Research

Wilson Sayre Wedding Cake, 1913 (Glass Negative), Library of Congress

I have been fascinated with food history since I was a teenager, and occasionally deliver academic papers and prepare research briefs for food business clients. Topics of interest include: decorative food, fake food, confectionery, and the intersection of fashion and food.

Selected Papers

‘Is It Cake?’ And Why It Matters: Internet Memes, Hyperrealism, and the History of Cake Decorating

Presented at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference, October 2022

The Everything Is Cake Meme in Historical Context

Presented at the Popular Culture Association National Conference, June 2021

“No One Will Ever Know”: Historically Locating Fake Wedding Cake

Presented at the Northeast Popular & American Culture Association Conference, 2016

From Fruitcake To Foam: Commodity Fetishism, ‘Tradition’, and the Evolution of the Wedding Cake

Masters Thesis, Boston University, 2015

The Year of Fearless Baking Blog, 2016

This blog chronicled my attempt to learn as much as I could about baking by stretching beyond my comfort zone in my own kitchen. When I started out in January 2016, I had no way of knowing how short-lived this experiment truly would be. That June my doctor advised me to stop eating gluten for a little while. To my dismay, I haven’t gone back since.

In the intervening years, I have also quit drinking and come to realize I am non-binary. Taken together, these developments make me want to annotate the posts here, like M.F.K. Fisher did in the 1951 edition of How to Cook a Wolf, as my perspective of a lot of things has changed. However, I’m not going to do that. This blog is completely unrelated to the 2017 book The Fearless Baker by Erin McDowell (although such a book would have been welcome at the time).