They generally do themselves pretty well, food-wise, at the annual Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. The opening night dinner at this September's symposium featured dishes mentioned by the famous coded 17th-century diary of Samuel Pepys, and it's still reverberating with attendees.

Some foodies have mixed feelings about the 17th century because that was when English cuisine began to diverge sharply from French. But, judging by this banquet, cooked for the symposium by Michelin-starred chef Fergus Henderson, Pepys' time required no apology. Boiled mutton came in caper sauce; there were venison pasties and rabbit hash.

The star of the meal was the roast beef shank. Just as "boiled mutton" offers no indication of how appetizing that dish was, "beef shank" gives no idea how big a cut of meat we're discussing. There were huge leg bones -- Flintstone size -- with slabs of roast meat hanging off them, surrounded by a hedge of roasted onions and carrots.

This was followed by a course of 17th-century jellies. The fascination with the translucent, jiggly qualities of jelly goes back long before the Jell-O craze of the '50s, all the way to the Middle Ages, when jellies were aristocratic food. These were molded in antique shapes, such as St. Paul's Cathedral, London. (The St. Paul's before the Great Fire, mind you.)

Connecting the dots from korma to ghormeh ...

Mostly, of course, a symposium is about scholarly papers, and this year's subject was "food and language." I contributed what I thought was a wonderfully nerdish paper about all the dishes from Central Asia to Egypt that have names derived from a Turkish word meaning "fried," such as the Indian korma and the Persian ghormeh. My scholarly quibble was whether these dishes all descended from a single ancestral dish, or whether the word had been coined at different times for unrelated dishes.

But I was greatly outdone by Anthony Buccini's densely argued paper on the origin of the Greek word for "olive" (from which, by the way, we get our words "olive" and "oil" by way of Latin.) Because Greece had been in contact with Crete in ancient times, the question was whether the word elaiwon came from Crete. Buccini argued, citing proto-Indoeuropean roots, that the Greeks had learned it from the Hittites, their neighbors to the east. Wow. My hat was off to him.

... And from Pride and Prejudice to Bordeaux

Oddly, the paper with the nerdiest-sounding title was much more accessible. That was Patrick Braude's "The Hermeneutics of Wine Criticism." Ordinarily, you assume anything with "the hermeneutics of" in the title (hermeneutics being the study of interpretation) is going to be academic writing at its most tiresome, but Braude drew interesting parallels between literary criticism and wine criticism in the 20th century.

At the beginning of the century, he pointed out, literary critics talked a lot about their personal reaction to a piece of literature and often connected it with events in the writer's life; similarly, wine critics talked a lot about the region from which the wine came, and when they described its flavor, they tended to use impressionistic imagery -- comparing, for instance, a Bordeaux to a Jane Austen novel.

Then the New Criticism of the '20s concentrated on the text itself, rejecting both the writer's biography and the reader's reaction. Later in the century, wine writers started describing flavors using "concrete descriptors" (tobacco, bell pepper, etc.), rather than impressionistic comparison. Origin was not merely ignored, in the blind tasting it was ostentatiously concealed.

Then came what Braude identifies as the terroir movement, associated with the critic Hugh Johnson, which objected to blind tastings and claimed to liberate us from being consumers of wine so we could become self-conscious members of a community consisting of wine makers and wine consumers. He characterized the theme of this movement as "it takes a village to enjoy a glass of wine." He compared this to deconstructionism in literature.

Of course, this postmodern style is far more popular with critics than with consumers, who still prefer concrete descriptors and Robert Parker's 50- to 100-point rating system, just as they're unlikely to read a deconstruction of a novel before going to the bookstore. Still, it makes you think we're all part of the zeitgeist, which I think of as a great big wiggly jelly.

Charles Perry is a former rock 'n' roll journalist turned food historian who worked on the Los Angeles Times' award-winning Food section for 18 years, where he twice was a finalist for a James Beard award.

Photo of orange jelly version of St. Paul's Cathedral by Nick Atkins

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