Paul Freedman Talk & Book Signing

Come to SoFAB for a conversation with Paul Freedman about community cookbooks, in conjunction with SoFAB’s exhibit, Talk About Good, Celebrating 40 Years, with original paintings by George Rodrigue.

Don’t miss this opportunity to meet Paul Freedman, Yale professor and author of American Cuisine, and hear him speak about the importance of community cookbooks to American cuisine.

Free with museum admission. Books will be available for purchase, and goodies from community cookbooks will be served!

ABOUT PAUL FREEDMAN

Professor Paul Freedman specializes in medieval social history, the history of Catalonia, comparative studies of the peasantry, trade in luxury products, and the history of cuisine.  His latest book is Ten Restaurants That Changed America (Liveright/Norton, 2016).

Freedman earned his BA at the University of California at Santa Cruz and an MLS from the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He received  a Ph.D. in History at Berkeley in 1978. His doctoral work focused on medieval Catalonia and how the bishop and canons interacted with the powerful and weak elements of lay society in Vic, north of Barcelona.

Freedman taught for eighteen years at Vanderbilt University before joining the Yale faculty in 1997. At Vanderbilt, he focused on the history of Catalan peasantry, papal correspondence with Catalonia and a comparative history of European seigneurial regimes. He was awarded Vanderbilt’s Nordhaus Teaching Prize in 1989 and was the Robert Penn Warren Humanities Center Fellow there in 1991-1992. During that time he published his second book, Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (1991).

Since coming to Yale, Professor Freedman has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies in History, Director of the Medieval Studies Program, Chair of the History Department, and Chair of the Program in the History of Science and Medicine He has offered graduate seminars on the social history of the Middle Ages, church, society and politics, and agrarian studies (as part of a team-taught course).

Freedman edited Food: The History of Taste, an illustrated collection of essays about food from prehistoric to contemporary times published by Thames & Hudson (London) and in the US by the University of California Press (2007).  His book on the demand for spices in medieval Europe was published in 2008 by Yale University Press.  It is entitled Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination.  Freedman also co-edited three other collections: with Caroline Walker Bynum, Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (1999)  with Monique Bourin, Forms of Servitude in Northern and Central Europe (2005), and with Ken Albala and Joyce Chaplin, Food in Time and Place (2014).

His honors include a 2008 cookbook award (reference and technical) from the International Association of Culinary Professionals (for Food: The History of Taste) and three awards for Images of the Medieval Peasant: the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy (2002), the 2001 Otto Gründler prize given by the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, and the Eugene Kayden Award in the Humanities given by the University of Colorado. He won the American Historical Association’s Premio del Rey Prize in 1992 (for The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia) and shared the Medieval Academy’s Van Courtlandt Elliott prize for the best first article on a medieval topic in 1981.

FROM LAFAYETTE JUNIOR LEAGUE

“This year, our beloved cookbook, Talk About Good II, featuring artwork from the legendary George Rodrigue, celebrates its 40th anniversary. Since its inception, this cookbook has sold more than 200,000 copies and is in its 10th reprint.

Cumulatively the four Junior League of Lafayette cookbooks have raised more than $1.2 million that have been invested in the Lafayette community through programs benefiting women and children in the Acadiana area. They have also allowed us to provide financial support for Junior League of Lafayette and its mission to promote voluntarism, develop the potential of women, and improve the community through the effective action and leadership of trained volunteers.”

TALK ABOUT GOOD, CELEBRATING 40 YEARS

As part of the Junior League exhibit celebrating the 40th anniversary of Talk About Good II, SoFAB has partnered with the George Rodrique Foundation to bring Talk About Good II further to life by displaying at least 10 of the original paintings illustrating Talk About Good II. These paintings come from artist George Rodrigue’s earlier years, when he painted scenes from traditional Cajun Louisiana Life, before he became known for his Blue Dog paintings.

“It’s organizations like the Lafayette Junior League that act as culture bearers, preserving food traditions and food culture through their community cookbooks. I learned Cajun cooking from these books along with hundreds of thousands of others from around the United States,” says Brent Rosen, President/CEO of SoFAB. “These women are culinary rock stars, and they don’t even realize it.”

“In the future, when people want to know, ‘How did people in Louisiana eat in the late 1900’s?’ they will find the answers in Talk About Good II,” says Rosen. As an extension of SoFAB’s special exhibit, five women instrumental in creating Talk About Good II have recorded oral histories with museum staff, which will be made available via transcript and select audio for researchers and enthusiasts through the Museum’s Boyd Culinary Library and Research Center, which also houses one of the most extensive collections of community cookbooks in the country.

“It’s really exciting to see our exhibits, our archives, and our kitchens all coming together through this Talk About Good II exhibit,” Rosen says.