Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery Oral History Project

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  Interview with Bee Wilson

  Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

  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.

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  Interview with Carolin C. Young

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  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.

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  Interview with David Sutton

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  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.

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  Interview with Elisabeth Luard

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  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.

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  Interview with Helen Saberi

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  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.

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  Interview with Jane Levi: Sopie Coe Prize

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  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.

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  Interview with Len Fisher

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  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.

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  Interview with Sami Zubaida

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  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).

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  Interview with Barbara Ketcham Wheaton

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  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.

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  Interview with Cathy Kaufman

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  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.

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  Interview with Jill Norman

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  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.

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  Interview with Tom Jaine

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  Tom Jaine (born 4 June 1943) is a former restaurateur, a food writer and until 2014 the publisher of Prospect Books. He was educated at Kingswood School (1955–1959) and at Balliol College, Oxford where he studied Modern history (1961–1964). He worked as an archivist from 1964 to 1973 and a restaurateur from 1974 to 1984. Tom’s link with food was influenced by his stepfather George Perry-Smith, an avant-garde self- taught chef/proprietor who ran ‘The Hole in the Wall’ restaurant in Bath. In 1980, while running ‘The Carved Angel’ restaurant in Dartmouth with Joyce Molyneux, Tom contacted Alan Davidson by sending him a self-published book he had written called ‘Fish times 30’ and they became friends. From 1984 to 1988, at the behest of Alan and Theodore Zeldin, Tom organised the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, before handing the reins over to Harlan Walker. From 1989 to 1994 Tom was editor of the annual Good Food Guide, taking over from Drew Smith. From 1993 to 2014 he was the proprietor of Prospect Books, a prize-winning publishing company specialising in food and food history, which he had taken over from Alan Davidson. He has been a regular stalwart in the book room of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery for years but reckons that he has never ever attended a single lecture there. In 2000 he took over the running of Petits Propos Culinaires (PPC), the food history journal that Davidson had also founded and which Tom recalls being introduced to its first issue around 1979 by a wine merchant named Robin Yapp. PPC was a huge influence on Tom, encouraging him to start writing about food. Tom has written four books, and has been a steady contributor to the media, both print and radio. He was Glenfiddich Restaurant Writer of the year in 1994, Glenfiddich Food Broadcaster of the year in 2000, and that same year he was also the winner of the top award: Glenfiddich Trophy for the best Wine and Food Writer of the year. In 2018, he was awarded a fellowship of the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium. He is married to Sally and has four daughters.

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  Interview with Ken Albala

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  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.

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  Interview with Phil Iddison

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  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).

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  Interview with Ursula Heinzelmann

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  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.

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  Interview with Andrew Dalby

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  Andrew Dalby (born 1947 in Liverpool) is an English linguist, translator and historian and author of numerous articles and several books on a wide range of topics including food history, language, and Classical texts. Dalby studied Latin, French and Greek at the Bristol Grammar School and University of Cambridge. Here he also studied Romance languages and linguistics, earning a bachelor's degree in 1970. Dalby worked for fifteen years at Cambridge University Library, eventually specialising in Southern Asia. After his time at Cambridge, Dalby worked in London helping to start the library at Regent's College and on renovating another library at London House (Goodenough College). He also served as Honorary Librarian of the Institute of Linguists, for whose journal The Linguist he writes a regular column. He later did a part-time PhD at Birkbeck College, London in ancient history (in 1987–93), which improved his Latin and Greek. His Dictionary of Languages was published in 1998. Language in Danger, on the extinction of languages and the threatened monolingual future, followed in 2002.

  Meanwhile, he began to work on food history and contributed to Alan Davidson's journal Petits Propos Culinaires; He was eventually one of Davidson's informal helpers on the Oxford Companion to Food. Dalby's first food history book, Siren Feasts, appeared in 1995 and won a Runciman Award; it is also well known in Greece, where it was translated as Seireneia Deipna. At the same time he was working with Sally Grainger on The Classical Cookbook, the first historical cookbook to look beyond Apicius to other ancient Greek and Roman sources in which recipes are found. Dangerous Tastes, on the history of spices, was the Guild of Food Writers Food Book of the Year for 2001. He lives in France with his wife. He has two daughters and his latest book is co-written with his daughter Rachel, who lives in Greece, and is published by Reaktion Books.

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  Interview with Aylin Oney Tan

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  Aylin Öney Tan is one of the leading food writers of Turkey, as well as an award winning architect, with her expertise on conservation of historic monuments. Currently, she writes two weekly columns for leading newspapers of Turkey; centre left daily of the country, Cumhuriyet, and English daily Hürriyet Daily News. Her prime research interest is historical, ethnological and cultural contexts of food; for that purpose she travels worldwide, and attends various symposia on food. Aylin is a regular participant in Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, where she has won the Sophie Coe Award for food history in 2008 with her paper titled “Poppy: Potent yet Frail”. She is also the leader of the Slow Food Ankara Convivium, previously being a jury member of the Slow Food Award from 2000-2003. She contributed to ‘The Encyclopaedia of Food Cultures of the World’ from ABC-CLIO/Greenwood, with the entry on Turkey. Aylin guides and gives consultancy to food writers and media crews on food culture and history of Turkey. Having studied architecture and conservation in Turkey, Italy and the UK, Aylin blends both of her professions at times; such as working as the curator for the Istanbul-Princess Islands City Museum, Culinary Culture Section. She is in the advisory board of publications for MSA, Culinary Arts Academy of Istanbul. Her latest work is the book, A Taste of Sun & Fire: Gaziantep Cookery on the cuisine of south-eastern culinary capital of Turkey. She has recently completed a book on Turkish Cuisine for Reaktion Books in UK.

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  Interview with Claudia Roden

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  Claudia Roden is an award winning cookbook writer and cultural anthropologist based in the United Kingdom. She is co-chair with Paul Levy of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. She was born in 1936 in Cairo, Egypt. After completing her formal education in Paris, she moved to London to study at Saint Martin's School of Art. She began her career as a painter, but soon realised following the Suez Crisis that the Jewish food culture of Egypt was disappearing which led her to begin her study of cuisine. Roden is best known for her Egyptian approach to Jewish food found in A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968) and her magnum opus The Book of Jewish Food—An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to Present Day (1997). Her other works include The Good Food of Italy—Region by Region (1990), Everything Tastes Better Outdoors (1984), Coffee—A Connoisseur’s Companion (1994), Mediterranean Cookery (1992), and The New Book of Middle Eastern Food (2000).

  Claudia’s work has received much critical acclaim including the highly respected James Beard Award for the Best Cookbook (1997), the National Jewish Book Award, six Glenfiddich prizes, most notably the 1992 Food Writer of the Year and the Glenfiddich Trophy. She has also been awarded the two most prestigious food prizes in Italy—The Premio Orio Vergani and the Premio Maria Luigia, Duchessa di Parma, and in 1999, Roden was honoured in the Netherlands with a Prince Claus Award “in recognition of exceptional initiatives and achievements in the field of culture.” Roden’s books are respected for their writing as much as for their recipes. Roden always includes ethnography and history of the kitchen and table, genealogy of recipes, dishes and ingredients. Each recipe also contains the story of how Roden attained it and folk tales surrounding the food, often starting with stories of her own childhood. As she says herself, “every recipe tells a story.”

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  Interview with Harlan Walker

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  Harlan Walker is one of the founding members of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery and edited the proceedings until 2003. He was born in 1924 in Birmingham, England, to an American mother and an English father. He spent some of his childhood in America in Pennsylvania and even went to school there for a short period. He joined the British Army in 1942 and after training was stationed in Italy. After the war, he studied French in Tours for a number of months before starting University in Oxford where he read – Politics, Philosophy and Economics. On graduating, he started work with J&P Coats, a Scottish firm that had a global monopoly on sewing thread, as sales manager. He worked in Naples and America with them. He married and had three children.

  His interest in food came from joining the Buckland Club which was a dining club in Birmingham named after Frank Buckland who was a 19th Century scientist, who had the ambition to eat food of every animal in Britain. The dined twice a year around a different theme and it was when organising a Lao dinner that he got to know Alan Davidson. This led to a long lasting friendship and Harlan has been central to the organising and running of the Oxford Symposium from the outset until the early 2000s.

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  Interview with Harold McGee

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  Harold McGee was born on the East coast of America but grew up in Chicago. He writes about the chemistry of food and cooking. He took up this odd vocation after studies at the California Institute of Technology and at Yale University, where he wrote a doctoral thesis with the prophetic title "Keats and the Progress of Taste." After several years as a literature and writing instructor at Yale, he decided to practice what he'd been teaching, and write a book about the science of everyday life.

  The result was the publication in 1984 of a 680-page compendium, On Food & Cooking: The Science & Lore of the Kitchen. His timing was lucky: America and Britain were awakening to the pleasures of good food and to the diversity of world cuisines, and On Food & Cooking helped satisfy the growing hunger for information about ingredients and techniques.

  Six years after On Food & Cooking, in 1990, Harold published a shorter and more personal book, The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore. It's currently out of print. Then in 2004, after working on it for ten years, he published the second, completely revised and significantly expanded edition of On Food & Cooking, which won several awards. And in 2010, Penguin Press published his practical kitchen handbook Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes.

  Along the way Harold has contributed reviews and original research to the scientific journal Nature, and has written articles for many publications, including The World Book Encyclopedia, The Art of Eating, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, and Physics Today. For five years he contributed a column on science and food, "The Curious Cook," to the New York Times. Harold has taught two-day courses at the French Culinary Institute in New York, and talk about food chemistry at such venues as the Culinary Institute of America and other professional schools, at Madrid Fusion, at universities, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Chemical Society. Since 2010, he has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard University in their course "Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science."

  He is currently working on a book about smells and flavours.

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  Interview with Malcolm Thick

  Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

  Malcolm Thick was born in Blandford, Dorset. An only child, his father was a clerk in a brewery. Malcolm went off to University to Queens in Belfast where he studied Economic History, and then moved to Oxford to study a D. Phil. on Early Modern Market Gardening in England, under the influence and guidance of Joan Thirsk. The doctorate was never completed, however, a summary of it appears in vol. 5 of the Agrarian History of England and Wales and he subsequently wrote a book on Market Gardening around London which also used a big chunk of the research so the research has been used one way or the other.

  Malcolm’s career went sideways for a bit while he took a year out to do a Cert Ed. He taught part time at the Oxford FE College for a couple of years. For almost two years he was a research assistant on volume five of the History of Criminal Law and Penal Policy specialising in 19th century juvenile delinquency. Then he became a tax inspector for something like twenty-seven years. He got early retirement ten years ago and was very pleased to retire and write history again. Malcolm has been a regular attendee and presenter at the Oxford Symposium since 1985 when Jane Grigson asked him to give a plenary paper, apart from the few years when the Symposium was in Headington. His latest research is published in PPC on the raising of rabbits intensively inside the built up area of London between the 16^th and 18^th centuries.

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  Interview with Paul Levy

  Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

  Paul Levy (born 26 February 1941 in Lexington, Kentucky) holds joint US / UK nationality and is an award winning author and journalist. He lives in Oxfordshire with his wife, Penelope Marcus, and has two daughters. Levy attended University of Chicago; University College London; Harvard University; and Nuffield College, Oxford. He was awarded his PhD in 1979. Levy was Food and Wine editor for The Observer from 1980 to 1991 and then Senior Contributor, Culture, The Wall Street Journal (1991-2015). He has contributed widely on food in the media including Gourmet (London Letter) (1990s); Travel + Leisure (1995-2014); wine writer, The Mail on Sunday (1993-2013); New York Times (1980-2012); frequent broadcaster BBC radio and television; Daily Telegraph (2010-); Independent (1990-); Spectator (2015-); New York Review of Books (2016-); TLS (1974-).

  Paul is co-literary executor with Michael Holroyd of Lytton Strachey's estate, trustee of the Strachey Trust, Jane Grigson Trust, and co-chair with Claudia Roden of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. With Ann Barr (and synchronically Gael Greene), he coined the word "foodie". He has won many British and American food writing and journalism prizes, including two commendations in the national British Press Awards, in 1985 and 1987. Paul blogs on culture at www.ArtsJournal.com/plainenglish.

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  Interview with Peter Hertzmann

  Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

  Peter Hertzmann was born in San Francisco and is a self-confessed obsessive. His interest in cooking goes back to the boy scouts at the age of eleven but he seriously started to cook after he graduated from college focussing nearly exclusively on Chinese food. He amassed the largest library of Chinese cookbooks in the English language which is now housed at UC Davis. He worked his way through school as a mechanical engineer getting a degree in photographic sciences and instrumentation (optics and statistics). After graduation he was involved with the mechanical optical design for the interior lighting of the space shuttle. Eventually he got into lasers working for Spectra Physics, the first gas laser company in the mid -70s. Then he got into surgical lasers and in 1982 was one of the three founders of a company called Laserscope which was a surgical laser company. He quickly morphed from being an engineer to developing new procedures, most famously the laparoscopic cholecystectomy which is taking out the gall bladder through the navel. He worked for a while as a consultant, then from 1994-1998, he was Head of the Clinical/Marketing side of a company that was doing an implant for central neural hearing loss. In 1998 he quit that, retired and decided to do what he wanted to do.

  Food wise, essentially from 1974 until 1994 all he cooked was Chinese food. When his son left home he cooked some Japanese food but in 1994 he went to France for the first time and had an epiphany. In 1997 he to spend a week in Sorges, at the Auberge de la Truffe, a restaurant specialising in truffles and foie gras. He later staged under a number of leading French chefs including Louis Outhier. Peter is interested particularly in butchery and knife skills, and in 2007 published ‘Knife Skills Illustrated: A User’s Manual’. Since 1999, his ramblings, thoughts, comments and observations have been available on his blog ‘A la Carte’ (http://www.hertzmann.com/index/index.php). He has been a regular attendee at the Oxford Symposium since 2008 and has modernised the typesetting of the proceedings.

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  Interview with Theodore Zeldin

  Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

  Theodore Zeldin (born 22 August 1933, British Mandate of Palestine), President of the Oxford Muse Foundation, is an English philosopher, sociologist, historian, writer and public speaker. Along with Alan Davidson, he is co-founder of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. Zeldin was born into a Jewish family in Palestine and went to school in Egypt and at Aylesbury Grammar School. He entered Birkbeck College, London when he was 15, graduating in 1951. He then pursued a further undergraduate degree at Christ Church, Oxford, before studying for his DPhil at St Antony's College, Oxford.

  Zeldin was first known as a historian of France but is today probably most famous internationally as the author of An Intimate History of Humanity (1994), a book which probes the personal preoccupations of people in many different civilisations, both in the past and in the present; it illuminates the way emotions, curiosities, relationships and fears have evolved through the centuries, and how they might have evolved differently. Since then he has focused on how work can be made less boring and frustrating, how conversation can be less superficial, and how individuals can be more honest with one another, putting their masks aside. Zeldin's masterpiece is A History of French Passions (originally published as France, 1848–1945 in the Oxford History of Modern Europe), an idiosyncratic work examining the ambitions and frustrations, intellectual and imaginative life, tastes and prejudices of a vast range of people. It is one of these passions, food, which led Zeldin to want to include gastronomy and food as a subject into the normal history syllabus. He successfully argued for Alan Davidson’s fellowship application to St Antony’s from which the Oxford Symposium emerged, and he is very pleased that today gastronomy and food have entered into the subjects that are seriously studied in Universities around the world.