History of the Oxford Symposium

The Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, the annual conference on food history held at St Antony's College Oxford, is co-chaired by Claudia Roden, the much-honoured food writer, whose books on the Middle East, Italy and Jewish cooking are modern classics; and by writer and journalist Paul Levy. It was originally founded and co-chaired by Alan Davidson, pre-eminent food historian and author of The Oxford Companion to Food and Dr Theodore Zeldin, the celebrated social historian of France.

 

The Symposium had its origin in seminars sponsored by Theodore Zeldin and conducted by Alan Davidson at St Antony's College, Oxford, when he was an Alistair Horne Fellow there for the academic year of 1978-79. Zeldin had arranged the fellowship for Davidson, against a background of official scepticism, and even some outright opposition to the idea that Davidson's proposed field of research was a suitable one for Oxford University. During his fellowship Davidson was studying Science in the Kitchen (from an historical perspective). In early 1979, at Zeldin's prompting, a series of three meetings were held.

 

The first seminar on 4 May took as its theme Davidson's fellowship subject, "Food and Cookery: the Impact of Science in the Kitchen". Twenty-one people turned up, representing several disciplines from the history of medicine to mathematics to French literature, to discuss the longstanding connecting of writing on food and medical matters - and why it took so long for any apparent connection to be made between cookery and physics and chemistry.The example of Count Rumford was examined. These very first symposiasts included Elizabeth David, her editor and publisher, Jill Norman, Anne Willan and Mark Cherniavsky of the La Varenne Cookery School in Paris, Paul Levy, Richard Olney and Professor Nicholas Kurti.

 

The second seminar on 11 May was on certain books published in the first half of the 19th century, especially Accum's Culinary Chemistry and the writings of Liebig. Claudia Roden and a few others joined the group for the second meeting. The large third meeting on the 18th May turned into a general discussion of cookery books. Elizabeth David here enunciated one of the principles of food history: that if you have an old recipe book with instructions for a particular dish, you must not conclude that this publication marks its debut as a dish, as it generally takes a generation - a minimum of 25 years - for a dish to get from kitchens to cookery books.

 

Other new participants were Jane Grigson, Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz, Sri and Roger Owen, bookseller Janet Clarke and the first international symposiasts who had come expressly for the seminar, two Dutch scholars and writers, Berthe Meijer and Titia Bodon.

 

The creeping success of the seminars showed that there was a great deal of interest in food history and the history of cookery, with no clearly established outlet for the enthusiasm. The people who shared this interest came from many different fields of study, and with no defined meeting point it could be very difficult to discover who else shared one's own thirst for information on these topics. The demand was so clear that Davidson and Zeldin decided to expand the smaller seminars into symposia, with themselves as co-chairmen. The first full scale Symposium was held in 1981; the next in 1983; since when, at the urging of Zeldin, under whose auspices the first Symposia were treated as University seminars, they have been an annual event.

 

In September 2002 the members decided to put the organization on a firmer footing. Past organisers, including Harlan Walker and Jane Levi had volunteered their skills and time, but the magnitude and onerousness of the task grows every year, and most participants felt it was time to share the burden. First, however, it was necessary to establish a legal entity to operate the bank accounts and so on, and a steering group of volunteers was formed to investigate achieving charitable status for the Symposium.

 

On Sunday January 19, 2003, the deed of trust was signed. Geraldene Holt was the founding Chair of the Trust. The current Chair of the Trust is Carolin Young.

 

Jane Davidson and Theodrore Zeldin are Patrons of the Oxford Symposium Trust.