Oxford Symposium

Oxford Symposium

Authenticity in the Kitchen

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2005

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Oxford Symposium

Celebration

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2011

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This volume, edited by Jill Norman, contains memories of the Symposium from some of the most prestigious symposiasts, from 1981 to 2011.

Contributors include: Theodore Zeldin on ‘What Recipes Reveal and Conceal‘, Ken Albala on ‘Breakfast’, Raymond Blanc on ‘Essence of Tomato’, Sophie and Michael Coe on ‘Borshch’, with a fine recipe, and Caroline Conran on ‘Cuttlefish Rouille’, again with two fine recipes. The illustrative material from the archives show how the event developed from a gathering of like minded souls, enjoying dinner together, to the current day fabulous celebration of food history, with over 300 people, enjoying curated banquets, now in the dining hall of St. Catherine’s College, every July.

A fine record of this  annual event, with menus designed by Jake Tilson, and a great collection to remember those who have now departed this earth, the coming stars and the redoubtable committee who work tirelessly on the event.

Oxford Symposium

Eggs in Cookery

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2006

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Sample pages including Contents and Foreword

Oxford Symposium

Fasting and Feasting

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1990

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Oxford Symposium

Food and Communication

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2015

The Oxford Symposium on Food on Cookery continues to be the premier English conference on this topic, gathering academics, professional writers and amateurs from Britain, the USA, Australia and many other countries to discuss contributions on a single agreed topic. Symposiasts considered food as an area of control and resistance in totalitarian societies; struggles between activists, corporations and bureaucracies over food labels; the use of food and cookery to explore the past and the exotic; the sounds of eating and selling food; and, as Brillat-Savarin predicted, the role of food in constructing and communicating aspects of individual and collective identity. This year marked the first Symposium under the leadership of Bee Wilson, the new Chair, and Ursula Heinzelmann, the new Director. We also celebrated many years of leadership from Elisabeth Luard and the inimitable Paul Levy. Also deserving a mention is the editing of these papers by Mark McWilliams.

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• Fava Beans and Béchamel: Translating Egyptian Food as Modern Cuisine Anny Gaul 11
• Secrets of the Great Chefs: Decrypting Untrustworthy Communications from the Kitchens of Carême, Escoffier and Guérard Ray Sokolov 
• Symposium Papers The Evolution of Cookbooks in the Digital Age Ken Albala and Christine Larson
• ‘Anything is possible!’: MasterChef, World-Wide Illusion Robert Appelbaum
• Tatattoouille on the Menu: Tats in the Kitchen, a Side of Ink, and Food as Communication Paula Arvela
• Totalitarian Tastes: The Political Semantics of Food in Twentieth-Century Germany Volker Bach
• Communicating Frenchness: Escoffier and the Export of Terroir Janet Beizer
• Nobody Said to Cook: The Chinese Food of Emily Hahn and Time-Life Books Lucey Bowen
• Tablecloth and River: Dramatizing Historical Land Claims in Tomson Highway’s Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout Shelley Boyd
• Communicating Jewish Identity Through Taste: Jewish Flavour Principles as Culinary ‘Midrash’ Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus
• Defining ‘Cuisine’: Communication, Culinary Grammar, and the Typology of Cuisine Anthony F. Buccini
• ‘That Was Good’: Eating, Drinking and the Etiquette of Slurping in Japan Voltaire Cang
• Lessons from Generations Past: Timely and Timeless Communication Strategies of Some Canadian Cooks of Note Nathalie Cooke
• Common Senses: Sound and Touch in London Food Shopping Anastasia Edwards
• Children’s Culinary Culture: Why It Matters Elizabeth Fakazis
• When Menus Talk: The Bernard Fread Menu Collection Rebecca Federman
• By Any Other Name Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
• The Past on a Plate: Images of Ancient Feasts on Italian Renaissance Maiolica Allison Fisher
• Dinner Isn’t Served!: The Use of Historic Cookery as a Method of Interacting with Visitors to Hampton Court Palace Richard Fitch
• Framework for a New Culinary-Arts Curriculum Peter Hertzmann
• Deep-frying the nation: Communicating about Scottish Food and Nutrition Christine Knight
• Messages of Subversion: Communicating Czech Nationalism through Culinary History Michael Krondl
• Dragon on a Platter: The Art of Naming Chinese Dishes Kian Lam Kho
• Communicating Superfoods: A Case Study of Maca Packaging Jessica Loyer
• A French Culinary Figure in the Anglosphere: Translating Édouard de Pomiane for English Books and Television Katherine Magruder 
• The Language of Food Gifts in an Eighteenth Century Dining Club India Aurora Mandelkern
• Hot, Sour, Salty…Write: Saveur Magazine, Thai Food Culture, and the Communicative Potential of Food & Travel Journalism Robert McKeown 
• Food Fight: Survival and Ideology in Cookbooks from the Spanish Civil War Maria Paz Moreno
• On Food and Fascism: Plating up Oral Histories Karima Moyer-Nocchi
• The Author, the Reader, the Text: Literary Communication of a 1611 Spanish Cookbook Carolyn A. Nadeau
• The Squander Bug: Propaganda and its Influence on Food Consumption in Wartime Australia Diana Noyce
• I Am What I Don’t Eat: Food and Eating as a Form of Communicating Distinction in the Jewish Literature of the Second Temple Period Harriet Publicover
• Looking Good: Picturing Food in Early Books and Prints Marcia Reed
• Whitebait or Blanchailles? Cuisine and Chaos in Britain, 1865-1914 Laura Shapiro
• The Rhetoric of Salmon: The War of Words, Images and Metaphors in the Battle of Wild-caught vs. Farmed Salmon Richard Warren Shepro
• The Comté Aroma Wheel: History of an Invention, Ethnography of a Practice. A Look at the Early Years Christy Shields-Argelès
• ‘What if I smell your peanuts and die?’ Communicating Fact and Fiction about Peanut Allergy Matthew Smith
• Communicating Gourmet Values in Japanese Popular Media Nancy Stalker
• Crossing the Kosher Food Barrier: Outside Influences on Talmudic Food Susan Weingarten

Food and Landscape

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2017

One may expect a symposium on landscape, or terroir, to be a fabulous celebration of the beautiful, bountiful and luscious green hills, valleys and fields we love to think about when the countryside is in our minds. Well, some of the papers celebrated the fruits of the earth, from scallops to mutton in the Highlands, so much tastier than lamb. But as the three days of the symposium progressed, we became aware of how we must change our ways, in order to keep these images of beautiful landscapes a reality. There are dangers ahead, from the effects of climate change, the threat of Brexit to farms which will lose all subsidy, and changing weather patterns in Kenya.

In such context, many Symposium presentations not only demanded careful attention to how humans have affected the landscape but also became calls for action.

Oxford Symposium

Food and Language

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2009

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Oxford Symposium

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2014
Edited by Mark McWilliams

The thirty-third Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery discussed food and material culture from every possible angle, and from every possible geographical perspective. Scholars assembled from countries around the globe, hailing from the UK, USA, Turkey, Italy, France, Brazil, Japan, Israel, and Germany.The topics of some of the papers are:

• Ballymaloe’s Darina Allen on farmer’s markets in Ireland
• Mastering the art of Soviet cooking by Anya von Bremzen
• Janet Beizer on royal table leftovers in eighteenth-century France
• Garritt Van Dyk on the origins of champagne
• Food and the Female Body by Mary Gray –
• Gillian Riley on food from Southern Italy painted by Dutch artists
  in the North
• Andrew Coe on the kosher poultry racket in early twentieth-century
  New York
• Doug Duda on why markets grow while cooking crashes
• Dan Strehl on the Hollywood market at the famous Hollywood and
  Vine intersection

The Table of contents, and one page of each of the first four papers from the conference can be found here.

Oxford Symposium

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2013

The thirty-second Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery discussed food and material culture from every possible angle, and from every possible geographical perspective. Scholars assembled from countries around the globe, hailing from the UK, USA, Turkey, Italy, France, Brazil, Japan, Israel, and Germany.The topics of some of the papers are:

• Aesthetics and politics of the kitchen in fascist Italy
• Why kitchen utensils matter
• Computer engineered food
• The bamboo tea whisk in Japanese tea culture
• Cooking under fire, 1914–1918
• Sugar sculpture in Italian court banquets
• Mongolian milk spoons
• Élite consumption trends in ceramic tableware in Georgian Ireland
• Vessels and equipment used by street food vendors of Istanbul
• Perfuming the table in old Baghdad
• Salt cellars and the origins of etiquette
• Utensils in the classical Greek world
• The everyday cooking pot of late antique Palestine
• Tools and learning the language of cooking
• The rise of the picnic hamper
• The story of mixers and mixing
• Beefy British bovril, plasmon and quality Cadbury’s cocoa essence
• Towards an anthropology of bimby food processors in Italy

Oxford Symposium

Food and Morality

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2007

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Oxford Symposium

Milk: Beyond the Dairy

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1999

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Offal: Rejected and Reclaimed Food

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2016

This year’s theme – offal, rejected and reclaimed foods – when taken in the broadest sense is a  subject well-suited to the explorative ethos of the Oxford Symposium, not least because there’s no universal agreement on what actually qualifies as offal. Each culture has its own views on whether foods are acceptable or merit rejection. Even in neighbouring countries, differences run deep. For example, English ‘offal’ is linguistically related to the Dutch word ‘afval’ which means unambiguously ‘garbage’, a designation that includes most animal-intestines and extremities. The negative connotation of the word indicates automatic rejection of offal by the native Dutch. Nevertheless, within the nation, differences can be observed. In modern times, consumption of most varieties of organ-meats, traditionally unusual in The Netherlands, is having a come-back thanks to newcomers from all parts of the world. Goatheads, chickens-feet, blood, liver, testicles, stomach, udder and heart, are all available if you know the right butcher.

Oxford Symposium

An Index to the Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1981–1994

Oxford Symposium

Public Eating

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1991

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‘The sights could not be more different. In one, curved greenhouse-like buildings rise gently from the wildflowered English countryside; in the other, an angular metallic shape juts starkly out of a snowbound Norwegian mountainside. And yet both – the Millennium Seed Bank at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Svalbard Global Seed Bank – serve at once as witness to the widespread destruction of the Anthropocene and as ark-like hope for surviving those same collective acts of self-harm.’ Mark McWilliams, Foreword, Seeds

The papers in this collection explored topics ranging widely from what was once seen as the promise of irradiated seeds to the many threats to indigenous species, from the way individual grains shape communal identity to the role of seeds in religious symbolism.  Crops are grown for different reasons, and not always to nurture the community that cultivates them. Economic boom and bust cycles can influence the choice of crops, and as  one region becomes the main source for a species of plant, perhaps a cash crop like coffee, at the same time the climate in another region changes, and the harvest falters. 

The topics ranged from prehistoric to high-tech ways of planting seeds. And yet the papers often share an unexpected similarity: though many explore the specific context of seeds in the past and others lament that loss in the present, both approaches share a sense of the way landraces – individual species carefully adapted to specific geographies and climates – capture a sense of place. 

Oxford Symposium

Staple Foods

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1989

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Oxford Symposium

The Meal

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2001

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Oxford Symposium

Vegetables

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2008

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Oxford Symposium

Wild Food

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2004

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Oxford Symposium

Wrapped & Stuffed Foods

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2012

• Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2012 •
• 32 essays by international scholars •The thirty-first Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery discussed wrapped and stuffed foods from every possible angle, and from every possible geographical perspective. This may include sausages on the one hand, or stuffed ravioli on the other. It may also go as far as pies and sausage rolls. In geographical terms the Symposiasts were willing to look at cultures as disparate as Turkey, the United States, seventeeth-century England, Korea and Italy.There is also a pan- cultural discussion of stuffing and wrapping foods in avant-garde or molecular gastronomy.Contributors include the Chinese expert Fuschia Dunlop, the Greek cookery writer Aglaia Kremezi, the celebrated food writer and cultural historian from America Laura Shapiro, the Australian food historian Barbara Santich, the Israeli commentator and historian Susan Weingarten, and the English anthropologist David C. Sutton.

Titles of some of the papers include: The Pillsbury Bake-Off: Stuffed and Wrapped in 1950s and 1960s America; Chicken Kiev: Material, Social and Discursive Wrappings; Samuel Pepys’s Venison Pasties; Barbarian heads and Turkish dumplings: the Chinese word mantou; A Knish Is Just a Knish–or Is It? The Evolution of a Street Food to Haute Nosh and Before Dolma:A Taxonomy of Medieval Arab Stuffery.

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