Christmas in July (Online)
Taught by Sarah Lohman
Sarah Lohman is a culinary historian and the author of the bestselling books Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods and Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. She focuses on the history of food as a way to access the stories of diverse Americans. Endangered Eating was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by Amazon’s Editors, Food & Wine, and Adam Gopnik on the Milk Street podcast. It was a finalist for the Nach Waxman Prize for Food & Drink Scholarship and winner of the Ohioana Library Book Prize for Nonfiction. Lohman’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and NPR. Lohman has lectured across the country, from the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, DC to The Culinary Historians of Southern California
Join food historian Sarah Lohman to learn about the American food traditions of Christmas and New Years. We'll talk about how Christmas was once a rowdy holiday for heathens. We'll learn about the New Amsterdam origins of Christmas foods and the very New York origins of the modern Santa Claus. You'll find out just how many Victorian holiday games and food involved actual fire, and how New Year's Day in NYC was a thinly veiled bar crawl. And of course we'll talk about all the symbolic feasting and sweets from Plum Pudding to New Years Cakes.
