Welcome to the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Collection Committee Website!

“The Romance of Virginia Ham: History and Production”
with
Sam W. Edwards, III
Owner of Edwards’ Virginia Hams, producer of highly renowned Virginia hams acclaimed by Gourmet magazine

Friday, May 23, 2008, 9:30 a.m.

Edwards' Virginia Hams
11455 Rolfe Highway
Surry, VA

Enjoy learning about Sam Edwards’s Virginia hams and the history of Virginia ham. Tour his Virginia ham processing facility in Surry, Virginia, and see the production techniques used in the creation of Virginia’s wonderful hams. On the evening prior to Mr. Edwards’s talk and tour, savor a dinner at the King’s Arms Tavern and a restful night at the Hospitality House in Colonial Williamsburg. Cross the James River on the ferry that started Mr. Edwards’ grandfather in the Virginia ham business. Sam’s grandmother prepared ham biscuits for the passengers, and so popular were these morsels that the Edwards’ Virginia ham business grew into the business that it is today. Lunch will be at the Surry House in Surry after the talk and tour.

Pre-registration required. Deadline: April 22, 2008.

Lectures for the year:

The Culinary Collection and the Committee

The culinary history collection is also known as the Peacock Harper Culinary Collection. The same people and same systems support both but we've carefully labeled all the original Peacock and Harper donations so you can tell them apart.

A committee governs and advises on all aspects concerning the collections. The participants promote, guide, and preserve the collection to maintain our rich heritage of recipe books and many other aspects of culinary history. The VT Image Base contains over 700 images pertaining to culinary history and the collection.

We also offer a newsletter with  interesting and timely articles, The Virginia Culinary Thymes.

Many Internet sites provide recipes and food information. That's great and we encourage you to visit them, but our goal is different: we support the preservation of a rich culinary history for reference and for scholarly research. With over 2000 books cataloged and archived, we have already achieved much. Please consider donating your books or making another form of support to help us fulfill our vision.

A Dollop of Philosophy

As cooking becomes less and less a home-based activity and as our society moves into new patterns of feeding itself, we believe that the work of the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Committee becomes ever more crucial, to document and preserve material on the culinary trends that shape our world.

Please take a moment to look at our site, check out the links, and examine the opportunities we offer for  people bother here in Virginia and around the world to enjoy one of the best things about daily life--the food we eat.

As Julia Child said so well, "Bon appetit!"

Purpose and Goals of the Peacock-Harper Culinary Collection Committee

Our purpose is to act as an advisory group for the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Collection housed in Virginia Tech's Newman Library and to promote and support interest and research in the history of foods, cuisines, and culinary customs.

We've added some major new acquisitions to the Collection. Our most recent addition is:

AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BESTSELLER IN FRANCE

        Although Menon (flourished 1740-1755) was one of the most
influential master cooks and cookbook authors in eighteenth-century France,
the details of his life are a mystery; even his first name is not known. He
has been called the first to clearly separate "haute cuisine" from "cuisine
bourgeoise." While his SOUPERS DE LA COUR was devoted to food in the grand
manner of Carême, in the work offered Menon wrote for the home cook in a
style clearer than previous French cookbook authors and offered recipes
with techniques and ingredients accessible to more modest homes. His LA
CUISINIERE BOURGEOISE, which first appeared in 1746, became a bestseller
and was published in dozens of editions/printings well into the nineteenth
century. As such, it is credited with spreading the emerging character of
French cooking and extending its practice from the provinces of the wealthy
and aristocratic to middle-class and modest households. In many ways
Menon's cookbook was to eighteenth-century France what Hannah Glasse's
cookbook was to eighteenth-century England. (Comments by antiquarian book dealer Lillian A. Clark)


LA CUISINIERE BOURGEOISE, suivie de l'office, a l'usage de
tous ceux qui se mêlent de dépenses de maisons. Contenant la maniere de
dissféquer, connoítre & servir toutes sortes de viandes. Nouvelle édition,
augmentée de plusieurs ragoûts des plus nouveaux, & de différentes recettes
pour les liqueurs. Paris: Chez les Libraires Associés, 1786. 372 p. 12mo.
Ribbon marker. Full leather; gilt spine; raised bands. Covers worn but not
badly worn; lacking front free endpaper, otherwise a well preserved copy.
Joints and hinges sound, binding tight, text clean.

AND we also added:

"But Cookery did not long remain a simple Science, or a bare Piece of Housewifry or Family Oeconomy, but in the process of Time, when Luxury enter’d the World, it grew to an Art, nay a Trade … THIS art being of universal Use, and in constant Practice, has been ever since upon the Improvement; and we may, I think, with good reason believe, is arrived at its greatest Height and Perfection  … for whatever new, upstart, out-of-the-way Messes some Humorists have invented, such as stuffing a roasted Leg of Mutton with pickled Herring, and the like, are only the Sallies of capricious Appetite, and debauching rather than improving the Art itself.”

Ten Most Wanted Cookbooks

(If you have any of these books and would like to donate them to our collection, please contact us.)

Ma Gastronomie, by Fernand Point

The Dinner Year-book, by Marion Harland

National Cook Book, by Marion Harland

The New England Cook Book, by Marion Harland (co-authored with Mary J. Lincoln and Maria Parloa)

Being an interesting collection of directions to guide in the prepration [sic] of Virginia cooking containing receipts of more than one hundred years ago.  Printed by Whittet & Shepperson, Richmond VA. 1939, by A. Brown and G. Drinker

Cooking of the Old Dominion prior to 18--; being an interesting collection of directions to guide in the prepration [sic] of Virginia cooking; containing receipts of more than one hundred years ago; to which is added, the observations of
publishers whose name follows herewith, Richmond Hotels, Inc., Richmond VA.. 1939, by A. Brown, G. Drinker and Richmond Hotels Inc.

First editions of M.F.K. Fisher's works.

First editions of Elizabeth David's works.

One of the books used to compile the Virginia Cookbooks Bibliography. Image from the Imagebase. Hundreds of pictures and scans related to the Peacock-Harper Culinary Collection can be found in the Imagebase. The Virginia Tech Library's Imagebase is a complete system that archives thousands of photos on a wide range of topics.

Book Review

Submitted by Cynthia D. Bertelsen

Out of Africa: Review of Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa

            Say “African food” and most people visualize a cartoon with two missionaries boiling in a black iron pot in the middle of a jungle clearing. That’s the “Dark Continent” picture, deeply rooted in the West’s persistent attitude of colonialism toward Africa. Or, instead, they “see” stick-thin children sprawled out on their mothers’ laps, listless, flies swarming everywhere.

Africa is more than colonial stereotypes and haunting photographs of endless death.

Fran Osseo-Asare, an American sociologist married to a Ghanaian professor, aims to change how the West visualizes African food. She wants to move from “yuk” to “yum.” With her new book—Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa (Greenwood Press, Food Culture Around the World series, 2005)—the author of A Good Soup Attracts Chairs is well on her way to achieving her goal.

Aimed at a number of different readers—from school-age children to culinary professionals to humanitarian aid personnel to gourmet “foodies” and academics, Osseo-Asare’s book covers an enormous amount of ground in only 158 pages of text. But Africa’s a big place and so is Osseo-Asare’s passion.

“I had several goals in writing the book,” she wrote in a recent e-mail message. One goal is simply to celebrate African food, “to get people excited about African food.” Another is to dispel stereotypes and misinformation about Africa in general and African food in particular.

Much as an African market vendor lays out her wares on the ground for her customers , Osseo-Asare organizes her book into four chapters, each devoted to a specific region of Sub-Saharan Africa.* She lays out detailed information about history, cultural practices, basic ingredients and cooking methods, representative recipes, special holidays, and health-diet interactions. Vivid word pictures dance across the pages, getting her points across as she guides the reader by the hand through each region. For example, of West Africa, she says, “One sees food vendors in the cities or along travel routes selling bread, oranges, bananas, pineapple, coconuts, kola nuts, boiled yams, or steamed cornmeal balls with hot pepper sauce, fried fish, plantain cubes or chips, tiger nuts, bean fritters, deep-fried cookies and doughnuts, meat turnovers, eggs, and chewing gum.”

            Definitely a “yum” image.

After reading that last paragraph, I dropped everything and hightailed it to our local ethnic grocery to snap up some red palm oil and a couple of dried smoked herring to make beefy “Palaver Sauce” (p. 31). After marveling at the incredible combination of subtle flavors in this dish, I realized that dried, smoked fish essentially constitutes West Africa’s version of smoked bacon.

African cooking is regional in nature, just like Italian or Chinese cooking. But most people outside of Africa don’t realize that.

It’s going to take more than one book to crack Western indifference and disdain toward Africa and African food. Fran Osseo-Asare believes that African cooking stays on the back burner in the food media and in Western people’s minds for political and economic reasons. In explaining the difficulty of getting across her message about Africa, Osseo-Asare says, “There’s this giant negative media image and bias about things (black) African. The hugely negative image has permeated almost all areas: Africa is linked in the popular imagination with poverty, disease, malnutrition and starvation, corruption, natural disasters and barbaric leaders and tribal warfare, religious fanaticism, plus oppression of women. This image is closely linked with the lack of political and economic power of most African nations.”

And, as I read this, I realized that she’s right. Most people in the West view Africa as a place where nothing much happens food-wise other than starvation, AIDS, and drought. Her reply caused me to think for days afterwards about the subtle interplay of power and perceptions in food and cooking trends.

Many of the foods eaten happily in the guise of escargots (snails) in France get labeled instead by Westerners in Africa as disgusting. Or take raw fish, as the sushi craze cascades over the food scene. People pay hundreds of dollars for this delicacy, while kitfo (raw minced beef) from Ethiopia seems weird to people who think Italian carpaccio the absolute height of culinary delight. People acquire tastes for certain foods. African foods are no different. Take manioc, a tuber one of the basic staples of African cooking, at least West African cooking. I positively loathed manioc when I first lived in Paraguay as a Peace Corps volunteer. After several months, I couldn’t get enough of it.

Exposure, positive exposure, is key.

Osseo-Asare is not the first author who’s tried to put African cooking and food on the map. Laurens van der Post attempted to bring African cooking alive in Time-Life’s volume about African cooking (1971) and his book, First Catch Your Eland (1978). Then came The Africa News Cookbook in 1986, probably the best African cookbook still in print. I use it constantly in my own kitchen. Dorinda Hafner’s Taste of Africa, published in 1993, conjures up some great-tasting dishes and Jessica Harris, another academic with a taste for African cooking and its study, produced The Africa Cookbook: Tastes of a Continent in 1998. Numerous other authors have trotted out cookbooks on African food, but Osseo-Asare judges these works as either lacking authenticity because the author is a Westerner who spent some time in a small spot in Africa or the author hails from Africa with no other credibility other than being African.

In only two ways could this excellent book be improved. Adding color photographs, especially of the finished dishes made from the recipes included in the book, would help. And affixing a summary chapter would add a polishing touch, thereby elevating the book closer to perfection. (According to Osseo-Asare, the lack of a concluding chapter reflects the series format.)

 “My book is the tip of the proverbial iceberg for work in this area,” says this woman whose infectious passion for her subject leaps off every page.

Read Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cook from it. And discover a whole new world.

*Another book in the series covers North Africa (Food Culture in the Near East, Middle East, and North Africa, by Peter Heine).

Newman Library's detailed page about Peacock-Harper Culinary Collection

To search the Collection itself, click on the following links:

• Search the Virginia Tech card catalog for all items in the "Culinary Collection" (over 1900 titles)
• Search the Virginia Tech card catalog for all items from the original Peacock and Harper Donations (631 titles)
• Search for a specific book using the "Addison" Card Catalog System