Food and the Book: 1300 – 1800 Friday, October 2, 2020 – Monday, October 12, 2020 Digital Conference Organized by David B. Goldstein, Allen James Grieco, and Sarah Peters Kernan Co-sponsored by the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library and Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, a Mellon Foundation initiative in collaborative research at the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library Biographies Friday, October 2, 2020 12-1 pm CDT Public Program: Cooking By the Book: A Conversation with Chefs and Authors Moderator: David B. Goldstein (York University and Folger Shakespeare Library) Tamar E. Adler – Tamar Adler is the author of Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revived and An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace. Tamar worked as an editor at Harper’s Magazine from 2001 through 2004. Having cooked at Prune restaurant one summer, after leaving Harper’s, Tamar worked as a personal chef, wrote, and did research for Dan Barber of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns. In 2005 Tamar moved to Athens, Georgia, to help friends open Farm 255, where she was the head-chef until leaving for California in 2007. She was hired at Chez Panisse a few weeks after arriving and spent a year and a half cooking there, also co-founding and directing the second meat CSA in the country, and leading Slow Food Berkeley. In 2009, Tamar left Chez Panisse to write An Everlasting Meal. Tamar had a column in the New York Times Magazine for a year and a half. She is now a contributing editor at Vogue Magazine. Tamar’s work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Leader, Mother Jones, Salon.com, Fine Cooking, Gilt Taste, the New Yorker.com, the New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, the Art of Eating, and other publications. Irina Dumitrescu – Irina Dumitrescu is professor of medieval English literature by day and essayist by night. She has written about food and culture for the New York Times, Atlantic, Times Literary Supplement, Serious Eats, Petits Propos Culinaires, Yale Review, Southwest Review, and Politico Europe. Her work has been nominated for the James Beard Foundation’s MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award and reprinted in Best American Essays 2016, Best Food Writing 2017, and Jay McInerney’s Wine Reads: A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing. She also teaches a course on food and eating in medieval literature at the University of Bonn. Paul Fehribach – Born and raised in the rolling, forested hills of Southern Indiana, Paul Fehribach calls the small town of Jasper home and vividly recalls ample time as a youngster spent on family farms, exploring the wonders of kitchen gardens, and wandering the woods hunting and fishing. Years later, upon opening Big Jones, these early experiences would shape Fehribach’s approach to the Southern culinary cannon, taking things beyond superficial farm-to-table proclamations while seeking deeper meaning in the history and heritage behind the Southern table. Applying his passions for history and social science to cooking, Fehribach believes that only by grounding a cuisine in the richness of its history can one look forward with a trained eye into the future. Resulting is an obsession with heritage and heirloom crops and livestock breeds, traditional farming methods, and culinary history. Fehribach studied trombone and education at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana before deciding to pursue restaurants as a career, a notion he first conjured up as a young boy. After learning to cook eggs on 1,000-cover breakfast shifts at Denny’s during college, Fehribach moved into the kitchen at Chapman’s Restaurant, and within two years found himself Executive Chef at age 24, a position he held for three years before helping Richard Satnick open the legendary Laughing Planet Café on Kirkwood, one of the first organic and local foods-focused fast food restaurants in the country. From there, Fehribach’s career took an unconventional turn. He moved to Chicago and moved into front of house work in order to “pay the bills and save some money” as he put it, logging five years at both Hi Ricky Asia Noodle Shop and Schubas Tavern. By 2007, it was time to strike out on his own, and Big Jones opened in 1 April 2008. Big Jones’ presence was soon felt as it was named “Best New Restaurant” by Chicago Magazine in 2009, and received three stars from the Chicago Tribune’s Phil Vettel in 2011. Big Jones continues to make headlines as one of OpenTable’s best brunch restaurants in America, Bon Appetit’s best fried chicken north of the Mason-Dixon, and many other honors. Most recently Fehribach has been honored as a nominee for the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef: Great Lakes in 2013, 2014, and 2015. Fehribach published the Big Jones Cookbook on University of Chicago Press in May 2015 to great celebration in Chicago. Fehribach has been featured regularly on WGN’s nationally-syndicated Lunch Break, and has appeared on WBEZ, WGN Radio, ABC-7 Chicago, and WTTS Chicago Tonight. His recipes have been published in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-times, Plate, Traditional Home, Edible Chicago, the Chicago Reader, TastingTable, and Chicago Magazine. Paul Fehribach is a proud member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, James Beard Foundation, Seed Savers Exchange, serves on the boards of Chefs Collaborative and Edna Lewis Foundation, and volunteers with Cooking Up Change, the Green City Market, Share Our Strength, and Purple Asparagus. In his spare time he’s a fitness enthusiast and avid vinyl record collector, specializing in Cuban, Brazilian, and African popular music of the 1940’s-1970’s, and the New York Spanish Harlem scene of the 1950’s-1970’s in addition to Southern and Chicago soul. Michael Twitty – Afroculinaria is a food blog authored by Michael W. Twitty, (Twitter: @Koshersoul /Instagram:@thecookinggene/Michael W. Twitty on Facebook), a food writer, independent scholar, culinary historian, and historical interpreter personally charged with preparing, preserving and promoting African American foodways and its parent traditions in Africa and her Diaspora and its legacy in the food culture of the American South. Michael is a Judaic studies teacher from the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area and his interests include food culture, food history, Jewish cultural issues, African American history and cultural politics. Afroculinaria highlights and addresses food’s critical role in the development and definition of African American civilization and the politics of consumption and cultural ownership that surround it. Michael’s work is a braid of two distinct brands: the Antebellum Chef and Kosher/Soul. Antebellum Chef represents the vast number of unknown Black cooks across the Americas that were essential in the creation of the creole cuisines of Atlantic world. The reconstruction and revival of traditional African American foodways means seed keeping, growing heirlooms and heritage crops, raising heritage breeds and sustainably gathering and maintaining wild flora and fauna that our ancestors relied upon. The responsible exploration of the Southern food heritage demands that the cooks of colonial, federal era and antebellum kitchens and enslaved people’s cabins be honored for their unique role in giving the Southland her mother cuisine. It is important that we not only honor the Ancestors but provide a lifeline to contemporary communities and people of color looking for a better life in the new economy, a way out of the health and chronic illness crisis, and a way to reduce the vast food deserts that plague many of our communities. To honor the food past and provide for the food future is what Michael calls, “culinary justice.” Kosher/Soul is the brand that deals with what Michael has termed “identity cooking.” Identity cooking isn’t about fusion; rather it’s how we construct complex identities and then express them through how we eat. Very few people in the modern West eat one cuisine or live within one culinary construct. Being Kosher/Soul is about melding the histories, tastes, flavors, and Diasporic wisdom of being Black and being Jewish. Both cultures express many of their cultural and spiritual values through the plate and Kosher/Soul is about that ongoing journey. The Cooking Gene is Michael’s personal mission to document the connection between food history and family history from Africa to America, from slavery to freedom. Begun in 2011, the project successfully garnered funding and significant media attention in 2012 to initiate a journey known as The Southern Discomfort Tour. The project and tour continue as Michael visits sites of cultural memory, does presentations on his journey, and visits places critical to his family history while conducting genealogical and genetic research to discover his roots and food heritage. Michael believes that Terroir is in Your Genes. Food is also extremely culturally connected and inherently economic and political. It is a proving ground for racial reconciliation and healing and dialogue. The Cooking Gene seeks to connect the whole of the Southern food family–with cousins near and far–by drawing all of us into the story of how we got here and where we are going. 1:15-1:30 pm CDT Opening Remarks Sarah Peters Kernan – Sarah Peters Kernan is a Scholar-in-Residence at the Newberry Library. She holds a PhD in medieval history from The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on cookbooks and culinary activity in medieval and early modern England. She is working on her first monograph, Creating Cookbooks: Networks of Recipe Readers and Writers in England, 1300–1700. Sarah is an editor of The Recipes Project and a Corresponding Member of the journal Food & History.