©National Trust Images/Andreas von Einsiedel

King Edward VII was on the British throne as the 20th century swept into England. Already 59 years old, the new monarch continued the late Victorian fashion for considerable material consumption and fine dining. Faster modes of transport, along with the spread of the British Empire, gave rise to the availability of exotic foods served at the English table. Transatlantic marriages also brought American wealth into the dining rooms of aristocratic households. The result was a decade of lavish dining on a grand scale, with a complex series of courses using specialized tableware and expensive decorations. In this lecture, Sarah Coffin will explain how this elaborate dining method was expressed in the fashionable hotel restaurants in London, as well as in the country houses of the Edwardian elite. She will mark the transformation of British dining culture from the Edwardian era through the interwar years—when the table became both a canvas for creativity and a symbol of changing times. She will discuss how WWI brought about dining changes as well as the introduction of new materials—such as stainless steel. She will illustrate how the increased use of the motor car led to fancy picnic baskets for fashionable feasting outside. Finally, she will discuss the changes in the 1930s that brought modern dining elegance outside the dining room.

Sarah Coffin is a decorative arts and design consultant, curator, and lecturer. She has extensively researched and explored the interaction of culinary design and history. From 2003-2018, Coffin was Senior Curator and Head of the Product Design and Decorative Arts Department, at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Museum. Previously she worked at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Metropolitan Museum, NYC prior to becoming a Vice President and Decorative Arts Representative at Sotheby’s. Her tenure at Cooper Hewitt included her curation of the exhibition Feeding Desire: Design and Tools of the Table, 1500-2005, which explored the significant role of flatware and cutlery as design objects that impacted social mores and cuisine. Her other curated exhibitions (and authorship of exhibition catalogues) include The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s; Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels; and Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730-2008 among others. She has taught and/or lectured at NYU, George Washington University, Yale, Bard Graduate Center, and Parsons School of Design, as well as to numerous museum and private groups.

Tickets: $20 members*; $30 non-members
*Membership discount applied automatically when logged into your Royal-Oak.org account