Going Wild at Oxford

The annual Oxford Symposium always brings exotic food info to light. This year’s event, held at St. Antony’s College on Sept. 5 and 6, featured over 40 papers on food and travel, and it might as well have been titled the Wilder Shores of Food.

Retired Oxford University professor Nicholas Kurti, known for his hair-raising experiments in applying chemistry lab techniques to home cookery, weighed in with a reminiscence of what he ate when he was researching in the Falkland Islands in the late 1940s. The best things to eat there included leopard seal brains and seal chitterlings (conveniently, since the small intestine of one species of South Atlantic seal can be several hundred feet long). “Particularly to be avoided,” he recalled, “were giant petrels (flesh or eggs) and elephant seals, which, although the subject of my PhD theses, are repulsive however cooked.”

Sharon Hudgins, one of several Americans at the event, described dining among the Buriat Mongols of Siberia, one of whose favorite delicacies is a confection of raw horse liver and horse fat. After recounting a day when she and her husband found themselves obliged to eat four successive banquets (and some snacks), drinking quantities of horse milk brandy along the way, she remarked that to her surprise, during her year and a half in Buriatia she lost 20 pounds, simply because the climate is so cold.

One learned what Lewis and Clark ate during their expedition: largely wild game, wild berries and a starchy root called wappato, harvested by digging the roots up under water with the toes. Symposiast Hugo Dunn-Meynell reported discovering during an involuntary weeklong stay on the South Pacific island of Raratonga that a sophisticated nouvelle Raratongan cuisine was being invented by a local restaurateur.

A paper on Japanese ways of adapting Western food revealed that Japanese cooks have invented a hamburger served between two cakes of rice, rather than in a bun, and a sort of salad sushi, where salad greens are rolled up in rice and seaweed. Meanwhile, a British-born professor at Hiroshima Shudo University, who has lived in Japan for 23 years, expressed the opinion that M.F.K. Fisher would not have blithely remarked that she could live happily on Japanese food for the rest of her life if she’d spent a couple of years in Japan, rather than just two weeks.

The bombshell of the Symposium was a paper delivered by historian Constance Hieatt. She offered evidence that, despite what everybody has believed for a couple of hundred years, 13th and 14th century English cookbooks were not French in inspiration.

Though many recipes had French names, she observed, they were full of practices, such as cooking with flower petals and putting fruit in tarts, which the Italians followed but the French didn’t. Meanwhile, there were lots of Mediterranean recipes, such as lasagne (“losenys”) and ravioli. In fact, Hieatt said, the earliest recipe for ravioli anywhere is in a 13th century English manuscript known as B.L. Additional MS 32085.

How could Mediterranean food leapfrog over France into England? Easy, Hieatt concluded. The traditional ties of English court were with the court of Normandy, rather than that of Paris, and during the Middle Ages the Normans were also the kings of Sicily. QED, as they like to say in Oxford.