One of my goals was to uncover the origin of the ubiquitous Winking Chef. We’ve all seen him – the chubby mustachioed man wearing a chef’s hat and often making a gesture of approval
with his hand. I dug around as much as I could – searching old magazines and websites looking for the origin of the image. Of course generic chef images go way back in print
advertising but I was looking for one image in particular, the one I grew up with on my pizza boxes in New Jersey. Who was this guy? Was the image based on a real person? What’s the
deal????
…
There are few people in this world who are more-obsessed with pizza than I, but Scott’s gotta be one of them. Since discovering this blog post of his I now really want to
go on one of his pizza-themed walking tours of New York City. But you might have guessed that.
Anyway: Scott – who has a collection of pizza boxes, by the way (in case you needed evidence that he’s even more pizza-fixated than me) – noticed the “winking chef” image,
traced its origin, and would love to tell you about it. An enjoyable little read.
Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.
I live a just outside the village of Stanton Harcourt in West Oxfordshire. It’s tiny, but it’s historically-significant, and
there’s one very-obvious feature that I see several times a week but have never been inside of.
The Old English name “Stanton” refers to the place being “by stones”, probably referring to the stone circle now known as The Devil’s Quoits, about which I’ve become a bit of a local expert (for a quick intro, see my video about them). But that’s not the local
attraction I’m talking about today…
When William the Conqueror came to England, he divvied up large parts of the country and put them under the authority of the friends who helped him with his invasion, dioceses of the
French church, or both. William’s half-brother Odo1
did particularly well: he was appointed Earl of Kent and got huge swathes of land (second only to the king), including the village of Stanton and the fertile farmlands that surrounded
it.
Odo later fell out of favour after he considered challenging Pope Gregory VII to fisticuffs or somesuchthing, and ended up losing a lot of his lands. Stanton eventually came to be
controlled by Robert of Harcourt, whose older brother Errand helped William at the Battle of Hastings but later died without any children. Now under the jurisdiction of the Harcourt
family, the village became known as Stanton Harcourt.
These three (Normanesque) towers of Stanton Harcourt are, from left to right: the manor house kitchen, Pope’s Tower, and the tower of St. Michael’s Church. Photograph copyright
Chris Brown, used under a BY-SA Creative Commons license.
The Harcourt household at Stanton in its current form dates from around the 15th/16th century. Perhaps its biggest claim to fame is that Alexander Pope lived in the tower (now called
Pope’s Tower) while he was translating the Illiad into a heroic couplet-format English. Anyway: later that same
century the Harcourts moved to Nuneham Courtenay, on the other side of Oxford2 the house fell into disrepair.
It’s a piece of local history right on my doorstep that I haven’t yet had the chance to explore. Maybe some day!
Footnotes
1 If you’ve heard of Odo before, it’s likely because he was probably the person who
commissioned the Bayeux Tapestry, which goes a long way to explaining why he and his entourage feature so-heavily on it.
2 The place the Harcourt family moved to is next to what is now… Harcourt Arboretum! Now you know where the name comes from.
If you’re a tourist on one of “Jump Man” of Footprints Tours’ tours, I’m sure that the obligatory “jump for a photograph” moment at the end is a fun novelty. However, the novelty
quickly wears off when you work in one of the library offices right next to their usual spot, and the call of “3… 2… 1… JUMP!” is the loudest thing you hear all day, each day,
throughout the summer season.
