A dessert becomes national by being claimed rather than invented

Origin is rarely what is actually being argued about

Disputes over national desserts have a recognisable shape. Two countries each hold that a dish is theirs, each produces documentary evidence, and neither is much moved by the other. What is striking about these arguments is how little the outcome depends on the historical record. A dish becomes national when a large number of people treat it as a marker of who they are, and that process can run entirely independently of where it was first written down.

It is also worth noticing what these disputes have in common. They almost always involve dishes that are simple, cheap and made from ingredients available in both places, which is precisely the situation in which independent invention is likeliest and documentation weakest. Nobody argues about who invented a dish requiring a rare ingredient. They argue about meringue, eggs and cream.

The pavlova case, and why it won’t settle

The pavlova — a soft-centred meringue with cream and fruit — is claimed by both Australia and New Zealand, and it is named for the Russian dancer Anna Pavlova, who toured both countries in the nineteen-twenties. The naming isn’t in dispute. Everything else is. Research comparing printed recipe collections has produced earlier New Zealand references than Australian ones, and when a major English dictionary revised its entry to reflect that, the result was a certain amount of newspaper indignation.

The evidence is genuinely awkward, because meringue desserts of this general kind existed in Europe well before either claim, and because the earliest printed uses of the name attach to things that aren’t quite the modern dish. What can be said is that the pavlova as it is now understood took its recognisable form in Australasia between the wars, and that both countries developed it. That is an unsatisfying answer, which is why it has never been accepted by either side.

Print is what fixes a claim

The recurring mechanism in all these stories is publication. A dish exists in households for years without leaving a trace, and then somebody prints a recipe, and the printed version becomes the reference point against which all later claims are measured. Community cookbooks, women’s magazines and manufacturer pamphlets did an enormous amount of this work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they are consequently where most origin arguments end up.

This gives a systematic bias to the record. Places with an early printing industry and a habit of collecting domestic recipes appear to have invented more than places without one. It is a bias, not a fact about cooking, and it is worth holding in mind whenever a firm date is attached to a dish that plainly existed before anybody wrote it down.

Tourism and migration do the distributing

Once a dish is associated with a place, two forces spread it. Emigrants carry it and it becomes a way of maintaining an identity at a distance, which is how a regional sweet can become a national symbol abroad long before it is one at home. And tourism creates demand for something recognisably local to be sold to visitors, which encourages standardisation — a dish with many regional versions is gradually pressed into one canonical form because that is the version the guidebooks describe.

Both processes make the food more national and less local, and both tend to freeze it. A dish that is a tourist expectation stops evolving, because a shop that changes it disappoints the people who came looking for it. That is a real cost, and it is rarely mentioned in the celebration of a national dessert.

And then the lawyers arrive

The final stage is legal. The European Union operates a system of protected names under which a regional food can be registered so that the name may only be used for products made in a defined area or by a defined method, and a considerable number of marzipans, nougats and regional cakes are registered — Lübecker Marzipan among the better known. Similar schemes exist elsewhere, and they turn a cultural claim into an enforceable one.

What is protected is generally the name and a specification rather than the recipe. Anyone may make the thing; they simply may not call it by the protected term unless they meet the conditions. That is a sensible arrangement and it has an odd side effect, which is that it makes the boundaries of a food explicit for the first time, and in doing so it settles by administrative decision a question that a hundred years of cooking had left comfortably vague.