Reading Historic Cookbooks: A Structured Approach

Reading Historic Cookbooks: A Structured Approach
Sunday, June 6, 2010–Friday, June 11, 2010

Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Harvard University
10 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA
Applications will be accepted through May 14, 2010. A participation fee is required.

The Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University invites applications to the seminar “Reading Historic Cookbooks: A Structured Approach.” Cookbooks are among the best sources we have for the study of food history, but they are complex documents that yield their secrets only to an attentive and systematic reader.

Join scholar, writer, and honorary curator of the library’s culinary collection, Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, for a highly interactive, weeklong seminar in augmenting research skills in culinary history. A maximum of fourteen participants will have the opportunity to work closely with Ms. Wheaton to explore the art of reading cookbooks for meaning.

The seminar will cover such themes as ingredients; the cook’s workplace, techniques, and equipment; meals; cookbooks; and the worlds of the writer, the reader, the cook, and the eater. Participants will examine selections from a number of English and American cookbooks ranging in date from the late fourteenth century to about 1910, as well as auxiliary sources such as inventories, architectural books, and archaeological research. No matter what era or geographic region you specialize in, the critical evaluation tools gained through this course will be relevant.

Participants will have the opportunity to view a selection of rare cookbooks from the Schlesinger Library’s culinary collection, and a public services librarian will introduce the facilities available to researchers. Wireless Internet access is available at the library and participants are encouraged, though not required, to bring laptops.

Wheaton has been conducting culinary history research for more than 40 years and is honorary curator of the culinary collection in the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where there are more than 20,000 books on cookery, foodstuffs, and the history of cooking and eating. Her book Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983) won the Prix Littéraire des Relais Gourmands in 1985. This seminal work has also been published in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Japan.

Wheaton has an AB in art history from Mount Holyoke College and an AM in the same field from Harvard University. Her workshops in reading cookbooks as sources of social history have been attended by food writers, working cooks, historians, and scholars in other fields.

Seminar size: 14 participants

Participation fee: $350. This includes the “Get-acquainted Dinner,” lunches, an introduction to the Schlesinger Library’s extraordinary resources for studying food history, and a variety of original texts, reprints, printouts, and imprints that the instructor will supply for use during the week.
The seminar schedule and application are available on the Schlesinger Library’s website at
http://www.radcliffe.edu/events/calenda ... eaton.aspx
Applications will be accepted through May 14, 2010. Selected applicants will be notified of their acceptance on May 15,
2010.