Sandy Levins researches the foodways of bygone eras to create historically accurate faux foods for period settings. From a simple cheese-and-cracker platter to a traditional holiday feast, her foods help create the illusion of “lived-in” historic spaces, down to the faux flies on the fruit and faux-crumbs on the dining room floorcloth.

President of the Camden County Historical Society in Camden, New Jersey, Levins began researching historic foodways and crafting period-appropriate fare for the society’s 18th-Century Quaker mansion, Pomona Hall, in 2002. A researcher by training, she pores over period cookbooks and studies 18th-Century newspapers to learn about local and seasonal food availability. She then creates her faux foods using only museum-safe, nontoxic materials.

Her work has appeared at Winterthur Museum; Historic Deerfield, where her foods were featured in the exhibition Dinner is Served! Dining and the Decorative Arts in Early America; Savannah’s Telfair Museum of Art; the country house of American General Philip Schuyler at New York’s Saratoga Springs National Park; Deshler-Morris House, also known as George Washington’s Germantown White House; Independence National Historical Park; and George Washington’s Mount Vernon, where her faux foods helped bring the Green House Slave Quarters to life.

Levins lives with her husband of 43 years in Haddonfield, New Jersey, where she continues to enjoy the trial and error that is the fun of faux food, and savors the surprise and satisfaction of transforming plaster, papier-mâché, and acrylic paints into historically correct dishes that actually look good enough to eat.

Sandy Levins has been selected for the following Directories: