For eight years, he skillfully combined traditional elite dining with an anti-monarchical ideology and Virginian sociability in a way that pleased his dinner guests and promoted his own agenda.

Sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation.

What can making now tell us about the past? Or should the past remain untouched? 

Is there anything more ludicrous than the present day barbeque contests in which contestants are prohibited from supplying meat that might be more sapid than those of their fellows?

Is slave food soul food?

As students write and perform toasts, they attempt to speak the (often combative) language of 1790’s politics.

Historians are finally coming to realize that diet, the production of and commerce in foodstuffs, and cookery are not only important but are actually defining characteristics of a nation’s culture.

Of all aspects of food history, recipes are the most difficult to interpret.

Bon appétit!

Isn’t barbecue one of the few foods prepared and enjoyed by all Americans regardless of color?

This breakthrough addition to Whitman’s corpus refocuses his personal, poetic, and political vision while enriching current debates over masculinity, disability, affect, and the medical-industrial complex.

That is not to say that the Web offers no substantive food history sites. Hidden between the layers of fat on the Web are some juicy morsels that serious researchers will find worthwhile.

Europeans embraced tobacco’s healing properties, just as the Aztec did, and the consumption of chocolate in European culture “simultaneously served to fortify social bonds and underscore, or even confer, distinction”

Baics’s primary concern is to understand the benefits and costs of public markets and their deregulation for the living standards and material well-being of all of the city’s inhabitants.

David Shields’s book about Southern foodways contains the seeds of many future conversations.

This book has many virtues. A chronological look at the architectural implications of food preparation and consumption in America from […]

Craving a taste of home—something to break the monotony of bland diets masters sometimes planned for them—African slaves applied knowledge that they possessed to grow some of their own food.

Alcoholic beverages for most people were food, prepared in the same kitchens by the same people who cooked the spoon bread, stirred the porridge, and roasted the meat.

These poems and images are the result of a sort of excavation of my paternal grandmother’s well-worn Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book (copyright 1950, and how!).

Pigeons—like some other breeds of birds—were easy to hunt, indeed, so easy that the hunt couldn’t be sustainable.

  AT ATKA In February at AtkaI stood on the black sandsbelow the trading postand watched my husbandfade up the […]

Enacting Nat Fuller’s Feast at the University of South Carolina

The descendant of Nat Fuller’s mentor reflects on the 2015 Feast.

I set out to make something totally arcane relevant.

In essence, what is taken as the fruit of the fig is its flower.

An open letter from Chef Kevin Mitchell to Chef Nat Fuller.

How does one create memory around an event that has long been lost to history?

A twenty-first century chef invites guests to enter the spirit of Nat Fuller’s 1865 Reconciliation Banquet.

David Shields reflects on the legacy of Nat Fuller in the wake of the attack on the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston.

The contents of the issue fulfill the imperatives of the new Food Studies: to view eating as an agricultural act

An invitation to Common-place readers to create their own events dedicated to reconciliation.

The most significant accomplishment of America’s Founding Food is the truly impressive collection of lively and illuminating primary-source accounts.

Clinton, South Carolina, seems at first blush an unlikely host location for the Nat Fuller Feast.

This roundtable is part of an ongoing series devoted to “First Person” experiences with early American culture.

Unlike the courthouse, church, town hall or other purpose-built public structure, the public market of the first half of the nineteenth century welcomed everyone–the farmer with his cabbages to sell, the housewife in search of dinner, the indigent widow-huckster provisioning her basket, and those with nowhere else to go to find shelter, sociability, a job, or a cheap meal.

When horticulturists began developing varieties of the European roots, their delectability for animals mattered as much as their taste as human food.

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