Kulinarisches Wissen auf Reisen

Abstract

This essay investigates the interplay of the senses as brought to the fore in travelogues, while describing local food that travellers consumed in ‘contact zones’. I argue that the travellers’ bodies served as a filter in the knowledge production. Such culinary knowledge, produced during travels to the Tsardom of Russia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as well as Habsburg Galicia in the nineteenth century, was an important marker in the construction of spaces. Even though both examples show clear signs of stereotypes connected to Central European imaginations of Eastern Europe, the focus on knowledge production helps uncover the effects of different underlying epistemologies.