A History of Cooks and Cooking
A History of Cooks and Cooking

Author: Michael Symons

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2003-10-15

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780252071928

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Never has there been so little need to cook. Yet Michael Symons maintains that to be truly human we need to become better cooks: practical and generous sharers of food.Fueled by James Boswell's definition of humans as cooking animals (for "no beast can cook"), Symons sets out to explore the civilizing role of cooks in history. His wanderings take us to the clay ovens of the prehistoric eastern Mediterranean and the bronze cauldrons of ancient China, to fabulous banquets in the temples and courts of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia, to medieval English cookshops and southeast Asian street markets, to palace kitchens, diners, and to modern fast-food eateries.Symons samples conceptions and perceptions of cooks and cooking, from Plato and Descartes to Marx and Virginia Woolf, asking why cooks, despite their vital and central role in sustaining life, have remained in the shadows, unheralded, unregarded, and underappreciated. "People think of meals as occasions where you share food," he notes. "They rarely think of cooks as sharers of food."Considering such notions as the physical and political consequences of sauce, connections between food and love, and cooking as a regulator of clock and calendar, Symons provides a spirited and diverting defense of a cook-centered view of the world.Michael Symons is the author of One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia and The Shared Table.

Consider the Fork
Consider the Fork

Author: Bee Wilson

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2012-10-09

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0465033326

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Award-winning food writer Bee Wilson's secret history of kitchens, showing how new technologies - from the fork to the microwave and beyond - have fundamentally shaped how and what we eat. Since prehistory, humans have braved sharp knives, fire, and grindstones to transform raw ingredients into something delicious -- or at least edible. But these tools have also transformed how we consume, and how we think about, our food. In Consider the Fork, award-winning food writer Bee Wilson takes readers on a wonderful and witty tour of the evolution of cooking around the world, revealing the hidden history of objects we often take for granted. Technology in the kitchen does not just mean the Pacojets and sous-vide machines of the modern kitchen, but also the humbler tools of everyday cooking and eating: a wooden spoon and a skillet, chopsticks and forks. Blending history, science, and personal anecdotes, Wilson reveals how our culinary tools and tricks came to be and how their influence has shaped food culture today. The story of how we have tamed fire and ice and wielded whisks, spoons, and graters, all for the sake of putting food in our mouths, Consider the Fork is truly a book to savor.

A History of Cookbooks
A History of Cookbooks

Author: Henry Notaker

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0520294009

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Prologue: a rendez-vous -- The cook -- Writer and author -- Origin and early development of modern cookbooks -- Printed cookbooks: diffusion, translation, and plagiarism -- Organizing the cookbook -- Naming the recipes -- Pedagogical and didactic aspects -- Paratexts in cookbooks -- The recipe form -- The cookbook genre -- Cookbooks for rich and poor -- Health and medicine in cookbooks -- Recipes for fat and lean days -- Vegetarian cookbooks -- Jewish cookbooks -- Cookbooks and aspects of nationalism -- Decoration, illusion, and entertainment -- Taste and pleasure -- Gender in cookbooks and household books -- Epilogue: cookbooks and the future

The Cooking Gene
The Cooking Gene

Author: Michael W. Twitty

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2018-07-31

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 0062876570

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2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018 A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together. Illustrations by Stephen Crotts

The Blue Ribbon Cook Book
The Blue Ribbon Cook Book

Author: Jennie C. Benedict

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-10-17

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0813159881

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Jennie C. Benedict's The Blue Ribbon Cook Book represents the very best in the tradition of southern regional cooking. Recipes for such classic dishes as Parker House rolls, lamb chops, corn pudding, Waldorf salad, and cheese and nut sandwiches are nestled among longtime local favorites such as apple butter, rice pudding, griddle cakes, and Benedictine, the cucumber sandwich spread which bears Benedict's name. Throughout the cookbook, Benedict's delightful voice shines. Once the most famous caterer in Louisville, Benedict also operated a celebrated tearoom and soda fountain and trained with Fannie Farmer at the Boston Cooking School. Five editions of Benedict's famous cookbook have been published, and her aim in sharing her recipes was simple; as she mentions in the preface, "I have tried to give the young housekeeper just what she needs, and for more experienced ones, the best that can be had in the culinary art." As a creative entrepreneur, Benedict had a significant influence on the local culture and foodways. Her sweet and savory dishes were the stars of many Derby parties, and yet she placed equal emphasis on simple luncheon and dinner recipes to satisfy the needs of home cooks. While her popular dishes graced genteel tables all over the Bluegrass, Benedict's chicken salad sandwiches, sold from a pushcart, offered Louisville children the first school lunches in the city. This new edition of The Blue Ribbon Cook Book welcomes new generations of readers and cooks—those who remember wearing white gloves and eating delicate tea sandwiches at the downtown department store as well as those who want to make satisfying regional classics such as blackberry jam cake like grandmother used to make. Food writer Susan Reigler introduces the story of Benedict's life and cuisine.

Seeking the Historical Cook
Seeking the Historical Cook

Author: Kay Moss

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781611172591

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"A guide to historical cooking techniques from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century receipt (recipe) books and an examination of how those methods can be used in kitches today"--Dust jacket.

The Cook Not Mad
The Cook Not Mad

Author: The Cookbook

Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing

Published: 2012-10-16

Total Pages: 81

ISBN-13: 1449428177

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Published in 1830 in North America, this volume in the American Antiquarian Cookbook Collection stresses American cooking over European cuisine. Within a year of its publication in the United States, The Cook Not Mad was also published in Canada and thus became Canada’s first printed cookbook. In contrast to some of the larger encyclopedic cookbook collections of the day, The Cook Not Mad provides 310 recipes and household information designed to be a quick and easy reference guide to domestic organization for the contemporary housewife. The author describes the content as “Good Republican dishes” and includes typical American ingredients such as turkey, pumpkin, codfish, and cranberries. There are classic recipes for Tasty Indian Pudding, Federal Pancakes, Good Rye and Indian Bread (cornmeal), Johnnycake, Indian Slapjack, Washington Cake, and Jackson Jumbles. In spite of the author’s American “intentions,” the book does include foreign influences such as traditional English recipes, and it also contains one of the earliest known recipes for shish-kebab in American cookbooks. Reproduced by permission from the volume in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, founded in 1812.

Cuisine and Empire
Cuisine and Empire

Author: Rachel Laudan

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2015-04-03

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 0520286316

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Rachel Laudan tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world’s great cuisines—from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present—in this superbly researched book. Probing beneath the apparent confusion of dozens of cuisines to reveal the underlying simplicity of the culinary family tree, she shows how periodic seismic shifts in “culinary philosophy”—beliefs about health, the economy, politics, society and the gods—prompted the construction of new cuisines, a handful of which, chosen as the cuisines of empires, came to dominate the globe. Cuisine and Empire shows how merchants, missionaries, and the military took cuisines over mountains, oceans, deserts, and across political frontiers. Laudan’s innovative narrative treats cuisine, like language, clothing, or architecture, as something constructed by humans. By emphasizing how cooking turns farm products into food and by taking the globe rather than the nation as the stage, she challenges the agrarian, romantic, and nationalistic myths that underlie the contemporary food movement.

The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France
The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France

Author: Sean Takats

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2011-12-15

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1421403382

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In the eighteenth-century French household, the servant cook held a special place of importance, providing daily meals and managing the kitchen and its finances. In this scrupulously researched and witty history, Sean Takats examines the lives of these cooks as they sought to improve their position in society and reinvent themselves as expert, skilled professionals. Much has been written about the cuisine of the period, but Takats takes readers down into the kitchen and introduces them to the men and women behind the food. It is only in that way, Takats argues, that we can fully recover the scientific and cultural significance of the meals they created, and, more important, the contributions of ordinary workers to eighteenth-century intellectual life. He shows how cooks, along with decorators, architects, and fashion merchants, drove France’s consumer revolution, and how cooks' knowledge about a healthy diet and the medicinal properties of food advanced their professional status by capitalizing on the Enlightenment’s new concern for bodily and material happiness. The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France explores a unique intersection of cultural history, labor history, and the history of science and medicine. Relying on an unprecedented range of sources, from printed cookbooks and medical texts to building plans and commercial advertisements, Takats reconstructs the evolving role of the cook in Enlightenment France. Academics and students alike will enjoy this fascinating study of the invention of the professional chef, of how ordinary workers influenced emerging trends of scientific knowledge, culture-creation, and taste in eighteenth-century France.

A History of Food in 100 Recipes
A History of Food in 100 Recipes

Author: William Sitwell

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2013-06-18

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 031625570X

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A riveting narrative history of food as seen through 100 recipes, from ancient Egyptian bread to modernist cuisine. We all love to eat, and most people have a favorite ingredient or dish. But how many of us know where our much-loved recipes come from, who invented them, and how they were originally cooked? In A History of Food in 100 Recipes, culinary expert and BBC television personality William Sitwell explores the fascinating history of cuisine from the first cookbook to the first cupcake, from the invention of the sandwich to the rise of food television. A book you can read straight through and also use in the kitchen, A History of Food in 100 Recipes is a perfect gift for any food lover who has ever wondered about the origins of the methods and recipes we now take for granted.