Bonus minisode: Serve it Forth Food History Festival 2026

The British Food History Podcast

This bonus episode serves as a preview for the Serve it Forth Food History Festival 2026, an online event scheduled for October 17th. The ho

Key takeaways

• The 'Conquest Man' skeleton reconstruction by English Heritage reveals a person likely of Scandinavian origin living in Barton-on-Humber.
• Isotope analysis of medieval skeletons suggests that nutrition levels for children in Barton were significantly lower than modern standards.

Main topics

• Serve it Forth Food History Festival 2026
• Norman Conquest dietary habits

Notable quotes

I'm the amuse-bouche.

Conclusion

An engaging and appetizing preview that highlights the intersection of

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:18) Dr Neil Buttery here, food historian and chef. Next month on the 17th of October it will be the Servit 4th Food History Festival 2026. It's the online food history festival that I curate along with my colleagues Sam Bilton, Thomas Dinas and Alessandra Pino. This is a little extra bonus mini episode that we have recorded together to help give you a little bit of a taste of what is to come in this year's Serve It Forth. Tickets, by the way, are available via Eventbrite for £12 plus booking fee. And if you miss some or all of the festival, well, don't worry. All ticket holders will get access to all of the sessions after the event because we're recording them. Check out the show notes for links to the Eventbrite page and the Serve It Forth website. I can't wait to see you there. Cheerio! Speaker 3 (1:16) What do Norman food, Roman gladiators, Regency travellers and anchovies all have in common? Speaker 5 (1:24) Well, they're all on the bill of fare at Serve It Forth 2026, our online festival dedicated to food history. Speaker 2 (1:33) Thank you to everyone who has already bought tickets. They're selling like proverbial hotcakes. And also thank you to our sponsors. Cookbook, Steenburgs, Regency Fiction Writers, Replica, Blackfriars Restaurant and Lindisfarne Mead. On Speaker 1 (1:51) Saturday, 17th of October, we'll be travelling across centuries of cooking and eating with a series of courses. So, what will we be starting with, Neil? Speaker 5 (2:02) Well... I'm the amuse-bouche. We're not going for a full course. Yeah. And I'm going to be talking to whet everybody's appetite, speaking with Dr. Eleanor Barnett about, well, a couple of things. She's an excellent food historian and she very much, because we've all come into food history from our own directions, right? And she's... come into it from a very different direction to me via art history. So I wanted to talk about her personal journey. At what point do you suddenly decide you're a food historian now? There's no course in it that you can do really. So I wanted to talk about that and also have a look at some of the pieces of artwork that she's looked at at the past that she thinks is particularly interesting or important when it comes to the studying of food history. That's just to get us started. Something a bit lighthearted, nothing too intense. Speaker 2 (3:04) Excellent. Speaker 5 (3:06) Sam, you're the first proper substantial course, aren't you? Speaker 2 (3:10) Yes, I am. Given that the country is currently gripped by Bayer tapestry fever, I thought it would be interesting to explore how the Normans have changed the way that we eat. So I'll be discussing this with Professor Giles Gasper of Durham University and food historian Jenny Hood. in the first course. And to get us in the mood, I had a chat with Kevin Booth, head curator of collections at English Heritage, about the unveiling of Conquest's Man and what his skeleton can tell us about people living in Britain and their lives at the time of the Norman Conquest. Speaker 2 (3:57) I'm looking at a portrait of a man on the English Heritage website. He has receding, short grey hair, soft grey-green eyes and a lined but kindly looking face. Just an ordinary middle-aged bloke, really, that you could easily walk past on any street in Britain. Except this is no ordinary man. The image staring back at me intently is Conquest Man, a meticulously reconstructed visage based on a 1,000-year-old skeleton found at the Church of St Peter's in Barton-on-Humber. The face of Conquest Man has been revealed thanks to a research project combining the expertise of English Heritage, Historic England, the Crick Institute, the British Geological Survey, the University of Southampton, MuViz and Facelab. And it has revealed some surprising results. Speaker 2 (4:54) I had a chat with Kevin Booth, English Heritage's Head Curator of Collections, to find out what their research has uncovered about the people living in Britain and their lives at the time of the Norman Conquest. Speaker 2 (5:11) Hello, Kevin. Good Speaker 4 (5:13) afternoon. Speaker 2 (5:14) Thank you for joining me today to talk about this very fascinating project that you've been working on. Now, when we think about the Battle of Hastings in 1066, it's very easy to assume that it was a simple case of Anglo-Saxon English fighting against the Norman French. But how does Conquest Man illustrate that it's not quite as simple as that? Speaker 4 (5:37) It's not quite as binary as that, is it? I think about it in that... 50 years before some chap called William sails across with his flotilla of boats and lands on the south coast of England, a chap called King Canute does the same thing. He lands on the south coast of England. He subdues the country. He takes the crown. But at the time, he's king of England and of Denmark and of Norway