 Welcome to this 2021 British Library food season event exhibiting excess food through art and history very generously supported by KitchenAid. My name is Polly Russell and I'm the Foundering Curator of the Food Season working closely with the food writer, Angela Clutton who is the Seasons Guest Director. This is the fourth of food season for the British Library and like seasons before we have an eclectic series of event which explore food in every aspect. So tonight we're doing 5,000 years of food history through two landmark exhibitions. Next week we've got the history of British food, we've got the life of Churchill's cook, we've got British Library manuscript food collections and that's just next week. So please check out the British Library website and the food season page which is also linked at the end of this event on your screens to find out more. On this page you'll also find details about the food season competition we're running giving you the chance to win a range of KitchenAid cordless appliances, a place on a virtual cooking course and a signed copy of the pie room by Callum Franklin. So just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. Please use the menu on your screen to give us feedback on the event and also to donate to the British Library. We really value your feedback and of course we really value your donations. Also click on the bookshop tab for an opportunity to buy books from our speakers. Right, now today's event which I'm delighted to be chairing. We're exploring two extraordinary food exhibitions. The Brilliant Feast and Fast, the Art of Food in Europe 1500 to 1800 which was staged by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge last year but is now no longer open, had to close early because of COVID and Tables of Power, a history of prestigious meals which is currently on at the Louvre-Renons in France. And I'm delighted to say that we have members of the curatorial teams who staged these exhibitions with us tonight. From France, we have Helen Bouillon, a doctor of Egyptology specializing in relations between Egypt and the Near East in antiquity. She is the heritage curator for the Louvre-Renons Museum's exhibitions and was one of the team who curated Tables of Power. Victoria Avery is the keeper of the Applied Arts Director, direct department at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Victoria has researched, lectured and published widely on all aspects of the applied arts and she co-curated Feast and Fast. And Ivan Day is an independent food historian who has more than 40 years of experience recreating period food using original historic equipment and methods. He is particularly interested in the evolution of table display and his work has been featured in so many exhibitions. I cannot name them all, but he worked with the Cambridge Curatorial Team on Feast and Fast. So this is our amazing panel. Now, hello everybody. To say that this year has been a challenging time for museums is a real understatement. You know, COVID has forced exhibitions to close and cancel. So for many of us watching, this will be the first opportunity, the only opportunity to have a glimpse of these extraordinary exhibitions. I actually did manage to get to Feast and Fast before it was forced to close and it was extraordinary. And I cannot wait to find out more about it and also to find out about tables of power, but it just feels like in the context of COVID, this is an extremely special event to have this opportunity. So just to explain to our audience very quickly how the evening is going to run, we are each of the speakers, Victoria and Ivan, are going to talk for about 20 minutes about the exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Feast and Fast, and so that we can all find out about it. And then LM will talk for about 10 or so minutes about tables of power. We'll then have an opportunity to have a discussion amongst ourselves for about 10 or 15 minutes and then we would love to have audience questions. So please do ask questions as a tab at the bottom of your screen. We'd love to hear from you. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Victoria and say welcome and please tell us about the wonderful exhibition that you co-curated at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Thank you very much indeed, Polly. We'll have the deck of slides up if we can start, please. What I should absolutely stay at the start is that Ivan and I were absolutely ably assisted by Dr. Melissa Calleraisu, who was the co-curator of the exhibition. She's a cultural historian based at Gonville and Keyes College in Cambridge. And it was a typical Fitzwilliam Museum where we combine academic expertise with curation and objects. As we've said, unfortunately, the exhibition had to shot early in March, but actually was given an error pre for a month in August, which was lovely to allow a few more visitors to see. What we're going to do now is I'm going to speak very briefly about some of the key themes in the exhibition and then I'm going to hand over to Ivan to talk about some of the highlight objects and then I'll end up by talking about some of the community engagement and visitor responses. So in terms of, next slide, yeah, some of the key themes in the exhibition, it was called deliberately feast and fast in a way they are two sides of very much the same coin. And we wanted to think about everyday eating but also excess and also innocence deprivation in the early modern period and thinking about fasting times. We made our audience aware that actually during the early modern period if you observed all the fast days as prescribed by the church and also by the secular government, you might be fasting and not eating meat or dairy derived products for something like a third or a quarter of the year. So actually there was a lot of food deprivation or special food choices going on. Also about production, provisioning and preservation of food, thinking about access and thinking about seasonality, making people understand that actually, even if you were the wealthy aristos and you had access to greater amounts of land and to food that actually seasonality played a role that it doesn't really play so much today when actually can buy anything you want in a supermarket. Preparation and presentation, these are key to us today but they were very key to audiences in the past. So thinking about what was traditional and what was innovative were also themes we were trying to pull out. Cookbooks, recipes, how they're passed on, the skills of the kitchen, knowledge chance there was something we were very interested in because obviously audiences are interested in celebrity cooks today. We wanted to make the point that actually that's nothing new. But also food choices, obviously economics plays a part, seasonality plays a part, but also religious, medical and politics played a part. So these were some of the key themes that we were keen to address. I'm just going to show you now just a couple of slides by way of example of one of these themes. So we're thinking about local and global and in terms of global in the early modern period of course trade routes open up, all the European powers are vying with each other finding new trade routes and bringing in so-called exotic food stuffs. So we had a section where we focused on four different food items, the pomegranate and in the slide you can see on the left there was a wall with pomegranate and then another section about pineapples and then we thought about ginger and we thought about sugar. And in the middle of the room you can see here a detail of one of Ivan's wonderful recreations, a top-end Georgian confectioner's window. And you can see here a detail of that window. It was inspired by this wonderful Gilray print. Soldiers scoffing, wonderful whipped stiller bubs and ice cream in a London confectioner shop Gilrays. And you can see in the background the shop window with exotic fruits. And this is what we were trying to explain to our audiences. The porcelain, the glassware that was sold or hard out but also the sweet treats, the cakes as well as the exotic imported oranges and pineapples and other fruit like that. The backside of that same display showed the workshop with all the tools and the instruction manuals and the equipment to make all of the sweet treats and the biscuits, the cakes and so on. And on the left side, you can see that the room continues and you'll see that case inbuilt wall case with items paraphernalia connected with sugar and the production of ginger. I'm just gonna point out the bottom of the case, bottom left, there are some little gingerbread molds that Ivan will be talking to in a minute. So in that case, you can see now a little detail of some of these wonderful sugar crafts and some of Ivan's molds and his tools. But we also wanted to point out the difficulties with sugar and the gross exploitation that colonialism brought with it. So we had, for example, these images of sugar, sugar cones and so on but we also wanted to point out the exploitation. So we borrowed in from St. John's College some letters to do with the slave trade. This is an example of a letter from Jamaica and a sugar plantation and they're talking about acquiring a gang of seasoned so-called Negroes to work on the sugar plantations. And we also showed this list of those Africans, the enslaved Africans who had to work in appalling conditions on these European managed and owned sugar plantations. And we had an illustration of the appalling conditions to make people think rather harder about that. And also then the idea of the fair trade and not buying slave produced sugar. So how sugar was acquired but also the problematics of it. I'm now gonna hand over to Ivan to talk about some of the star objects in the exhibition. Ivan, over to you. Thank you, Vicky. Well, my role in the exhibition was to try and translate the wonderful paintings in the collection, a lot of the decorative objects that belong to the table also in the collection and focus on what they told me as a food historian about food. So I'd like to start off by showing you this slide of a painting which is by an artist called Van Myris. It dates from the 1730s. And it shows us a little open-air stall or shop which is selling food. If you look very carefully on the table, you'll be able to see some chestnuts, there are some meddlers. It's a seasonal setting. We're actually in the late autumn, the onions hanging up, there's some cartridges there. If you look in the background, you can see a tree that's bereft of leaves in front of a rather stormy looking sky. So we're at the tail end of the year. And it's Netherlandish. And if you look very carefully on the wall behind the old lady who runs the shop, you can see in the detail, some stockfish, some dried fish hanging up, which is throughout Europe, a Christmas speciality. If you look very carefully, you see a little lollipop there, a little candied bird on the end of a stick. I think that's probably the earliest European depiction of a lollipop. And two gingerbreads, two little speculas. There's one at the top of a stag or possibly a reindeer. And then below, there's a little man, a little soldier and militiamen with a pike. And if we go on to the next slide, I recognize this guy because I actually own a mold to make one. This mold is probably English and it was probably carved when Shakespeare was still alive. So it's a lot older than the painting. But if you look very carefully, they're almost identical. They're in military uniform with a feathered cap and they're bearing this pike. On the other side of the mold, on the next slide, you can see that the gingerbread pikemen, it's an impanion, an item of history, the ginger woman, equal opportunities to all gingerbread people I say because if you think of the modern gingerbread man, it was a little homunculus, a Mr. Man with a row of currents or buttons. These are two very sartorily elegant characters. And we've actually done something with them here. We've dressed them in gold. It was very common for gingerbread to be gilded and it was often sold at fairs and often with something called Dutch gold leaf, which was a fake gold. But the context of gingerbread in England was quite different to the idea of giving them as gifts to children on the 5th of December, the Feast of St. Nicholas. So in the next slide, we're showing that in Britain during the 16th and 17th century, they often featured as nobilities on tables at the very end or after a meal, what we called the banquet course or the after course, which in the 16th and 17th century became an extraordinary array of sugar foods. For instance, this table has got plates and tatsay stands made of sugar. You can actually see what looks like a little Chinese blue and white where crack porcelain plate, which is actually made out of sugar. And standing in front of this sugar novelty building in the middle of the table, you can see our two little gingerbread people. And the recipes are making these occur in little books that were published mainly and aimed at gentle women who were literate and who wanted to make the kind of confectionery that was being made by professional comfort makers and of course at court. So if we go on to the next slide. So I wanted to interpret some of the paintings in the exhibition. This is a painting that is not in the Fitzwilliam collection Victoria managed to get it from Birmingham from the art gallery there. And it's a wonderful, very well-known painting of the Netherlandish kitchen scene, a very busy scene. There's a lot going on. But fundamentally what we've got on the left, if we can go back to the full painting, on the left hand side, you can see hanging by the chimney breast a mechanical thing that turns bits. And you may notice I'm sitting in a kitchen. I've got one actually behind me. I don't know if you can see that up there. That one we actually had hanging by the painting in the Fitzwilliam. So if we go back to the painting. So we're about to roast some meat. So if we focus on that detail again, we go back to the detail, you can see that the cook is sowing some strips of back fat, of bacon fat into a hair. A hair is a very, very dry animal. And when it rotates in front of a fire, you need to lubricate it with extra fat. So this was a very common practice. So we go on to the next slide. Sorry, stay on that one actually for now. Go back to it, sorry. You can see also we depicted another way of showing this. A beautiful mid 18th century mice and figure in the Fitzwilliam of a very well-dressed cookmaid struggling with the bloody hair, which is just larded. And if we go on to the next slide, you can see the actual kit that she's using. So what we wanted to do was to expand all the things in that painting. So hanging next to the painting, we have the apparatus to roast the animal that was depicted in the picture, as well as the equipment that was used by the cook to lard the hair. Next slide. So I just round up here. This is a table that I created, which got its original inspiration from a painting that wasn't in the exhibition, which is this one, which is a wonderful velvet brogol showing an incredible table covered with these incredible pies. If you look very carefully, you can see that the pastry decorations are gilded and the response of gold leaf on the bird's plumage as well. Next. And this is the painting that is in the Fitzwilliam. You can take my word for it, you can't see it, but on that table of these celebrating people from the Old Testament, and there are some bird pies as well. Next one. And we decided that these kind of creations, these extraordinary pies with real taxidermy birds sitting on, were actually made, the records of them being made in London. And this is an incredible picture, which shows a marvelous kind of unbelievable poultry shop. And yes, all of those animals, very saddy were consumed by people. So finally, one other inspiration was this wonderful painting by Iris Van Sonne, which was specially cleaned for the exhibition with this incredible lobster. And then finally, if I show you how we exhibited this, I made those pies using equipment from the 17th century. So the little wooden molds that make all the wonderful kind of arabesques on the pastry were for real. And in the background, we put this wonderful painting of the poultry shop. So you can see the provisioning and you can see the final result of one of the most extraordinary high status styles of table display in the history of dining. Ivan, thank you so much. So I'm just going to wrap up quickly now with just a few comments about our public programs, a creative zone that was put in at the end of the exhibition to really try to engage our audiences in the multi-sensory ways with the exhibition. And then finally, Polly asked me to say something about public responses. So in terms of the public programs, I should say that we have a very skilled and experienced learning team, and they all have specialisms in dealing with different types of audiences. And this is just a screen showing four different types of a particular audience engagement. So you can see our work with those who live with dementia and their carers and how they were engaging with the exhibition and creating artistic responses. You can see we also have a special program for those with blind and who are blind and partially sighted. And we consulted with them before the exhibition talking about some of the exhibits. They were able to handle them and we wanted to find out from them how they would like to bring in non-visual aids into the exhibition. This is partly why we created the creative zone. We also do work with disadvantaged families in areas of deprivation in Cambridge. So the Talking and Eating Together was a Cambridge City Council funded program to engage families with speech and also how to eating at the table and so on. And also we do work with particular schools. So this is just a very small example of the programs that we did. I just wanted to say a little bit more in detail about one particular program I was involved in from the start. We have long standing links with the wonderful Rowan Arts Studio in Cambridge and they do work with learning disabled adults. And we wanted to bring these wonderful art students into the equation from the beginning. So we developed a program for them all the way through from the pre-planning stages. You'll see we brought them in on a number of occasions to discuss which exhibits should be in the show and how they should be displayed. And you'll see here that we're discussing that the promagranate charger should be displayed vertically. They then came back into the museum and they were filmed handling some of the exhibits that were going to go in the show together with some ceramic responses that they had made specifically in response to these visits. And I decided I wanted to display some of them into the exhibition. The film also included the making food together at the Rowan Arts Center and eating and talking about food experiences because this was a way to bring in the making of food and eating into the exhibition in the film. As I say, I also felt it was important that their artistic responses should be included in the creative zone at the end so you can see them with their exhibits looking delighted that they are there. The creative zone had the film as you can see and their ceramics. It also had this multi-sensory mini pineapple that you could touch and with a hand pump you could squeeze it and smell pineapple. This is a way of getting some perfumes and food smells in there. There was this interactive box where some of the exhibits became as it were first person. So the lobster from the table was a mini thing that you popped onto this box and it spoke to you in the first person and you could listen to him talking about himself which was meant for the children but the adults liked it very much. We also wanted visual responses. So we set up a still life table and you can see some students and some families creating visual responses together. And you can see some of these wonderful visual responses that we kept because we think they're very important in terms, some people prefer to give you visual rather than verbal responses. And here are a few more. I think they're absolutely wonderful. We also did a feedback. Well, we did a feedback form. One of the questions we said to the visitors were what three words most come to mind having visited the show? And we did a survey and then you can see which words came up most popular. We had a terrific response actually. Very, very interesting to see what words that came up were. And then we asked for some feedback and I don't unfortunately have time to read all of these comments out but I think you can see that actually people had a very, very profound response to the exhibition and they thought about changing their food habits. They thought about cooking more. They thought about where their food was coming from. And so as they were sadly now shut but the exhibition lives on in the catalog which is still available to purchase and also on the website. And that is the link to the website. And I'll now hand over to Elaine. Thank you very much. I'm very delighted to be here tonight and very honored to be invited to this event and to be able to show you our exhibition which is not opened yet but we will open it next Wednesday. So maybe we can start with the presentation. This exhibition is also a collective work. The idea of it was from Zéves Gaurarier who was the chief curator of this exhibition and the director of the Louvre Lance, Marie Lavandier who wanted to show because for many years the Louvre Lance has delivered to ex-public thematical exhibitions to deal with universal subjects such as, for example, love which was an exhibition also by Zéves Gaurarier. And this one shows how banquets and feasts were occasions for princes and head of states to show their power and either to stage the hierarchy of the society or to promote the equality of the citizenship. So the visitor will enter with a prologue. And this prologue is a kind of joke about COVID because it deals with a, and of course it is based also on sociological and historical facts. It deals with the fact that the hand washing is the first step to a meal. And of course the hand washing is now a hygienic act but at the time it was a purification before this very sanctified moment of the meal because of course the powerful would eat but the less powerful maybe would fast. So after this prologue, you will enter the first part. And the first part deals with the creation of the state and the creation of the cities in Mesopotamia and how these states and cities would have banquets which were part of the worship of gods because it was held, the banquets were held to honor the deities. So you will see for example, the very, very ancient images of these banquets which were liturgical banquets. And this one for example was loaned by the Louvre Museum and its characteristic from the Sumerian area. So we are in the third millennium BC. So you will spend the exhibition going from 3000 BC to up till now. In the next room you will see how in the second and the first millennium the archives of these eras show us how this dawning art of protocol is used then by the kings of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the Levant to invite each other and to invite ambassadors and to showcase the luxury vessel and also the richness and the rarity of the dishes. During the first millennium there is a new fashion beginning adopted then by the Greeks and the Etruscans and the Romans the new fashion of reclining while having a meal. So the Greeks adopted the reclining position and at the same time invented a new conception of sharing a meal and a new conception of table manners with the emergence of citizenship and the new notion of conviviality which takes place in the Androm. So there the key point of these banquets and the most important part was the second part of the banquets not when you would have a meal but when you would drink. And at the end of the banquets during the symposium you would have also jokes and a manner of joking between men because of course these banquets were a banquets for male people. At the end of antiquity the important thing is to show your luxury vases. So there is an invention of beautiful objects which showcase these beautiful vases. And during the third part of the exhibition you will have sideboards, you will have luxury vessels of course from France but also from England and from Austria which will lead you to the ritual of the vases the sovereign's meal which increases through times and the climax of it is during the reign of Louis XIV in France with the Grand Couverte. The Grand Couverte which becomes so excessive as a protocol that it will lead to a new approach of meal sharing in the age of lights in France with the creation during the reign of Louis XV of a new room in Versailles which is a dining room where the king would invite his close relations to a refined supper and have a small supper with between friends. And also the 18th century is the century of Chinese porcelain which will be imitated throughout Europe. So the 18th century is the time where king will dine in the northern where and not in the metalware in Europe. So you will have these fastuous services in Sevres and Saxe porcelain which will be given by kings and emperors to other kings and emperors as political and diplomatic gifts. And then we will finish with the contemporary part of the exhibition where the French Republic will invent another kind of protocol mixing the royal protocol and another protocol of conviviality where every guest is an equal as it was in Greece. So the organization of the state dinner at the Elyse Palace will conform to a very strict protocol and of course you will have the menus. The menus are showcases for the French gastronomy and the terroirs of France. But the exhibition will also show you that there is an evolution in these menus because throughout the 20th century you will see the number of dishes that the number of dishes will reduce very drastically. And of course the Elyse Palace gives the same welcome to every guest but also the special guests will always be the Queen of England in the Elyse Palace. So we'll hope that we will be able to welcome many visitors from the UK as well. Hello, thank you so much. I cannot believe that you were just forced all of you to talk about these extraordinary exhibitions which deal with such kind of breadth and depth into the subjects and you have to squash them into 15 minutes each, you've did an amazing job. So thank you very much for giving us a kind of taste and a flavor. We've got masses of questions coming in which is wonderful but before we get to those I just wanted to ask a couple of questions to kind of draw out some of the sort of ideas behind the exhibition. And I just wanted to start with you perhaps, Vicky, about the time frame, Vicky and Helen, about the kind of time frame of each of them, feast and fast, 1500 to 1800 and then tables of power, 5,000 years. Why those frames, what were you trying to do? Why were they significant? If you can try and again, I'm sorry I'm gonna compress you into time and being a merciless timekeeper. But yes, could you think about that for us, Vicky? Sure, I mean, it's a very interesting question and I really do admire Helen's global ambition and this chronological sweep. We decided to keep the exhibition fairly focused, thinking that actually the time period we chose was quite long enough. There are various sort of pragmatic reasons. Dr. Melissa Calerazzo, say the co-curator, she is particularly expert in the 18th century and my field of specialism is really the renaissance. So we were kind of playing to our strengths. It should also be said that in terms of the sorts of material that we showed in the exhibition, the Fitzwilliam Museum has particular strengths in that time frame, in the renaissance route, the sort of early modern period. So I think also that a lot changes really in the sort of the Victorian period in the 19th century. So we felt it was better to limit it to that particular time period, but also make sure that then we drew parallels with the present day to make it very relevant. But it was contained because of our expertise and the objects of the museum has. Thank you. Thank you. That's really, that's fascinating. That kind of mix of pragmatic, the sort of pragmatic and also the kind of themes and ideas coming together. Elaine, could you answer the same question please? Yeah, for us it is very important because we are the Louvre lance. So it is the Louvre in north of France to be what we call the Louvre with a difference. So we do very universal thematical exhibitions, but with this idea of dealing with them for a very, very long period of time. So because we are lucky to have this very close relationship to the Louvre, the Louvre in Paris, we are able to ask for loans in all the departments. So we are able to put together Mesopotamia, the France in the Renaissance and also every kind of period. That is kind of overwhelming in a way. And I suppose one of the things is that you have a huge luxury of not just objects, but also space at the Louvre lawns that allows you to tell this huge story, which is so exciting. I wanted to ask you, Ellen, and also Ivan, about the extent to which the exhibitions deal with food beliefs, food habits, food cultures, which are very familiar to us, that it's about continuity or the degree to which your respective exhibitions are actually showing us worlds which just seem completely alien in terms of understandings and experiences of food. Ivan, would you like to think about that for? Sure. I think looking at those strange pies with swans and peacocks sitting on top of them, you realise that food was served in a very different universe back in the 16th and 17th century. Thank God that that one has gone because in that wonderful painting of the Poultres Shop by Schneiders, there were actually two little kingfishers which were for sale. And I know of a feast in London in 1607 when James I was actually served a pie with an owl baked inside it, but another one sitting on top. So, you know, we've lost a lot of stuff, which I think probably did deserve to become extinct. Familiar things. I mean, this is an extraordinary thing. Of course, all the food we eat now was created by our ancestors. But we didn't invent cheese, butter, beer, any bread, it was all worked out by people, often by Neolithic farmers. All of our staple foods, whether it's rice, oats, wheat, you know, cassava, sorghum, whatever, all those plants were actually bred by Neolithic farmers and we've inherited that. But there are other sort of, if I call them really like vapor trails to the past, which for instance, you know, you go into a restaurant, most restaurants in France and England will have a table napkin on the left hand side of your table setting. And there's a reason for that, because originally before the knife, sorry, before the fork became around, people had to wipe the left hand where they touched their meat to cut it on a napkin over their shoulder. It wasn't like a big square thing, it was like a towel and you clean it and you threw it over your left shoulder. When the fork arrived, that piece of cloth moved onto your lap to stop food going on there. And of course we've forgotten all this, but still there's this kind of folk, not a memory, but a relic of the left hand side being the place where the napkin lives. And food is full of these extraordinary relic things which most people, you know, just don't understand them at all. And we try to illuminate that in some of the parts of the exhibition. Thank you, Ivan. Helen? Yes, it is very interesting to see throughout a very long period of time that there is continuity and also there are exotic things. So continuity, for example, was for me to discover that the moment, which is quite the most important moment is always the monument when you drink during a meal. Or during which there is music and advertisement. And this is true for Mesopotamia because when people drink, you will have music and clowns and jonglers. And this is also true in Elysée because after the meal, you will have a show of music or a play after you will have dinner. Just really, I've got lots of questions to ask from those, but I've also got so many questions coming in from the audience that I actually feel that we ought to sort of ask, let them have some questions because there are some terrific questions here. So I'm going to start working through these. There's a first one here that I think it would be great if all of you could answer this. Starting with Vicky, this is from Jan Marshall. The Prince Regent was renowned for his extravagant, nostentatious banquets. What would you regard as the most extravagant banquet in history from any period of time? Gosh, well, I think there were very enormous numbers of extravagant banquets. And I think Ivy is probably better placed after that than me. I mean, there are many records, for example, in this sort of, you know, the Royal Archives documenting absolutely excessive banquet. But I think it's also interesting to remember that what the royals would eat on a daily basis, we would consider completely extravagant and there'd be multiple dishes of which they would just sort of pick one or two little dainty pieces. And then actually once they had gone, actually, you know, the sort of the courtes would have a pick and then down to the servants. So, yeah, I mean, extravagant banquets, there are many and I think in a sense, the banquet that Ivan recreated, the baroque feasting table, we were trying to sort of show generic, very, very extravagant banquet that you could have found across Europe at the beginning of the 17th century with the four bird pies, you know, swan, pheasant, peacock and partridge. And those, the four birds, the pies were specifically taken from the key birds that were hung in that Snyder's painting. But I think Ivan might want to say more about that. Well, yeah, it's a very easy one to answer because it's the bicentenary, actually, of the coronation feast of that gentleman, the Prince Regent, it was mentioned in the question, who became George IV in July 1821, which is 200 years ago. And that meal was one of the most extravagant, not just for the food, but also for the glorious tableware, extraordinary silver gilt tableware made by some of the great goldsmiths of Regency London. And the food was also amazing. The king sat in Westminster Hall at a table with six of his brothers and they had two main courses. The first course had 20 dishes in with four different soups, including turtle, molligatoni and a couple of others, lots of roast meats, all invisible, in a sense, in the hall, because it was all served in these extraordinary silver gilt churrines from the Grand Service. And then the second course had 22 different dishes in, although four of them were decorative. There was a sugar model of a ruined temple, another one of a rotunda and other sort of elements and lots of sort of lighter savoury foods. And this is all choreographed because the food was delivered to the table by a procession of men with horses coming down the central aisle of Westminster Hall. And then finally, the dessert, I think had 24 different dishes in it, you know. And we know that the king, the newly crowned king, just toyed with some turtle soup, which we know is his favorite dish. And I think he was a, I think a partridge pie that he kind of sliced off and that was it, basically. And he left early. The idea was that you couldn't tell a king what he had to eat. You just put in a huge array, like going into a restaurant and having every item on the menu put in front of you so that no one could dictate to you what you ate. So that is the bi-sintenary of a remarkable event. And it was incredibly illustrative. There are wonderful paintings and chromolithographs. And the menu survives. And you can look at it online if you go onto the Georgian papers on the Royal Collection website. That is fantastic. Ellen, could you answer that question? Yeah, I have in mind, of course, because that's my specialty, the big, big feast held by Ashornat-Zirpal II for 13,000 people in... Ellen, please forgive me, but can you just say when that was so that... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was in the 18th... Not the 18th, yeah, the 18th century BC. Thank you. In Mesopotamia. But I have in mind just one text. It is a very little piece of glaze in our exhibition. And it is a text, very rare, because it's a text about the deliciousness of a meal or of a dish, a specific dish. And it is a rarity, because in the antiquity, you would speak about the amount of food, but not the taste of food. So this is to my colleagues, the Assyriologs colleagues. This is a very rare text. And this is a text about a letter sent to an intendant of a palace saying that the intendant of the palace of the king of Babylonia should taste this food because it's delicious and it is rat, desert rat. How extraordinary and, you know, how wonderful though to be thinking about taste and deliciousness, not just what something looks like in terms of, you know, it's kind of visual appeal. What a shame it was a rat. And this... And delicious. And delicious, yeah. Don't be close-minded. Ivan, your description of that Prince Regent's feast leads me to another question, because it's sort of slightly reminiscent of the kind of all-you-can-eat buffet you might get at a Pizza Hut, you know, where you just can go and sort of hoover up as much as you want or a holiday camp. So there's a really nice question here. Can the panel trace a line from the early modern periods type of display to today's food display, whether in shops or home kitchens or Instagram? And if not, when did approaches to food display make a break with older approaches to food display? Perhaps you, Ivan, and then... Or, yeah, Ivan, would you like to...? Sure, yeah. I mean, this is really about an uncharted area, really, which is about the aesthetics of food on the table or on the plate. And it changes so rapidly. I mean, about 10 years ago, food became an abstract expressionist composition on the plate. You know, you had a little splash of that, a little smear of that, a little tower of this, you know. If you went back 200 years ago into the 18th century, you know, the beginning of the 18th century, a pie, for instance, might be made in a Rococo style, you know, with extraordinary kind of, you know, applied ornament. By the end of the 18th century, it might be neoclassical. And, you know, the zeitgeist, really, of aesthetics was applied just as much to food as it was, you know, to decorating your palace or, you know, the kind of pictures that you preferred. And, of course, we've been talking, Vicky and I particularly, well, and then, too, about excess, really, visual excess as well as culinary excess. And if you think about food in the early part of the 20th century, it was, you know, Cucina povera, it was basically, modernity made everything very, very simple. And the very, very fancy Victorian over-embellished, overdone food with lots of different courses got whittled down for obvious historic reasons, you know, the First World War. We became an industrialized society. So, all these, the sort of dynamics they feed into, how our food appears. Now, of course, you know, we are sort of basically crushed under a tsunami of beautifully illustrated cookery books and the authors are often leading these aesthetic changes. And, of course, the internet, too, particularly with Instagram, which is a very, very fashionable medium for cooks and confectioners and bakers to exchange idea. And it's become very competitive, you know, people put out there a much more intricate, you know, kind of decorated tart than the last person. So, things are changing enormously, but there's always been competition amongst food professionals, you know, to produce the finest dish. So, I mean, it's a complicated area and it needs a book. Somebody ought to write a book about changing aesthetics in food. Ivan, I think you need to write that book. Or perhaps the three of you should write that book. Four of you together. How about this, in the past year with the pandemic, how do you think our sharing of food and eating has changed? But I think this is the question that's really interesting in a way, is, have these changes been seen before in history with responses to other diseases, famines, crisis around food? Victoria, would you like to reflect on? I think Ivan would be much better placed to answer the historical questions. I can do museology and exhibition things. But I think I'm going to pass that to Ivan, if I may. OK, why don't we start with Ellen? Do you have anything just in case Ellen, do you have something to say about that in terms of antiquity, perhaps, and famine or disease and food? Maybe not with antiquity, but it makes me think about the fear of poison during the Middle Ages and the use of magical objects and the use of the nef de table, for example, because in the Middle Ages and even in the Renaissance time, there was this fear of being poisoned that would lead a king to have this vessel where he could put his knife and his salt, pepper, things like that in a very closed thing, like the nef de table. So yeah, for me, there are things like that. So there's kind of anxiety around the risk of poisoning. Yeah, that's really interesting. They're kind of keeping food safe and sterile and preventing disease and contamination. And Ivan? Well, food and medicine have always been incredibly linked together. And if you look back at other pandemics and pestilences, for instance, during the Black Death and in the 17th century, the plague, often in cookery books, you often have a section of printed cookery books and handwritten ones, which is based on medicine. And you do get remedies for treating the plague. Some of them are not just medicines. They sometimes move into the sort of food area. For instance, the Fitzwilliam, where our exhibition is displayed, has got a remarkably rich collection of English delf wear in what's called the Glacier collection. And there are lots of posset pots, which are these extraordinary, usually blue and white, this terracotta that's got a tin glaze on it with little blue kind of designs on it. And a posset was a very sort of warming supper dish, usually. It was made from cream, egg yolks, and usually some strong wine, usually sac and sugar, maybe some spice as well. And often to sort of help the posset sort of go down. And if you were ill, they would sometimes put medicines in them as well. I mean, I think Shakespeare is sort of something about somebody drugging the possets. And there are quite a few recipes for posset which came out during the time of the plague, in fact. So a lot of those vessels in this vast collection that we didn't actually display because we thought they were more to do with beverages and we didn't discuss drinking our exhibition. Maybe we'll do another one about drinking one day, you know. Well, you know, there is this extraordinary crossover. And you do find it, and you'll know as a curator of ancient cookery texts, Polly, that it's one side of this page or the coin is medicine, the other is food. So they're completely interchangeable. And that leaves me on. I think we've got time just for one more quick question for Vicky and for Elaine in use of just alluded to it, Ivan, which is what did you have to leave out? Someone's asked, what did you leave out that you really wanted to include? I mean, these are huge exhibitions covering huge amount, but of course you have to make choices. Could you just tell us one or two choices that you had to make that were difficult? Vicky. Cool, it's a very interesting question. We unfortunately don't have as much space as Ellen does in the Louvre-Lon. And so the question really for us was visual impact and actually trying to make interesting visual narratives. So sometimes we would decide to include quite a lot of exhibits and mass them together. And sometimes we felt it was better just to choose one example of something and then showcase that. So for example, we didn't include an awful lot of cutlery. We had thought at one point about doing a case of the universal spoon, and including actually talking a global story in a very much, much longer chronological story. And in the end, because of lack of space, the spoon story sadly didn't make it in. And we included a number of knives, for example, a pair of rare bride knives that Ivan had found for us on the Tudor wedding sugar banquet table. And we included a pair of carving, a carving knife and fork in the context of the Baroque feasting table. We have a really superb collection of cutlery made in different European centres across time. You know, we could have talked more about the introduction of the fork, but sadly, we decided that actually there were other narratives we wanted to say. So, Tal, so I would have liked to include it, for example, yes, more of our cutlery, but that simply wasn't possible. I think there are calls in the questions here for there to be another and a different exhibition on a similar subject. So I think that the forks and cutlery can go in that next exhibition, Vicki. Ellen, could you quickly, we're really out of time, but could you just quickly say what had to be left out? Yeah, of course, the expensive loans very far away were out of questions. And the first thing I had to renounce was the Uruk Vaz, which is in the Iraq Museum at Baghdad and which displays the first ever banquet scene. It is 3,000 in BC, and we couldn't have it, that was. Well, that must have been very sort of heartbreaking in a sense. You obviously have so much in there, but again, tantalising to hear about it and also, you know, I think that this talk and hearing about these exhibitions and reading the questions and the responses just is telling us all that people love this subject and there is so much more to learn and explore. You know, you're going to be writing your book on aesthetics now. We need more exhibitions like this. Everyone needs to go to the Louvre Allons if they can get out there. If Mr. Robb will let us travel from the UK. I want to thank the panel. This could have gone on for hours. We have just touched the surface, but what wonderful details and texture and kind of I can always have tasted is just so wonderful. Thank you so much. I want to say a couple of things just to remember that Feast and Fast is no longer open. Please do go to the Fitzwilliam Museum because it's wonderful when it opens, but don't go to see that. But I understand our book tab is not working today. So I'm just holding up the catalogue again because it is available still and it's a reputable booksellers. It is the most wonderful, sumptuous, wonderful catalogue. I don't know, is there a catalogue for the Tables of Power? There is. So again, everybody should look that out as well because if you can't get to an exhibition, that is the next best thing. Thank you to my amazing panel. It's been a complete pleasure. Thank you to the audience as well. Please check out the future of food season events coming up next week and then the week after that. Please send us any comments or feedback about this event. Remember that there's a donate button if you feel so inclined to support our work. You will be able to watch this event on catch up if for any reason it was glitchy or if you would like to share it with friends and family in a couple of days it should be available. And finally, once again, thank you to this amazing panel of speakers and thank you for the work you do in exhibitions and museums. Good night.