Description
Herbs & Spices
Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2020
Herbs and Spices (Oxford Symposium 2020) was the first gathering to happen entirely online, as the V-Symp came to be known. We managed to cook a meal together with Sri Owen’s turmeric lamb curry, a memorable achievement for all. We heard about making curry with the spice known as stone-flower, Parmotrema perlatum, a dried lichen fungus. Yes, it was a shame not to touch and smell it, but you can read about its cooking (steamed, fried, you name it) in Priya Mani’s paper. You will discover that in medieval cooking, saffron was used more often than green herbs, for colour of course, but also for that subtle flavour that makes basic food interesting. All kinds of peppers, saffrons, galangal, similar to Thai ginger get a very thorough airing. Fascinating reading, and of course, a warm and welcoming online group that made us all feel a part of a real Symposium, even though St Catherine’s College was far away.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Mark McWilliams
Opening Plenary Paper
Gastrophysics: The Psychology of Herbs and Spices Charles Spence
OFS Rising Scholar Award Winner
‘Half-Coloured with Turmeric’
The Visual Function of Spices in Early Modern Britain
Julia Fine
Symposium Papers
The Rise and Fall of Certain Herbs Ken Albala
A Visual History of Basil Lauren Allen
Season to Measure: Measurements in Early Culinary Recipes and their
Relation to Medicine
Volker Bach
Melegueta or Grains of Paradise: To be ‘Pepperish’
Scott Alves Barton
Cheating the Senses
Nina Bauer
Travelling with a Hairy Heart, or Where Cooking with Annatto Can Take You
Janet Beizer
Shichimi: The Spice, its Trade, and Centuries of Food Business Survival in Japan Voltaire Cang
Marianne Jennifer Datiles, Francesca Scotti, Vivienne Lo, and Michael Heinrich
Grass Fed: Cannabis Cooking in the United States
Rebecca Federman and Jessica M. Pigza
The Savoury Course at Oxford and Cambridge Colleges
Paul Freedman
Vodka in Early Modern Muscovy: Foreign Doctors, Travelling Herbalists, and
the Tsar’s Kitchen
Alexandr Gorokhovskiy
Foraged Food of Nepal: A Short History of Stinging Nettle
Binti Gurung
Perils of Popularity: How Popularization Leads to Ultimate Degradation
Ian Hemphill
The Road That Spices Travel is No Longer Silk
Peter Hertzmann
Captain James Cook, Scurvy, and the Use and Misuse of Herbs
Heather Hunwick
A Journey Back in Time Taste: Herbs and Spices in Medieval German Cuisine Helmut W. Klug, Christian Steiner, Fritz Treiber, Julia Eibinger, and Astrid Böhm
The Chilli Diaspora: Unravelling Evidence from Sixteenth-Century Botanicals Michael Krondl
‘Good Old Things’: The Transformation of Wild Herbs from Common Sustenance to Aristocratic Luxury in Early Modern England
Gina Rae La Cerva
Just Mad About Saffron: A Note on Jewish Memory and Pharmacology
Joshua Lovinger
Stone Curry: Parmotrema perlatum as a Secret Spice in Indian food
Priya Mani
Cinnamomum Zeylanicum: Continuing Voyages of Discovery
Jennifer Moragoda
What Does Prestige Taste Like? The Divorce of Saffron from its Cultural Context James O’Donnell
‘A Spice of Idolatry’: Seditious Spices and Ginger Anxieties in Jonson’s
Bartholomew Fair
Taylor Parrish
Isot: The Pepper on Hot Rooftops
Tuba Şatana
Season with Money, Prestige, and ‘Civilization’: Culinary Herbs and Spices in Colonial Congo (1885-1960)
Eva Schalbroeck
‘This is all very well, but where in Ireland can you get fresh tarragon?’: Myrtle
Allen and Herbs: Towards the Creation of an Irish Food Identity
Regina Sexton
The Geopolitics of Saffron and the Puzzles of Saffron Arithmetic
Richard Warren Shepro
Pepper and Paradox in the Roman Imagination
Jeremy Simmons
The Wild Yuzu: Japan’s Little Treasure
Aiko Tanaka
Ambiguous Aromatic Umbellifers and Other Obscure Characters: On the
Intricacies of Recreating China’s Culinary Past
Robban Toleno
A Twenty-First-Century Spice: A Journey to Madagascar and the Promise and
Peril of the Wild Tsiperifery Pepper
Amy B. Trubeck, Eric Bishop-von Wettberg, and Maya Moore
The Curious Case of Asafoetida
Sharmila Vaidyanathan
Herbs and Spices in the Court Cuisine of Medieval Cyprus: Food in the Cyprio-Gallic Style
William Woys Weaver
Food for the Soul: The Rabbis’ Cinnamon
Susan Weingarten
Lessons from the Chilli in China
Gerald Zhang-Schmidt
