Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, born in Philadelphia in 1931, is a writer and food historian. Since 1990, she has been the honorary curator of the culinary collection at the Schlesinger Library,

Radcliffe College Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. Considered founded in 1879, it was one of the Seven Sisters colleges and he ...

, one of the largest collections in the United States of books and manuscripts relating to cooking and the social history of food.

Biography

In 1976, Wheaton produced a modern edition of Agnes B. Marshall's Victorian classic ''The Book of Ices'', originally published in London in 1885. She is the author of the well-reviewed ''Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789'', and of the biography of Marie-Antoine Carême, French exponent of '' grande cuisine'', in Alan Davidson's '' Oxford Companion to Food'' (1999). At her request (she did not want to wash dishes and wanted a durable but disposable dish) the MIT Media Lab's Counter Intelligence Group created its

Dishmaker The Dishmaker is a machine which Thermoforming, thermoforms cups, bowls, and plates from acrylic (polymethyl methacrylate) plastic discs and then thermoforms them back into discs when they are done being used. It was about the size of a home dishwas ...

, a machine that made dishes on demand out of food-safe materials and recycled them afterwards. She developed "The Cook's Oracle", a searchable database that establishes relationships among recipes in cookbooks from different historical periods. Wheaton hopes to find someone who will continue her database, now on Microsoft Access, and make it available. Wheaton received a bachelor's degree in art history at

Mount Holyoke College Mount Holyoke College is a private liberal arts women's college in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It is the oldest member of the historic Seven Sisters colleges, a group of elite historically women's colleges in the Northeastern United States. ...

in 1953 and a master's from Radcliffe College in 1954. In 1964-65 she attended the

École des Trois Gourmandes L'école des trois gourmandes (The School of the Three Hearty Eaters) was a cooking school founded in Paris, France, during the 1950s by Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle. The work done by the school was later expanded into the two-v ...

founded in Paris by

Julia Child Julia Carolyn Child (née McWilliams; August 15, 1912 – August 13, 2004) was an American cooking teacher, author, and television personality. She is recognized for bringing French cuisine to the American public with her debut cookbook, '' ...

, Simone Beck, and

Louisette Bertholle Louisette Bertholle (26 October 1905 – 26 November 1999) was a French cooking teacher and writer, best known as one of the three authors (with Julia Child and Simone Beck) of the bestselling cookbook ''Mastering the Art of French Cooking''. H ...

. She was a founding Trustee, 2003–2007, of the Charitable Trust for the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery and has been vice-president since 2008 of the American Friends of the Oxford Symposium. She is also an Overseer at Plimoth Plantation and a Corporator of the Worcester Art Museum. On October 28, 2007, the Schlesinger Library held a day-long symposium to mark her seventy-fifth birthday.Elizabeth Gawthrop Riely,
Library Honors Food Historian Barbara Ketcham Wheaton
in ''The Radcliffe Quarterly'' (2007)

Publications

; Books * (introduction and annotations) ''Ices, Plain and Fancy: The Book of Ices by Agnes B. Marshall''. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976. Reissued under the title ''Victorian Ices & Ice Cream'', 1984 * (with Patricia Kelly) ''Bibliography of Culinary History: Food Resources in Eastern Massachusetts''. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987 * ''Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789'' Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983; London: Chatto & Windus, 1983. French translation: ''L'office et la bouche: étude des moeurs de la table en France, 1300-1789''. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1984 ; Articles * "How to Cook a Peacock" in ''Harvard Magazine'' (1979) * "The Cooks of Concord" in ''Journal of Gastronomy'' (1984) * "The Serendipitous Year" in ''Journal of Gastronomy'' (1987) * "Petits Riens and Pommes Barigoule: Food in France after the Revolution" in ''Journal of Gastronomy'' (1989/1990) * "The Pleasures of Parisian Tables from Daumier to Picasso" in Barbara S. Shapiro, ed., ''The Pleasures of Paris from Daumier to Picasso'' (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1991) * "Carême" in Alan Davidson, ed., '' The Oxford Companion to Food'' (Oxford, 1999) * "Culinary History" (with Ellen Messer, Barbara Haber and Joyce Toomre) in ''The Cambridge World History of Food'' (Cambridge, 2000) * "Le menu dans le Paris du XIXe siècle" in ''À table au XIXe siècle'' (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux; Flammarion, 2001. Catalog of an exhibition at the

Musée d'Orsay The Musée d'Orsay ( , , ) ( en, Orsay Museum) is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art ...

, 2001–2002)

References

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 Ursula Heinzelmann, born in Berlin in 1963, is a freelance German food and wine writer, a sommelière and a gastronome. Career She was a good cook before she had learned to read, according to a radio interview on ''HR2-Kultur'', and she was a pr ...

,
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) {{DEFAULTSORT:Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham 1931 births Living people American food writers Food historians Writers from Philadelphia Mount Holyoke College alumni Radcliffe College alumni Women food writers