Dishes of Rotherham

Abstract

Cooking, dishing up and eating together might appear to be ordinary activities. Across every time and culture, they are also important community activities, providing identity, skills, a sense of connectedness, tradition and mental as well as physical well-being. In the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s, one of the most famous and spectacular ways to dish up was provided by the porcelain tableware made by the Rockingham Pottery in Rotherham. The Rockingham Works made some of the most colourful, exuberant, lavish and expensive tableware available at the time, for a national and international clientele. This book brings together food made by 10 cooks from contemporary Rotherham and some of the Rockingham tableware from Rotherham Museums, Arts and Heritage collection. The cooks come from different cooking traditions, including Pakistani, Sudanese, Guinean, Ukrainian, Czech, Yemeni, Malaysian and British. Each cook visited the Museum, chose an item of Rockingham tableware, and then cooked and styled their dishes to be served on the Rockingham items themselves. Professor Simon Grennan organised the dishing up and worked with each cook and with photographer Sally Robinson to spectacularly style their food and dish it up on the Rockingham. Stills from a new film by David Sánchez Marín about the making of these displays appear alongside Sally’s photographs of the cooks' food. Portraits of each cook, drawn by Simon, recipes and personal stories from the cooks complete the work.