This year’s Symposium was one of the most successful ever in terms of the quality and range of the talks, the meals, as well as the welcome presence of many new symposiasts, who constituted some 40% of the total. First-timers were identified by green badges, while repeat offenders were identified by more sombre black, or red if they were trustees. This made it very easy to initiate conversations, and conversation is what the symposium is largely about – along, of course, with the papers and the food.

The symposium got off to a flying start with Darina Allen’s (of Ballymaloe Cookery School fame) vivid account of the establishment of a network of farmers’ markets in Ireland, for which she has largely been responsible. Her enthusiasm and drive, together with her bluff responses to the sometimes unthinking demands of the regulatory authorities (e.g. demanding running hot and cold water for hand washing) held the audience breathless (in this case, her common sense answer was for stallholders to bring a thermos of hot water and a bottle of cold water!).

The third plenary lecture, on the fate of leftovers from the royal table in eighteenth-century France, delivered by Janet Beizer with her usual mixture of dry wit and scholarly precision, was a major highlight of the symposium. She showed how leftovers were formed by sellers into “Arlequins” – a patchwork mixture (like the patchwork of a Commedia dell’arte Harlequin costume) that could contain just about anything. With considerable relish she demonstrated just what they could contain, producing from a large cast iron pot fish heads, crab shells, half-eaten tarts, meat bones and a host of other ingredients that went through stages of sale and resale, gradually rotting and getting cheaper, and sometimes even rescued from refuse heaps after the authorities had confiscated and dumped them.

While on the subject of prizes, congratulations must go to Mary Gray, whose talk “Food and the Female Body” drew interesting parallels between the food market and the prostitution market in Fanny Hill, and deservedly won the award for best student presentation. There were interesting connections between this and Janet Beizer’s talk, and also that of Gillian Riley, who gave us a guided tour of pictures featuring food from Southern Italy that had finally found its way to the North, painted by Dutch artists. She always seemed to find something of interest in the background – a bible scene on one side, something rather more lascivious on the other – and her tongue-in-cheek account frequently had the audience in stitches.

Andrew Coe’s talk on the kosher poultry racket in early twentieth-century New York was another that drew wide-spread comment, and held the audience enthralled with its account of how employers and labourers alike used gangsters to get their way and defeat their rivals.

Room D, with its weird (but true to historical original designed by Arne Jacobsen) arrangement of chairs and tables around an empty central area, was frequently filled to capacity, never more so than in the session featuring Doug Duda and Dan Strehl, where there were many more standees than there were sitters. Doug’s was one of the few to ask “why?” in his talk about why markets grow while cooking crashes. He made the particularly valid point, reflected by a few other speakers, that despite the enthusiasm and public approval for farmers’ markets, they still account for less than one percent of food sales, and major supermarkets are having an impact even here, especially in the sale of “organic” foods.

Sounds played a prominent part at several points in this year’s symposium, including spontaneous piano renditions of Débussy in the deserted lecture hall by new symposiast Mark Seiden, and the sound of a trumpet leading a chefs’ procession at the final lunch. In the talks themselves, Ashley Young, recipient of this year’s Cherwell Food History Studentship, gave a fascinating account of the cries of street and market vendors in New Orleans and Baltimore, playing actual recordings and even singing along to the cries of “hooorseraadish, hooorseraadish” and “prah – ah – ah – line, prah –ah – li – ine. Anastasia Edwards’ talk on the cries of London fish sellers followed a similar theme, and even included the libretto of a sixteenth-century work by Orlando Gibbons based entirely on such cries  LINK.

Which was one of the themes in my own presentation with Janet Clarkson, where we acted out the evolution of food markets across the centuries, although our particular emphasis was that the Tragedy of the Commons, where the pursuit of individual ends in a group situation can ultimately lead to disaster, is in fact likely to produce disaster for future food markets, especially in the face of global warming.

Future food markets were the concern of Richard Shepro, who interpreted the present complex long-distance international market as a “giant local market.” Richard’s erudite talk on what freshness now means pointed to the increasing quality of farmed fish, where producers can plan feeding schedules around the expected market (e.g. starving the fish for a fortnight before killing to reduce subsequent spoilage), and box the fish better because their dimensions are predictable. It was slightly alarming, however, to hear of “tuna coffins”, and of fish being transported thousands of miles to market, only to be brought back and sold less than a hundred miles from where they were caught.

Words could not do justice to the wonderful food that was prepared for the symposiasts by visiting chefs Allegra McEvedy (Friday dinner), Karina Baldry and Katrina Kollegaeva (Saturday lunch), Trine Hahnemann (Saturday dinner) and Joseph Pepe Patricio (Sunday lunch), supported by generous sponsors, supporters and facilitators that included Ursula Heinzelmann, who offered the Friday predinner welcome drinks in celebration of her new book on the history of food in Germany. So instead of words, here are some pictures – the menus, the food, the chefs, the sponsors, and the participants – in short: the symposium.

Keelin Tobin

Ashley Young