Feasts and Feats

This collection of articles, essays, academic presentations and poetry was compiled in celebration of the cultural contributions of Doreen G. Fernandez. We'll borrow from our description of Tikim, Fernandez's best known work on Filipino culinary culture:

Doreen G. Fernandez (profiled here in The New York Times) was an insightful and rigorous scholar of the foodways of her native country, bringing a knowledge of and curiosity about culinary history to her work. She was also a gifted writer, who brought clarity and spirit to her prose...

“Writing about food,” Fernandez notes, “is not  a matter of dipping into the thesaurus to discover the many ways to say ‘tasty.’ Instead it means digging deep  into human experience, because tasting, eating, and savoring are intimate ventures….When one describes food, one does not use words alone, but the readers’ remembering as well—of past pleasures, of savored sensations. One writes on their reservoirs of pleasure. In effect, one draws on all of the culture that shaped oneself and one’s readers.”

Fernandez was also important in the realms of theater, cinema, and literature and the contributors here come from those areas as well. There are family remembrances, tributes from her academic colleagues, and more. Most are in English; several are in Tagalog. These copes are from a limited print-run in 2000, two years before Fernandez's death. Although they are unused and printed on good stock, they display some faint spots of discoloration on the pages that we suspect is the beginning of foxing, which can be brought on by storage in humid environments. Hardcover.