tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4326846166088247509.post8630107820963089126..comments2023-07-07T01:55:57.343-07:00Comments on Southern Food & Beverage Museum Blog: Lessons Learned in Graduate SchoolUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4326846166088247509.post-43444644482511343452009-08-15T11:18:17.230-07:002009-08-15T11:18:17.230-07:00Zella is absolutely right. Checking your sources t...Zella is absolutely right. Checking your sources thoroughly is the only way to support your argument in a sound way. Once it is in print, either on paper, or on the net, there are a thousand and one people out there who will want to shoot you down in flames if you get it wrong. However, we all make mistakes - even leading scholars sometimes commit huge errors. The important thing is to learn from those mistakes and move on. <br /><br />As part of a very wide range of food history activities, I attempt to re-create high status European and British food, often in the form of table settings in Museums. I am working on two exhibits this Fall, one in the Metropolitan in NYC and another at Hillwood in Washington DC. Both tables are dressed in the aristocratic manner of the eighteenth century and include important ceramics - Du Paquier at the MMA and Sèvres at Hillwood. Both are dessert settings and include recreations of elaborate sugar sculpture and table architecture. The MMA table with its Vienna du Paquier ceramics is a recreation of a table for Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria; while the Hillwood table displays Sèvres porcelain which once belonged to Prince Louis Cardinal Rohan, a contemporary of Marie Antoinette. You cannot get more imperial than the Empress of Austria or more high-ranking than a Bourbon prince. <br /><br />However, neither Maria Theresa, nor Prince Rohan in their lives ever cooked a meal, created a recipe, crafted a sugar table centrepiece. Nor did either of them ever make a ceramic plate or a beautiful biscuit sculpture. They were in fact completely useless drones, their pampered lives only fit for court intrigue and frivolous diversions.<br /><br />In my opinion the extravagant tables which I recreate do not glorify the food or culture of this aristocratic class. They are a tribute to the anonymous servants, artisans and artists who produced that food and the material culture it spawned. These were people who had extraordinary creative skills and knowledge. It is them for whom I have respect, not for their powerful, but talentless overlords and it is them that I honour when I attempt to revive the forgotten skills they developed.<br /><br />To use another example, I am the kind of person who believes that the Great Pyramid of Cheops is not a grandiose memorial to the dead Pharaoh who lies beneath it, but a remarkable testimony to the thousands of unfortunate slaves and forgotten craftsmen who built it.Ivan Dayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03500437663759868535noreply@blogger.com