Food Stories was a touring exhibition celebrating East Anglian recipes, cooking, farming techniques and dialect words that have been passed down through generations. As we travelled around the region visitors were invited to take a seat at our table, to share memories, stories and conversations about food and language.

The starting point for the exhibition was a collection of oral history recordings and dialect studies from East Anglia, made by the University of Leeds for the Survey of English Dialects (SED) 1946-1978. These histories are a fascinating window into the lives of historic rural communities with their rich array of East Anglian dialect words such as horkey, winklers and swimmers.

The exhibition aimed to start conversations with local people about the connections between food, language and identity. The tour visited 20 locations in Spring 2022, some of which were original SED villages, where recipes and dialect words were shared and helped to build a contemporary picture of East Anglia’s food and words.

Scroll down for some photographs from the tour.