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Speakers and Topics
Clements Library Curators:
Barbara DeWolfe, Curator of Manuscripts
Brian Dunnigan, Curator of Maps
Clayton Lewis, Curator of Graphics
Don Wilcox, Curator of Books
Culinary Resources at the Clements Library
in manuscripts, maps, graphics and books.
Anne Willan and Mark Cherniavsky
Anne Willan is an internationally respected cooking teacher and writer; founder
of ecole de Cuisine La Varenne in Paris in 1975; author of many cookbooks,
including The
Great Cooks and Their Recipes. Willan and her husband Mark Cherniavsky,
a renowned bibliophile, are currently researching and writing a new culinary
history for the University of California Press, based on their rare book collection,
highlights of which were recently exhibited at COPIA, The American Center for
Wine, Food and the Arts in Napa, California.
European Books Seminal to American Cuisine and Early European Views on American Cooking
Willan and Cherniavsky will explore answers to historic and controversial questions, including: What are the traceable connections between English cookbooks and the American culinary tradition? What did 18th and 19th century travelers have to say about produce and eating in America?
Ari Weinzweig
Ari Weinzweig is one of the founding partners in the Ann Arbor-based Zingerman's Community of Businesses, which includes Zingerman's Delicatessen, Bakehouse, Creamery, Catering, Mail Order and ZingTrain. Weinzweig and his partners have recently opened Zingerman's Roadhouse, a full service restaurant featuring traditional American foods, beers and wines. He is the author of a number of articles and books, including Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating, recently published by Houghton Mifflin.
Almost Lost but Happily Refound: Traditional American Foods at
the Start of the Twenty first Century
A look back at some of the foods that contribute so significantly
to traditional American cooking
including wild rice, grits, artisanal breads and cheeses, heirloom
varieties of produce, and pork from
free ranging herds. In his talk Ari will examine the history behind
these traditional foods, discuss how
they were nearly lost to the industrialization of the 20th century,
and how they have been brought back
to the American table in recent years.
Dan Longone
Dan Longone is Professor Emeritus, Department of Chemistry,
University of Michigan, and founder of Ann Arbor Wine and Food Society, co-founder of The Wine and Food Library and the Longone Culinary Center and Archive, and a national lecturer on the cultural history of wine.
Early American Wine Making: The Nineteenth Century Experience
The earliest accounts of the North American coast describe
with wonderment a profusion of grape vines
and the attendant promise of wine. Reports of wine making
in North America appear in early Spanish,
Dutch, French and English colonial records beginning
with the early sixteenth century.
It is the nineteenth century, however, which fully describes
in literature and lore the early American experience. It
is an absorbing history, even exciting, involving villains
but mainly idealistic heroes, disasters and some success,
opposed camps championing the use of either native or European
varieties
of grapes; but above all, remarkable pioneers, patriots
in their zeal to meet the challenge of producing
wines to match the greatness of the country.
The lecture will describe some significant colonial experiences
and then concentrate on the first hand
accounts of the nineteenth century, tracing the wine
trail from the Atlantic coast to the Ohio and
Missouri valleys then the leap to California.
Darra Goldstein
Darra Goldstein is the founding editor of Gastronomica:
The Journal of Food and Culture; author of several cookbooks, including The Georgian Feast, winner of the IACP Julia Child Award for Best Cookbook of 1993; Series Editor of California Studies in Food and Culture; and Professor of Russian at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass.
American Dining Etiquette: How to Set a Table in the
Gilded Age
Once dining involved more than a communal
bowl or a haunch of meat on
the table, our forebears began to employ implements
beyond a spoon for scooping and a knife for spearing.
Serving utensils were needed to transfer food
from the platter to the individual plate. The fork
evolved from a simple design of two tines for impaling
sweetmeats to
four tines for sweeping up peas. In the nineteenth
century, the newly
fashionable
style of dining--la russe necessitated ever greater
arrays
of tableware, and in the Victorian period eccentric implements
for
fashionable foods proliferated. Ice cream trowels and
saws, buckwheat-cake lifters, terrapin forks, marrow
spoons, grape snips, and
toast servers all found a place on the table.
This lecture
will look at
the wonderful excess of Gilded Age table settings in
America and
ultimately explore
questions of cutlery's underlying civilizing effect:
Do the tools of the table facilitate or encumber eating?
Do they make
us more refined or distance us from our food?
Andy Smith
Andy Smith is Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia
on Food and Drink in America; author of 14 books, including The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture and Cookery; General Editor of the University of Illinois Press’s Food Series; instructor in Culinary History at the New School University.
What is American about American Food and Drink?
The presentation will address the following
questions: Is American food the foods with which Americans celebrate national holidays—turkey, cranberries, pumpkin pie, hot dogs, corn-on-the-cob? Or is it just warmed over British food spiced with dishes from other groups? Perhaps it is
the variety of ethnic foods introduced by continuous waves of immigration
and now popular in bastardized forms—
tacos, pizza, bagels, croissants? Or is American food
the commercial products such as McDonald’s
hamburgers, french fries, potato chips, chocolate bars,
canned soups, frozen vegetables and Coca-Cola?
Historic American Culinary Music:
Joan Morris and William Bolcom
Joan Morris has taught in the Musical Theatre Department of the University of Michigan since 1981.
William Bolcom has taught composition at the University of Michigan since 1973. Since 1973, Bolcom and Morris performances and their many recordings have spanned American popular song from the 1890s to cabaret songs by Bolcom and Weinstein. Bolcom's compositions (symphonies, chamber music, operas, keyboard, vocal and choral music) are widely performed and recorded. His 12 New Etudes for piano received the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Music. In 2003 Morris wrote, produced, codirected, and starred in a musical review, The Police Gazette, based on material housed in the Clements Library. She is currently completing the last chapters of her book on American Popular Song and writing a new entertainment based on the life of Jenny Lind.
The Michigan State University Children's Choir, Mary Alice Stollak, Director
The Michigan State University Children's Choir program began in 1993. In 2002, they performed at the Sixth World Symposium on Choral Music as the official representative of the United States. They have been guest artists and performed with many national orchestras and programs, including the William Bolcom Songs of Innocence and Experience. They have recorded the CDs Songs of Sorrow, Songs of Hope, works with texts written by children caught in the Holocaust and the war in Bosnia; America the Beautiful: Songs of Our Heritage; Reioice!, traditional Christmas music; and, for their 10th Anniversary, Songs From the Heart. Alice Stollak is Founding Director of the Michigan State University Children’s Choir. She was the 2001 recipient of the Maynard Klein Award for Lifetime Achievement and Dedication to the Choral Art.
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