The Making of Mamaliga by Alex Drace-Francis
Mămăligă, maize porridge or polenta, is a universally consumed dish in Romania and a prominent national symbol. But its unusual history has rarely been told. Alex Drace-Francis surveys the arrival and spread of maize cultivation in Romanian lands from Ottoman times to the eve of the First World War, and also the image of mămăligă in art and popular culture. Drawing on a rich array of sources and with many new findings, Drace-Francis shows how the making of mămăligă has been shaped by global economic forces and overlapping imperial systems of war and trade. The story of maize and mămăligă provides an accessible way to revisit many key questions of Romanian and broader regional history. More generally, the book links the history of production, consumption, and representation. Analyses of recipes, literary and popular depictions, and key vocabulary complete the work."a richly textured and fresh approach to the history of eighteenth–nineteenth century Romania through the lens of maize and the Romanian “national” dish mămăligă (boiled cornmeal)Much more than a food history, The Making of Mămăligă is a holistic commodity history that reveals the overlapping “imperial tectonics” of the three empires that dominated east central Europe—the Russian, Ottoman, Habsburg—with Romania uniquely situated at the confluence of all three."
-- Mary Neuburger * Slavic Review *
Alex Drace-Francis is Associate Professor of Modern European Literary and Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanian and Balkan social, cultural and literary history; on travel writing and circulation of ideas and images; and on European identity as a whole.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9789633866245 |
| ISBN 10 | 9633866243 |
| Title | The Making of Mamaliga |
| Author | Alex Drace-Francis |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Central European University Press |
| Year published | 2022-09-15 |
| Number of pages | 226 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |