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Panel: Literary Bites: Tasting the Past, from Shakespeare to Fitzgerald
Ken Albala, Tori Avey, and Bruce Kraig
Whet your appetite for luscious food imagery and descriptive prose in this creative tasting session. Three food historians will tantalize you with mouth-watering passages and tasting samples inspired by literature, exploring works by Jane Austen, Rabelais, Mark Twain, Laura Ingalls Wilder and more. Taste the history and connect to different culinary time periods and cultures through classic literature.
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Panel: There Will Be Beer: The Rebirth of the Beer Cocktail
Ken Albala, Jacob Grier, David Solmonson, and Lesley Jacobs Solmonson
Long before mankind invented distillation, mixed drinks with a fermented base were the libation of choice -- and the key to social lubrication. The Egyptians brewed dates, Shakespeare espoused metheglin, and Harry Potter opted for a pint of Tudor-style butter beer. Today, beer cocktails remain an obscure genre of cocktailia but one that is quickly growing in popularity as bartenders and home mixologists discover the vast array of profiles, complexities, and flexible natures of beer and ale. Using tastings of Pharaoh’s Ale, Buttered Beere, and a modern beer cocktail, the panel will trace the history of beer-based beverages to arrive at the modern intersection of the craft brew and craft cocktail movements.
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The Most Excellent Book of Cookery = Livre fort excellent de cuysine (1555)
Ken Albala and Timothy Tomasik
The Livre fort excellent de cuysine is one of a family of cookery books that first saw the light with Pierre Sergent’s La Fleur de toute cuysine (renamed Le Grand cuisinier de toute cuisine) of 1542. This edition of the Livre fort excellent was published in 1555. Scholars have often dismissed the printed cookbooks of 16th-century France as simple rehashes of the great medieval Viandier of Taillevent or as merely concentrating on marginal dishes such as sweets and sugarwork. True French cooking, they say, did not start until the publication of Le Cuisinier françois by La Varenne in 1651. While there is some truth in this, the translators and editors of this book would maintain that the change from medieval to modern (already under way in Italy and Spain for example) can be dated back to this book and its kindred; that it was more than a plagiaristic copy. The Livre fort comprises about 70 pages of original French, with an English translation on facing pages.
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Food in Time and Place: The American Historical Association Companion to Food History
Paul Freedman, Joyce Chaplin, and Ken Albala
Food and cuisine are important subjects for historians across many areas of study. Food, after all, is one of the most basic human needs and a foundational part of social and cultural histories. Such topics as famines, food supply, nutrition, and public health are addressed by historians specializing in every era and every nation.
Food in Time and Place delivers an unprecedented review of the state of historical research on food, endorsed by the American Historical Association, providing readers with a geographically, chronologically, and topically broad understanding of food cultures—from ancient Mediterranean and medieval societies to France and its domination of haute cuisine. Teachers, students, and scholars in food history will appreciate coverage of different thematic concerns, such as transfers of crops, conquest, colonization, immigration, and modern forms of globalization.
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The Italian Renaissance Dinner Party Sessions I
Katherine McIver Albala, Alison Smith, and Ken Albala
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The Italian Renaissance Dinner Party Sessions II
Katherine McIver Albala, Alison Smith, and Ken Albala
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A Cuisine without a Community: The Strange Case of Sephardic Cuisine in the US
Ken Albala
This paper examines the theoretical basis for recognizing an established cuisine - a standard repertoire, ingredients, equipment and techniques as a well as a historical legacy. Can a cuisine exist however without a coherent community of practicioners and consumers? The case of Sephardic cuisine will be examined, which has a 2,000 year old history, and is in no danger of disappearing, even though a Sephardic community is difficult to discern in the US today. I will also trace the basic outlines of Sephardic cuisine from the diaspora to the 20th century and its current popularity today as one among many ethnic cuisines, the lesser known Jewish cuisine, if you will, though represented by many cookbooks and with a stable presence. Where, however, are the people who cook this food today? Are they connected in any meaningful way as a community and does this threaten to turn this cuisine into a museum piece, effectively halting its evolution?
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Adventures in Cooking from the Past
Ken Albala
Experiments in historic cooking, including fermentation, curing meat, cheese making, and distillation.
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Grow Food, Cook Food, Share Food: perspectives on eating from the past and a preliminary agenda for the future
Ken Albala
Grow Food, Cook Food, Share Food is a practical food history lesson, an editorial about everything gone wrong with modern food, and a call to arms of the kitchen knife variety. Historian Ken Albala relates his experiences of growing, cooking, and sharing food in ways that people did in the past, ways that we have needlessly lost. He finds lessons in surprising places, including obscure seventeenth century Italian farmer/nobles, ancient statesmen, and quirky cheesemakers from centuries ago. A rare but important variety of historical activism, Grow Food, Cook Food, Share Food uses history to enrich people's lives through a greater awareness and appreciation of what they put in their bodies.
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