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Welcome by the chair of the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium Official Symposium Opening by Orla McDonagh, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, TU Dublin Living the DGS Ethos - Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Dr Len Fisher is a scientist, writer and broadcaster whose work shares how scientists think about the problems of everyday life. Author of a number of books, including the 2002 How to dunk a Donut, he has won an Ig Nobel Prize for showing how physics could be used to work out the best way to dunk a biscuit. Len has written and broadcast extensively about the role of science in food, cooking and gastronomy. He was born in Sydney Australia. His father was English but recognised education as a path out of poverty and encouraged his children to be academic. Len originally trained as a physical chemist, working in the area of colloid and surface science, although he has since taken a degree in biology and an MA (with distinction) in philosophy. After nearly two decades working in food research in Australia, with excursions into biomedical science, nano-technology, mining engineering, and philosophy, Len moved to the UK, first in the anatomy department at University College London, and then in the Physics Department at the University of Bristol, where he still holds an honorary position, and which he combined for a while with teaching science communication at the University of the West of England. Len’s link with food and gastronomy originated with his attending the Molecular Gastronomy workshop in Erica, Sicily with Peter Barham where he met Nicholas Kurti, Hervé This, and Heston Blumenthal. Len began attending the Oxford Symposium in the early 2000s where he explained the science behind Fritz Blanc’s service of smoked salmon. He was impressed by the food knowledge of the Oxford symposiasts, half of whom spotted that his jellied Champagne with bubbles intact was actually Cava! He has been a regular contributor over the years and is also a member of the advisory board. He gave the keynote address at the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium 2014 of the them of ‘Cravings / Desire’. Len’s papers and performances have covered varied topics from fat and flavour, musical carrots, to dried Egyptian Mummies. He has contributed to the Sage Encyclopedia of Food Issues and to the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1023/thumbnail.jpg

Carolin Young grew up in Brooklyn, New York, one of two siblings, but using Voltaire’s expression considers herself ‘a citizen of the world’. The family travelled extensively including to China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, where she attended an all-Chinese school. She completed her undergraduate degree in European history at Oberlin College, Ohio, where she partook in a number of ‘study abroad’ programmes (including a time in Oxford), and subsequently studied Decorative Art History in London at Christies, the London auction house, when she was awarded a Royal Society of Arts Diploma. Subsequent to that she presented lectures at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York on the history of dining. Carolin Young grew up in Brooklyn, New York, one of two siblings, but using Voltaire’s expression considers herself ‘a citizen of the world’. The family travelled extensively including to China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, where she attended an all-Chinese school. She completed her undergraduate degree in European history at Oberlin College, Ohio, where she partook in a number of ‘study abroad’ programmes (including a time in Oxford), and subsequently studied Decorative Art History in London at Christies, the London auction house, when she was awarded a Royal Society of Arts Diploma. Subsequent to that she presented lectures at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York on the history of dining. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1018/thumbnail.jpg

For many years, food was seen as too quotidian and belonging to the domestic sphere, and therefore to women, which excluded it from any serious study or consideration in academia. This chapter tracks the evolution of gastronomy and food studies in Ireland. It charts the development of gastronomy as a cultural field, originally in France, to its emergence as an academic discipline with a particular Irish inflection. It details the progress that food history and culinary education have made in Ireland, suggesting that a new liberal / vocational model of culinary education, which commenced in 1999, has helped transform the gastronomic landscape in Ireland. The chapter also discusses the power of the Michelin Guide and its system of consecration within haute cuisine. Up until 2008, there were rarely more than three restaurants in Ireland awarded Michelin stars. In 2020, the Michelin Guide distributed 24 stars between 21 restaurants and awarded Bib Gourmands to a further 27 restaurants on the island of Ireland. This chapter will discuss how gastronomy and food studies in Ireland moved from the dark margins to the spotlight and will discuss some of the key factors pivotal to this transformation.

David Sutton (born 18 October 1950) grew up in Stourbridge, a market town in the West Midlands, moving to Saffron Waldon before his studies and career took him from Leicester to Dublin, Sheffield, Paris, Coventry and Reading, where he now lives. He was awarded his PhD in 1978 from the University of Leicester, where his tutor and mentor was the poet G. S. Fraser. David trained as a librarian at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Sheffield. He worked at the British Library for a period before studying food history under Professor Jean-Louis Flandrin at the Université de Paris Huit Vincennes from 1978 to 1980. After his studies in Paris, David returned to his previous career, and is currently Director of Research Projects, based in the University Library, at the University of Reading. In 1982 David became the senior research officer of the Location Register of English Manuscripts and Letters project. Since 1984, David has been the UK editor of WATCH (Writers Artists and Their Copyright Holders), a joint project between the University of Reading and the University of Texas at Austin. David’s interest in food history has been a constant research pursuit since those years in Paris. Introduced to the Oxford Symposium through his friendship with Paul Levy, he first presented a paper on English Food Proverbs at the 2009 Symposium on Food and Language, becoming a trustee of the Oxford Symposium in 2013, and the Symposium’s Treasurer in 2015. His publications include works on Location Registers of literary manuscripts and a contribution to the Global History of Food series published by Reaktion Books on the history of figs, published in 2014. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1019/thumbnail.jpg

Bee Wilson grew up in Oxford in a family of academics. She studied history as an undergraduate at Cambridge and obtained a Masters in political science from Penn State University. Her interest in the history of ideas and the history of political thought lead her to complete a PhD on French utopian socialism. She came to food from a taste perspective; childhood memories include fighting her sister for the last jam tart and the smell of warm coffee beans at Cardews of Oxford where she accompanied her mother shopping, before heading to the delicatessen followed by the butchers, where she remembers the sight of game birds hanging up. Food was initially more of a hobby while studying for her PhD, but eventually turned into a writing career starting with a weekly column for the political weekly, New Statesman, followed by twelve years writing for the Sunday Telegraph. While at the New Statesman, she was contacted by the renowned British literary agent, Pat Kavanagh, at whose insistence she began to formulate ideas for a book. Kavanagh eventually liked one of Wilson’s pitches, which then went on to become The Hive: the Story of the Honeybee and Us, published in 2005. This was followed by Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee – The Dark History of the Food Cheats in 2008, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, in 2012 and First Bite: How We Learn to Eat in 2016. Wilson first attended the Oxford Symposium in 1998 having heard about it from a friend to whom she had been lamenting the lack of food history writing. To her delight, she discovered a whole community of food history lovers, in particular Alan Davidson with whom she fondly remembers discussing ‘every aspect of food and his Oxford Companion’, as well as Helen Saberi and Fuschia Dunlop. She has been in attendance most years since that first visit and served as Chair of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery from 2015-2017. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1017/thumbnail.jpg

Sami Zubaida, born Baghdad, Iraq in 1937 is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London and has held visiting positions in Cairo, Istanbul, Beirut, Aix-en-Provence, Berkeley CA, Paris and New York. His research interests include Middle East Politics, Religion and Law, Nationalism, Food and Culture. Professor Zubaida has attended all but one of the Oxford Symposiums on Food and Cookery and was first introduced to Alan Davidson and the Oxford cohort by Claudia Roden. In 1992 Sami organised a conference in SOAS on the culinary cultures of the Middle East, the papers were published in book form in1994. He is a regular contributor to the LMEI’s The Middle East in London magazine and has published extensively on the Middle East. Sami attended the two food conferences organised by the Halici family in Turkey, in both Istanbul and in Konya, which was influence by the Oxford Symposium. He is also a Professorial Research Associate of the Food Studies Centre, SOAS and has published widely on food and culinary cultures including 'Drink, meals and social boundaries', in Jakob A. Klein and Anne Murcott (eds), Food Consumption in Global Perspective: Essays in the Anthropology of Food in Honour of Jack Goody (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (ed. with Richard Tapper, Tauris Parke, 2001). Sami also co-authored Food, Politics, and Society: Social Theory and the Modern Food System with Alejandro Colas, Jason Edwards, and Jane Levi (University of California Press, 2018). https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1022/thumbnail.jpg

Jane Levi first heard of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery through a friend’s husband, Joe Roberts, and met Alan Davidson by driving him and his wife Jane to Bath to a book party Joe was organising. They immediately became friends, had many things in common, including an interest in food and computers (pre-internet) and this led her to attend the Symposium for the first time in 1995 (Cooks and other People). Born in Wales, but raised in Scotland near Falkirk by English parents, both scientists, who had lived in Italy, Jane experience good food from an early age. After school in Scotland, she reluctantly studied French and English Literature in Royal Holloway in London, but her real passion was food working in cocktail bars and restaurants. Always good at mathematics, she took an initial positon with Reuters summarising and digitising news for a searchable database for librarians (pre-internet), but this led to employment in the financial sector, translating thick legislation to understandable chunks for the tech industry, going on to write speeches for the chairman of Merrill Lynch for EU and European Central Bank committee meetings, and lucky not to be in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Jane began using her digital skills in assisting Alan Davidson on a number of food history related projects, working alongside people such as Helen Saberi and Anissa Helou. She describes having a double life; one was the day job working in the Stock Exchange, the other as a volunteer food researcher and from 1996 as the organiser of the Oxford Symposium, taking over from Harlan Walker. She took on the task of organising the bibliography of the Oxford Companion to Food for Alan. She was main organiser of the Symposium from 1997 to around 2002. The Symposium moved to Oxford Brookes after Alan Davidson’s death for two years before finding its current home in St. Catz. After Alan’s death, Jane was among a group who set up the Symposium as an educational trust and found it a new home where chef Tim Kelsey and his team, encouraged by Carolin Young, helped transform the food offering. From an educational perspective, Jane enrolled in the Masters in Gastronomy around 2001, offered by Barbara Santich online at the University of Adelaide and found the journey to be enlightening. Her thesis topic was ‘Food in Space’. She was awarded a PhD in 2015 on ‘Food and Utopianism’ from Kings College, London, although it started with the London Consortium. Jane has published a book with Sami Zubaida and co-delivers a course on Food and Politics in Birkbeck, London which she thoroughly enjoys. Jane is currently chair of the Sophie Coe Prize committee. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1024/thumbnail.jpg

Helen Saberi was born and lived in Yorkshire until she was nineteen years old. After secretarial college in Leeds she applied for a post in the Foreign office and moved to London. She was posted first to Warsaw, Poland and then to Kabul, Afghanistan where she stayed until 1980 when she returned to England. In the late 1980s she met Alan Davidson with whom she worked on the Oxford Companion to Food, following which they co-authored ‘Trifles’ which she describes as a lot of fun and the complete opposite to the Companion. She has fond memories of working with Davidson in those early years while keeping tabs on Prospect Books and PPC (Petits Propos Culinaires) and Davidson’s ever-expanding piles of books, papers and files. She has gone on to publish The Road to Vindaloo: Curry Cooks & Curry Books with David Burnett, Cook’s Delight: An Anthology of Food, Fantasy and Indulgence with Madeline Swan, Tea: A Global History and Turmeric: Great Recipes Featuring the Wonder Spice that Fights Inflammation and Protects Again Disease. Helen also edited the proceedings of the 2010 Oxford Symposium Cured, Fermented and Smoked Foods. She first attended the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 1991 at Davidson’s urging that she present a paper on Afghanistan and public eating following the earlier publication of her book Noshe Djan: Afghan Food and Cookery. She remembers meeting people such as Sami Zubaida, Harlan Walker, and Catherine Brown, and describes the importance of the lasting friendships she has made at the Symposium as well as the fun of the pot luck meals when it was held in St Antony’s. Poignantly, she recalls organising the Afghan meal in 2001, the same year that 9/11 took place and how, with her Afghan husband, they arranged for a group of London-based Afghan chefs to travel to Oxford where they created and cooked the meal served. She hasn’t missed a Symposium in twenty-six years and describes the gathering as an annual class reunion with people who have become an important part of her life. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1021/thumbnail.jpg

Food studies and Irish Studies stem from the same ‘studies’ phenomena and share many similarities in their journeys from the margins to becoming established academic disciplines. A common feature of the new academic studies movement, whether French, gender, postcolonial, cinematic, African, Irish or food is their interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary nature. They become more than any one discipline and scholars within these new fields continuously investigate from various angles, often adopting ‘self-reflexivity’ as an approach. Stereotypical postcolonial notions of the drunken or ‘stage Irishman’, or food’s association with the quotidian domestic, and therefore, feminine, led some academics up until relatively recently to dismiss either as worthy of any form of serious study. However, with the advent of the cultural turn in the 1970s, whether you were interested in medicine, literature, poverty or religion, each could be studied by applying either an Irish or a food lens. Moreover, recent research has argued that a food studies lens could be insightful to the field of Irish Studies and that a ‘gastrocritical’ reading of canonical writers such as Seamus Heaney or Maria Edgeworth might prove revelatory. This chapter will compare the journey by Irish Studies and food studies to becoming established disciplines, discussing the key figures, journals, courses, conferences, and encyclopaedias associated with both. It will identify early outliers of food themes within the Irish Studies canon in addition to traditional sources, track the growth of food studies in Ireland, particularly in the last decade, and make suggestions where future Irish Studies scholars might adopt a food studies lens.

Elisabeth Luard was born in London during the war, her father was a pilot and died in the Second World War in 1943, leaving her and her older brother as war orphans. When Elisabeth was six or seven, her mother remarried a diplomat and had two other children. They were posted in Montevideo in Uruguay, and Elisabeth went to school there and learnt Spanish, as well as French which was the language of diplomacy at that time. She also learnt a lot from the maids and cooks and often spent weekends in the homes of the domestic staff. At the age of eleven, she returned to England to attend a boarding school in Worcestershire along with many other diplomat daughters, and then at the age of fifteen, she was sent to the Eastbourne School of Domestic Economy where she received quite a professional training. On leaving, she was sent to Paris for training to a Mademoiselle Anita to become a debutante, but as she was already fluent in French, she spent six months attending the Sorbonne with a friend of her brother, listening to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, when she was meant to be attending a Lycée. By the time she got back to London, Elisabeth was not heading in the general direction of being a debutante. In her own words, ‘I wanted to be Juliet Greco, black panda eyes, long stockings, short skirts and sassy!’ It was 1959, she was 17 and although she went through the season as a debutante, and some of her contemporaries did marry, her mother and family moved to Mexico at the end of the season, and Elisabeth enrolled in Kennington City and Guilds Art School and I took a job at Private Eye (Magazine). She met her husband Nicholas Luard who was running a satirical nightclub with Peter Cooke called ‘The Establishment’ and they married when she was twenty-one and they had four children. Elisabeth moved the family to Spain and was basically self sufficient while the children attended the local school. They then moved to Castlenaudary in the Languedoc around 1978 and Elisabeth began writing a food page for The Field along with a botanical drawing. Around 1980 or 1982 she discovered Petits Propos Culinaires (PPC) and rang on Alan Davidson’s doorbell and he encouraged her to write her book on European Peasant Cookery and allowed her access to his library and introduced her to the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery and to a whole network of like-minded individuals. Her book was published in 1984/5 by Transworld under the Corgi imprint, and the American version of the book brought her on a seven-city tour of the States where she met the Culinary Historians of Boston, including Julia Child, and on the other side of the country, M.F.K. Fisher and a visit to Chez Panisse. In the past forty years, she has never looked back! Elisabeth has served as Chair of the Oxford Symposium from 2017. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1020/thumbnail.jpg

Martinmas, or St Martin’s Day falls on November 11th, sometimes known as Old Halloween. The late Brendan McWilliams (1944-2007), who penned the regular Weather Eye column in The Irish Times, had a wonderful way of marrying folklore, history, literature and science with his principal profession as a meteorologist. In 2006, to coincide with the Feast of St Martin, he wove a tale of Roman legions, Christianity, and the etymology of fine early-morning spiders’ webs – which I had previously associated solely with prophylactics. In 2018, when the second cohort of students on the Masters in Gastronomy and Food Studies at TU Dublin were deciding on themes for their “global in the local” group dining project, one team, inspired by a Swedish student in their group, prepared a meal of spicy blood soup followed by roast goose. This article discusses the food traditions and folklore associated with Martinmas in Ireland.

Irish immigrants have been responsible for the diffusion of Irish food culture and traditions around the world. While Halloween is more associated with America in popular culture today, its rituals, games and food have their origins in ancient Ireland. From the Jack O' Lantern made from pumpkins in America to 'Bubble and Squeak' (a refried version of colcannon in England), both have a link with Samhain, the Irish quarterly festival that morphed into Halloween with the coming of Christianity.

The cookbook is packed full of delicious meal ideas suitable for brunch, lunch, dinnertime and parties, highlighting the versatility of the famous Clonakilty pudding range which is known for its characteristic oaty texture and spicy flavours. This book will provide you with inspiration for new and exciting ways to enjoy Clonakilty pudding. Sit back, enjoy reading and get cooking!

Jill Norman grew up in the Midlands region of England where her father had a market garden and vegetable shops, so she ate well as a child. She studied French and History in Kings College, London, and following some travels, became editorial director in Penguin Books. She looked after the food list initially, working with Claudia Roden, Jane Grigson and Elizabeth David, but by the time she left she was looking after the social sciences, environment, business, and education, the classical part of the classics and the food and drink.During her time at Penguin Books she worked closely with Elizabeth David and is literary trustee of the Elizabeth David Estate UK. Another of her authors was Alan Davidson and she was one of the twenty or so people who attended the first ever Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 1981, and has been a regular contributor and attendee ever since. She commissioned Alan to write the Penguin Companion to Food and sold the hardback rights to Oxford University Press. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1016/thumbnail.jpg

Dining out during the 1980s in Ireland could be summarised gastronomically by prawn cocktails, Chicken Maryland, Black Forest gateau and bottles of Blue Nun or Mateus Rosé. All this changed with the Celtic Tiger when the Irish public was introduced to Caesar salad, tomato and fennel bread, tapenade and Chardonnay. From 1989 to 1993, Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud was like a lone beacon of consistency in the Irish edition of the Michelin Guide. However, in 1994, five Michelin stars were awarded on the island of Ireland. Change was afoot. Many young Irish chefs and waiters emigrated during the 1980s although some, such as Kevin Thornton, Michael Clifford, Ross Lewis, Robbie Millar and Paul Rankin, returned during the late 1980s and early 1990s with knowledge of nouvelle cuisine and fusion cuisine gained in the leading restaurants of London, Paris, New York, California and Canada. They brought a new energy and confidence to the Irish restaurant industry on their return.

Barbara was born in Philadelphia and after a brief study of Freshwater Biology, she studied Art History in Harvard. She married Bob Wheaton, a historian, and they moved to the Netherlands c. 1958 where they lived for over two years and where she discovered a book called La Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange, and started cooking French food. On her return to Cambridge, she got a library ticket for Harvard and started reading the Menagier of Paris treatise on domestic management, which includes a big section on food history, or rather recipes. From here Barbara moved on to Medieval English Cookery books and then German and Italian and had the idea she would write ‘the history of European cookery from the middle ages to the present’. The book she finally published in 1983 was ‘Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789’. She was one of the founding members of the Culinary Historians of Boston. She first attended the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery around 1985 and has been coming nearly every year since. Barbara has always been fascinated with computers and from early days she had been building a database of cookbooks, first on punch cards and now on an elaborate system that she calls ‘the Sifter Project’. This project is based at Harvard University where Barbara is honorary curator of the Arthur Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Barbara has been teaching a course called ‘Reading Historic Cookbooks: A Structured Approach’ for many years in Harvard, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto and Dublin. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1015/thumbnail.jpg

Cathy was born in small town in New Jersey, with Manhattan visible in the distance, a bit like Oz. She had a history major from college but qualified as a lawyer, influenced by the feminist movement of 1970s with women following what had been traditionally seen as male career paths. Cooking was a respite from the law and was a form of antidote, so after five years of contemplating a career change, Cathy signed up for a course in Peter Kump’s New York cooking school where she was particularly influenced by one of the instructors, Katherine Alford, who was smart, clever and sarcastic. Internship for two months followed the sixteen week course, and then Cathy worked for over two years in a place called Industria Superstudio, which was a complex of fashion photography studios that had a captive kitchen, catering for up to 100 covers a day. A period as an executive chef in a catering company followed before landing the ideal job as personal chef to an enormously wealthy man, cooking for six people four days a week for seventeen years with medical and pension rights. During this time, Cathy began teaching part time in Peter Kump’s and gradually started giving classes in food history which proved enormously popular. Cathy was so fascinated doing the research because the one thing she missed about law was the brief writing and crafting a story and a narrative to be persuasive. Here she met Carolin Young, who took on of her classes, and also Andy Smith, who is the person responsible for Cathy’s introduction to the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. Harlan Walker stands out as one of the first and fondest memories Cathy has of early Oxford, but she made good friends over the years (British, European and American). Cathy’s paper on eggs in Roman cookery led her to strike up a friendship with Sally Grainger and Chris Grocock and they gave great assistance reading early chapters of Cathy’s book ‘Cooking in Ancient Civilisations’ (2006: Greenwood Press). Carolin Young introduced Cathy to Barbara Wheaton and eventually she became involved with the American Friends of the Oxford Symposium and from there onto the board of Trustees of the Symposium. She currently acts as programmer for the Oxford Symposium. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1014/thumbnail.jpg

Ken Albala was born in New Jersey to first generation American parents but his grandparents were Sephardic Jews from Turkey and Greece who met in New York. He recalls his grandmother always cooking but his father was in the clothing business. He studied history in Columbia University and did his PhD on Renaissance dietaries which led to his first book, Eating right in the Renaissance. From there, his research interests moved to cookbooks and culinary topics, food and religion, food and art and food and fine dining. He first came to the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery around 1995 when it was in St Antony’s and he soon began to present papers at the Symposium. He has been Professor of History in the University of the Pacific in California since 1994. He became editor of Food Culture Around the World series for Greenwood Press and recruited many of his authors at the Symposium. After five years as books editor with Food, Culture and Society, he became joint editor of the journal with Lisa Heldke. In 2015, he became a trustee of the Oxford Symposium and feels his time involved over the years has been very positive with all the friends and professional connections he has made. Twenty years, and over twenty books, on from Alan Davidson telling him to write a book on aphrodisiacs, he has finally signed a contract with Reaktion Books on same. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1010/thumbnail.jpg

Phil Iddison was born in 1950 and grew up in West Yorkshire. His mother and grandmother were excellent traditional Yorkshire cooks but it was on moving to University that Phil first began cooking. As a Civil Engineer, specialising in highway engineering, Phil travelled the world (UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey, Thailand etc.) with his work experiencing new cuisines, exploding his interest in food, and amassing databases of food related terms in these new countries. While in Thailand, working on an English Thai scientific food glossary, he wrote to Alan Davidson about his book on Laotian river fish which led to a friendship developing and his research being published in PPC and him giving his first paper at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. Phil and his wife Patsy have been regular attendees and speakers at the Symposium for many years and Phil was elected a Trustee and became Treasurer for a number of years where he managed to build up a reserve and set the finances on sounder footing. Patsy was involved in running of the Symposium for around seven years and Phil was among the group who managed the relocation from St. Antony’s to St. Catz (albeit via a short period in Brookes). https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1012/thumbnail.jpg

Some common themes within the history of food and literature include starvation, famine, gluttony, feasting, commensality, hospitality, religion, gender, and class, and indeed food also functions as a complex signifier of national, racial, and cultural identity. Despite the growing international scholarship of food in literature (Bevan 1988; Schofield 1989; Ellmann 1993; Applebaum 2006; Piatti-Farnell 2011; Gilbert and Porter 2015; Boyce and Fitzpatrick 2017; Piatti-Farnell and Lee Brien 2018), until recently, Ireland appeared “as only the smallest of dots on the map of high gastronomy” (Goldstein 2014, xi). Most international collections discuss the canonical Irish writings of James Joyce and of Jonathan Swift, and more recent collections include Seamus Heaney’s poetry (Gilbert and Porter 2015). Much of Joyce’s work is oral in as much that it is more talked about than read, but this article broadens the understanding of orality from the oral tradition to also includes what does or does not enter the mouth.

Ursula Heinzelmann, born the eldest of three children in Berlin in 1963, has always been interested in food and cooking. She apprenticed as a chef in a Berlin Hotel whose restaurant earned a Michelin star and later ran a restaurant on Lake Constance with her first husband also winning a Michelin star for local, regional, seasonal food, which in the 1980s was avant garde. She trained as a Sommelier in Heidelberg in 1992 and later married her love of wine with cheese before focusing her energy on food writing. Moving back to Berlin with her second husband, an English wine writer, Ursula began to write freelance for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and a number of different publications. She published her first book in 2005. Ursula first attended the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 2003 which she describes as a revelation and where she found her “intellectual home”. Winning the Sophie Coe Prize for writing on food history in 2004 and 2006, she has been involved in the Advisory Board, as a Trustee and as the programmer of the Oxford Symposium for many years. She is currently the author of nine books, numerous articles and in 2008 she won the Prix du Champagne Lanson for her wine journalism in Slow Food Magazine, and since 2017 has been acting as director of the Symposium. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1011/thumbnail.jpg