Food in the Library

Over one hundred rare cookbooks from the Fillin-Yeh collection went up for sale at Swann Auction Galleries this past Monday. The New York Times did a little piece about the auction, which included some pretty important books, including Mrs. Levy and Amelia Simmons, some inscribed 1st edition MFK Fisher, etc.

The auction house website has the catalog kinda hidden, and I can’t link to their dynamically generated ASP stuff, so I made it more accessible. Here is a text only catalog of lots for Sale 2141, Early Printed Books / Gastronomic Literature from April 7, 2008. The print catalog is available for sale on Swann’s site for $35. Above are pictures of a few lots from the sale.

Professor Carl Winter has a webpage of Food Safety Music. My favorite is Clonin’ DNA, a song to the tune of Surfin’ USA by the Beach Boys. A toxicologist with the UC Davis Food Science & Technology Department, Winter rocks out on synths to popular songs, with rewritten lyrics, about food safety. Yes, there’s video. Thank you to Professor Winter and the internet, for blowing my mind.

I put together a collection of songs about food. You can listen to it online at foodinthelibrarydotcom.muxtape.com/
It’s way less interesting and awesome than Professor Winter’s songs. And it’s more Pour Some Sugar on Me than Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy; actually neither of those songs is on there. A friend commented that he hadn’t ever seen Jimmy Buffet and The Smiths on the same playlist before.

Others have created far more extensive and inclusive lists of songs about food. The Food Section compiled a list of one hundred! And Peter Bochan at WBAI put together a whopping 525 song playlist about food. My hat is off to them.

Friday April 4, 3:15 - 4:15
42nd & 5th

What are you doing this Friday? If the answer isn’t “making my way to NYC for an introduction to culinary research in one of the world’s premier libraries”, then I presume that, like me, you’ll be sighing a lot and wistfully gazing at images from Libraries by photographer Candida Höfer, while eating a pastrami sandwich the size of a football.

Librarian Rebecca Federman is teaching the class. Here’s the post about it on her blog, Cooked Books. I think free, public events about food and culinary history from top institutions are a really big deal. Serious popular interest in food has grown with the rise of the Food Network. But that interest hasn’t quite extended to culinary history, and the culinary history community seems to be deliberately at arms length. I look forward to seeing this change.

How was I unaware of this? Check out the events calendar for the Farmers’ Museum in Upstate New York.

Spring Beekeeping A workshop offering an introduction to the fundamentals of beekeping!

Photo: TW Collins

From Udder to Butter?! Start by milking a cow and finish by eating the butter you finished churning! Gah!

Photo : Vicious Bits

They Farmers’ Museum has tons of awesome events like this all year round. Sweet succulent living history! They’ve also got a behind the exhibit scenes lecture series. Makes sense, what with the graduate program museum studies program in town. The lecture series is titled food for thought…when I have a chance, I’ll put something on the blog to count instances of this phrase that I find. (I admit I considered food for thought as a name for this blog.)

Anyway, next time you’re in Cooperstown, enjoy the Farmers’ Museum. And while you’re in town, you might inquire about other area museums. I heard they have one just dedicated to baseball!

**Note, for you readers who want to get your apiary on, but cannot attend the beekeeping workshop, try WC Harbison’s 1860 classic work Bees and Beekeeping. University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman mentioned this ‘bible of beekeeping’ a her speech on the value that full-text digital collections. Michigan’s hard copy was rarely used, but the scanned version in the Making Of America collection gets tons of views. Cool eh?**

Table Manners
March 29 through September 14, 2008
The Arizona Museum for Youth

Table manners is at a museum in Mesa, Arizona. Mesa is Spanish for table. Coincidence? Not Very Likely. The exhibit will be very hands on. Kids will learn to use chopsticks, fold napkins, etc. They’ll use the food pyramid to plan meals and create place settings.

The art on display will include metalwork, ceramic, prints, sculptures and more. Sounds like good family fun. For some reason, though, it makes me think of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Is that weird?

Photo: zzzed

A few weeks ago, I found out about British Photographer Carl Warner and his foodscapes. Those aren’t clouds, they’re cauliflower. Broccoli trees, mountains of bread, and is that polenta paving? Nope, it’s cumin. Warner has fifteen foodscapes on his site, carlwarner.com.

These vivid and fantastic images really struck a chord online, and not just among food bloggers.
Check out the Google Trends Graph Below.
Prior to 2008, he’s nowhere, then in January, the BBC online does a piece on him, digg and technorati pick it up. Cool. I would like to thank my girlfriend’s mother, who goes by the name of RadBarb, for bringing Warner’s culinary craziness to my attention.

So, these images got me thinking about other food imagery that is not primarily commercial, documentary or incidental. I’ll do a whole post on still life images with food at some point, but Carl Warner’s images made me think specifically of 16th century painter Arcimboldo.

Yeah, that guy. I didn’t remember his name either, so I took a trip to the University of Michigan Fine Arts Library and in short order walked away with a couple books on him. Here are the catalog entries for the books; there are several others.

• Arcimboldo the Marvelous, by André Pieyre de Mandiargues
• Arcimboldo, Spring, Federico Zeri, Ed.

Arcimboldo created paintings that are called symbolist, and sometimes pre-surrealist; knockoffs are known as Arcimboldesques. Of about 17 -30 known works, many are composed largely of food. There’s a whole essay…holy crappie. I just found UCSD Professor Peter Moyle’s page of citations of all his publications on fish imagery in art. Naturally this includes an essay on Arcimboldo’s piece, Water, which is part of The Elements series.

Looking at this series, and at The Four Seasons series, it’s interesting how different they are from food porn, which is all about the delicious aesthetic of food. With Arcimboldo, the food isn’t food. I mean, that guy’s symbolism has symbolism. More about that another time.

Film maker Stefan Nadelman used slightly less profound symbolism in what he calls the “viral mini-epic short film about war called Food Fight”. Over 1.75 Million views on YouTube. Some might say Food Fight is in poor taste, given the details he manages to convey through sound effects and the fast foods of the world. But Nadelman’s striking use of food to represent war between nations is not only more graphic than I would have thought possible, but also a more successful representation than I would have thought possible.

The Oceanside Museum of Art will be hosting a Culinary Cinema Series. The Union Tribune says they’ll be featuring menus too.

• May 3: “Big Night”
• Aug. 9: “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman”
• Sept. 27: “Babette’s Feast”
• Dec. 6: “Like Water for Chocolate”

Nice Choices. But for those who can’t make it to California, or won’t feel sated after four feature films, I’ve put together a small list of books about movies about food!

Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study
James R. Keller, 2006

Food in Film: A Culinary Performance of Communication
Jane Ferry, 2003

Food in the Movies
Steve Zimmerman and Ken Weiss, 2005

Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film
Anne Bower, 2004

Reel Meals, Set Meals
Gaye Poole, 1999

I’ve looked at the books by Zimmerman and Bower I don’t really know how the rest are. I just remember browsing the stacks at the Van Pelt library and being amazed that there were multiple books about food movies. I had a vague idea that I might spend a year watching only food movies, but I have not yet made that happen.

Thanks to engineer & photographer Jasper Nance for her high speed image “egg drop”.

This started out as a post about Edith Poston. But the internet kept steering me toward other work people have created with and about eggs. I think Mrs. Poston would have approved.

Mrs. Poston collected eggs for more than 30 years. After her death in 2005, she left over 300 eggs to the Gaston County Museum, near her home in North Carolina. The collection includes eggs from at least three continents. 19th century Bristol glass eggs, ostrich eggs, Russian Fabergé-style eggs, porcelain, metal, and more.

On February 5th, the Gaston County Museum opened the first of three annual exhibits from the Poston egg collection. I spoke with the museum’s curator, Aimee Russell, to learn a bit more about the collection. But I found that I was even more interested in this woman who spent 30 years collecting eggs. I wish I knew more about her. And I wish she had a presence online; she’s a great example of why the internet is great. For any interest, there exists a community of interest. I feel confident that if Mrs. Poston had been online, she’d have found a lot of people that shared her interest in eggs.
Next year’s exhibit will be on the cultural significance of eggs, a subject on which Mrs. Poston lectured. (Ms. Russell is checking on possibly getting me access to the unpublished manuscript from that talk).

Thinking about eggs reminded me of other works about eggs. I thought about Eggs, the poem by Susan Wood I read in high school. Somehow I didn’t remember that it’s a really intense, turbulent poem.

I also thought about One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs, a book published by Alexander Filippini, the chef at Delmonico’s in 1892. I remember seeing this book at the Clements Library. The Schlesinger Library’s copy has been scanned, and it’s available in full text.

One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs By Alexander Filippini
For some primary source material on Delmonico’s, check out menus from the NYPL Buttolph Menu Collection.

And finally, I’d like to mention Hervé This. A mutual friend of science and mine sent a Make Magazine Blog Post on Hervé This entitled the Man Who Unboiled an Egg. I thought I had better mention him in this post too.

That’s about all the thoughts about eggs I can muster. I trust you’re appropriately grateful that I summoned the strength to forgo comments about hatching ideas, things that are eggcellent, etc.

Perhaps you will enjoy the Iron Chef Egg battle, while it’s still up on YouTube.

Update: This event will soon be available on demand at the AADL Streaming Video Collection

I was very glad I went to From the Farm to Your Fork. The panelists represented a fascinating array of backgrounds, the farmer, the chef, the dietitian, the scientist. Their talks were thought provoking and inspiring.
During the Q&A, it became apparent that I was not alone in wanting to be convinced that small-scale, local farms are better for our health, communities, and environment, with effects from local to global and for people of every demographic. Although the audience was literally a Pollan-waving bunch, (you’ll see) there were undoubtedly a lot of university types. (I mean, it’s Ann Arbor, throw a rock hit a post-doc. At one point I wanted to test that hypothesis, but I couldn’t get it through IRB) I think a lot of people who are sympathetic to this cause crave evidence, research, data. Thoughts?

From the Farm to Your Fork – Why Local Food Can Make Us Healthier, Happier and More Secure
Monday February 18, 2008:
7:00 pm to 8:30 pm –
Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

The Ann Arbor District Library is bringing together an incredible panel to discuss eating local.

• Alex Young, Chef at Zingerman’s Roadhouse and 2007 James Beard Foundation Nominee for Best Chef : Great Lakes. (No, that’s not him in the picture. That’s the windy city’s molecular gastronomic golden boy, Grant Achatz. Here, here’s Kitchen Chick’s great piece on Chef Alex Young.
• Professor Catherine Badgley. A biologist, she teaches Food, Land and Society at the University of Michigan and lists agriculture and biodiversity among her chief research interests. I can’t wait to see her, she sounds totally awesome.
• Annie Elder & Paul Bantle, local farmers who run a biodynamic farm, which, i think means that the farm is ethical enough to win the approval of Al Gore, Captain Planet and St. Francis of Assisi.
• Ruth Blackburn, a nutritionist who has been working to educate people about food, health and community as a nutrition specialist for the University of Michigan. Here’s an article she wrote for Cooperative Grocer on the importance of co-op staff knowing nutrition.

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