The Tidewater Culinary & Heritage Cider Society

What we are

The Society is a Virginia nonstock corporation, Tidewater Culinary & Heritage Cider Society Inc., with rooms at 416 Prince George St in the Historic Core of Williamsburg. It was formed in 2015 by a culinary historian, an orchardist, an oyster dealer and a tavern cook who had been holding an informal oyster roast on the James for several Novembers and decided to make it a public festival.

We are not a restaurant and we are not a museum. We are closer to an eighteenth-century improving society: a group of people with a shared subject who meet, eat, argue, and publish what they learn. Our subject is the autumn harvest table of Tidewater Virginia as it was eaten between about 1700 and 1800, and how it can be eaten now.

The four pillars

• Oyster roasts on the James and York, by the historic method of iron sheets and wet burlap over red-oak embers, and a merroir tasting of the eight Virginia oyster regions.
• Heritage cider from Hewes Virginia Crab, Albemarle Pippin and Winesap apples, pressed on a double-screw press and fermented dry in neutral oak puncheons in the Society cellar.
• Hickory-smoked country ham from a Surry County smokehouse, aged two years and carved thin at the table.
• Tavern gastronomy: the seated supper in removes, the toasts, the tall tales, the parlour games. The table as the colony kept it.

The steward

Nathaniel Dandridge, Culinary Historian & Festival Steward, has run the festival since its first year. Trained as a historian of foodways, Nathaniel spent a decade in the kitchens of the Historic Area interpreting eighteenth-century cookery before founding the Society. They write the almanac, keep the cellar book, set the bill of fare and, on the closing Sunday, serve as toastmaster. Nathaniel is the author of the Society's treatises on oyster merroir and heritage cider, and of the two tavern companions on opening nights and table wit.

Membership and tickets

Membership is open to anyone, costs the price of a bushel of oysters a year, and gives a fortnight's early call on the seated supper, a share of the cellar's cider at the closing toast, and the Society's printed almanac. Tickets to each sitting are sold to the public by writing to the box office. Members, purveyors and volunteers eat together on opening night.

Write to the stewards at [email protected] for anything about the Society, its orchard or its treatises. Write to the box office at [email protected] for tickets and reservations.