Food, Fantasy and Glamour:
the aesthetics of everyday food in the Australian Women’s Weekly, 1930s-1980s
Chat & Discussion happens in the comments below. (Edit: This presentation has been edited for length and is not 29mins, but 15-ish, apologies and thanks to those who noted it was a bit confusing. The pictures from the AWW in this presentation are gold gold gold btw. )
From its earliest issues, the Australian Women’s Weekly (the Weekly) has provided its multitudes of readers with beautifully illustrated food editorials. Recipes are accompanied by glossy, coloured images of the end product: neat rows of tempting savouries, luscious roast meats, glistening jellies, bulgingly cream-filled cakes.
This paper is an exploration of the aesthetics of everyday food in the Weekly throughout its first fifty years of publication. Through this exploration, I will uncover the shifting imaginings of Australian domestic food culture and the ways in which these imaginings were communicated to the Australian public through the images of food on the pages of the Weekly and its related cookbooks.
The Weekly’s food pages were sometimes a site of fantasy, where the mouth-watering images of exciting, expensive or foreign cuisine acted as a substitute for actually being able to eat the dish due to economic or other restraints. At other times, though, the Weekly presented attainable meals - tinned soup, anyone? - imbuing them with glamour and sophistication through their presentation. These were ‘realistic’ dreams presented on a plate, and ones which the readers of the Weekly were excited to emulate.
Lauren Samuelsson is a final year PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong. Her PhD thesis focuses on the Australian Women’s Weeklymagazine and cookbooks and its role in the development of Australian food culture during its first fifty years of publication. Her research interests lay in cultural history, the history of popular culture and the history of food and drink.
Thank you Lauren - your work is endlessly fascinating - I remember your talk on mock foods somewhere too!
I really enjoyed that! I also heard your talk in London last year I think it was on mock foods. Another wonderful talk. I was interested in your use of the term 'everyday' and I wondered how you conceptualise the term here? I ask as I have just written a paper for a special on everyday digital food cultures and I had to do quite a bit of thinking about what constitutes the everyday and how it gets visualised.
Great start to the conference, Lauren! I
am curious about the references to America as a touchstone of food modernity. Was there a specific magazine or periodical that was an inspiration for editors of 'the Weekly'? Or is this a general reflection on postwar fashion and media?
Don't get me wrong — banana boats and fried chicken and cereal-encrusted ice cream does seem like some fine mid-century American fare. 🍴
Ahhh, the symbiotic relationship between food and fantasy. The AWW certainly provided a potent combination of fantasy's temptation (the images of well-presented food ready to serve) and the means of achieving such a potential result (the descriptive text – at times revealing the personality of the writer in order to become familiar and suggesting the benefits of what could be achieved – and recipes). Professor Mary Kalantzis has recognised such text and image interplay as 'multimodal grammar' – a central structural key in multimedia advertising/communication.
Thank you for this presentation. It has definitely made me more fascinated with the retro food photographer and greater appreciation for Women's weekly's intersection of fantasy and realistic achievable dishes for the household.
Hope you find it. I have a copy of Leila Howard and Marguerite patten’s cookery in colour that is very illustrative of the visual effects produced ( even the background blocks of colour). It’s a long time since I thought about all this so thanks for the reminder!
Hope you find it. I have a copy of Leila Howard and Marguerite patten’s cookery in colour that is very illustrative of the visual effects produced ( even the background blocks of colour). It’s a long time since I thought about all this so thanks for the reminder!
Thanks Lauren. Compared to Mum's wartime cookbooks the WW cookbooks were revolutionary!
Thank you Lauren, your presentations invariably conjure memories of my mother's efforts at food styling - tomato shells stuffed with peas, for example....
I'm wondering if you have identified a relationship between the food styling and sponsorship from retailers that provided props and table settings, and perhaps sustained the photographic features through the war years. The Home magazine made no pretence of this in the 1920s and the practice continued well into the 1990s and no doubt still does in some publications.?
Hi Lauren. I really enjoyed the presentation. I was looking forward to your presentation on the programme, as I actually got into food reading my mum's Women's Weekly cookbooks from the home library series and some Margaret Fulton, when I was in primary school in the late 1980s including the Chinese Food Cookbook.
Your point about the popularity of coloured images among troops in World War II putting these images alongside “Hollywood Cheesecake” brings to mind the idea of “food porn”. Perhaps it was “food porn” before “food porn”.
My lasting impression of the imagery in the Home Library series was that it was not like any house in Sydney that I’d seen. I recall a recipe for a duck ballotine (I think it was) in the French Food Cookbook from the home library series, where the dish was presented on a silver platter and the setting looked like a garden party in a tycoon’s garden. There were similar settings with some recipes in cookbooks like the Biscuits book. Perhaps the styling spoke to certain aspirations, and even decadence in the 1980s(?) with society figures like Alan Bond and Christopher Skase. To a more contemporary point the image of the store-bought strawberry ice cream covered in cereal flakes reminds me of Jamie Oliver’s recipe for vanilla ice cream with crushed (or I think he called them “smashed up”) Maltesers (the more things change the more they remain the same or a case of the sustained, irresistible appeal of convenience).
Lauren, the Weekly has been written about so much in accounts of Australia's cultural history, it must have been hard to find an original perspective for your argument. However, I think, with your emphasis on changing aesthetics, you've managed this really well. A suggestion though, I'd really like to know more about how photography itself changed during the years you studied (ie the actual technical stuff - eg more on the influence of photogravure, for example, and those wonderful washed-out pastels which (fashionable then, and now, retrospectively) we tend to link with nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s.
Well done Lauren. Your thesis can't come soon enough given the way Bauer media are laying waste to the magazine business in Australia. With reference to my own work, the influence of the Weekly on ideas of taste, not just what to cook, but how it should look, is incalculable. Given the sort of food photography we have today, it's hard to imagine yourself back in the 1950s or 1960s and actually being tempted by some of these images, but important to be reminded how revolutionary they were.
One of my biggest food regrets is giving away the large collection of AWW cookbooks I had accumulated over the years. Many were my mothers, many mine, some from other sources long forgotten. When I moved states, it seemed so daunting and there were already so many boxes labelled 'cookbooks' I started to relabel the boxes as other things (toiletries and photo albums come to mind!) Now I go to visit the old trusties and in a flash of annoyance, remember they are gone. I hope they are appreciated somewhere.
Back in the ‘80s I worked as a pastry cook at the Bayswater Brassiere in Sydney. We sometimes used AWW recipes. They worked.
It's really interesting how the narrative of food has both broadened and narrowed over time. I really enjoyed this foray into the visual narrative in particular and wonder about the prevalence of this is food marketing vs home cooking. I know my grandsires were fiercely proud of their home food presentation, but would never have dreamed of photographing it (well,...cameras were pretty new back then).
I enjoyed this presentation- the objectives were clear and presented in a straightforward manner. I had those cookbooks, bought them here in Manila, Philippines and liked the easy layout of the recipes and of course the photos.
Wonderful to see the range of Women's Weekly cookbooks and their contribution to food aesthetics. In the 70's it was the main way most of us learnt to entertain and present food for our families and guests.
For some reason, the recording just cut out after about 15 minutes.
Such great work. At one stage 1/4 of all the households in Australia had the Weekly. I had enjoyed Susan Sheridan's work on the Weekly, but it was clear that it deserved a food focus. Well done Lauren -- I'm looking forward to reading the thesis!