Note: Meetings are usually held on the second Sunday of each month, September through May, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. Currently we are meeting via Zoom, but in-person meetings are held at the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Services Center, 4805 Edgemoor Lane, Bethesda, Maryland, and occasionally at other venues. The meetings are open to anyone. However, certain meetings may require a fee.
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
The Great Gelatin Revival traces the history of aspics, jiggly desserts and jello shots. The author predicts that given the patterns of popularity since the Middle Ages, gelatin is about to come back into fashion. Not kitsch, nor artificially flavored and colored monstrosities of the mid 20th century, but seriously delicious concoctions that will thrill,… Read More »The Great Gelatin Revival
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
The Arabic word “Maghreb” means “land where the sun sets,” a region which includes Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Libya and in ancient times, parts of Spain, Sicily, and Malta. The history of the Mediterranean region of the Maghreb is unique, and the cuisine reflects the influences of the many cultures that conquered or colonized the… Read More »Flavors of the Maghreb & Southern Italy: Recipes from the Land of the Setting Sun
Event information This is a members-only event. You can purchase a reservation below. The reservation can be paid per Paypal or credit card.
Speaker: Jenny Bardwell Mt. Morris, Pennsylvania Salt rising bread is a unique North American bread raised without yeast. The mystery of how it is raised has been only partly clarified. The tradition of salt rising bread began in the Appalachian region of early America, circuit the late 1700’s, where the earliest recipe was found from… Read More »Salt Rising Bread: A Nearly Lost Appalachian Tradition
Speaker: Dr. Mark Benbow Alexandria, Virginia TALK DESCRIPTION Christian Heurich (1842-1945) was not only Washington D.C.’s most successful brewer, but he was also the world’s oldest, with 90 years of experience. He walked across central Europe learning his craft, survived a shipboard cholera epidemic, recovered from malaria, and worked as a roustabout on a Caribbean… Read More »The Nation’s Capital Brewmaster: Christian Heurich and his Brewery
Speaker: Shirley Cherkasky Alexandria, Virginia BIO Shirley Cherkasky is a founding member of CHoW DC. Since 1989 she also has been an active member of the International Commission on Ethnological Food Research. The theme of the 2012 meeting at the University of Lund in Sweden was “Traditional Foods That Are New Again.” Intrigued by the… Read More »Marshmallow Metamorphosis
Speaker: Judith Tschann Redlands, California BIO Judith Tschann is Professor Emerita at the University of Redlands, where she has taught a variety of courses in language and literature, including History of the English Language. She received a Mortarboard Professor of the Year Award and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and has lectured and written for… Read More »What Can We Learn from the Study of Food Words?
BIO Dr. Kelley Fanto Deetz is the Vice President of Collections and Public Engagement at Stratford Hall, the birthplace of Robert E. Lee, and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California Berkeley. She holds a B.A. in Africana Studies and History from The College of William &… Read More »Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine
Speaker: Jim Chevallier North Hollywood, California SUMMARY: "For over a century, the term "medieval food" has not in fact referred to the food of most of the Middle Ages. Rather, by convention, it typically refers to food from a few centuries at the end of a millennium. Why? The standard explanation is that not enough… Read More »Feasting with the Franks: The First French Medieval Food