On the Table Series
ON THE TABLE:
Three Banquets For a Queen
Gastronomy meets art in a new series, On the Table, edited by the provocative, genre-straddling Swedish writer Charlotte Birnbaum. The first publication is a new translation of a 17th-century text describing three spectacular banquets that greeted Queen Christina of Sweden when she visited Rome in 1668. Antonio degli Effetti was on the scene, and described all three feasts in their sumptuous glory, detailing the lavish preparations for the celebrations and the dining experience itself, designed by Bernini, no less! The original text, dotted with quotations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid, is placed in today’s context by a foreword and two essays by Birnbaum. Was it dinner or was it 300-year-old performance art?
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THE BEAUTY OF THE FOLD
An Interview with Joan Sallas
This second book in the ground-breaking On the Table series about the culture of gastronomy as artistic expression – edited by Charlotte Birnbaum – delves into the art of napkin folding. It features German master Joan Sallas, whose folded napkins graced the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibit of 1780 Viennese royal table silver. (Watch him fold a “water lily” napkin on YouTube.) Birnbaum interviews Sallas on the history of napkin folding, stretching back to the Renaissance and Baroque, and contributes a short essay on the art’s complex history; the remainder of the book is an illustrated catalog of Sallas’s ornate folding techniques.
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