THE HUNGRY TRAVELLER. 18TH-CENTURY TRANSYLVANIAN TRAVELLERS AND THE WESTERN CULINARY EXPERIENCE
THE HUNGRY TRAVELLER. 18TH-CENTURY TRANSYLVANIAN TRAVELLERS AND THE WESTERN CULINARY EXPERIENCE

Summary/Abstract: The present article discusses food narratives from travelogues written by the Calvinist elite of Transylvania. The paper firstly presents attitudes toward travel and travel writing in 18th-century Transylvania and then offers examples about stories associated with food and foodways. In the first instance, we discussed the attachment of Transylvanians to familiar tastes, then we offered examples of food rejection, either culturally or confessionally motivated. The asymmetrically opposed constructions of these food narratives, the constant distinctions made by the authors between “our” food and “theirs”, suggest the importance of food in identity building. In the last part of our paper, we approached the social dimension of food, arguing that we are witnessing a cultural shift and the changing of the existing food regime, processes undergoing due to the increased number of travels, especially to Vienna.

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