What’s Cooking?
New Directions in Historic House Kitchens Conference
Thursday, June 27, 2024
Once secondary or even hidden, historic kitchens
are now taking center stage as active, complex, and captivating spaces for history experiences. This intensive one-day conference, in partnership with the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) and designed for historic house and museum directors, curators, exhibit designers, educators, and interpreters, will immerse you in the flavorful world of historic house kitchens. Join seasoned experts and museum practitioners in exploring the untapped potential of food spaces with sessions on restoration, curation, interpretation, and programming.
The program’s format will include a keynote address, panel discussion and break out sessions as well as a tour of Old Westbury Gardens. Continental breakfast and lunch are included in the registration fee.
Location
The main presentations will take place in the Barn at Orchard Hill, an example of adaptive reuse of a 19th c. building on the Old Westbury Gardens property.
Registration
Fee: $145; includes continental breakfast, lunch, reception
10% off for AASLH and LIMA members
Registration begins March 1, 2024.
Space will be limited so plan now.
Keynote Speaker
Sarah Lohman is a culinary historian and the author of the bestselling books Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods and Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. She focuses on the history of food as a way to access the stories of diverse Americans. Endangered Eating is a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by Amazon’s Editors, Food & Wine, and Adam Gopnik on the Milk Street podcast. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and NPR. Lohman has lectured across the country, from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in NYC to The Culinary Historians of Southern California. She is a columnist for Gastro Obscura and writes about rare foods. Lohman is based in Las Vegas and is a frequent collaborator with the Neon Museum Las Vegas and is co-host of the Las Vegas City Cast podcast.
Conference Program
Wednesday, June 26
7:00 PM Pre-Conference Talk: Following Flavors: How Food Storytelling Brings History to Life
Tonya Hopkins, a.k.a. “The Food Griot,” reflects on how everyday foods can spark deep investigation into the rich contexts that created them. Often surprising and always compelling, food stories can connect us with the past and help keep alive the contributions of those who came before us. Drawing on her experiences researching and presenting culinary history at historic sites and in the media, Tonya inspires us to see the foods around us with fresh eyes and follow their unique flavors to gain insight into history.
About Tonya: Tonya Hopkins is a culinary history consultant and wine and spirits storyteller who shares food and drink narratives across many mediums. She serves as the lead Culinary History Advisor for the Old Stone House of Brooklyn and served as an advisor to the exhibition “African/American: Making the Nation’s Table” for the Museum of Food And Drink (MOFAD). Tonya helped cofound the nonprofit James Hemings Society to uphold the timeless Black culinary talents that so profoundly shaped the development of fine dining in the Americas. She frequently appears on radio and television programs, including ABC’s “The Chew” and the Food Network, among many others.
Thursday, June 27
8:30 a.m. Continental Breakfast (provided)
9:00 a.m. Conference Begins: Welcome, Keynote Address
Keynote Talk: Sarah Lohman
Sarah Lohman is a culinary historian and author of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine and Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Food (named one of the Best Books of 2023 by Amazon’s Editors, Food & Wine, and the Milk Street podcast). Sarah’s culinary career began in museums, where she led tours, programs, and demonstrations of historic foodways.
9:45 Session 1: Many Hands, Heavy Work: Revealing the Stories of Elite Service Kitchens
In their heyday, high-end kitchen wings were functional workplaces. Hiding food labor from view created an illusion of effortless luxury for owners and guests. Reversing that tradition, today’s museum kitchens are showplaces for stories of their complex operations and the people who managed them. This session looks into two service kitchens of the late Gilded Age, exploring how painstaking restoration, material culture, and creative imagination bring them back to life for public audiences.
Presenters:
Lorraine Gilligan, Director of Preservation, Old Westbury Gardens
Helena Gomez, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
10:30 Morning Break
11:00 Session 2: Thoughtful Choices: Interpreting Kitchens with Histories of Enslavement
For much of colonial and US history, kitchens, including many in the Northeast, were sites of forced labor. What choices are faced by those interpreting these histories of enslavement? Two contrasting historic sites, one in New York City and one in Massachusetts, describe their interpretive process and discuss themes of coercion, asymmetric power, agency, creativity, privacy, risk, and safety, and how they were expressed in spaces designed for cooking.
Presenters:
Lauren McCormack, Executive Director, Marblehead Museum
Kristin Gallas, Principal, MUSE Consulting
Riah Kinsey, Public Programs Manager, Prospect Park Alliance
K. Kennedy Whiters, Principal, wrkSHäp kiloWatt
Tonya Hopkins, The Food Griot/Lefferts House Advisor
12:00 Session 3: Indigenous Food Culture and Sovereignty in (and outside of) Museum Kitchens
Cultivated for millennia by Native American people, Indigenous food is the basis of all American cuisine - a fact that traditions of colonial-revival historic house kitchens have often erased. In this session, Indigenous interpreters discuss the power of food history to reclaim spaces, create wider awareness of Native history and promote food sovereignty.
Presenters:
Silvermoon LaRose
Chenae Bullock
12:45 Lunch (provided)
2:00 Session 4: Breadwinners: Interpreting Commercial Kitchens
A kitchen can be “the heart of the home” and also the foundation of a family business. Hear from two museums that feature the commercial kitchens of immigrant-owned, family-run businesses, exploring how creative interpretive techniques and expansive programming share themes of economic survival, community-building, and cultural resilience.
Presenters:
Sarah Litvin, Founding Director, Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History
Victoria Berrios, Education Manager, Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History
Dolan Cochran, Tenement Museum
2:45 Afternoon break
3:00 Closing Conversation: Sweet, Sour, Spirited: What it Means to Interpret Culinary History
Two masters of culinary history interpretation join in a summative discussion on food in public history and its layered meanings.
Kathleen Wall
Lavada Nahon
3:45 Tour: Revealing the Secrets of the Service Wing
Tour the newly restored Service Wing at Westbury House and hear about the restoration, interpretation, and development of its popular public tour.
4:30-6:00 Happy Hour Reception and Food Swap
Accommodations
Old Westbury Gardens has arranged for a discounted rate at The Roslyn, Tapestry Collection by Hilton. You may make reservations through this link or you can also call The Roslyn at 516-625-2700 to reserve your rooms and refer to the Old Westbury Gardens block in order to receive the discounted rate.
Questions: Contact Paul Hunchak phunchak@oldwestburygardens.org
About Old Westbury Gardens
The former John S. Phipps house and gardens is one of the finest examples of the American country estate era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The gardens, sweeping lawns and woodlands surround Westbury House, whose original contents portray a lifestyle of the early 20th century.
Old Westbury Gardens recently completed the restoration of rooms within its Service Wing (c. 1911) for guided tours by the public. Ongoing activities include acquisition of period kitchen equipment and re-installation of cabinetry that was repurposed elsewhere in the building. Future projects associated to expand the tour include reproducing historic floor coverings to allow visitors to experience this important family space.
About American Association for State and Local History
The American Association for State and Local History is a national membership association dedicated to helping the history community thrive. For the better part of a century, AASLH has provided leadership and resources to its members who preserve and interpret state and local history to make the past more meaningful to all people. AASLH is the professional association for history-doers.
In 1904, the American Historical Association, itself a fledgling professional body, established the semi-autonomous Conference of State and Local Historical Societies to serve the leaders of those agencies. In 1939, a group of Conference members proposed the creation of an independent entity to better coordinate the activities of historical societies and stimulate the writing and teaching of state and local history in North America. On December 27, 1940, the Conference of State and Local History disbanded itself and formed the American Association for State and Local History. Its first charter stated that AASLH’s purpose was, simply, “the promotion of effort and activity in the fields of state, provincial, and local history in the United States and Canada.”
Today AASLH provides crucial resources, guidance, professional development, advocacy, new publications, field-wide research, and a sense of connectedness to over 5,500 institutional and individual members, as well as leadership for history and history organizations nationally. It is the only comprehensive national organization dedicated to state and local history.
