Barbara Ketcham Wheaton
Barbara Ketcham Wheaton Philadelphia, 1931 is a noted food historian, writer, and the honorary curator of the culinary collection at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. She is the author of the well-received Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983) and coauthor, with Patricia Kelly, of Bibliography of Culinary History: Food Resources in Eastern Massachusetts (G.K. Hall, 1987). For the past few years, she has been developing the Cook’s Oracle, a database that establishes relationships among recipes from different historical periods.[1]
Mt. Holyoke College A.B. cum laude, 1953, Art History; Radcliffe College, A.M., 1954; attended the École des Trois Gourmandes, Paris 1964-65 (diplôme avec mention).
Honorary curator of the Culinary Collection at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, with responsibilities for developing, maintaining and preserving one of the largest U. S. collections of materials relating to cooking and the social history of food. A culinary collection of over 15,000 books — spanning five centuries and global cuisines — is one of the world's most significant. This collection also includes the papers of several famous chefs and foodwriters such as M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Elizabeth David.
Founding Trustee, the Charitable Trust for the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (2003-2007); Advisory Committee member 2008-present. American Friends of the Oxford Symposium; vice-president 2008-present
Work by Barbara Ketcham Wheaton
- Books
- Culinary History Resources in Eastern Massachusetts with Patricia M. Kelly. (G.K. Hall, Boston, 1988).
- A Bibliography for Culinary Historians Using the Harvard University Libraries and the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America with Patricia M. Kelly. Cambridge, 1985.
- Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983; London: Chatto & Windus, 1983). Subsequently published as: L'office et la bouche: étude des moeurs de la table en France, 1300-1789. Translated by Beatrice Vièrne. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1984). De Smaak van het Verleden (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1988). A Japanese translation by Miki Tsuji (Tokyo: Taishukan Publishing; Osaka: École de cuisine Tsuji, 1991.
- Editor, Agnes B. Marshall's Book of Ices (London, 1885), published as Ices Plain and Fancy. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976), reissued as Victorian Ices and Ice Creams.
- Articles
- “Le menu dans le Paris du XIXe siècle,” in À table au XIXe siècle, Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux; Flammarion, 2001, the catalog of an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, December 2001-March, 2002.
- “Culinary History” with Ellen Messer, Barbara Haber and Joyce Toomre, in The Cambridge World History of Food, 2000.
- “Carême” in Alan Davidson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Food, 1999.
- "Petits Riens and Pommes Barigoule: Food in France after the Revolution," The Journal of Gastronomy, 1989/90.
- "The Pleasures of Parisian Tables, from Daumier to Picasso," in The Pleasures of Paris from Daumier to Picasso, ed. Barbara S. Shapiro. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1991.
- "The Serendipitous Year," Journal of Gastronomy, 1987.
- "The Cooks of Concord," Journal of Gastronomy, 1984.
- "How to Cook a Peacock," Harvard Magazine, 1979.
Bibliography
- "Food-Historikerin Barbara Ketcham Wheaton" in Valentinas-Kochbuch.de (January 2010)
- Francesca T. Gilberti, "Stacks of Delicious" in The Harvard Crimson (1 November 2006)
- Ursula Heinzelmann, "Die beharrliche Entschlüsselung der Kochbücher" in Effilee (29 Oct. 2009)
- Verlyn Klinkenborg, "Of Cabbages and Kings: Why don’t cookbooks reflect what's really going on in the kitchen?" in Gourmet (June 2000)
- Elizabeth Gawthrop Riely, "Library Honors Food Historian Barbara Ketcham Wheaton" in The Radcliffe Quarterly (Cambridge, Mass., 2007)
Still needed
- Sheryl Julian wrote about me in the Boston Globe in 1983