Study Days

Lecturer: Sarah Lenton

Booking Months:
Cost:  To be advised – Lunch & Coffee,Tea included
Location:  Letcombe Regis Village Hall, OX12 9LJ

Opera is an extraordinary art form
how did it come about?
how do you cope with its exuberance and over the top emotions?
This Study Day tackles these questions, adding a practical finale which takes us backstage.

Talk 1 charts 400 years of opera history, from the moment it swept over Europe from Italy, landing up in France, Germany, Russia and, once it hit England, the back streets of Waterloo.
Talk 2 will look at the operas of the composer who can always be guaranteed to fill a theatre, Giacomo Puccini.
Talk 3 will show how the operas we’ve been discovering are actually put on stage, the balancing act of high-tech wizardry and very low tech theatrical know-how.

All talks are illustrated by audio and video clips.

Lecturer: Peter Ross

Booking Months:
Cost:  To be advised – Lunch & Coffee, Tea included
Location:  Letcombe Regis Village Hall, OX12 9LJ

A fascinating and fun day of three lectures covering the very broad range of foods that our Georgian ancestors prepared and consumed both in and out of the home. From the cooking skills and equipment in the Georgian Kitchen, by way of the dining habits of Jane Austen and Parson James Woodforde, to the food available in the streets and at chop houses and coaching inns of Georgian London. The study day is an in depth look at the social history of our ancestors eating habits illustrated with paintings, prints, recipe books, diaries and cooking equipment

Lecture 1: More than Just Buns: Eating out in Georgian London
Georgians of all classes dined out in pubs, coaching inns, French ordinaries, and confectioners. They also ate all kinds of street food and had an almost insatiable appetite for buns. On a journey through London we will discover the early morning drinks consumed on the street before dawn, ‘nunchions’ served at coaching inns, Billingsgate dinners, confectioners’ cakes, syllabubs and ices, the proverbially thin ham dished up to diners at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, as well as the Jewish takeaway foods of the East End and even London’s first ‘Indian’ restaurant. Our journey will be illustrated from prints, paintings and broadsides of the period, some long neglected as a source for a forgotten but fascinating part of our Georgian ancestors’ way of life.

Lecture 2: Dining with James and Jane: Eating at home with the Georgians
The Norfolk clergyman James Woodforde kept a diary between 1758 and 1802 in which he daily recorded almost every dinner he ate, whether at home, with friends, at an inn or in the houses of the local gentry. Jane Austen, moving in similar social circles a generation later, recorded food and manners in her letters and novels that illuminate Woodforde’s careful recording of his every meal. This lecture brings together these two with images of paintings, prints, cookery books and the objects of daily life to illustrate the often hidden domestic lives of our Georgian ancestors.

Lecture 3: Cinders in the Dripping Pan: Cooking in the Georgian Kitchen
Cooking in a Georgian kitchen required immense skill as a cook struggled to control the temperature of an open range, refined sugar, kept the ale-yeast alive, fed the bread oven, churned ice-cream in salt and ice, mixed, pureed, sieved, juiced, rolled, chopped, baked, roasted and boiled without any electricity or gas and virtually no mechanical aids. Discover through prints, paintings, book illustrations and surviving Georgian kitchens and equipment, how a cook used the myriad of tools, moulds, boards and pots to store, prepare and cook a remarkably diverse menu of dishes. But we will also discover that not everyone had the skills to achieve the hoped for results and some would have committed the ultimate sin of letting the cinders from the range fall into the dripping pan.