BACH 12/2024 - Holiday Potluck

As in prior years, BACH will have one event for November/December, which will be our annual holiday party. This will be an in-person only potluck dinner at a private home in Oakland, CA on the evening of Saturday, December 9th at 5:00 p.m. Attendees will receive the exact address prior to the party. As space is limited, we are asking that attendees bring no more than one guest. Note that we are not able to accommodate children and that this will be an indoor event.

This year we will be hosting Anthony Buccini speaking on Per Devozione: Southern Italian Culinary Traditions of the Christmas Holidays. Along with the presentation we will enjoy a potluck dinner of Southern Italian holiday dishes. We ask that each person bring one dish to share. A set of recipes representative of southern Italian holiday fare as well as additional details will be provided to registered attendees later in November.

This is likely to be “sold out”, so there is a waitlist available. In the past we have had last-minute cancellations, so if you find that tickets are no longer available, we encourage you to sign up for the waitlist. Tickets are $10 per person.

Anthony Buccini writes:

Traditional Southern Italian foodways are, of course, intimately connected to the local agricultural calendar but also pervasively organized around the religious calendar of Roman Catholicism, in which the principal celebration is Easter; indeed, each Sunday throughout the year requires a festive meal that is, in essence, an echo of the Easter celebration. Second only to Easter in importance for most Southern Italians is, however, Christmas Eve, the traditional feast for which contrasts strikingly with other celebratory meals, particularly those of Easter and Christmas Day, in that it is necessarily a festa di magro, a meal which must conform to the strictest rules of abstinence from terrestrial animal products.

In this talk I discuss the traditional menus for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and the other notable holidays of the Christmas period and call attention to some important but overlooked historical aspects of the foods involved. In particular, I present evidence for the probable great antiquity of some specific dishes which, even for non-religious bearers of traditional southern Italian culture, are still today rigorously prepared and consumed per devozione.

Anthony F. Buccini studied at Columbia University (B.A.) and Cornell University (Ph.D. 1992, Germanic Linguistics); he also studied and later conducted research as a Fulbright Scholar at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He taught for many years in various capacities at the University of Chicago (Germanic Languages and Literatures, Linguistics, the College). Buccini is an historical linguist and dialectologist with particular interests in the Germanic, Romance, and Celtic language families and in language contact. Over the past two decades he has also been active in the field of food studies and has published on a wide array of topics, from pre-historical to contemporary and theoretical issues. In food history, his research focusses on Mediterranean and Atlantic World foodways. Buccini is a two time winner of the Sophie Coe Prize in Food History (2005, 2018).

We look forward to seeing you there! As always, it is super helpful if you can indicate your interest for the event on the BACH Events page on Facebook *in addition to registering here onEventbrite*.

Host or Publisher Andrew Sigal