Winner of the 2023 Prize Announced

We are delighted to announce that the Sophie Coe Prize 2023 was awarded to Frank Veraart for his book chapter ‘Catalysing Socio-Ecological Change: The Extraction and Processing of Edible Oils, 1910–1940’. The Judges commented that his work is “powerful, intelligently and coherently argued, and disturbing. The author shows very clearly the capitalist world is changing the ecology as well as the social conditions of the rest of the planet.” Many congratulations to our worthy winner.

2023 was an excellent year with many strong entries for our Judges to consider, and they particularly commended three additional papers:

‘The Origins of the Jewish Pig Prohibition: Pig Consumption and Ethnicity from Leviticus to the Maccabee’ by Julia Rhyder; ‘Building Pasta’s Empire: Barilla in Italian East Africa’ by Diana Garvin; and ‘The Limits of Disgust: Eating the Inedible During Jamestown’s “Starving Time”’ by Rachel Winchcombe. 

The Prize was announced at the Oxford Food Symposium on 8^th July. Sadly, none of the winning authors were there to hear the applause in person, but we pass on all of our congratulations to them all.

You can read the full Judges’ Report here; and where possible we provide links to all winning papers on our Winners page.

Winner of the 2022 Prize Announced!

The winner of the 2022 Sophie Coe Prize was announced and the Prize awarded at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery today. Our judges remarked on the generally high standard of entries this year, noting that they enjoyed reading “much original research and many exhaustive investigations over a range of topics stretching from the dawn of the Christian era to the present day.”

We are delighted to congratulate Marta Manzanares Mileo who is awarded the £1,500 Prize for her essay ‘Sweet Femininities: Women and the Confectionery Trade in Eighteenth-Century Barcelona’. After several years of virtual meetings it was an additional pleasure to be able to congratulate her in person at the Oxford Food Symposium. 

The judges also chose several other authors’ outstanding essays for commendations and special mentions, and we congratulate them all:

HIGHLY COMMENDED
Madeline Shanahan, “’When cheifest Rebell feede’: food, fosterage and fear in early modern Ireland”.

COMMENDED
Diana Garvin, “The Italian Coffee Triangle: From Brazilian Colonos to Ethiopian Colonialisti”.
Rebecca Ford, “Re-localising food in the nineteenth century: watercress, place, and purity”.

SPECIAL MENTIONS
Danielle Terrazas Williams, “The Inconvenience of Chocolate: Disciplining The Society of Jesus in Seventeenth-Century Mexico”.
Shanti Morell-Hart, “Maya Gastropolitik”.

You can read the full Judges’ Report for 2022 here. Where possible we upload copies of the winning papers on the complete page of winners of the prize, where you can find a full listing of present and past winners and commendees. If the winners’ work is/was published elsewhere, we will add a link to a copy of the essay or book chapter if we have permission to do so.

One more day to go!

Entries for this year’s Sophie Coe Prize are due by midnight tomorrow, Friday 26th April 2024. Check the How to Enter section and send us your work!

Sophie Coe Prize 2024

The closing date for entries in the 2024 Sophie Coe Prize is Friday 26th April 2024. Full details of the Prize can be found on the How to Enter page – click above.

Dr Kaori O’Connor

We are sorry to share the news of the death of one of our Trustees, the anthropologist and author Dr Kaori O’Connor. Kaori won the Sophie Coe Prize in 2009 with her paper “The Hawaiian Luau: Food as Tradition, Transgression, Transformation and Travel”, published in the journal Food, Culture & Society, and joined the trustees of the Sophie Coe Memorial fund in 2013. Her combination of efficiency, directness, humour and warmth made her a superbly effective trustee, and we will miss her hugely.

Sophie Coe Prize 2022

The closing date for entries in the Sophie Coe Prize 2022 is Friday April 22nd, 2022.

Please click the How to Enter option above for full conditions of entry and submission instructions.

2021 Winner and Commendees Announced!

The winner of the 2021 Sophie Coe Prize was announced and the Prize awarded at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery today. Competition was fierce this year. We received a record number of entries–85.

We congratulate Carl Ipsen, whose essay “From Cloth Oil to Extra Virgin: Italian Olive Oil Before the Invention of the Mediterranean Diet.” is awarded this year’s Prize of £1,500. Professor Ipsen recorded a short video for us, accepting the (as it turned out–literally!) earth-shattering news.

The judges also wished to acknowledge several other outstanding essays from amongst this year’s submissions.

“’Nothing which hunger will not devour’: Disgust and Sustenance in the Northeastern Borderlands” by Carla Cevasco (Highly Commended). 

“The Pleasures of Eating in Early Modern Britain, c. 1550-1800” by Ella Sbaraini (Highly Commended).

“From Kitchen Arabic to Recipes for Good Taste: Nation, Empire and Race in Egyptian Cookbooks” by Anny Gaul (Commended).

“Finding Apūpa: Not forgotten, just hidden in plain sight” by Priya Mani (Honourable Mention).

You can read the full Judges’ Report here, and link to past and present winning papers that we are permitted to share on the Winners’ page here.

Sophie Coe Prize 2021: submission deadline April 23rd

The Sophie Coe Prize is awarded each year to an engaging, original piece of writing that delivers new research and/or new insights into any aspect of food history. We welcome entries of up to 10,000 words on any relevant topic. The Prize is £1,500 for the winning essay, article or book chapter. Authors may submit one entry only each, and they must be delivered to us by this year’s closing date of Friday 23rd April 2021.

Please read the “How to Enter” page before submitting your entry (accessible via the menu option above). We also recommend that you follow the other pages linked from the menu to find out what kind of work has been commended by the Judges in past years, and to find out more about Sophie Coe, in whose honour the Prize was founded and is awarded.

The origins of Susanne Belovari’s winning paper, by the author

In spring 1997, in a small university town in the American Midwest, I accepted a job cleaning the house of a psychologist and a professor of classics to earn money to pay for my dissertation copies. As it happened, the family was Orthodox Jewish of Austro-Hungarian and Eastern European background. Because we got along well, eventually we became friends, and because I was quick in learning the requisite kosher rules, they also had me clean and cook for orthodox Pesach (Passover), the most restricted kosher cooking there is. When they asked me, however, to bake some of their typical Pesach desserts, I balked at it. I had grown up in Vienna from the 1960s to1980s eating very traditional Viennese cuisine and its desserts made by my mother, who had been an excellent cook. My mother’s mother had run her own small Viennese coffeehouse until 1920 and so renowned were her apple strudels and other desserts that my much older cousin would bike even from Graz to Vienna in the 1950s to get a piece. My other grandmother had been a pastry chef for an aristocratic family in Graz until the end of World War I. In this kind of family, the recipes handed to me for Pesach desserts were not palatable.

Instead, I leafed through my Viennese grandmother’s handwritten cookbook and my copy of Die Wiener Küche by Olga and Adolf Hess from ca. 1929 and I baked what were our quintessential family Christmas cookies, Haselnußbusserln and a Viennese Veilchentorte (hazelnut cake) among others. None of these dishes needed leavening, flour, or fermentable ingredients which are all prohibited during Pesach, and while Pesach guests were delighted and wanted the recipes, I was left with a puzzle: how was it possible that many of my grandmother’s recipes, menu plans, and those of the archetypical Hess cookbook were applicable to even the strictest Jewish culinary rules without needing any adjustments for kosher cooking? And my next thought was an unsubstantiated leap: was our famous historical Viennese Cuisine perhaps a shared culinary product, practice, and legacy of Viennese Jews and non-Jews alike?

Trying to search for answers led me along paths of archival and historical research as part of which I met many Viennese Holocaust survivors, formed close friendships with them, and learnt from their stories. The context within which I situate my culinary history is deeply influenced by my interdisciplinary background and my work as a former Holocaust restitution historian and archivist for the Jewish Community of Vienna, Austria (IKG), where I rebuilt the historical IKG archives the National Socialists had closed down. If this culinary research helps to unearth, acknowledge, and honor the contributions of Viennese Jews to our Viennese Cuisine, if it helps us see the complexities involved in everyday culture and the most simple of acts, if it helps us to remember and honor the Viennese Jews I met along the way as well as the amazing grandparents on both sides of my family who held on to the humanity of their neighbors, friends, and their own in troubling and dangerous times, then this research served its purpose.

 

2020 Winner Announced

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2020 Sophie Coe Prize is Susanne Belovari, for her paper, ‘The Viennese Cuisine before Hitler–‘One Cuisine in the use of Two Nations’”. The judges commented on the “the thoroughness, elegance, and originality of Belovari’s analysis of Wiener Küche…” as well as her extensive use of notes “to keep her narrative clean while at the same time sharing the depth and subtlety of her underlying research.” They concluded that “Belovari’s essay, twenty years in the making, emerges from its long gestation as a powerful work of culinary history, an extraordinary example of how the study of food can pose fundamental questions about the workings of the human heart.” We are delighted to award her this year’s prize of £1,500.

There were seventy (70!) essays entered into the competition this year, a record for the Sophie Coe Prize. The judges commented on several other papers from this year’s submissions, and commended them all for different reasons. We heartily congratulate them all.

First, the Judges commented on the general lack of work on the food of the powerless, and called out for particular attention Markéta Slavková’s “Starving Srebrenica and the Recipes for Survival in the Bosnian War (1992-1995)” and Ayfer Erkul’s “Food refusal as a protest tool. Hunger strikes in Belgian prisons during the interwar period.”

Next, they commented on the use of archaeobotany and experimental archaeology to solve basic, previously unsatisfactorily answered, questions of culinary history. Adeline Bats’ ”The Production of Bread in Conical Moulds at the Beginning of the Middle Kingdom. The Contribution of Experimental Archaeology” and Mennat-Allah El Dorry’s “Forbidden, Sprouted, Stewed: An Archaeobotanical and Historical Overview of Fava Beans in Ancient Egypt” were singled out for particular praise on this front.

Finally, there were numerous more traditional essays on culinary history, with the following bringing “valuable insights to their studies” and being a pleasure to read: Rebecca Earle’s “Potatoes and the pursuit of Happiness”; Vicky Hayward’s ““And in the morning the cook… shall go to his kitchen”: Juan Altamiras’ New Art of Cookery, and its Defining Influence on Modern Spanish Cooking”; Fanny Louvier’s “Maid in the Kitchen: Female Domestic Servants and Food Businesses in France, 1900-1939”; Helen Pfeifer’s “The Gulper and the Slurper: a Lexicon of Mistakes to Avoid While Eating with Ottoman Gentlemen”; and Simon Werrett’s “Physics and Fruitcakes: Food Thrift and Experiment in the Early Modern”.

To read the full Judges’ Report, click here. To read the winning and commended works, please visit our Winners’ page, where links are posted as soon as we are able or permitted to do so.