Eating New England: Key Foods of the Commonwealth
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Speaker:
Date: Location: |
Rob Cox, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Saturday, April 30, 2016 at 2 pm Damon Education Center, Historic Northampton, 46 Bridge Street, Northampton, MA |
Corn Products Cook Book, circa 1920
UMass Amherst Special Collections |
Rob Cox will give an illustrated talk Eating New England: Key Foods of the Commonwealth, in which he explores the development of some of New England’s signature foods over the centuries. During four hundred years of European settlement, a distinctive culinary culture developed in New England that makes the most of our region's natural gifts – rocky soil, turbulent water, and forbidding climate. But chowder, cranberries, and a host of pies do more than anchor our tables and fill our stomachs; they are some of our quietest, keenest indicators of changes in our society and long-term shifts in our tastes, values, and aspirations, and a way of thinking about our history and culture. Cox will speak at Historic Northampton on Saturday, April 30th at 2 pm. The talk complements an exhibition currently on view at Historic Northampton: Table Talk: Food, Cooking, and Eating in Northampton Then and Now.
Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie from New England Pie: History Under a Crust by Robert Cox (American Palate, 2015). Photograph by Eliot Wentworth.
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Rob Cox, by his own admission, led a checkered life before becoming head of Special Collections and University Archives at UMass Amherst in 2004. A recovering paleontologist and molecular biologist, he received a PhD in history from Michigan and is responsible for a spate of articles and five books on topics ranging from the American Spiritualist movement to Lewis and Clark to New England culinary history. He is currently at work on the history of 20th-century Spiritualism and the history of sleep. This spring, Cox taught a senior seminar, New England Eats, at Greenfield Community College.
Dougherty's New England Mince Meat
advertising booklet, circa 1895 UMass Amherst Special Collections |
Gilbert's Chowder House, Portland, Maine
from History of Chowder by Jake Walker & Robert Cox (History Press, 2011). Photograph by Eliot Wentworth. |