Museum cookin' up somethin'
good
Secrets of the culinary arts now on display in Providence
by J.A. Lopata
PROVIDENCE — Special recipes and ingredients used by the world’s
great chefs, bakers and restaurateurs are among the most
zealously guarded secrets on the planet.
But keeping things hush-hush is bad business for the world’s
largest culinary arts collection.
“We’ve been called the best kept secret in Rhode Island,” says
Culinary Archives & Museum’s (CAM) Director of Programs Deborah
Pinkham. “We’d rather people know about us.”
Pinkham recently served up a plateful of fascinating tidbits to
in newsweekly on some of the half-million food-related items
held in Providence, demonstrating CAM as the world’s leading
curator of culinary artifacts.
Did you know, for example, that the table sugar we currently
spoon into our coffee once arrived in the form of a sugar cone?
The museum has sugar cone nippers on display to prove it.
Or that prior to shrink-wrap, one of the most efficient means of
packaging food to keep it fresh was putting it in an empty
coconut shell? Visitors can see the shells near the PEZ
dispensers, which are, of course, another mode of packaging
food.
Did you know that the menu for President Abraham Lincoln’s
Second Inaugural Dinner included almost twice as many dessert
choices as non-dessert options? The bill of fare is one of the
framed centerpieces of the museum’s prized presidential
collection. Boasting culinary items from every U.S. presidential
administration, you’ll find everything from a letter from
President Madison concerned about unwanted “garlick” on his
farm, to a President John F. Kennedy-signed menu featuring
Jacqueline Kennedy’s beloved French cuisine.
These autographed executive-branch documents form a part of the
museum and archive’s largest bequeathal, in 1989, of over
200,000 items — cookbooks, cutlery, recipes, art work, and
cooking artifacts — from Chef Louis Szathmary.
Szathmary, interestingly enough, had no New England connection
prior to his donation. He was raised in Hungary, he cut his
cooking chops in New York City, and made his name with his own
restaurant in Chicago, called simply The Bakery. So why did he
choose Providence as the home for his legacy?
It was the reputation of Johnson & Wales University, which is
one of the world’s preeminent culinary and hospitality
institutions of higher education, and is located in Providence.
Szathmary, a corpulent fellow with an irreverent sense of humor
who looked a bit like Santa Claus, spent a great deal of time
regaling aspiring young chefs at the school until his death in
1996.
One can only guess the stories he must have had about some of
the items now in the collection.
What is there to be said about a cannibal-club fork and dish
that was in use in Fiji in the 17th Century before cannibalism
was outlawed?
One can only imagine the tales Szathmary could have woven about
some of the whimsical etchings he assembled of chefs in chef’s
uniforms. The museum wisely organizes the portraits to
illustrate the development of the contemporary chef outfit from
its Turkish antecedent.
And what about the Hershey’s giant 10-pound chocolate mold? “We
have hundreds of chocolate molds,” said Pinkham, half bemoaning
the archiving, but half savoring the sweetness they must have
held.
Not everything on display comes from the Szathmary legacy. The
archives were founded 10 years before Szathmary’s donation, when
7,000 rare cookbooks were donated by collector Paul Fritzsche in
1979. One of the cookbooks on view shows what CAM believes may
be the one of the first recipes for a hamburger.
Subsequent to Szathmary and Fritzsche’s bestowals, and as the
word of the museum and archives’ capabilities slowly spreads,
CAM has been receiving more donations.
CAM has an impressive collection of stoves. Ranges dating back
to colonial hearths, through wood, gas, kerosene, even
petroleum, through to contemporary electric and microwave stoves
and ovens are on display.
The museum has a number of odd gadgets such as a banana slicer
and a utensil that doubles as meat spear and spoon, apparently
created to somehow make eating meat with gravy more efficient.
It apparently never caught on.
One of the more recent acquisitions is a vintage deco diner that
serves as a featured item in the museum’s latest exhibition on
the history of diners. The exhibit, “Diners: Still Cookin’ in
the 21st Century,” is a particularly apt show for Providence, as
the Rhode Island capital was home to the first diner in America.
The modest eatery was first created by Walter Scott, according
to museum materials, a “sometime peddler who first hitched a
horse to a wagon and sold sandwiches to the night shift.”
From that modest start, the diner flourished into a major
American cultural phenomenon.
The CAM may well be learning from the diner.
With no current competition, and a slowly rising recipe for
sustained growth, the CAM could grow from being the best kept
secret in Rhode Island to simply being the best kept (no secret)
culinary arts museum in the world. s
The Culinary Archives & Museum at Johnson & Wales University is
located at 315 Harborside Boulevard in Providence, near the
Cranston line. Open Tuesdays through Sundays from 10 a.m. to 5
p.m. and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. For more information,
call 401/598-2805 or connect to
www.culinary.org.
Photo: Kullman Industries Inc. of Lebanon, New Jersey designed, manufactured and donated this gateway and neon sign for the ‘Diners: Still Cookin’ in the 21st Century” exhibit, now part of the Culinary Archives & Museum permanent collection.
Photo Credit: Culinary Archives & Museum / Steven Spencer © 2003 All rights reserved
This story first appeared in "In Newsweekly: New England's largest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender newspaper."
September 9, 2004