In Oxford, food is not just about feeding the brain. Think of Oxford marmalade, college feasts, sconcing and High Table. Indeed, college feasts are the last remaining echoes of fine Norman dining: the codified seating, profusion of dishes, formal manners and solemn Latin graces that for 600 years have been reminding everyone to sit up just that bit straighter. As early as 1460, diners were advised not to sniff, belch or put their hands down their trousers to scratch their codware; farting was circumscribed and – even then – elbows were kept off tables.

Not so long ago, Oxford’s colleges used to be virtually self-sufficient with their fishponds, deer parks, dovecots and beehives, and to this day Magdalen dons dine like medieval princelings on their own venison. While most of Britain’s oldest covered markets have disappeared, the city’s 12th-century market has clung on, its grocers, delis, butchers and bakers thriving tenaciously in the face of supermarket competition. Feller’s butchers is the kind of place where your granny used to shop. At Christmas, the huge carcasses of swamp deer swing from sharp hooks. According to the season, there could be 30 whole muntjac lined up alongside rabbits, hares and every kind of game bird from mallard to wigeon, wild guinea fowl to snipe. It is a meaty heaven in which the Tudors would have felt at home, a place where fur, skin, eyes, feathers and tails are part of the experience, encouraging a very hands-on appreciation in the purchasing of good fresh flesh.

In 1524, when Cardinal Wolsey began Christ Church, the college’s vast kitchen was his starting point, its wooden ceiling rising more than 60ft to louvres through which smoke from the three vast roasting ranges could escape. Twenty feet across, with baking ovens set into their sides, these fireplaces would have held a variety of spits at different heights, thick and heavy for whole carcasses, finer for small birds and game. A great stone mortar was built into the wall and a myriad of outlying offices proliferated: larders, storerooms, cellars and butteries for the wine and ale in butts, pantries for bread and sculleries for the keeper of the dishes. A wide stone staircase led up to the beamed great hall, whose ceiling was decorated with heraldic motifs and escutcheons; up-to-the minute carved wooden screens concealed the arches to the kitchen and buttery corridors, muffling the draughts.

Wolsey’s great kitchen – suitably adapted for 21st-century appetites – is still used by the college today and its vaults will supply an extraordinary stage-set for Tamasin Day-Lewis’s talk on April 4. Hall too, is virtually unchanged: a working dining room for hundreds of hungry, black-gowned undergraduates, when it isn’t serving as the backdrop for the festival’s series of banquets and talks. The kitchen’s survival is all the more remarkable for its rarity: only a century after it was built, the Tudors began to forsake the feudal, first-among-equals nature of their great halls. By the 1530s, the wealthy were more inclined to privacy than hospitality and were increasingly likely to dine in upstairs privy chambers. As the numbers of merchants and the squirearchy grew, hierarchical dining survived only in academic palaces such as the colleges of the ancient universities.

Centuries of dons must have wished themselves somewhere smaller and warmer. As early as the 1630s, the philosopher Robert Burton – melancholic keeper of the college’s library – believed that coffee had the potential to cure despondency and, within a generation, Oxford was among the first cities outside London to establish coffee houses: crucibles for passionate and sometimes seditious debate. Simultaneously, in college rooms and fashionable saloons, Oxford was renowned for its enthusiasm for the latest avant-garde drink – chocolate.

Food and cooking are about more than sustenance. Their history inevitably weaves into itself discussions of empire and economics, of politics, culture, fashion, horticulture and even architecture. Descriptions of the way food has been prepared and received can effectively punch a hole through time: strained by the monotony of Lent, one 15th-century schoolboy scrawled in his schoolbook “thou wyll not beleve how werey I am off fysshe, and how moch I desir that flesch wer cum in ageyn.”

The empty shell of an immense West Indian green sea turtle still hangs on the wall of the Christ Church kitchen. A forgotten relic of the ostentatious dining of the later 18th century, it trails the whiff of an age of rampant socialising and unbridled appetite in which waistlines swelled and buttocks widened, a time when plain roast beef was the symbolic backbone of stable Middle England, in contrast to the tricksy dishes of French chefs. More than a century on, perhaps – who knows? – that turtle shell also caught the eye of the college’s mathematics professor Charles Dodgson as he contemplated his stories for Alice. Brain food indeed.

OXFORD: WHERE TO STAY AND HOW TO BOOK

This year’s Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival runs at Christ Church from Monday, March 31 to Sunday, April 6. To get a flavour of the festival, and to immerse yourself fully in the atmosphere of Christ Church, you can stay at the college, either by booking individual rooms for a starting price of £53 per night, B&B, or by taking advantage of our two-night festival packages, available exclusively to Sunday Times readers:

March 31-April 1: accommodation and breakfast at Christ Church, plus tickets to see Sebastian Faulks, Clarissa Eden, Oliver James and Rita Carter. Prices from £130.

April 2-3: accommodation and breakfast at Christ Church, plus tickets to see Seamus Murphy discussing Afghanistan with Anthony Loyd; the Penguin readers’ evening with Catherine Bailey, Jane Johnson and Jeremy Page; Dragons’ Den judge Peter Jones; Mark Tully; and Adam Mars-Jones talking to Margaret Drabble. Prices from £137.

To book your stay, call 01865 286848/286877 or e-mail festival@chch.ox.ac.uk.

BOOKING TICKETS

To book tickets for events at the festival, go online at www.ticketsoxford.com (24hr booking until March 31 at 10am) or telephone 0870 343 1001.

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