The Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, September 2001
Report by Barbara Santich
Each year the Oxford Symposium takes a specific topic as its theme – not that
this narrows the range and diversity of the presentations – its focus this year
being The Meal. The grounding of flights in USA resulted in the cancellation
of approximately one-third of papers and a last-minute program re-shuffle but
even so, choosing which of the two concurrent sessions to attend was as difficult
as ever.
In the opening Plenary Session, in lieu of an address on “The Unhappy Meal”
from Andrew Smith, Dr Theodore Zeldin attempted to tease out some preliminary
ideas on the characteristics of the meal. Most of the accounts of “memorable
meals” offered by symposiasts emphasised the event rather than what might have
been eaten, leading Theodore to a tentative conclusion that perhaps the most
important attributes of the meal related to togetherness, sociability and communication.
Some of the subsequent papers, however, challenged the assumption that these
qualities define the meal, although Joy Adapon’s suggestion that eating street
food in Mexico is analogous to conducting an illicit extramarital affair confirmed,
at least in this culture, the link between meal, family and hearth. James Ferguson’s
paper discussed the increasing prevalence and acceptance of “the one-armed meal,”
eaten in solitude, in Europe and America. In Indonesia, where eating street
food is totally acceptable, the cook for the household will prepare and set
out in the morning the various dishes for family members to help themselves
whenever they want; Indonesian family meals are typically associated with special
events, to which friends and neighbours might also be invited. The Middle Eastern
meal is often relatively unsociable and brief, especially if preceded by mezze
(or the equivalent in other Mediterranean countries), since the sociability
and conversation are associated with drink and mezze, not with the meal itself.
According to Sami Zubaida, “the mezze concept is intrinsically coupled with
drink. In practice, a long evening of drink and mezze was concluded with a quick
supper.” Roman funerary meals, often vast quantities of wine plus the favourite
dishes of the deceased, were still intended as meals even though the deceased
would never eat them, much less accompany them with conversation.
Other presentations focused on particular meals in particular cultures, on
changing mealtimes, on table settings and table layouts. Fiona Lucraft, for
example, commented on the apparent extravagance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
dinners served à la française, where many different dishes would be placed
on the table for each service. Her research indicates that many of these dishes
would appear on the table day after day, until the pie, the pudding, the potted
lobsters and the collared eel were finished; the cook did not prepare fourteen
different dishes each day.
In the final plenary session, Theodore Zeldin tried to bring together the many
threads introduced by each of the papers in order to draw some conclusions about
The Meal. But the meal seemed to resist any attempts at categorisation; as soon
as one possible generality was nominated, a dozen exceptions disproved it. The
family is sometimes the unifying force but sometimes the opposite. The commensality
of the shared meal has a positive social value but there are also advantages
to the solitary meal in a top restaurant where the diner’s total devotion to
the food and drink earns the appreciation of the chef.
The Saturday dinner was an Afghan Meal, planned long before the events of September
11 – large circular platters piled high with lamb and rice pilau, spinach pilau,
an unusual dish of sticky white rice with mung beans served with a lamb and
sour plum stew, okra and aubergines and salad; and for dessert, a cardamom-flavoured
milky pudding and pistachio icecream.
The theme for the 2002 Oxford Symposium is Fat, and for 2003 Food and Children.
For information and enquiries contact the organiser, Jane Levi, at foodsymp@banksider.demon.co.uk.
Barbara Santich is a lecturer in the new postgraduate program in gastronomy
at Adelaide University.
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