To Örebro University

The serving of meals in professional contexts is a complex task. To succeed, the critical elements of planning and service should be carefully considered. Few, useful tools exist for designing and assessing dishes, meals, and menus. This article introduces the framework of gastronomic variables, developed over 20 years of pedagogical and didactical practices, as a qualitative tool in designing meals. The framework comprises seven gastronomic variables: taste and flavour, aroma, temperature, texture, colour, shape, quantity/volume. The framework helps students and professionals to focus on critical components in the design of dishes and is also useful for assessment in education.

The issue of human eating crosses many conceptual boundaries, from humanities and social science to natural science, and for that reason it must be interpreted from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. In this introductory chapter, we present the area of meal research and, more particularly, the development of the academic subject of Culinary Arts and Meal Science, at Örebro University in the School of Hospitality, Culinary Arts and Meal Science situated in the village of Grythyttan in the Swedish countryside, 70 kilometres from Örebro. The anthology presents original, multifaceted, and revealing perspectives from the institutions’ researchers on how to study culinary arts and meals. The contributions showcase a variety of angles on meal research, from sensory sciences and economics to sommellerie, aesthetics, food history, gender, culture, pedagogics, food innovation, and service and hospitality. The chapters make use of a variety of methods and theories. This variety is needed to unravel the complex phenomenon and understand all the elements of which a meal is composed. We choose to use the word “revealing” in our title, Revealing Meals, to insist on meals as revealing experiences and to highlight the ambition of our research to explore and reveal the “what” and the “how” of different meals. The goal of the anthology Revealing Meals is to present how we study meals at Campus Grythyttan and to inspire others who are interested in meals to take part in this never-ending exploration of how, why, and what 10 Revealing Meals we eat. The anthology brings together the past, present, and future of meal research by explaining the history of the field at our institution while positioning it in the Nordic landscape of meal research; by presenting what we do presently; and, finally, by pointing to new directions in culinary arts and meal sciences.

In this chapter the author introduces the untold history of the festivity cooks in Sweden as being a development of female professional livelihood in meal production. The festivity cooks were active from 1850 to 1960, in the beginning in the countryside and, later, in the bourgeois homes in the cities.The research method is a bricolage method with different types of sources, i.e., archive materials, a broadcast programme, a few earlier research reports and literature regarding local cultural heritage, and folklife cooking traditions and cookbooks. The author presents some conclusions that may be made from the diverse data found: the festivity cooks were strong individualists and highly respected among their customers. They were embedded in their social contexts, where they cultivated their specific way towards mastery. The festivity cooks worked as lone stars in contrast to the professional hierarchical working-life experiences of male chefs.

In this chapter the authors attempt to problematise the ideas of service and hospitality in the dining room craft with an emphasis on the use of the materiality of the restaurant. The authors also suggest that it is possible to use theoretical concepts in practical education to strengthen knowledge development among culinary students and among practitioners in the restaurant industry. By exemplifying different dining room situations and the materiality involved, the contributions of time-geography and practice theory to help understand and analyse how a waiter can promote or impede service and hospitality are discussed. The authors argue that theoretical perspectives can be especially useful in craft professions within the restaurant industry as their concepts are directly transferable in the everyday work of practitioners.

From a sustainability and food-supply perspective, it is crucial to contribute to a reduction of food waste, such as meat raw materials, and to develop knowledge on how to make underexploited foods acceptable for inclusion on restaurant menus. This study applies a gastronomy perspective that integrates culinary arts with sensory science to support knowledge development and creativity in the restaurant industry. The aim was to explore locally produced mutton in collaboration with culinary craft practitioners and food producers, in a Swedish context. An additional aim was to design an applied model for creative and innovative meal solutions that are both sensory approved and sustainable. This was done through a combination of sensory evaluations and culinary workshops. This mixed-methods approach was used to merge qualitative and quantitative data to gain complementary views on the research problem. Identifying the knowledge and experience of lamb producers and culinary staff, was done by using sensory methods in connection with a qualitative approach that focused on observing cooking activities, conversations and group talks among participants. The sensory results indicated that mutton is a fully edible food material and can thus be defined as an unutilized gastronomic resource. Among the workshop participations, overall liking was high and evenly distributed between the mutton dishes. The main outcome of this study was the provision of a model for sustainable resource management of locally produced food. This model can be used for understanding the importance of the locality, sustainability and cultural acceptance of products, in addition to the value chains and network practices embedded in direct supply-chain relationships. From a long-term perspective, this understanding may lead to increased awareness, knowledge and skills among producers and restaurants regarding the benefits and opportunities of locally produced food.

Sustainability is a key concern within the restaurant industry, which offers a variety of initiatives and approaches to it. This, in turn, creates different shared understandings, what we here call sustainable cuisine imaginaries. The practices fostered by these imaginaries are now facing unforeseen challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic, creating a dissonance in the way restaurants normally operate. By using storage and preservation practices as an entry point, this ethnographic study of six Swedish restaurants uses the concept of imaginaries to explore the different beliefs and ideals for restaurant sustainability and the practices fostered by those ideals. Three distinct imaginaries of sustainable cuisine were identified: locality as a quality, reducing meat in favor of vegetables, and the creative and knowledgeable professional. These imaginaries are materialized through different storage facilities, like root cellars, wine cellars, or meat aging fridges. This study shows how disruptions in restaurants, triggered by unexpected situations, exposed the fragility of these imaginaries. We argue that the sustainable cuisine imaginaries, as a complexity reducing mechanism, help restaurant professionals manage the intricacy of sustainability. However, they also demonstrate an array of simple solutions very susceptible to external factors. Sustainable practices can thus easily become unsustainable.