Calendar of Events

Chopsticks have become a quintessential part of the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean culinary experience across the globe, with more than one fifth of the world's population using them daily to eat. Dr. Wang’s vibrant, original account of the history of chopsticks based on his book, Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History, charts their evolution from… Read More »Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History

TALK DESCRIPTION: Over the centuries, Spanish cuisine has been influenced by foreign invaders, friendly visitors, and her colonial history. In the course of CiCi’s presentation, we will travel 2,000 miles around the country and visit six culinary regions: • Central Spain and Madrid, where roasted meats and tortilla Español predominate. • The Pyrenees, where a… Read More »“Circumnavigating Spain: An Exploration of Her Regional Cuisines”

TALK DESCRIPTION: Mr. Ryan will take us on a journey through the history of White House hospitality that explores presidents’ experience of wine. Early presidents recognized the important function wine played in entertaining at the White House. Some appreciated and enjoyed wine; others considered it merely a ceremonial necessity. Still others campaigned to outlaw wine… Read More »“Wine and the White House”

TALK DESCRIPTION The modern “paleo” diet movement makes many assumptions about what our ancient human ancestors ate. But are these assumptions based on actual evidence? Presenting a variety of lines of evidence for prehistoric human diets including early human, animal, and plant fossils, ancient stone tools, DNA, and living human and chimpanzee diets, Dr. Briana… Read More »The Real Paleo Diet: What Ancient Humans Actually Ate

TALK DESCRIPTION What is bread? Is it cereal or pulse-based? Is it fermented? What microbes raise the dough? These are basic questions that support an in-depth understanding of this culinary invention. My focus is to examine the bread fermentation methods developed around the world that capture microbes other than yeast. Yeast-free risen breads have a… Read More »Yeast-free Breads Rising Around the World

TALK DESCRIPTION At seventeen, when I was living in a semi-cloistered convent in south India, I got my first taste of Christmas. A Hindu by birth, I had spent my whole life until then in the Muslim Middle East and had yet to experience a true Christmas. As a boarder at the convent, I observed… Read More »The Sacred Foods of India

TALK DESCRIPTION Dr. Piñer’s talk explores the Jewish cuisine that originated and developed in Spain. It is a scholarly exploration of Sephardi cuisine that touches on the origins of recipes and their cultural importance as well as on their apparent disappearance as a result of religious persecution. It reveals links to antisemitism throughout history. Her… Read More »A Sephardic Taste of History: How Sephardi and Jews, Food, and Spain Reflect the Culinary Heritage of the Jews of Spain and the Diaspora

TALK DESCRIPTION In the late 1970s and 1980s, archivist and author Susan Tucker compiled and wrote about oral histories of domestic workers and employers of domestic workers in articles as well as a book called Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South. The book has continued to elicit… Read More »Domestic Workers and Their Employers: Reactions to One Book 35 Years Later