Find me somebody who believes drinking is an entirely honorable pursuit and I’ll find you a drunk. This is an age of self-improvement and self damnation, and there’s no such thing as a guiltless drinker. Cocktail hour is the sum of everything wrong we’re doing: wasted time, wasted opportunities, empty promises, and empty calories.

Bless the clever people who figure out a way around that. Some of them got together last week for “Punch: A Brief History of the Monarch of Mixed Drinks,” an educational cocktail party thrown by the Culinary Historians of New York in conjunction with the National Arts Club. The students got their fair share of sauce, but it was of an edifying vintage, and at the end of the evening they didn’t have to go home hating themselves. Indeed, by then they were better people than they’d been just a few hours earlier. After all, they knew everything there is to know about punch.

It was your basic crowd of Interesting-with-a-capital-I types: dandyish fellows with newsprint smudges on their wrists, women in boldly patterned geometric scarves. Clutching plastic glasses of industrial-strength 17th-century punch, the 100-plus students listened to a lecture by the cocktail historian David Wondrich. When he made an important point, several people would take a sip, as if it might help commit the information to memory.

Two long tables served as bookends for Mr. Wondrich’s lectern, one supporting bowls of Bombay Government Punch based on a 1694 recipe, the other with the ingredients for the Bank Exchange’s Piso Punch, a recipe with a birth date of 1880.To go with it all was historical food: depressing gray cakes from the 18th century and thick hunks of buttered anchovy toast. “The flavors are so defined,” oohed Helga von Eiken, an artist with copper-colored corkscrew hair. “Now everything you get is much more subtle.”

Every month a historical food event is staged by the Culinary Historians of New York. Happenings to date have included a look at Indian rice and grains from 6,000 years ago, a talk on ancient wine, and a lecture on the Crusaders and gingerbread. Coming up next month: food and wine of 17th-century Jewish mystics. Tastings are always part of the group’s gatherings, and its Web site, www.culinaryhistoriansny.org, also includes historical recipes, such as 17th-century English salads and 18thcentury ketchup. The organization counts about 200 people as members.

Many of the people who’ve joined are food professionals, such as chefs, cooking teachers, and food stylists, but, according to the program director, Linda Pelaccio, a former Food Network producer, 40% of the members are amateur enthusiasts who just get a kick out of learning about ancient pickling practices.

Food history has always figured into the worlds of food studies and anthropology, but it’s recently gained a popular following among nonprofessional foodies who don’t just want to eat their complicated food, they want to study it. It’s partly a backlash against the hip factor that can attach itself to a food. As food trends’ expiration dates start to rival those of cartons of milk, food enthusiasts are wont to look back at times when popular food stayed that way for years. “It’s not just of the moment,” a food-science writer, Patricia Gadsby, said. She was munching on a walnut she’d just cracked by hand.

Another reason could be that as the food industry shifts toward the highbrow, it’s more common to think of food in intellectual terms. In decades past, cooks were generally considered craftsmen. Today, a certain artistic and intellectual prestige goes along with the job. Cooking schools are echoing that trend, placing greater stress on research and papers than ever. Cathy Kaufman, a teacher at the Institute of Culinary Education who is chairwoman of the historians group, said: “It’s not just how fast can you chop.”

The Culinary Historians of Chicago recently staged a 10 a.m. event called “Fresh from the Past: Recipes and Revelations from Moll Flanders’ Kitchen.” Next summer the Smithsonian Institution is putting on a traveling exhibition called “Key Ingredients: America by Food,” an exploration of our food choices, attitudes, and preparation over the past 500 years, that will also include tasting events.

Fifteen years ago the only culinary history groups were based in New York City, Ann Arbor, and Boston, but now they have them in Chicago and Washington, Austin and Houston, Los Angeles and even Catawba Valley, N.C.

There are two camps in the world of food-history buffs: those who go in for full-blown costume changes and period-specific table manners, and those who proceed in a more dignified and academic manner. The city’s culinary historians’ klatch definitely falls into the latter category, but Ms. Kaufman conceded that for the group’s 20th anniversary next year there might be a costume dinner, at which members would dress up in the period of the meal.

Devotees of culinary history say that, even on the most basic level, the pursuit increases their understanding of food. Barry Popil, who runs his own food Web site and is the consulting editor for the “Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink,” recently traveled across the world to learn more about food. In France he found out that the original crepe suzette was named after- ta-da! – someone named Suzette. “It makes it a richer experience,” he said.

Not only does food history enrich one’s understanding of gastronomy, but it also helps to justify it. Thinking long and hard about food and drink, rather than just inhaling it, is a way to circumvent utter gluttony – now it’s gluttony with both nutritional and intellectual value!

“I like the forgotten details, the minutiae,” a military food historian, John U. Rees, said from his home library in New Hope, Pa., a room that doubles as a wardrobe for his historical military garb. “Food is a way to get into the soldiers’ heads. You really understand what they were homesick for.”

At last week’s event at the National Arts Club, the lecture on the rise and fall of punch didn’t touch on anything so sentimental, but it did manage to transform a cocktail party into a riveting discussion of migration, class, etymology, and the British royal family’s propensity to sire boozing nincompoops.

Following a painfully scholarly question-and-answer period – one punch pundit raised her hand to point out that 13 toasts were given at the 1776 Evacuation Day Party – guests got to taste for themselves the punch that was popular in 19th-century San Francisco. It was an improvement over the 17th-century version, though it still went down like cleaning solution.