Photo: Masha volyňských ^[1] The ethnographic museum holds its Exhibits at the beautiful villa formerly owned by the Kinský noble family in a leaf park under Petřín hill. Petr Janeček, the head of the ethnographic department, was kind enough to show me around the Exhibit, which is part of the Monarchy series the National Museum is currently running. Although food itself could not be kept in glass boxes around the villa, the Exhibit ‚s creators decided to present the culture surrounding food, its ingestion and preparation, as well as important Personalities from the Culinary world of the Czech lands and Austro-Hungary during the Reign of Emperor Franz Joseph. Here is how Petr Janeček described the main concept of the Exhibit.

„Because gastronomy is a very popular issue today in the Czech Republic – we have many TV shows about gastronomy, many books about cooking and gastronomy – we decided to show what the gastronomy looked like in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy from the middle of the nineteenth century to World War One.

„And we decided that the basis of the Exhibit will be rural people, country folk, because they made up the majority of the population of the Czech lands and Central Europe at that time. But we also wanted to show other social ztráta, for example, the aristocracy. And we also wanted to show the middle class, which was a very dynamic and progressive social group of that period. We are showing not only the gastronomy itself, but also the cultural, social and political context of gastronomy of the second half of the nineteenth century. „

[To be continued. For the full report, please listen to the mp3 recording]

References

1. ^{^} Photo: Masha volyňských (img.radio.cz)