask many open ended questions, which, as a consequence, does not stimulate long self-reflections in the narrators. Long silences are also quite rare. The interviews feel much more like a normal conversation rather than a place to let the mind wander to recall memories. Only the oldest narrator, chef Joyce Molyneux, managed to make extensive room for stories and anecdotes. Regardless of the dynamics of power in place, both Russell and Dillon were able to ask the male participants potentially uncomfortable questions on gender inequality in the kitchen. To me this shows that even though only 2 out of the 12 narrators were women, gender issues were very much on the interviewers’ radar.

Without diminishing the scope, and the extensive research that has already been done by Food: From Source to Salespoint, as the project continues I would very much like to see this project futher contributing towards feminist oral history. Chef Cathy Chapman’s interview was recorded in 2004, at a time where male chefs dominated British professional kitchens. According to a 2010’s survey of 7,000 chefs across the United Kingdom only 19 per cent were women.[iv]  However, this trend seems to have been changing in recent years. The Office of National Statistics declared in 2017 that  25% of UK’s chefs are now women, compared to 20% of 2016. In this light, should we witness a constant growth in the rate, in 2022 women may even surpass men.“one in four chefs in the UK is now female, up from one in five in 2016” and that, in this light, should we witness a constant growth in the rate “women could potentially outnumber men at the pass by 2022.” [v] Since this oral history project is an ongoing one,[vi] it may need to produce a collection that is reflective of the changes which have been happening so far in British hospitality industry.

I remember - there's this other chef also called Christine Ha, and she's known as the blind chef. And then - I mean for America I guess there's Martha Stewart but I never watched her show. Ehm. I don't know if Julia Child counts. Another chef I know is Nigella Lawson, she likes a lot of butter I remember that.

Besides the two Asian women you mentioned do you know anyone else? That's also Asian and a woman?

[pause]

My mother.

[laughter]

[i] ‘Food - Oral History | British Library - Sounds’, accessed 13 March 2020, https://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Food.

[iI] Katrina Srigley, Stacey Zembrzycki, and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century (London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018) 2.

[iiI] ‘Eyre, David (4 of 10). Food: From Source to Salespoint - Food - Oral History | British Library - Sounds’, accessed 13 March 2020, https://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Food/021M-C0821X0214XX-0004V0.

[iv] bighospitality.co.uk, ‘Survey Finds Imbalance between Male and Female Chefs’, bighospitality.co.uk, accessed 13 March 2020, https://www.bighospitality.co.uk/Article/2010/02/24/Survey-finds-imbalance-between-male-and-female-chefs.

[v] bighospitality.co.uk, ‘Number of Female Chefs in UK Rises by a Third’, bighospitality.co.uk, accessed 13 March 2020, https://www.bighospitality.co.uk/Article/2017/10/16/Number-of-female-chefs-in-UK-rises-by-a-third.

[vi] ‘The British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue’, accessed 13 March 2020, http://cadensa.bl.uk/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/5?searchdata1=CKEY5182150&_ga=2.151993343.73121879.1584120836-118198526.1581720548.