• Agenda
• Presentations
• Workshops
• Register Now!

Presentations

Keynote Address
Margaret Visser, food historian and sociologist

Dining as Celebration: Feasts and Festivals in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Sarah Coffin, Curator of 17^th and 18^th-century Decorative Arts, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

Diplomacy, weddings, and other significant events occasioned major dining productions during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, often involving difficult travel for the participants. The spectacle of formal dining and the possibility for cultural cross-fertilization through such events will be the focus of this talk.

"In the New Fashion": Dressing the Table, 1700-1850
Philippa Glanville, Senior Research Fellow, Victoria & Albert Museum; Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths

This lecture addresses etiquette, advertising, the development of mass-production techniques, and industrial competition in the trans-Atlantic culinary culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

On Entremets and Sotelties: The Orchestration of the Meal
Darra Goldstein, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, and Professor of Russian, Williams College

This presentation will explore the development of European feasts, from the ribald gatherings of the Middle Ages to the opulent banquets of the Renaissance. The talk will trace the evolution of place settings and table decorations and look at the progression of courses and the foods that were served. The origin of the term "banquet"–originally a dessert course–will be discussed, along with such issues as seating arrangements for women and men, mealtime entertainment, and the actual service of the meal.

Creating the 21st-century Feast
Rick Ellis, food stylist

Historically, a feast was a meal typified by its richness and abundance, traits that, today, are all too typical of our everyday meals. What then constitutes a twenty-first-century feast? By looking at examples as diverse as a take-out Thanksgiving dinner, a wedding with a sit-down dinner for 350, and a tailgate barbecue, this lecture will examine the extremes to which people go in creating elaborate occasions that can still be called feasts.