Food and Material Culture
Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2013
Mark McWilliams [+–]
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
Table of Contents
Foreword
Plenary Papers
Symposium Papers
California. He has published 27 books and won the 2023 Outstanding Faculty Award at the
university.
formerly taught at the University of Chicago in the Departments of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Linguistics. As a food historian, his research focusses on the Mediterranean and Atlantic World. He is a two-time winner of the Sophie Coe Prize in Food History.
Japan’s ‘intangible’ heritage, including food and other cultural practices and tradition.
Outstanding Teaching at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. His most recent book is
Gastronomic Judaism as Culinary Midrash.