From Onions to Champagne – Food and Drink in the SrpELTeC Corpus

Abstract

The paper presents a set of examples excerpted from the Serbian ELTeC collection, which illustrate eating habits and language about food in the Serbian population from the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The results are confronted with ethnographic sources and description of private life from that time, as well as with the language of food illustrated in few existing cookbooks in Serbian of the time. Unlike these sources, the examples from the corpus show not only what food was used at that time, but also the attitude of the local population towards food, as well as elements of their food taste as part of a collective identity.