Historic Gastronomy

image courtesy Sarah Lohman
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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

 

 

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In this course, we will explore the day-to-day cooking of the past 200 years: tasting; talking; and extracting inspiration from the past to inspire contemporary cooking. In this three-part course, you'll become familiar with the popular flavors and recipes of different eras, then learn how to interpret historic and vintage recipes for a modern day kitchen.

Part 1: A Timeline of Taste

A Timeline of Taste will explore the history of American food through flavor: we'll travel from 1796-1950, making a pit stop every 50 years to explore the tastes of a particular time. You'll be allowed to smell and sample the spices, fruits, extracts, and other ingredients that defined the flavors of different time periods. From rosewater to vanilla; nutmeg to cinnamon; citron to reddi-whip, we'll discuss why each of these flavors were popular and how they were used in day to day cooking.

Part 2: Iconic Dishes

What was being cooked in the kitchens of American can reflect the politics and popular culture of an era. Looking at the past 200 years, we'll explore iconic recipes from each time and discuss why each was popular: including the legends behind them and the technology that made them possible. We'll taste each of these recipes and talk about what they represented to families, communities and culture.

Part 3: Re-writing Recipes

In our final session, participants are invited to bring in their own vintage cookbooks and handwritten recipe cards from the past as we learn how to interpret historic recipes. We'll unveil tricks to modernize these recipes for today's kitchen: how to interpret amounts, flesh out directions, find comparable ingredients and most importantly, learn how to pull inspiration from these recipes to create unique contemporary dishes.

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