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Edible History with Victoria Flexner
31 Plays6 days ago
In this episode, Sarah Kernan talks to Victoria Flexner, food historian and founder of the historical dining collective, Edible History. She is the author of A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes, published by Rizzoli in 2023. Through these projects and her Substack newsletter, Victoria expertly communicates history through food. Follow Victoria Flexner on Substack and Instagram for updates.
Show notes, links, and transcript available on The Recipes Project.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:08
Speaker
This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I'm your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.
Season 2 Theme: 'Making'
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to Season 2, Dedicated to Making. In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them.
00:00:38
Speaker
For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting.
Meet Victoria Flexner
00:00:48
Speaker
However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.
00:01:02
Speaker
Today I'm speaking to Victoria Flexner, food historian and founder of the Historical Dining Collective, Edible History. Along with Jay Reifel, she is the author of ah History of the World and 10 Dinners, 2000 Years, 100 Recipes, published by Rizzoli in 2023.
00:01:21
Speaker
You can also read her work in her Edible History Substack newsletter. And I'm so excited to speak to Victoria today about her extensive experience recreating historic recipes and communicating history through food.
00:01:34
Speaker
Victoria, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
The Birth of Edible History
00:01:41
Speaker
Before you published A History of the World in 10 Dinners, you founded Edible History in 2014 as a way to share history through food and dining experiences.
00:01:53
Speaker
Could you talk briefly about the Supper Club events Edible History hosted for several years and how that eventually led to your book? Absolutely. I studied history as an undergrad and then um also did obviously my postgrad in history as well.
00:02:09
Speaker
But I'd also worked in restaurants for many years. And so Edible History as the Supper Club was kind of a natural evolution of my work in those two spaces. um And it began um as sort of a small little indie supper club in Bushwick and Williamsburg.
00:02:29
Speaker
um around 2014 and kind of quietly grew into, you know, still kind of like a local separate club, but we had a nice loyal following of people. it was an interesting mix of,
00:02:45
Speaker
foodies, people who are really interested in history. um And yeah, we would host these dinners in different kind of pop-up spaces um around Brooklyn.
Historical Dinners Experience
00:02:58
Speaker
Each dinner was rooted in a specific time period. So like Tudor England and all the dishes served that night would be from um period cookbooks and manuscripts from Tudor England.
00:03:12
Speaker
And so then as each course would come out to diners, I would tell everyone about the dish itself, you know, where it came from, but then also use it as sort of like a window into kind of broader historical themes of the period. So the idea was always to use the food as just kind of a lens through which to approach the entire time period and kind of bring people in through the the flavors and the smells and things.
00:03:40
Speaker
and then kind of get them hooked into the into the moment. Yeah. Absolutely. How did that eventually lead to the creation of the
Shift to Cookbook Writing
00:03:49
Speaker
cookbook? Was that a goal initially or um just a product of the process over time?
00:03:57
Speaker
It was kind of a bit of both. Through a long series of events as as these things kind of often happen, Someone came to a supper club who introduced me to someone who worked in publishing. And eventually I began working with my agent.
00:04:13
Speaker
um And the idea for a book was was sort of always there in the background, but the supper club was kind of operating full force at the time. um We were doing a residency at the Museum of Food and Drink, MOFAD, when it was back in Williamsburg. And um and so it was one of those things that kind of just kept getting pushed down the road. It's like, oh, when we have a bit more time, we'll we'll put some kind of a book proposal together. And then the pandemic hit and...
00:04:42
Speaker
You had time. was a lot of time. Do things like write a book proposal, which is exactly what I did. It was acquired by Rizzoli.
00:04:53
Speaker
um and And yeah, I guess. And then that became the book. So it was sort of a, I think Edible History, The Supper Club really pivoted into sort of the written format during the pandemic. Interestingly, that was like the pandemic pivot for for edible history.
Post-Pandemic Challenges
00:05:12
Speaker
Does edible history exist as a supper club anymore? lives on in in my sub stack. um which is kind of musings and individual histories of foods and beverages.
00:05:27
Speaker
um And it lives on in the book. But I think the Supper Club, it existed in like a really unique time and space also within kind of the food scene in New York. You know, it's it's interesting post-pandemic Everything is more expensive, which is so legitimate, but also it kind of changes the ways in which you can do ah fun, affordable pop-up dinner.
00:05:55
Speaker
And I think that we have like a ah wonderful supper club that we can kind of like put our... you know hang the hat up on or whatever the like saying is. um We did amazing events for almost a decade.
00:06:09
Speaker
And that feels like a really wonderful run for the supper club wing of the whole
Diner Reactions and Engagement
00:06:15
Speaker
thing. Before I start asking you a lot of questions about the book, I i do have one follow-up question about um the supper club events, just because ah encountering historic recipes out in modern dining experiences is is not very common. There's only a handful of restaurants you can go to, for example, that serve um historically inspired ah recipes or dishes um on a regular basis.
00:06:43
Speaker
And so I'm wondering, what was the response that you got from diners who attended the event? Was it a little bit of shock and awe, or were they just more engaged in in history after the experience? Did they think the food was just incredibly weird and off the wall?
00:07:01
Speaker
What did they think? It was a wonderful range of reactions, and it kind of depended on the diner. you know If it was like someone who was at the 10th century Baghdad dinner because they love reading about 10th century Baghdad in their spare time.
00:07:17
Speaker
They're probably there more for a bit of like the history chat, but some of my favorite diners were always like the friends and family members who kind of got dragged along by their foodie or history loving loved ones.
00:07:34
Speaker
and hill who would be um kind of ah ah a bit shocked at first, maybe a little intimidated, ah maybe not super enjoying some of the flavors. But I think after, you know, maybe like a dish or two when they...
00:07:51
Speaker
would understand that this isn't going to be like a typical tasting menu that you would get at a restaurant and, and the conversation is is kind of flowing about the period. You would, you would see them sort of almost start to like settle into the time period and, and,
00:08:07
Speaker
And it was it was really amazing. I mean, once when we did a Tudor England meal in Bushwick, um this young guy came with ah like a a friend of his and he was horrified when we brought out the cock and thrice, which was one of Henry VIII's favorite dishes, which is the front end of a pig, so to the back end of a partridge. and He was like kind of hiding behind his friend and, and like, and that's great because you know what? He probably won't forget the cock and thrice like that. Exactly. Forever.
00:08:41
Speaker
And, and it also, I'm sure we'll, we'll probably talk about this more, but one of the most magical things about recreating historical recipes is that you get to be in the same place where just for a moment as someone who lived so long before you.
00:09:00
Speaker
And that shock and awe that, you know, that guy was having in reaction to the cock and thrice is perhaps the same that someone else at Henry VIII's court centuries ago also experienced when they saw the cock and thrice being wheeled out of the kitchen. And that's so cool to just witness and be heard of.
Exploring 'A History of the World in 10 Dinners'
00:09:23
Speaker
For listeners who haven't had a chance to read a History of the World in 10 Dinners yet or even look at it, um I just want to describe it for a moment. um it It is both a cookbook of historic recipes and an incredibly well-researched deep dive into specific moments and places in global history.
00:09:43
Speaker
And it's also ah visually stunning book. um The design and the layout are are so thoughtful. The food styling and the photography are beautiful. They bring each chapter and dinner party to life.
00:09:57
Speaker
And it really makes you want to just start cooking the dishes um that are in the book. It covers a very wide range of historical periods and places. And notably, many of the dinners and the recipes are from non-Western culinary traditions.
00:10:14
Speaker
So ah to get started with talking about the book, how did you decide exactly what to include, the themes and the chapters, as well as even the specific recipes?
00:10:26
Speaker
We set out a large project for ourselves. I remember mood a few months after signing the book deal, um i I was visiting my my godfather at a at his beach house and I was walking down the beach and I just started crying because I realized like the, the magnitude of the project that I just sort of like signed all this paperwork to do. an idiot Why did I decide to do this?
00:10:54
Speaker
Why not just like one place or one time period? um It was tricky to kind of take the entire globe and then distill it down. it's like, okay, we're gonna, we're, we're doing 10 time periods in places.
00:11:07
Speaker
one of the rules that ah was sort of self-imposed, but I felt like was important was um I didn't want to include any um recipes from any place that we didn't like have recipes from So one could start in ancient Sumeria because there are cuneiform tablets um that still exist to this day with recipes for bread and beer.
00:11:34
Speaker
But I felt like you kind of want a whole cookbook from a time period or a larger collection of recipes to work from that give a fuller experience.
00:11:46
Speaker
image of of what that culture and that place was like, because we are going to use these recipes as the windows into sort of doing a little kind of mini history of each place. So if we're only going to cover places that ah kind of large culinary repertoire still exists from that that kind of cuts it down um a large amount.
00:12:11
Speaker
And the oldest cookbook that we know of um in human history is um a cookbook from ancient Rome that was compiled in the first century AD by a man named Apicius.
00:12:27
Speaker
um And so this ancient Roman cookbook felt like a place to start and it's yes, perhaps a little problematic to start with ancient Rome is like beginning of history.
00:12:41
Speaker
um i hope that I did a good job of acknowledging in the text that um Just because we're beginning with ancient Rome doesn't mean that that is the start, quote unquote, of history, um because it often is in kind of more like textbook Western history, which is problematic as we sort of revisit the historical narrative writ large from a 2025 post-colonial perspective.
00:13:10
Speaker
um And then once we sort of had the start point, I knew that the end point was going to be New York City in the 19th century because I did not want to include a time period that someone was still alive from because then you're competing with memory and that you're never going to win. It's challenging.
00:13:30
Speaker
Yeah. like That's not how my grandma made it. Or like I actually remember that, you know, I used to, my mom used to do it this way. Anyway, ending in the 19th century with New York and the birth of the restaurant, which felt like perhaps after the writing of the first cookbook in ancient Rome, the birth of the restaurant about 2000 years ah later is in New York, is perhaps like another really pivotal moment in global food history. So that felt like a neat place.
00:14:01
Speaker
to wrap it up. And then it was about trying to strike a nice balance between the Eurasian continent and the Americas, ah trying to be reflective of pre-Columbian American history, while also not working with a lot of written sources and also trying to include some African history, again, not working with a lot of written sources.
00:14:29
Speaker
There
Global Culinary Traditions
00:14:30
Speaker
was ah quite a few cookbooks and manuscripts to choose from, from medieval Europe. There's about 140 culinary manuscripts from medieval Europe that still exist.
00:14:41
Speaker
um either in libraries physically or kind of digitized versions. um So that was easy. It was almost like an embarrassment of riches and one had to kind cut down. Okay, we've already done, you know, France.
00:14:53
Speaker
But Asia and the Middle East, also a fair amount of sources to work with. So that was just kind of juggling What recipes fit in with the other ones? You know, i chose Spain, Muslim ruled Spain, Al-Andalus, because that felt like a nice way to touch on European history, but also is Islamic history within Europe, which is not a subject people know a lot about.
00:15:22
Speaker
For the African continent, it would have been amazing to do something from Timbuktu. from the empire of Mali. Unfortunately, all those sources were destroyed um by Al-Qaeda in 2010s or so.
00:15:36
Speaker
um So that knocked that out. And then it felt like we'd already done, you know, perhaps a ah good amount of sort of places near Egypt. So didn't include Egypt, but yeah, it was just kind of an interest. It was sort of like putting a patchwork together of of different places.
00:15:54
Speaker
um But hopefully the the kind of end result is that as you move through the cookbook from ancient Rome through the Middle East back to Europe, and then kind of into the Americas, into Africa, back into Europe for a moment, and then end in New York, you feel like you've seen a lot of parts of the world in some of their most impactful moments and sort of follow the journey of culinary styles and ingredients. So you're also following the kind of food itself around the world. And it's
00:16:27
Speaker
Only a history of the world, not the history of the world. Hopefully protect ourselves a little. How many of these chapters, which are are basically organized as dinner parties, essentially, if that's fair to say, um how many of these did you...
00:16:47
Speaker
do as as supper club events? I know that there's at least a couple, like the Tudor England, which you had done at least some of the recipes from events.
00:16:57
Speaker
i Are a lot of these taken directly from your experiences with the events or was a lot of it brand new? Yeah, a lot of them are. Actually, i think Ethiopia and Al-Andalus might have been the only ones that were, and Versailles, weren't done as supper clubs prior to the cookbook coming out.
00:17:19
Speaker
So we had, I mean, we'd been doing the supper club for ah number of years. So we had covered a good amount of, you know, space and time and geography. But But which was also really helpful in in putting it together because we'd seen firsthand people's reactions to different dishes and narratives. And, you know, you're sort of evaluating like which stories are people really resonating with, but also simultaneously which dishes are speaking to people, which is so hard to kind of determine sometimes because even if it speaks to you, it might not...
00:17:56
Speaker
really resonate with someone else. I mean, it's so it's so subjective in that sense. Yeah. Yeah. So when you're putting together these recipes, how are you balancing what is said in the actual recipes, in the original cookbooks, the original texts,
00:18:15
Speaker
and balancing that with ah the modern kitchen setting, modern expectations of cookbook readers today. ah how How do you accommodate all that? And how does that affect the final product that you're putting out?
00:18:31
Speaker
Yeah, well, the original recipes are pretty spartan. Often it's just like, kind of hear the ingredients and, you know, combine them and, you know, walk around a field and say 15 Hail Marys and cook it until it's done.
00:18:51
Speaker
And serve it forth. Exactly. yeah And serve it forth. So there is a fair amount of like kind of guesswork that you're doing with measurements and cooking times and temperatures and and things like that.
00:19:05
Speaker
i I would say that recipes today are so much more detailed, which is fair enough because recipes for most of human history that were recorded weren't recorded to be used by average people, you know, as a cookbook that you would look to when, you know, you want to make like a nice Friday night dinner for your friends or something.
00:19:31
Speaker
These recipes were recorded by very elite professional chefs who were working for the nobility, the aristocracy, you know the wealthiest individuals.
00:19:44
Speaker
And they were recorded more as kind of like a record of of what was occurring in that household, but also often as sort of like a... um ah manuscript to consult for kind of dietary guidance or medicinal guidance.
00:20:02
Speaker
In a time before our medicine was made in labs, what we ate was our medicine and how we, you know, heal ourselves or adjust our temperaments or humors.
00:20:16
Speaker
um And a cookbook that you might find in a noble house in Renaissance Italy wasn't going to be used by the family to to cook up a 30 minute weeknight meal. it was there for the doctors to consult and also just kind of as a ah physical representation of the culture that was being exercised there. I mean, these are the same individuals that were having their portraits painted and who were commissioning churches and grand houses.
00:20:48
Speaker
You know, they wanted the way in which they experienced culture to be kind of codified and remembered.
Food as a Historical Medium
00:20:56
Speaker
Could you talk a bit about what role you think food plays in connecting with and understanding history, since that is such a fundamental part of of this book?
00:21:09
Speaker
Yeah. I think it's only recently that food has... And I mean really recently, like the last decade or two, maybe that might be a stretch, maybe the last decade, that food has really been taken seriously as a medium to study history.
00:21:30
Speaker
I often compare it to kind of like what women's studies or women's history was in the 1970s and 80s, where it just wasn't taken very seriously by traditional academia.
00:21:41
Speaker
I mean, even when I was doing my first master's degree, I had to explain to my professors what food history was, which was kind of like mind blowing to me, but they hadn't heard of other food historians, um even though there were some who were out there practicing, like Ken Albala, who's, you know, like a legend and and a true OG in that sense.
00:22:01
Speaker
But most history kind of comes to us either in the written format, or we look at a painting, or we go to an old historic site, and and we're kind of taking it in that way. But food is...
00:22:15
Speaker
is tasting the past, it's deeply sensorial, but what makes it so critical to the study of the past is that it's a way to access the lives of individuals who left nothing behind.
00:22:28
Speaker
Most humans who have lived on this planet left absolutely no trace of their life. And I think any of us would be really sad to think that you know once we ah we we pass, there's nothing left of us.
00:22:42
Speaker
and And it's not just individuals, it's entire cultures and communities. and if We're gonna be frank, this is this is generally speaking um women and people of color. you know history is written by the victors and the victors have been white Christian Western men.
00:22:59
Speaker
So it is mainly their experiences that we have records of. But food gives us way to relate to people who weren't literate, who didn't write books or build buildings or make art that we still have today.
00:23:17
Speaker
And when we cook something that someone else cooks like 500 years ago. We're performing similar actions. We're inhabiting a shared metaphysical space for a moment with this person. We're smelling what they smelled. We're tasting what they tasted.
00:23:34
Speaker
And maybe it sounds a bit woo-woo, and maybe that's why the ivory tower is still a little bit on the fence about the entire subject, but it is a legitimate form of study. It's anthropological in a lot of senses.
00:23:46
Speaker
it It gives us access into someone else's life, not perhaps in the traditional sense of they were born on this date. This is you know how long they lived. These were the major events of their life.
00:23:58
Speaker
but you can share an understanding that's very similar to the understanding you have when you go to a restaurant and you eat something that is mind-blowingly delicious.
00:24:09
Speaker
And you you know, for a moment really are so grateful to the chef and the, and the, and the cooks who prepared it and the people who grew that food, you know, you're, you're connecting with someone else. It's just connecting with others across space and time.
00:24:24
Speaker
One thing that i really like about the format of of your book, when you look through it, the images and the layout, it it it is like a work of art.
00:24:37
Speaker
And that gets across in a very different way than if you're just like reading these historic recipes on their own. When you're seeing these images of the final products or the stages of cooking, um you you really get the sense that dining in the past and food of the past was a really beautiful sensorial experience um in a way that you can't really access through a lot of other things um ah historical sources.
00:25:09
Speaker
And i I think that's a real ah gift from this book. it's it's a It's a different way to appreciate these historical recipes and to consider dining in the past.
00:25:22
Speaker
and a different way of thinking about that. So when i when I look through the book, I start thinking about how beautiful of an experience some of these dinners must have been um hundreds of years ago in a way that I don't necessarily get immediately when I'm just looking at the recipes and the historic cookbooks on their own.
00:25:42
Speaker
So I think that is a wonderful contribution that that you and Jay have made through this cookbook as well. um Thank you for saying that. Although I think that a lot of that credit has to be given to Lucy Schaefer, who is the photographer for this book, and Victoria Granoff, who is the food stylist. I mean, the two of them were, are just legends, the absolute best. I mean, every day on set with them, you know, we sort of knew which dishes we were doing. And, you know, in your mind, you might think, oh, okay, well, it would look really cool if we did this.
00:26:19
Speaker
And then they would just come up with something that was like a thousand times better than you could have ever imagined. um and there They are two women who are supremely good at what they do and and and should get all the credit for for really making making this book so visually stunning. And Rizzoli also does...
00:26:41
Speaker
They know how to make a beautiful book. I have to say the cover of this book was um Victoria Granoff's idea. she She was like, I want to do ah a Roman floor mosaic. And so she had given me this like huge list of all these various um things to buy before the photo shoot. So I spent like three mad days running around New York, like requiring like half a red snapper and like an oyster shell that looked exactly like this and one bone marrow bone. And, and I was, it was before I'd met her and she's a good friend now, so she'll find this funny. But I was like, this woman is either completely insane or a genius.
00:27:27
Speaker
Randomly one peacock feather, four roses. And, and on the first day when we showed up, she had made this mosaic. They weren't actual um kind of like ceramic pieces. They were little pieces of paper that she had individually hand painted. And then she made this entire kind of like floor and then got all these random ingredients out and and just sort of started, you know, kind of placing them around and her and Lucy worked together a lot.
00:28:00
Speaker
Lucy just sort of, you know, kind of instinctually knew where to go and how to photograph it. And you're just standing there looking at it like, oh God, it's like a lot of food scraps on like a piece of cardboard. This is weird. This isn't what I thought.
00:28:16
Speaker
And you look at it on the screen and you're like, that's incredible. That's absolutely incredible. um It was the first shot we did of the whole shoot. And I knew immediately that it had to be the cover because Yeah, I mean, it really does look like a Roman mosaic when when you look at the cover. I mean, so much of it. i For anyone who actually makes or attempts to make historic recipes, I think we all run into the same problem.
00:28:45
Speaker
the final product is often just a different shade of brown and it doesn't look all that, yeah all that attractive yet somehow like everything in this book is so colorful and just beautiful to look at. i mean, there's so many colors and textures and none of it looks boring or just all different shades of brown. and is really exceptional.
00:29:10
Speaker
um Kudos to the whole team that worked on this. yes thank Yeah. team came together and and and yeah, and magic happened in the kitchen and the studio.
Writing on Substack
00:29:21
Speaker
Well, if I could switch a little bit to asking about more recent work, your most recent food history writing is on your sub stack, Edible History.
00:29:31
Speaker
What sorts of things do you write about in that space? And do you have any plans for what that will become or what you want to do in that specific writing space?
00:29:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So the Substack looks at individual foods and beverages, and it's covered a really broad range. Again, it's kind of like taking one singular dish or ingredient like the pineapple or the tomato or Dr. Pepper or, you know, the the New York City cup of coffee um and that kind of classic Anthura blue and white cup.
00:30:08
Speaker
And then using that as, again, a way to kind of look at a kind of bigger moment of history or ah ah bigger theme within history. um And they've been really fun to put together. It's been fun to work in a way where I'm still kind of wearing my historian hat and doing a lot of research, but it's also a way to reach, I think, an even broader audience. And it's been really interesting, kind of this whole new audience that I've been able to engage with over Substack, which is also its own interesting kind of entity at this moment in time. If you're anyone who's writing in any way, I think Substack is just kind of an interesting place to be.
00:30:50
Speaker
but It's pop culture. It's, you know, ah it's now, but it's also history. And so I'm really enjoying writing about food in a way that's perhaps feels like a bit more immediate, but is still very much tied to the past.
00:31:07
Speaker
So it's it's been really wonderful. And hopefully somewhere in those sub stacks, there might be a future book. I can't say, but yeah, absolutely kind of continuing to work in that sort of style, I suppose. Wonderful.
00:31:26
Speaker
Thank you so much for speaking with me today. I really appreciate your time, Victoria. Oh, thank you for having me. It was really wonderful. Thanks to everyone for listening today.
00:31:37
Speaker
Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I'll see you again next time on Around the Table.