The Feast

The Feast is a culinary history podcast hosted by Laura Carlson, and it comes at the past through what people put on the table and in the glass. Its method is conversational. Carlson sets the scene, then turns to guests who have researched a meal, documented a tradition or kept one running. In 'Dinner in Camelot' she acknowledges that dinner parties were off the calendar during social distancing, then offers a seat at one of the best of the 20th century, beside writers, politicians, actors and civil rights advocates. The conversation moves through the White House rooms that were used, the order of the evening, the recent renovation under Jackie Kennedy and a seating plan unlike anything a modern host would expect. Beer is a thread the show keeps coming back to. Two episodes come out of the Beer Culture Summit, which the Chicago Brewseum held in Chicago in October 2019. The Brewseum is a museum devoted entirely to the history of beer. In one episode Liz Garibay, its founder and executive director, describes building it from existing relationships with cultural institutions, recruiting a board of people she admired, and staging events at both museums and breweries. The other, 'The Lost Women of America's Hop Industry', turns to the annual hop harvest and to Ella, a picker the guest came to know through her diary and the inspiration for a collaborative beer presented at the summit. Carlson has admitted to being tempted to call one run of episodes 'The Feast's Celebration of the Midwest'. At Carillon Brewing Company, a guest walks through a baking day: two fires, an oven that takes hours to heat, dough mixed by hand and a sourdough starter built up the day before, with volunteers doing much of the work. 'Serving Up Wisconsin's State Secret: The Supper Club' brings in a documentary maker who visited supper club after supper club. The talk covers how the clubs shifted toward welcoming women and whole families, how some have been passed down through generations, and a recent wave of new clubs that stick to homemade food and family ownership. The show also lets history turn bitter. In 'Feast & Fast: How Clean Eating Came to Early Modern Europe', guests discuss a print of soldiers stuffing themselves in a high-end confectioner's shop, published months after a letter from a Jamaica sugar plantation. The contrast is the point: artful sugar work on one side, and on the other the trafficking and exploitation of the people who produced the sugar. Carlson's own list of subjects reaches further, from England's early modern pineapple craze to a thousand years of distilling tradition in the Sonoran Desert. Her questions stay concrete, about rooms, fires, hops, starters and seating charts. For a first listen, 'Dinner in Camelot' offers one vivid table. 'Beer is Culture: A Conversation with the Brewseum's Liz Garibay' is the way into the beer thread.