Rich Food Poor Food is a study of the two food traditions in western society: the food eaten by rich people and the food eaten by poor people. It suggests that, until very recent times, the two traditions have rarely intersected.The book studies the gastronomy of the rich, with some extraordinary accounts of extravagant banquets, but also underlines that poor people had food preferences and pleasures which mattered greatly to them. It contrasts, for example, the turbot of ...

A Fantasy Lover’s Food GuideEqual parts writer’s guide, comedy, and historical cookbook, fantasy author Krista D. Ball takes readers on a journey into the depths of epic fantasy’s obsession with rabbit stew and teaches them how to catch the blasted creatures, how to move armies across enemy territories without anyone starving to death, and what a medieval pantry should look like when your heroine is seducing the hero.Learn how long to cook a salted cow tong...

In Is It True?, Max Cryer explores the truth or otherwise of facts and beliefs we may have always been told are true, but which on closer examination may not be. In a wide-ranging book encompassing social history, language, music, politics, the natural world and much more, we discover the truth behind some of our most cherished beliefs. Always fresh and amusing, Max Cryer will take you on a journey through your acquired knowledge, testing whether it is really up to scratch.

A 2015 James Beard Award Finalist: "Eye-opening, insightful, and huge fun to read." —Bee Wilson, author of Consider the ForkWhy do we eat toast for breakfast, and then toast to good health at dinner? What does the turkey we eat on Thanksgiving have to do with the country on the eastern Mediterranean? Can you figure out how much your dinner will cost by counting the words on the menu?In The Language of Food, Stanford University professor an...

A fascinating persuasive history of how sugar has shaped the world, from European colonies to our modern dietsIn this eye-opening study, Sidney Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life, and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry. He discusses the production and consumption of sugar, and reveals how closely interwoven are sugar's origins as a "slave" crop grown in Eu...

A New York Times Notable Book: A renowned scholar explores the way we eat across cultures and throughout history.From the wild parties of ancient Greece to the strictures of an Upper East Side meal to the ritualistic feasts of cannibals, Margaret Visser takes us on a fascinating journey through the diverse practices, customs, and taboos that define how and why we prepare and consume food the way we do.With keen insights into small details we take for granted,...

Deliciously organized by the Seven Deadly Sins, here is a scintillating history of forbidden foods through the ages—and how these mouth-watering taboos have defined cultures around the world.From the lusciously tempting fruit in the Garden of Eden to the divine foie gras, Stewart Lee Allen engagingly illustrates that when a pleasure as primal as eating is criminalized, there is often an astonishing tale to tell. Among the foods thought to encourage Lust, t...

An essential history of a taste that shaped the world.Spices: for centuries the staple of cuisine, remedies and ritual, they have commanded the highest of prices. To this day, saffron is, per ounce, one of our most expensive commodities. For their sake, fortunes have been made and lost and new worlds discovered. Astoundingly, in the 17th-century more people died for the sake of cloves than in all the European dynastic wars of the period.Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs depict a...

A "funny and fascinating" cultural history about one of our favorite pastimes: eating ( The Village Voice).This is a delightful and intelligent look at the food we eat, with a cornucopia of incredible details about the ways we do it.Presented like a meal, each chapter of Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner represents a different course or garnish, which Margaret Visser handpicks from the most ordinary American dinner: among them co...

From the Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution, the Romans to the Regency, few things have mirrored society or been affected by its upheavals as much as the food we eat and the way we prepare it. In this involving history of the British people, Kate Colquhoun celebrates every aspect of our cuisine from Anglo-Saxon feasts and Tudor banquets, through the skinning of eels and the invention of ice cream, to Dickensian dinner-party excess and the growth of frozen food. Taste tells a st...

From the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author James Salter and his wife, Kay—amateur chefs and perfect hosts—here is a charming, beautifully illustrated tour de table: a food lover's companion that, with an entry for each day of the year, takes us from a Twelfth Night cake in January to a champagne dinner on New Year's Eve. Life Is Meals is rich with culinary wisdom, history, recipes, literary pleasures, and the authors' own memories of successes and catastrophes.For instance...

In this brilliant, engrossing work, Jack Turner explores an era—from ancient times through the Renaissance—when what we now consider common condiments were valued in gold and blood.Spices made sour medieval wines palatable, camouflaged the smell of corpses, and served as wedding night aphrodisiacs. Indispensible for cooking, medicine, worship, and the arts of love, they were thought to have magical properties and were so valuable that they were often kept under lock and key. For so...