Historian, cook, teacher, volunteer, recovering attorney

In 1991, before there was a TVFoodNetwork, before there were cell phones capturing every drool-worthy mouthful of gastroporn, before there was even a nascent food studies world in the United States, I threw away my 11 year-old lawyer’s briefcase and picked up a whisk (actually a menagerie of culinary tools) and enrolled in what was then Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School for its 20-week immersive professional training.

My mother was horrified: first, she didn’t like to cook, and I have no gauzy memories of cooking together (sorry, culinary memoirists). More to her point as a child of the Great Depression, why stand over a hot stove when you could sit behind a desk, have a secretary screen your calls, and make a comfortable salary?  The answer was simple: whether mastering the complexities  of clarified consommé or flaky pâte feuilletée or sharing a homemade bean soup for a winter’s dinner, cooking was visceral, artisanal, and intellectually engaging in ways that navigating the tedium of civil procedure were not. Watching a raft of eggshells and whites form, entrapping the last licks of grease and cloudiness from a stock, feeling the silkiness of puff pastry after the last set of folds, or hearing the gentle bubbling of a stew, not to mention the immediacy of smells and tastes, cooking involved all senses. Cooking expressed our common humanity through our diversity of cultures.

After five years of restaurant cooking, I started teaching. It was a joy to share knowledge and life skills. Yet one thing was missing: the art of formally crafting a story. As a lawyer, I had enjoyed fashioning persuasive arguments from disparate facts. I chanced upon Madeline Pelner Cosman’s Fabulous Feasts, one of the few books at that time written on medieval cookery, and immediately felt the stories buried in the cuisines of the past.  I haunted bookstores for old cookbooks, thrilled when I found a copy of the English translation of the ancient Roman cookery book of Apicius (the better, out-of-print version from 1959, not the clumsily-translated version from 1936). Resurrecting my college training in history, I attacked the mysteries of cuisines past, scrutinizing primary sources, contemporaneous art, historical dictionaries, and the now-fattening stack of secondary sources that were flowing out of academic and popular presses.  I slogged through the lexicographic thorns of Middle English in The Forme of Curye (1390), slid over the culinary French of La Varenne’s Le cuisinier françois (1651), and tried to analyze the original Latin of Apicius. Soon I started experimenting with these recipes, getting a taste, however attenuated, of the past. That led to teaching hands-on historic cookery classes at Peter Kimp’s that proved very popular, much to everyone’s initial surprise.

In 1998, I nervously ventured to the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery at Oxford University. Oxford opened a vista onto a world that married ideas, culture, policy, and craft in a intellectually smart, but not pointy-headed academic, way. I felt at home in a community of engaged thinkers. I have returned to Oxford every year, save 2001, when all planes were grounded in the dark days after September 11, eventually joining the Board of Trustees of the Oxford Symposium and the American Friends of the Oxford Symposium. Back in New York, I become more involved in the Culinary Historians of New York, a small non-profit promoting education in culinary history, becoming its president in 2003, a position I continue to hold. I also spent six years as a member of The Culinary Trust, the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ philanthropic arm.

I continue to research and write, as well as working with colleagues to organize and participate in conferences and work on other projects. I am on the verge of completing a Masters in Food Studies at New York University and regularly teach undergraduates in the Food Studies Department at The New School for Public Engagement.

Follow me @cathykkaufman (primarily culinary matters) or Facebook  (food, politics, and more)

Osias Beert, Still Life with Cherries and Strawberries in China Bowl, 1608