The imperial cuisine

Abstract

The life and works by Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929), a popular author of a number of novels, stories and articles that were mostly set in India, are analyzed in the article. Steel’s fiction was well-known in Great Britain at the end of the 19th and in the first half of the 20th centuries. The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook written by Steel and Grace Gardiner was extremely popular with the British women readers. First printed in 1888, it was repeatedly reprinted and republished during the following decades. In 2010 the book was published in the Oxford World Classics series; this fact confirmed its role in the history of literature. The aim of the article is to analyze the text of the book that is commonly considered to be a vivid example of the British colonial literature. This analysis clearly correlates with studies of everyday cultural practices, with postcolonial studies in general and with the role of women in the colonial male world studies in particular. Following the existing pattern of writing books on housekeeping for the British middle-class women, Steel (a note: Gardiner wrote only a couple of chapters of the large volume) includes into her book not only recipes for cooking, but also recommendations on how to manage an Indian colonial house, its stables and gardens, and a whole team of servants. A number of methods and approaches were used to study the book, namely, a biographic method, semiotic and post-colonial approaches. Some facts from the author’s biography relevant for the book were mentioned in the article; Steel’s descriptions of everyday practices and concrete things were viewed as illustrations of the epoch, but also in their ideological function, as symbolic representations of the British colonial history and politics. The author’s individual style was also studied; and it was disclosed that among the main objects of her irony were the English memsahibs in India. The article clearly shows that the author of the book demonstrated her hybrid personality when her Anglo-centric views coexisted with critical approaches towards many colonial practices, and her patronizing patterns towards the Indian people – with deep interest to their culture and languages. Thus, the author has come to a conclusion that, in a number of cases (Steel’s was among them), works of colonial literature go far beyond the domineering colonial discourse. Thus, their readers are offered a wider view of ambivalent cultural contacts and relations. From this point of view, Steel’s approaches coincide with Rudyard Kipling’s ones. © 2019 Tomsk State University. All rights reserved.