One Big Table: New London Feast To Benefit Custom House Maritime Museum

Join us, Friday, November 11, at 6 o'clock PM, when One Big Table, the multimedia initiative dedicated to identifying, collecting, preserving and celebrating American recipes and food stories teams up with the New London Maritime Society for a meal that tells the story of Maritime New London. Curated by Molly O'Neill , long-time New York Times Columnist and founder of One Big Table, the menu is drawn from the family archives of New London denizens ranging from the earliest French and Yankee Maritime settlers to the Portuguese, Italian, Irish, Dominician, and African peoples who have worked the water --- and the local home kitchens. Sponsored by the Enders Fund, the event is a fund-raiser for the Custom House. Tickets are a $75 donation; a $100 donation includes Molly's new book One Big Table (a $50 value), which she will autograph that evening. For reservations, call 860-447-2501 or email nlmaritimedirector@gmail.com. The dinner is absolutely limited to 45.

Charles Van Over, the scholar and brick oven baker is interpreting breads from a variety of these ethnic groups, while Elisa Giommi of Mangetout will be working with recipes collected by One Big Table to create contemporary versions of some of the finest dishes in Maritime New England. A local winery will match their wines to the menu to create an evening that celebrates place, time and spirit. Additional dinner details will be posted on the Custom House Web site as they develop.

A fund-raiser for the Custom House Maritime Museum, proceeds benefit the museum's mission: to protect and preserve New London's U.S. Custom House and New London Harbor Light and to promote and interpret the maritime life & history of the port of New London and the surrounding region through museum exhibitions and educational programs.

At the dinner, Ms. O'Neill will speak about Food Stories and Fish Stories In Maritime New England. There also will be a special exhibition of family recipes as described in word and image by students in the New London Public School's Lighthouse Kids program, a joint effort with the New London Maritime Society.

About Molly: Born in Columbus, Ohio, long before words such as multiculturalism or immigration were part of the local vernacular, Molly O'Neill is the author of four cookbooks, including The New York Cookbook, and of a memoir, Mostly True. She was the editor of American Food Writing, an anthology published by the Library of America. A multiple James Beard award winner, O'Neill hosted the PBS series Great Food and was, for over a decade, the food columnist for The New York Times's Sunday magazine. She spent the last ten years traveling around the U.S. gathering recipes and food stories from American cooks to create the acclaimed One Big Table: A Portrait of American Cooking. Despite such demands as eating the occasional fried grasshopper, Rocky Mountain oyster, lutefisk, old drum, and Big Mac, she is continuing to locate, document, and preserve American recipes and food stories.

ONE BIG TABLE: Almost as soon as I decamped from one place at this table to another, I knew that the reports of the demise of home cooking were greatly overstated. I found a preponderance of grocery stores, markets, and farmstands with stock of uncooked food-irrefutable evidence that most homes still contain working kitchens-and observed many people preparing dinner.
The more miles I logged, the clearer it became that "Americans don't cook" is an updated version of an old slur. From the birth of the nation until quite recently, Europeans and those Americans who measure culture in relationship to European society claimed that Americans can't cook. The assertion may have been reality-based in the nation's early days-rare is the culture that mints a refined cuisine before it clears the wilderness and establishes communities-but in more than 300,000 thousand miles, I found that my fellow citizens can and do cook. Some cook badly, some cook well, and all cook to say who they are and where they come from.

-from "Introduction: Hometown Appetites"

http://www.nlmaritimesociety.org/

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