Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery – serie

Food Rules and Rituals includes selected papers from the 2023 Oxford Food Symposium. Grounded in a number of different disciplines, writers from around the globe consider how rules and rituals structure the experiences and meanings of consuming foods in a wide variety of contexts.

Gardens, Flowers and Fruit includes selected papers from the 2024 Oxford Food Symposium. Grounded in a number of different disciplines, writers from around the globe consider the precariousness of our fragile lifestyles, celebrating the joys of the natural world while conscious of the significant stresses on our environment.Highlights include papers on floating gardens in Xochimilca foodways, Tasmanian apples and ecological colonization, the blight of #Cottagecore, Virgil’s Tarentum and Pompeiian garden painting, cherry dishes and sensual imagination in medieval China, resilient Indigenous food systems in the Ecuadorean Amazon, Persian orange blossom jelly, and food and vitalism in The Broken Earth.

The annual volume of papers selected from the previous year's Oxford Symposium will be devoted to the exploration of the theme "food and the elements".The papers examine not just the four elements of classical Western philosophy — fire, water, earth, and air — but also the elements of flavor, of chemistry, of culture, of care. In short, all the building blocks of the culinary world.Grounded in a number of different disciplines, writers from around the globe consider the flavor of bitterness in rituals of trauma, the terror of elemental uptake, calendar change and culinary continuity in southern Italy, costal foraging in Mont-Saint-Michel Bay, traditional food pairing in French Polynesia, the role of caste in late nineteenth-century colonial western Indian meat markets, the uses of lithium, salts in the Himalayas and on the Catalan coast, nixtamalization in traditional Mexican foods, synthesizing saffron and vanilla, sourness in Persian cookery, Japanese temple cuisine, feeding the Royal Navy in the Age of Fighting Sail, water and food insecurity in Uganda, edible gold, and accounts of the creation of Adam, changing dietetic patterns in Medieval Islam, and the Guangzhou kitchen.