2-3  author double header! Darra Goldstein, author of many books, most recently Fire & Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking and The Georgian Feast + Cortney Burns, co-author of Bar Tartine: Techniques and Recipes

Darra Goldstein is the Founding Editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. Hailed as “a New Yorker for foodies,” the journal was named the 2012 Publication of the Year by the James Beard Foundation. She is also the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, Emerita at Williams College, where she moved beyond her initial training in Russian language and literature to teach courses in food studies. Goldstein’s interest in studying food began in grad school at Stanford, where she was told that she couldn’t write a dissertation on food in Russian literature. So, as a newly minted PhD, she published her first cookbook, À la russe: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality, which led to a stint as a spokesperson for Stolichnaya vodka when it was first introduced to the US—a fascinating exercise in cross-cultural communication during the Cold War. It also led to menu consulting for New York Russian restaurants like the Russian Tea Room and Firebird. Goldstein has published widely on food, literature, culture, and art and has organized several exhibitions, including Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age and Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500-2005, both at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. In 2015 she published the James Beard-nominated Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, for which she served as Editor in Chief. She’s the author of five cookbooks: A Taste of Russia (nominated for a Tastemaker Award), The Georgian Feast (winner of the 1994 IACP Julia Child Award for Cookbook of the Year), The Winter Vegetarian, Baking Boot Camp at the CIA (IACP award finalist), and, most recently, Fire and Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking, a finalist for the James Beard, IACP, and Art of Eating awards. For many years she was Food Editor of Russian Life magazine and continues to be the Series Editor of California Studies in Food and Culture from the University of California Press. Her new cookbook, Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore, will appear in February 2020. Goldstein has consulted for the Republic of Georgia (an AgVANTAGE/USAID project on Georgian agriculture), for Norway (the European Union Northern Dimension Initiative), and for the Council of Europe, a think tank for the European Union, where she was part of an international group exploring ways in which food can be used to promote tolerance and diversity. Under her editorship the volume Culinary Cultures of Europe: Identity, Diversity and Dialogue was published in 2005. In 2013 she was named Distinguished Fellow in Food Studies at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto, and in 2016 was honored with a Macgeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. She currently serves on the Kitchen Cabinet of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and on the Advisory Board of the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts. www.darragoldstein.com

A native of the Midwest, Burns’ interest in food began at an early age with childhood outings to the market for comfort foods like warm corned beef and Muenster cheese. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Burns earned degrees in Cultural Anthropology and South Asian studies with a focus in Tibetan language, which took her to Nepal and India for a year, where she fell in love with the region’s exotic spices and flavors. Upon graduation, Burns moved to Australia, where she first began to cook professionally, and eventually returned to the States in 2001, settling in the Bay Area. In San Francisco, Burns first worked at Café Rouge under Marcia McBride, honing her kitchen skills and exploring butchery and charcuterie. From there, she moved on to the management team at Quince, where her true passion for handcrafting foods took hold. After Quince, Burns worked her way through many kitchens in the San Francisco area, spending many years working at Boulette's Larder under the tutelage of Amaryll Schwertner. Burns left San Francisco in 2006 and opened a private chef business in Sun Valley, Idaho, which took her to cook in Seattle and Hawaii as well. In 2008, she returned to California, cooking in wineries in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys and teaching at The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone. In 2011, Burns joined co-chef Nick Balla at Bar Tartine, where the duo cooked bold and innovative dishes that earned national acclaim. The pair wrote their first cookbook together in November 2014, Bar Tartine: Techniques and Recipes (Chronicle Books), which won a James Beard Foundation Award in the “Cooking from a Professional Point of View” category and an IACP Award in the “Chefs and Restaurants cookbook” category. In October 2016, Burns and Balla opened Motze, a pop-up okazu-inspired restaurant in San Francisco, then returned to their Central European roots by transforming Motze into Duna, a restaurant where the menu centers around Hungarian and Central European flavors. After Motze’s opening, Burns closed Bar Tartine in December 2016 and moved east to assist with opening Tourists, a 55-acre hotel property in North Adams, MA, where she curated the food program. After the opening she left North Adams and currently splits her time between Cape Cod and New Hampshire as she finishes writing a new book, “Nourish Me Home,” which will be published in Spring 2020. She is also consulting on the setup and extension of various preservation programs around the country.

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