Highlights of the Quarterly, Winter 2006
A cook's tour of Wheaton
In her memoir, A New England Girlhood, nineteenth-century poet and Wheaton teacher Lucy Larcom wrote fondly about the hearth-style kitchens of her youth.
"Primitive ways of doing things had not wholly ceased during my childhood; they were kept up in these old towns longer than elsewhere," she wrote. "Cooking-stoves were coming into fashion, but they were clumsy affairs, and our elders thought that no cooking could be quite so nice as that which was done by an open fire. We younger ones reveled in the warm, beautiful glow, that we look back to as to a remembered sunset."
For some, like Larcom, food inspired memory and verse. For others, it represents great ideas about our past, present and future. It's in the pages of history and the politics of sub-Saharan Africa. It's on the Viking range of a famous restaurant and in the grateful hands of a hospice client. It's an economic force in the mountains of Costa Rica and the neighborhoods of Dorchester.
Beyond simple sustenance, food engenders rituals that speak of social and cultural mores; it reflects the realities of income, race, ethnicity and class, and mirrors the technology of the times. As the Wheaton community illustrates in this issue of the Quarterly, food is a conduit for engagement in an evolving world. In these pages we invite you to meet some alumni, students and faculty who are involved in pursuits related to food, cuisine and culture.
Download feature (pdf file, Acrobat Reader required).
