Food and Material Culture

The thirty-second Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery discussed food and material culture from every possible angle, and from every possible geographical perspective. Scholars assembled from countries around the globe, hailing from the UK, USA, Turkey, Italy, France, Brazil, Japan, Israel, and Germany. The topics of some of the papers are: Aesthetics and politics of the kitchen in fascist Italy; Why kitchen utensils matter; Computer-engineered food; The bamboo tea whisk in Japanese tea culture; Cooking under fire, 1914-1918; Sugar sculpture in Italian court banquets; Mongolian milk spoons; Elite consumption trends in ceramic tableware in Georgian Ireland; Vessels and equipment used by street food vendors of Istanbul; Perfuming the table in old Baghdad; Salt cellars and the origins of etiquette; Utensils in the classical Greek world; The everyday cooking pot of late antique Palestine; Tools and learning the language of cooking; The rise of the picnic hamper; The story of mixers and mixing; Beefy British bovril, plasmon and quality Cadbury's cocoa essence; Towards an anthropology of bimby food processors in Italy.