Season’s greetings and all good wishes for the New Year…

…from your friendly neighbourhood blog-hosts, Chair (retired) Elisabeth Luard and Trustee (Meals Co-ordinator) Gamze Ineceli (and btw – please do let us have suggestions/volunteerings for posts).

As the year turns, we’re looking forward with unbridled enthusiasm to gathering together over the Symposium weekend next July to explore Food Rules and Rituals at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.
Registration now open!

Those familiar with the new order of things will know we’ll be continuing thereafter online with daily paper-discussions over the following couple of weeks. Online-only attendees will be happy to hear that – by popular request – we’ll be adding a video or two of the weekend’s kitchen action, by our invited Chefs working wonders alongside Tim Kelsey, Head Chef at St. Catz.

Speaking of wonders, the holiday break is the perfect opportunity to disappear to a quiet corner and polish up at your sparkling paper proposal (500-1000 words – easy) for submission to editor Mark McWilliams by January 31st. Don’t delay – just press ‘send’.

Our online gatherings at the virtual Kitchen Table carry on apace (and incidentally provide the where-with-all to support our all-singing, all-dancing website through the year).  While these live exchanges go unrecorded – what’s said at the Kitchen Table stays there – we post a rough digest of the chatlines to the KT page right here on the website.
Meanwhile make a New Year’s resolution to join one or both of our monthly online freebies: Wiki-editing (beginners welcome) organised through Polly Russell in association with the British Library; or take the chance to shape The Sifter, an ever-expanding database for the analysis of historic cookbooks under the benevolent eye of long-time Symposiast Barbara Wheaton.

Which all goes to prove that once a Symposiast, always a Symposiast!