Art fare

Poised at the intersection of food and art history, an enchanting Texan beckons with her fork.

Maite (My-tay) Gomez-Rejon, 39, with a graduate degree in art history from the Art Institute of Chicago and a Grande Diplome from the French Culinary Institute in New York City, worked as a museum educator and private chef until two years ago, when she started a company called ArtBites to integrate her passions.

Now the Los Angeles-based chef and teacher crisscrosses the country conducting one-day adventures for folks who also find fascination in the fusion of food and art.

Last week at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gomez-Rejon guided a group of seven women (and her male cousin) through galleries of British, French, and Italian paintings and then cooked an appropriately themed lunch with them at La Cucina in the Reading Terminal Market.

It was her first time working with the museum and it was happy to have her. Museum spokesman Norman Keyes said tours such as Gomez-Rejon's augment the museum's official offerings.

"Whenever people are engaged in art, and can experience it in a fresh way, it's a wonderful opportunity," Keyes said.

Gomez-Rejon also offers tours focusing on Aztec and Chinese cultures, but last week she led her Grand Tour - a look at that British exercise that had wealthy young men of leisure touring France and Italy in search of art, culture, and the roots of Western civilization.

"In the early 1600s, there were no art schools, per se, in England," Gomez-Rejon told the group. In fact, most art was privately owned, and Grand Tour-ists made appointments to see collections at private estates.

Initially only gentlemen with time, money, and connections made the tour. Some took along promising artists of the day - also male - who could not afford such trips on their own.

In time young women made the quest. And by the 1960s, fresh college grads were backpacking through Europe, taking all the glamour and glitz out of the endeavor.

Here's where that fork fits in: Thomas Coryate reportedly introduced the fork to England after seeing it in Italy during his travels there in 1608. The utensil eventually caught on, and so did the desire to study Greco-Roman art, music, architecture, and ideas through extensive European travel.

"Everywhere they went, they ate well and experienced ingredients that were new to them and brought those foods back home," said Gomez-Rejon. "They probably did not miss the relatively bland food back home."

None of the paintings on her tour showed people eating and drinking. Instead, she linked food history to certain carefully selected portraits, sculptures, and objects at the museum.

So, for example, the group stopped at a bust of Louis XIV, who made sure his Palace at Versailles had a kitchen garden and a hothouse so he could enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables year-round.

Word is, Louis also liked to make his own omelets, Gomez-Rejon said.

"French service" originated at Versailles, she said. A parade of servants carried trays of food a mile or more from the kitchen to the dining room of the opulent palace, presenting all the picture-perfect dishes simultaneously.

"By the time the food reached the guests, it was probably cold," she said. "The way we eat now, with our food served in separate courses at different temperatures, derived from the Russian style."

Both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin dined at Versailles. Among Jefferson's papers were recipes for macaroni and cheese and vanilla ice cream, both written in his hand. And Louis XVI, who favored potatoes for their nutritional value, served Franklin a meal at which every dish was potato-based. Franklin was surprised and pleased, said Gomez-Rejon, given that Englishmen of the time shunned potatoes because they were not mentioned in the Bible.

Among the participants who paid $130 each for Gomez-Rejon's Grand Tour were Connie Holt, a hospitality teacher at Widener University, and two of her friends from Wallingford. For years, the three have been part of a larger supper club of couples who take turns making dinners for one another.

"You think you know," said Holt, who is particularly well-traveled. "But there is always more to learn."