Because one scoop of ice cream blog post is never enough, here’s a bit more on dessert equipage from the eighteenth century… As part of our installation devoted to the dessert service, we have on view an ice pail, made by the Worcester Porcelain Manufactory in 1770. This intricately decorated vessel is very much what it sounds like – it is a pail made to hold ice and chill food.  Designed in three parts, ice would...

If you enjoy an ice cream cone now and again (and we hope that you do), you might be interested to learn that ice cream was a favored dessert in European circles as early as the seventeenth century. As part of our exhibition English Taste, Rienzi has on view a series of porcelain objects from eighteenth-century dessert services, two of which were made specifically for ice cream.  If the thought of 300 year old ice cream...

If you have visited Rienzi to see English Taste: The Art of Dining in the Eighteenth Century, you have probably noticed a dish on the table vaguely resembling green beans. Rienzi’s docents often receive the question, “what’s that?” accompanied by an index finger aimed at the mass of unfamiliar green vegetation. The answer to the common query is samphire. What, you might ask, is samphire? Samphire, officially Crithmum maritimum but also known as crest...

This month we have been reading the third book in Rienzi and Bayou Bend’s History Reading Series, Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking by Kate Colquhoun. We thought it would be appropriate to have a British culinary-themed text to celebrate Rienzi’s current exhibition, English Taste. This book provides some supplementary information on some of Mrs. Rafflad’s dishes that grace Rienzi’s Dining Room table, including dishes that are the most puzzling...

Back in January of 2010, the news that the National Historical Publications and Records Commission would fund the MFAH’s two-year Electronic Records Archives (ERA) planning grant was met with elation by the project team, which originally consisted of the chief technology officer, the director of information technology, the records manager, and  myself, the Archives director. (A third I.T. staffer was added last spring to assist in the painstaking process of paring down the National Archives...