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On an average day at the office, Montara resident Carolyn “Carrie” Tillie is either creating food-inspired art or cooking art-inspired food.
When she’s not preparing her next presentation for the Oxford Food Symposium on an esoteric culinary topic, she’s busy bringing a century-old menu to life at a local eatery through her group the Bay Area Culinary Historians (BACH). When she’s taking a break from all of this, she’s writing her fourth book on a subject deliciously nestled between art and gastronomy.
“Every day’s an adventure,” Tillie said. “My desk is like a Victorian cabinet of wonders.”
At the heart of this artistic life lies her quirky line of food-themed jewelry, which she’s been making for over 30 years now. From ice cream cone earrings at $5 and leek earrings at $25 to a $350 Russian nouveau necklace with little vegetables in place of gemstones — think eggplants for amethysts and tomatoes for rubies — Tillie’s collection spans the price spectrum.
At the exquisite end are items like a sterling silver ice cream cone cuff bracelet priced at $1,200; initially made as a commission to a gallery in Seattle, it was eventually bought and gifted to “the woman whose father managed (artist) Wayne Thiebaud’s career,” Tillie said.
Her more popular items tend to be the under $50 pieces, such as earrings fashioned after a single food item like dangling carrots, or charm bracelets adorned with small doughnuts and pastries priced at $80-$100.
“Truth be told, but it’s a little whimsy…it’s not something that one can ask a lot of money for,” Tillie said about her jewelry. Among her most bizarre pieces is one that involves real food: a ring with silver wires, so that “for one very fleeting moment you could wear a diamond-shaped fresh strawberry.”
She also takes custom orders to repurpose old jewelry. From drilling to gluing to soldering, all the magic happens out of her Coastside home.
The story began many decades ago in Tustin, Orange County, when a 6-year-old Tillie received a jewelry-making kit for Christmas. It turned out to be a gift that kept giving.
“I had a deep and abiding love of jewelry, and my inherent love of history got me into researching art nouveau jewelry versus jugendstil jewelry versus arts and craft movements and just learning the different aesthetics…which bleeds over into architecture and paintings and a general love of art,” said Tillie, who holds an MFA in jewelry and metalsmithing from California State University, Long Beach. She also has a Master Chef certification from the Epicurean School of Culinary Arts in Los Angeles and a Level 2 certification from the Wine Spirit Education Trust.
The inspiration to combine her love of jewelry with her passion for food goes back to a time her friend returned from a trip to Japan with “gashapon,” or gumball machine toys with plastic miniature food inside. She got a small sushi curio with a salmon roll on top, which she turned into a ring and wore. “It was beautiful, it was jewel-like…you could see light through the plastic salmon roll,” Tillie said.
She then researched the company that made it and “bought hundreds and hundreds of them wholesale,” and began making her own food-inspired jewelry starting with sushi-themed items like earrings, necklaces and brooches.
Of course, there was limit to the number of people who wanted to walk around wearing nigiri as an accessory, so she started making little bento boxes and desserts like cupcakes, tarts and pastries, sourcing some of the raw material from Pierre Hermé’s shops and some from the British dollhouse industry.
After an enjoyable run at local festivals, she discovered that the miniature food jewelry space was being inundated with new players — and not all of them were worthy of being her artistic rivals. “Initially ‘street fairs’ had real artisans, then they started letting in wholesalers,” she said.
“I remember pitching my sushi jewelry to SF MOMA and they turned it down, and six months later imported plastic sushi jewelry was in their shop,” Tillie said. “It kind of killed the spirit; it was no longer fun to pack up the car and camp in my booth when there was now a flood on the market of miniature food jewelry.”
Today, she exhibits her work at local galleries like M Stark Gallery in Half Moon Bay and the ACCI Gallery in Berkeley, among others. Recently she displayed her vintage artwork at Prospect, a restaurant in San Francisco, at a rummage sale organized by Les Dames d’Escoffier.
Another passion that Tillie has cultivated over the years is throwing food-themed parties and potlucks, an activity that paved the way for the kind of elaborate meal recreations she does through BACH, an organization she has been running with fellow food historian Andrew Sigal since 2021. Formerly, it was known as the Culinary Historians of Northern California; when she and Sigal took charge, they decided to run it like a brand new group with a “cheeky” logo that has German musician Johann Sebastian Bach on it.
Though their approach is light-hearted, the work they do is intense; recreating a meal from 1900 for Sam’s Grill in San Francisco, or crafting a “Charles Dickens Christmas meal” for 20 people at her home, is hard work.
Back in a pre-internet era, when she first started cooking historical meals, she would devour European cooking shows, visit libraries and scout for recipes in magazines. The menu was always rooted in a specific cuisine or a certain time or place in history, like a Roman banquet. She drew inspiration from iconic chefs like Julia Child, Lidia Bastianich and the controversial Jeff Smith, who was known for creating dishes from ancient cuisines from China, Greece and Rome.
A chef and food historian who aided Tillie’s journey is Ken Albala, who referred her to the Getty so she could work with them to recreate Parisian foods from the Impressionist Era. Tillie cooked food depicted in paintings from that time; for example, she made the stone fruit galette that Claude Monet painted in 1882.
Another chef who helped her along the way is Paula Wolfert, best known for her cookbook on Moroccan food. Wolfert’s collection of cooking pots now has a place of pride in Tillie’s kitchen.
“She’s the one who really encouraged my writing,” said Tillie, who started her writing journey with a pioneering wine blog called ‘The Ultimate California Wine Blog’ during a phase when she moved to Napa.
Today, Tillie is the author of three books including “A Feast for the Eyes: Edible Art from Apple to Zucchini,” “Oyster: A Global History,” and “Arm Candy – An Exhibition of Food as Jewelry and Body Adornment.”
Her work is also featured in “500 Plastic Jewelry Designs,” a book by Lark Books. “A gold brooch with shrimp heads is in there,” she said. Certainly not something one wears every day.
For more information, visit carolyntillie.com or instagram.com/carolyn.tillie.
