Sixth Annual Symposium

 October, 2010

Speakers:  Fran Lord, Laura Sprague, Sandy Oliver

Sponsor:  Sally Lombard

Fran Lord speaking about the impressive Tate House Kitchen    

Secrets of the Colonial Hearth Revealed

Tate House Museum Celebrates the Year of the Kitchen with their Annual Decorative Arts Symposium

Three respected authorities in early American history and decorative arts present fascinating information about the colonial kitchen, its contents and food preparation.

Sandy Oliver, "What's Colonial About Colonial Cooking?"

The Tates ate identifiably New England gentry cuisine.  What was on the table for breakfast, supper and dinner and how did it compare to similar households elsewhere in the American colonies?  Food historian, Sandra Oliver, describes what was for dinner at the end of the colonial era, where it came from, how it was prepared, and what it meant to the people who ate it.  (And P. S., it isn't true what they say about lobster.)

Read what Sandy Oliver had to say about George Washington's dinner table in the Boston Globe.

Food historian and writer Sandy Oliver lives on an island in Maine. She is the founder and publisher of Food History News, a quarterly publication about the food history of North America, and is the author of Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Food at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century.  Check out her website. 

Frances Lord, Ph. D. "Hearthside Cooking in Colonial Maine"

A scholar of early American history and material culture, Dr. Lord has researched foodways in Maine and New Hampshire for over 30 years.  Her hands-on hearthside cooking has been in the mid-18th century kitchen of the Old Gaol at the Museums of Old York.  She developed the Interpretive Plan for the Tate House kitchen in 1988.  She will talk about the basic skills, equipment, and foodstuffs colonial women employed daily in the labor-intensive process of cooking over an open fire to sustain their families.

Laura Sprague, "Tate House's Kitchen:  Its Objects and Culinary Stories They Tell"

Laura Sprague is the Consulting Curator of the Tate House Museum.  She has published extensively including the landmark Agreeable Situations: Society, Commerce and Art in Southern Maine 1780 - 1830.  She oversaw the 2000-2002 Centennial Restoration of the Wadsworth-Longfellow House at the Maine Historical Society in Portland.  Since 1989 she has served as Consulting Curator of Decorative Arts for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.  She serves on the Collections Committees for the Maine Historical Society and Victoria Mansion.  In 2007 she completed a research fellowship on Maine Furniture at the Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Museum and Library.