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Bibliography

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Abad, Reynald. Le grand marché: L’approvisionnement alimentaire de Paris sous l’Ancien Régime.(Paris: Fayard, 2002).

Abaka, Edmund. “Kola is God’s Gift:” Agricultural Production, Export Initiatives and the Kola Industry of Assante and the Gold Coast, c. 1820-1950. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005.
Abaka’s investigation of the kola industry is a brief but significant addition to the scholarship on this important but little-studied commodity.
Trevor Getz, American Historical Review

Achaya, K. T.  Indian Food: A Historical Companion.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Discusses the full range and history of the Indian diet from prehistoric times to the modern era.

Adams, Jane.  Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2002.

Adams, Jane (ed.).  Proceedings of the Ninth Symposium of Australian Gastronomy: Food and Power. (no publishing information). 
See the review by Sarah Shepherd in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.

Adamson, Melitta Weiss (ed.).  Das Buch von guter Spise. (The Book of Good Food) Krems, Austria: Medium Aevum Quotidianum Sonderband IX, 2000.
This is a welcome edition, commentary and translation of "the oldest German cookbook." 
PPC

________. Regional Cuisines in Medieval Europe: A Book of Essays.  London: Routledge, 2002.
The book would serve as an excellent overview for students or amateurs, but [at US$85] this is a prince’s ransom. 
PPC

Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance.  Berkeley: University of California, 2002.
Albala’s engaging tour through the host of Renaissance dietary theories reminds us that our preoccupations with food and susceptibility to cranky advice about nutrition are nothing new. This is superior scholarship delivered with a light touch. 
Rachel Laudan

________. Beans: A History. Oxford: Berg, 2007.

________. Cooking in Europe, 1250-1650. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press,  2006.

________. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe. Urbana: University of Illinois    Press, 2006.

________. Food in early modern Europe. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press,  2003

________. (Series editor) Food Culture around the World. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003-2005.
The series is predictably uneven, and its format limiting, but it helps to propel food scholarship into the twenty first century with the task of culturing how we think about food culture.
Susan Tax Freeman, Gastronomica
Ashkenazi, Michael, and Jeanne Jacob. Food Culture in Japan.
Heine, Peter. Food Culture in the Near East, Middle East, and North Africa.
Mason, Laura. Food Culture in Great Britain.
Newman, Jacqueline M. Food Culture in China.
Sen, Colleen Taylor. Food Culture in India.
Houston, Lynn Marie. Food Culture in the Caribbean.
Long-Solís, Janet, and Luís Alberto Vargas. Food Culture in Mexico.
Lovera, José Rafael. Food Culture in South America.
Mack, Glen R., and Asele Surina. Food Culture in Russia and Central Asia.
Medina, F. Javier. Food Culture in Spain.
Osseo-Asare, Fran. Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Allen, Patricia. Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.
Together at the Table enables one to think about the agrifood movement in a more holistic manner, question our individual roles in the food system, and analyze our consumer nature and place in the world.
Heather McIlvaine-Newsad and Christopher D. Merrett, Gastronomica

Allen, Stuart Lee. In the Devil’s Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Fruit. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002.
A delightful read if consumed in bite-seize morsels. It is a little like pornography, titillating, works up to a point, but quickly gets tiresome.
Krishnendu Ray, Gastronomica

Allport, Susan. The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love. New York: Harmony Books, 2000.
This well-written book explores the complex relationship between the production and consumption of food, the evolution of Homo sapiens, and the difference between women and men. 
Les Field, Gastronomica

Allport, Susan. The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
If Allport is right, the disappearance of omega-3s from the Western diet is the key to understanding why that diet is making us so sick.
Michael Pollan

Ambrosoli, Mauro.  The Wild and the Sown: Agriculture and Botany in Western Europe, 1350-1850.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
This book describes the spread of new agricultural practice in the half millennium after 1350, and reconstructs a neglected part of Europe's agricultural past: the introduction of fodder crops and the continuous reorganization of traditional botanical inputs within a new system of farming.

Anderson, E. N. Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
Clearly designed as introductory but thoughtful reading for the general public and college students, the book baffles when Anderson’s generalizations turn to personal judgment, as in the case of the reception of tamarind in Mexico.
Katherine Dillon, Gastronomica

Anderson, E. N., with Aurora Dzib Xihum de Cen, Feliz Medina Tzuc, and Pastor Valdez Chale. Political Ecology in a Yucatec Maya Community. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005.
Anderson makes a compelling argument for the wisdom of indigenous methods of agriculture that are based in diverse plants, multiple microecological zones, and intense knowledge about the conditions needed for a successful harvest.
Clare Sammells, Gastronomica

Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
North and south, the livestock roved into the interior, many becoming feral and often encroaching on Indian cultivated fields. Livestock became the avant-garde of European settlement. When and where the Indians did adopt livestock, these animals in turn encroached on English fields, and the immigrant farmers blamed the indigenous people.
Alfred W. Crosby, American Historical Review

Andrews, Tamra.  Nectar and Ambrosia: An Encyclopedia of Food in World Mythology.  ABC Clio, 2000.
The magic properties and uses of food by both mortals and immortals as represented in the world’s myths and legends are brought together.

Appelbaum, Robert. Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
This book is as sumptuous and well structured as the Renaissance banquets in describes.
Michael Schoenfeldt

Armstrong, Elizabeth M. Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
An extraordinarily lucid and well-balanced analysis. Using the tools of history, epidemiology, and sociology, Armstrong has made the social construction of fetal alcohol syndrome a site for illuminating research and not a one-dimensional polemical slogan.
Charles E. Rosenberg

Arndt, Alice, ed. Culinary Biographies: A Dictionary of the World’s Great Historic Chefs, Cookbook Authors and Collectors, Farmers, Gourmets, Home Economists, Nutritionists, Restaurateurs, Philosophers, Physicians, Scientists, Writers, and Others Who Influenced the Way We Eat Today. Houston: Yes Press, 2006.
This book is a gem—a highly useful reference work, a thought-provoking journey, and a delight to read page by page.
Laura Schenone, Gastronomica

Artusi, Pellegrino. Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Living Well. Murtha Baca and Stephen Sartarelli, trans. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.
The cookbook by Pellegrino (1820-1911) towers above all other Italian cookbooks because the author sought to teach his compatriots not only about the glories of their cuisine but also about what it means to be Italian.
Fred Plotkin, Gastronomica

Ashkenazi , Michael and Jacob, Jeanne. The Essence of Japanese Cuisine: An Essay on Food and Culture.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2000.
[The authors’] main objective was to provide an overview of the relationship between Japan’s culture and its cuisine, and to "bolster some of the theoretical ideas relating cuisine and culture . . . suggested in Western cultures. They propose to trace the influence of a long list of factors that impinge upon food choices: material conditions, symbolic systems, social norms, families, social institutions, class structures, religion, the seasons, taste, and aesthetics. 
John Kochevar, Gastronomica

Atkins, Peter and Bowler, Ian.  Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography. London: Arnold, 2001.
A general overview of the expanding field of social and cultureal studies of food. It is an extremely ambitious book, full of references from various areas of food studies, ranging from geography and anthropology to rural sociology and agricultural economics. 
Daniel Ralston Block, Gastronomica
See the review by Sarah Shepherd in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre

Audoin-Rouzeau, F., and F. Sabban, F., eds. Un aliment sain dans un corps sain : Perspectives historiques. Tours: Université François Rabelais, 2007.

Avakian, Arlene Voski, and Barbara Haber, eds. From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005.
Unlike some other food studies collections, this edited work of original essays is not centered on a single topic or located in a single academic discipline or methodology. Instead the essays are responses to and reflections upon a simple but powerful question: What is the relationship between food and gender?
John Finn, Gastronomica

Ayala, César J.  American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1999.
This book is both a contribution to the study of the sugar industry in the Caribbean and an examination of the processes of American imperialism in this tropical setting. 
J. H. Galloway, American Historical Review

Ayres, Ralph. Ralph Ayres’ Cookery Book. Jane Jakeman, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Ralph Ayres was master of the dining hall of New College, Oxford, in the 1770s.

Baime, A. J. Big Shots: The Men Behind the Booze. New York: Penguin, 2004.
The real-life stories of Jim Beam, Jack Daniel, Jose Cuervo, Johnnie Walker, Baileys, Smirnoff, Bacardi, Seagram, Captain Morgan, Dom Perignon, Beefeater, and Hennessy.

Banerji, Chititra.  The Hour of the Goddess, Memories of Women, Food and Ritual in Bengal.  Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2001.
A very beautiful book about food.
PPC

Barndt, Deborah. Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail. Aurora: Garamond Press, 2002.
The tomato trail runs from Mexican agribusiness to Canadian supermarkets and restaurants. The object of the study passes along a tangled route, from the hands of indigenous women in the Mexican fields all the way to single Canadian moms scanning product codes in checkout stalls.
Gary Genosko, Gastronomica

Barnes, Donna R., and Peter G. Rose. Matters of Taste: Food and Drink in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Life. Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 2002.
Art historical and gastronomical studies here complement each other and enhance our appreciation of the artists’ works, an admirable example of how food history can illuminate art history, while taking on board the complexities of interpretation that might otherwise distort our vision.
Gillian Riley, Gastronomica

Bascove (ed.). Sustenance and Desire: A Food Lover’s Anthology of Sensuality and Humor. Boston: David R. Godine, 2004.

Bataille-Benguigui, Marie Claire and Cousin, Françoise (eds.)  Cuisines: Reflets des Sociétés.  Paris: Editions Sépia-Musée de l'Homme, 1996.
See the review by Barbara Santich in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.

Becker, Jasper.  Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine.  New York: Henry Holt, 1999.

Bell, Michael Mayerfeld (ed.). Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.
Through an accessible narrative that combines a colloquial, sympathetic, yet sophisticated discussion of the broad concerns and controversies facing the sustainable agricultural movement with finely detailed research based on in-depth interviews and long-term participatory observation, Bell and his collaborators introduce the reader to the Practical Farmers of Iowa, a grassroots sustainable agriculture organization founded and run by working farmers.
Timothy Vos, Gastronomica

Banerji, Chitrita. Land of Milk and Honey: Travel in the History of Indian Food. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2006 (available from Berg).
Tells the stories of India’s food. Te essays included here range from the rituals of propitiatory meals to the intricate variety of art connected with food and ritual.

Belasco, Warren and Scranton, Philip (eds.).  Food and Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies.  New York: Routledge, 2002.
Warren Belasco, "Food Matters: Perspectives on an Emerging Field;" Sidney W. Mintz, "Food and Eating: Some Persisting Questions;" Kolleen M. Guy, "Rituals of Pleasure in the Land of Treasures: Wine Consumption and the Making of French Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century;" Steve Penfold, "’Eddie Shack Was No Tim Horton:’ Donuts and the Folklore of Mass Culture in Canada;" Richard R. Wilk, "Food and Nationalism: The Origins of ‘Belizean Food;’" Amy Bentley, "Inventing Baby Food: Gerber and the Discourse of Infancy in the United States;" Martin Bruegel, "How the French Learned to Eat Canned Food, 1809-1930s;" Jeffrey Charles, "Searching for Gold in Guacamole: California Growers Market the Avocado, 1910-1994;" Tracey Deutsch, "Untangling Alliances: Social Tensions Surrounding Independent Grocery Stores and the Rise of Mass Retailing," Donna R. Gabaccia, "As American as Budweiser and Pickles? Nation-Building in American Food Industries," Sylvia Ferrero, "Comida sin par. Consumption of Mexican Food in Los Angeles: ‘Foodscapes’ in a Transnational Consumer Society;" Jeffrey M. Pilcher, "Industrial Tortillas and Folkloric Pepsi: The Nutritional Consequences of Hybrid Cuisines in Mexico;" Keith Allen, "Berlin in the Belle Epoque: A Fast-Food History;" Mauricio Borrero, "Food and the Politics of Scarcity in Urban Soviet Union."

________. Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry. Second update edition. Oxford: Berg, 2006.
A definitive account of how the sixties’ counterculture changed the way we eat.
Michael Pollan

________. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Reviewed by Roger Haden in Newsletter 43.
This astute, sly, warmly human critique of the basic belly issues that have absorbed and defined Americans politically, socially, and economically for the past 200 years is a knockout. Belasco’s important book, crammed with knowledge, is absolutely necessary for an understanding of where we are now.
Betty Fussell

Bender, David A. Oxford Dictionary of Food and Nutrition, New Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
The book includes a range of carefully chosen terms that straddle well the interrelated fields of cookery, science and history.
Roger Haden

Bendiner, Keith. Food in Painting: From the Renaissance to the Present. London: Reaktion Books, 2004.
Bendiner’s project is to prove that food painting is a separate genre of art history, on that has been surprisingly neglected in the past. He contends that food painting should be savored for the variety of information such images reveal about myth, medicine, religion, and politics.
Dorothy Moss, Gastronomica

Benporat, Claudio.  Feste e banchetti: Convivialità italiana fra Tre e Quattrocento.  Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2001.

Bentley, Amy.  Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity.  Urbana: University of Illinois, 1998.

Beriss, David, and David Sutton, eds. The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat. Oxford: Berg, 2007.

Berzok, Linda Murray. American Indian Food. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005.
The pursuit of Native American foodways has been hampered by roadblocks. . . . It is therefore with great joy that we welcome Berzok’s book, first in the series Food in American History, texts designed to complement high-school-level social studies programs.
Alice Ross, Gastronomica

Bestor, Theodore C. Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Bestor is a scholar, and his book isn’t for everyone; the four hundred pages brim with academic excursions into such esoterica as obligational contracting, upstream integration, and segmentary cartels. But there are nuggets of fun scattered throughout, and the book represents a heroic accomplishment of anthropological sleuthing.
Trevor Corson, Gastronomica

Bijlefeld, M., and S. K. Zoumbaris. Encyclopedia of Diet Fads. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003
In this collection of historical and contemporary approaches to weight loss the authors set out to describe historical and contemporary approaches to weight loss, from the mainstream to the fringe. The book is not really aimed at an academic audience and will only hold interest for scholars as an example of  popular writing on nutrition and diet.
Paul Fieldhouse, Food, Culture, and Society

Bilson, Gay. Plenty: Digressions on Food. Camberwell: Penguin, 2004.
While there are many books about food in libraries and bookstores, Plenty is distinguished not only by the quality of its prose but also by its insights; it has been written not by an observer or critic but by a practitioner, a professional who has experienced the joys of cleaning grease traps and of perfecting a dish such as brioche with poached bone marrow and red-wine butter. Gay’s descriptions of food are instantly evocative.
Barbara Santich

Bober, Phyllis Pray.  Art, Culture, and Cuisine: Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.
[The author] argues that the concept of haute cuisine–cooking as fine art–should be traced back to antiquity, if not prehistory. Bober, an expert in art history and archaeology as well as food history, brings all three disciplines to the table to examine food preparation and consumption from prehistoric Turkey to late medieval Europe.
Elizabeth McGowan, Gastronomica

Bogue, Margaret Beattie.  Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environomental History.  Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2000.
In writing about the past, Margaret Beattie Bogue has written a book about our present. The past–in this case the depletion of fish in the Great lakes due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and failure of governments to limit or restrain fishing or pollution–is all to familiar to us today.
John T. Cumbler, American Historical Review

Boisard, Pierre. Camembert: A National Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
The status gained and attributes lost over the historical course of this famous French solft chees are regained and gently debunked by sociologist of work Pierre Boisard . . . . “Just to be perfectly clear, let us admit there is no such thing as a wholly traditional Camembert.”
Gary Genosko, Gastronomica

Bottéro, Jean. The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Bottéro tells us that many of the culinary techniques, kitchen-organization structures, and professional titles we attribute to Europeans of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries were firmly in place in Mesopotamia by 1600 BC. Using cuneiform tablets from the Babylonian Collection of Yale University, Bottéro creates a remarkable and convincing panorama of the culinary life and rich cuisine of the ancient Mesopotamians.
Jeffrey Miller, Gastronomica

Bourguinat, Nicholas.  Les grains du désordre: L’Etat face aux violence frumentaires dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle.  Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2002.

Bové, José and Dufour, François.  The World Is Not for Sale: Farmers against Junk Food.  London: Verso, 2001.
As readers, we witness the difficulties of farming and of trying to change people’s perceptions of the rural life, as well as the struggles involved in confronting large multinational corporations.
Toby A. Ten Eyck, Gastronomica

Bower, Anne L., ed. Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film. London: Routledge, 2005.
While not the definitive volume on the subject, Reel Food nevertheless remains an enjoyable journey through the topic of food in film—and overall it constitutes a varied and tasty meal.
Suzie Ferrie, Food, Culture, and Society

Bradley, Martha.  The British Housewife: or, The Cook, Housekeeper's and Gardiner's Companion.  Facsimile edition in six volumes, with introduction by Gilly Lehmann.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books, 1997-1998.
Martha Bradley intended the subject of her book, originally published in weekly parts in 1756, to be 'oeconomy'. Her information was based partly on previous writings, often acknowledged, but principally, she wrote, 'from what assistance we have received from the Communications of others, and from our own Experience'. It seems not to have been successful, since after publication in two volumes in 1756 or 1757 it was not republished.
Gilly Lehmann, whose PhD thesis was on eighteenth-century English cookbooks, has added an extensive introduction to this facsimile. She describes Mrs. Bradley's cooking style as essentially French, and in particular French 'nouvelle cuisine' in the style of Massialot and La Chappelle, which probably explains the lack of success; while the aristocracy of the mid-eighteenth century might have appreciated this cookery, most English households seemed to prefer simple, basic, English dishes. Gilly Lehmann's diligent and meticulous research into the origins of Mrs Bradley's recipes (most, she shows, came from Hannah Glasse) could well serve a model for other culinary historians. Reviewed by Barbara Santich

Brandon, Ruth. The People’s Chef: Alexis Soyer, A Life in Seven Courses. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2004.
For those who have not yet discovered Soyer, Brandon’s book is an excellent introduction. Readers who are already familiar with Soyer’s life and work will find many new insights.
April Bullock, Gastronomica

Brennan, Thomas.  Burgundy to Champagne: The Wine Trade in Early Modern France.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Brennan's previous book was Public Drinking and Popular Culture in 18th-Century Paris. He now turns his attention to the development of a market in wine, especially the long-distant trade to Paris, focussing primarily on the 18th century once again. The provincial brokers who controlled this trade rose to positions of power and wealth.

Brewer, Priscilla J.  From Fireplace to Cookstove: Technology and the Domestic Ideal.  Syracuse: Syracuse University, 2000.
Regrettably, she says little about what happened to food itself as cooks moved from fireplaces to stoves–true roasting, for instance, disappeared. But within the confines of her material, she makes lively use of the sources.
Laura Shapiro, Gastronomica

Brown, Linda Keller and Mussell, Kay (eds.).  Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 2000.

Brown-May, Andrew.  Espresso!: Melbourne Coffee Stories.  Melbourne: Arcadia, 2001.
See the review by Don McMaster in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.

Bruman, Henry J.  Alcohol in Ancient Mexico.  Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000.

Brumont, Francis.  Madirian et Saint-Mont: Histoire et devenir des vignobles. Biarritz: Atlantica, 1999.

Bucheli, Marcelo. Bananas and Business: The United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899-2000. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
The author offers an insightful exploration of how the company achieved a dominant position in Colombia, and its subsequent shift from the production to the marketing of bananas.
Thomas O’Brien, American Historical Review

Buell, Paul D.,  Anderson, Eugene N.,  and Perry, Charles (eds.).  A Soup for the Qan: Chines Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-hui’s Yin-shan Cheng-yao.  London: Keegan Paul, 2000.
This is the first full English translation of a remarkable dietary guide and cookery manual, one that was specially designed to keep brain and physique in harmony.
Berrin Toroslan, Gastronomica

Bulliet, Richard W. Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relations. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
In this compelling exploration of the different ways societies have reinforced, symbolized, and rationalized their relations with animals, the author argues that “we are today living through a watershed in human-animal relations that is affection our material, social, and imaginative lives.”

Bunyard, Edward A. The Anatomy of Dessert: With a Few Notes on Wine. New York: Modern Library, 2006.
New edition of a book first published in London in 1929.Berriedale-Johnson, Michelle. Festive Feasts Cookbook. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Burnett, John. England Eats Out: a Social History of Eating Out in England from 1830 to the Present. Edinburgh Gate, Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004.
All too often “eating out” is taken to mean “fancy dining” in a restaurant that probably has tablecloths. Refreshingly, John Burnett takes a literal interpretation; eating out is simply the antithesis of eating in, of eating at home. His latest book, England Eats Out, is emphatically not a history of restaurants. Rather, it makes the point that eating away from home is very often a matter of necessity, as it was for workers in the early nineteenth century who started at 6.00 am and for the women working in munitions factories during World War II.
Barbara Santich

Burnett, John.  Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain. London: Routledge, 1999.
This study of the social history of drinks in Britain from the late 17th century to the present examines individual drinks and drinking patterns that varied with age, gender, region, and class.

Burns, Eric. The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.
Burns . . . works in a more anecdotal than academic mode. His prose is breezy and energetic, and he comes across more storyteller than scholar—not a bad role to be in if your job is to describe the loopy dance that American and booze have enjoyed together over the past few centuries.
Ray Isle, Gastronomica

Burton, Marda, and Kenneth Holditch. Galatoire’s: Biography of a Bistro. Athens: Hill Street Press, 2004.
The book documents a way of life particular to the Deep South through key periods in American history, shedding light on the origins of Creole culture and cuisine, the US immigration story, and issues such as prohibition, racial segregation, and gender equality. It entertains with its lively social commentary and inspires those with a deeper interest in Cajun and Creole culinary traditions to do more research on the background of the historical dishes that have been preserved on Galatoire’smenu. Above all, it captures the spirit of a fascinating, food-obsessed city and the soul of a truly unique restaurant.
Janet Boileau

Byrne, Al.  My Guinness Times: A Memoir. Dublin: Town House and Country House, 1999.

Cagle, William.  A Matter of Taste.  Oak Knoll Press: New Castle, 1999.
An inclusive bibliography of the international works of The John T. Gernon collection of The Lilly Library.
Cagle, William and Stafford, Lisa Killion.  American Books on Food and Drink.  Oak Knoll Press: New Castle, 1998.

Calhoun, Creighton Lee.  Old Southern Apples.  Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 2000.
Reviews the history and uses of the apples in the American south.

Campbell, Bruce M. S.  English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250-1450.  New York: Cambridge University, 2000.
Manorial lords appear in much of the book as frustrated capitalists rather than the exploitative overlords of a partially unfree, poverty-stricken population. Campbell has provided us with a wonderfully detailed picture of seigniorial medieval agriculture.
Jane Whittle, American Historical Review

Campbell, Christy. The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005.
The author demonstrates with great flair that the challenges phylloxera imposed on late nineteenth-century France were far deeper than simply keeping vines alive. . . . The tale of the struggle t control the pest is also an account of the coming of age of the scientific community in France; of culture wars not only across oceans but across town lines; of economic struggles that split regions apart.
Tara Q. Thomas, Gastronomica

Campbell, Robert A.  Sit Down and Drink Your Beer: Regulating Vancouver’s Beer Parlours, 1925-1954.  Toronto: University of Toronto, 2001.
See the review by Andrea Cast in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre

Capatti, Alberto, and Massimo Montanari. Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
This book is such a mishmash of ideas and information, so irritatingly complied and pompously written and moreover so poorly translated, that it’s tempting simply to throw it down in exasperation. However, the reader who persists will find that there are indeed nuggets to be extracted.
Nancy Harmon Jenkins, Gastronomica

Carlin, Martha and Rosenthal, Joel T. (eds.).  Food and Eating in Medieval Europe.  London: The Hambledon Press, 1998.
Marjorie A. Brown, "The Feast Hall in Anglo-Saxon Society," Elizabeth M. Biebel, "Pilgrims to Table: Food Consumption in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales;" Martha Carlin, "Fast Food and Urban Living Standards in Medieval England;" Christopher Dyer, "Did the Peasants Really Starve in Medieval England?" Julia Marvin, "Cannibalism as an Aspect of Famine in Two English Chronicles;" James A. Galloway, "Driven by Drink? Ale Consumption and the Agrarian Economy of the London Region, c. 1300-1400;" Constance B. Hieatt, "Making Sense of Medieval Culinary Records: Much Done, But Much More to Do;" Margaret Murphy, "Feeding Medieval Cities: Some Historical Approaches;" ffiona Swabey, "The Household of Alice de Bryene, 1412-13;" Alan S. Weber, "Queu du Roi, Roi des Queux: Taillevent and the Profession of Medieval Cooking;" Susan F. Weiss, "Medieval and Renaissance Wedding Banquets and Other Feasts."

Carney, Judith.  Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas.  Cambridge: Harvard University, 2001.
This book seeks, through an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on the history of rice cultivation in the Atlantic basin, to recover "a significant African contribution to the agricultural history of the Americas."
Lorena S. Walsh, American Historical Review

Carpenter, Kenneth J.   Beriberi, White Rice, and Vitamin B: A Disease, a Cause, and a Cure.  Berkeley: University of California, 2000.

Carpenter, Stephanie A. On the Farm Front: The Women’s Landed Army in World War II. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003.
Carpenter has now written a book on gender changes on the rural front in her thorough description of the Women’s Landed Army (WLA), formed in 1943 as part of the Emergency Farm Labor program. This program was designed to provide labor power for the nation’s farms where it was needed and to make up for profound labor shortages caused by military recruitment and migration to urban centers.
Maureen Honey, American Historical Review

Carrington, Selwyn H. H.  The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775-1810.  Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

Cass, Bruce (ed.).  The American Companion to the Wines of North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Overall, the sheer volume of information compiled makes [it] useful, but encough inaccuracies exist that the reader must beware of taking every entry as gospel.
Heidi Yorkshire, Gastronomica

Cato on Farming (De Agricultura).  Trans with commentary by Andrew Dalby, (trans.) and (ed.).  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books, 1998.
Andrew Dalby describes Cato's treatise, written in the second century BC, as 'the earliest surviving complete work of Latin prose literature'. A thoroughly practical manual for the owner or manager of a rural estate, it gives a complete guide to the year's work (just before vintage, have the windfall olives salted and buy in anchovies), provides instructions on building olive presses and a room to house them, describes in detail the operations of the olive harvest, and offers a few recipes - for bread and cakes, for improving faulty wines and for curing oxen bitten by a snake. Certain rituals, which were clearly part of the standard farming calendar, are also described: the Feast for the Oxen, before the spring ploughing, and the sacrifice of the Harvest Sow, to take place prior to harvest. The Latin text is printed together with the translation, and Andrew Dalby's introduction suggests the context of the advice: Cato was principally interested in the investment potential of a farm.
Reviewed by Barbara Santich

Caton, Mary Anne (ed.).  Fooles and Fricasees: Food in Shakespeare’s England.  Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1999.
As opulent as it is informative, [this book] offers a feast of images and information that will whet the appetite of anyone interested in Shakespeare, early modern England, women’s history, or the history, preparation, delectation, and meaning of food.
Ilona Bell, Gastronomica

Chambers, Thomas A. Drinking the Waters: Creating an American Leisure Class at Nineteenth-Century Mineral Springs. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003.
How American negotiated and defined class and sectionalism at mineral spring resorts in New York and Virginia.

Charlip, Julie A. Cultivating Coffee: The Farmers of Carazo, Nicaragua, 1880-1930. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003.
This is a model monograph of effective argument and impressive research. It takes its place in an emerging interpretation of pre-Somoza rural Nicaragua that see much of the countryside as, if not a utopia, at least a world of modest possibilities and prosperities for small farmers, an interpretation at odds with an imagine past driven both by class politics and twentieth-century realities.
David McCreery, American Historical Review

Chelminski, Rudolph. The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine. New York: Penguin, 2005.
The story of the suicide of celebrity chef Bernard Loiseau.

Chelminski, Rudolph. I’ll Drink to That: Beaujolais and the French Peasant Who Made It the World’s Most Popular Wine. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Christensen, Erleen J. In War and Famine: Missionaries in China’s Honan Province in the 1940s. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.
She provides an eye-witness account using letters, diaries, and personal accounts, many still in private hands, of one of the worst famines in China’s history and the great devastation caused by advancing Japanese troops.

Chaney, Lisa.  Elizabeth David–A Biography.  Oxford: Macmillan, 1998.

Chatterjee, Piya.  A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation.  Durham: Duke University, 2001.
Chatterjee’s real achievement is providing a multifaceted understanding of a complex socioeconomic system that touches each person who enjoys a simple cup of tea.
Chitrita Banerji, Gastronomica

Clarence-Smith, William Gervase, and Steven Topik, eds. The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500-1089. New York: Cambridge University press, 2003.

Clark, Christine.  The British Malting Industry since 1830.  Rio Grande: Hamilton Press, 1998.
This worthwhile study of the British malting industry confirms, yet again, that, as in politics, a particular company's success has meant a long climb up Benjamin Disraeli's "greasy pole," with little room at the top for survivors. Clark ably describes the changing structure of the industry that began the nineteenth century with thousands of licensed maltsters and has ended up today with only a handful.
V. Markham Lester, American Historical Review

Clarkson, L. A.  and Crawford, E. Margaret.  Feast and Famine: Food and Nutrition in Ireland, 1500-1920.  New York: Oxford University, 2001.
What we have is a history of food intake, and more particularly of nutrition, and hence that greater breadth of history that links consumption to health, disease, and general wellbeing.
Michael Turner, American Historical Review

Cleland, Elizabeth. A New and Easy Method of Cookery, Facsimile of first edition, Edinburgh, 1755, with introduction by Peter Brears (Berwick upon Tweed/Totnes: Paxton Trust/ Prospect Books, 2005).
According to Peter Brears, Mrs. Cleland’s book “is one of the most important sources regarding the culinary history of mid-eighteenth-century Scotland.” Written for the young ladies who attended her cookery school, it reflects the English style of cookery adopted by Scottish gentry (many recipes were “borrowed,” as was standard practice at that time, from such English classics as Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy and Eliza Smith’s Compleat Housewife) and contains very few of the dishes today considered to be typically Scottish. Nevertheless, as Peter Brears points out, the range of oatmeal recipes and the variety of recipes for venison all testify to the book’s Scottish origins and character (Barbara Santich).

Coff, Christian. The Taste for Ethics: An Ethic of Food Consumption. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006.
The issues surrounding the theory of ethical behaviour in relation to food are complex, as Coff makes clear in his admirable book. Coff’s meticulous, closely argued text offers in the first place an excursus on the history and philosophy of science that has influenced attitudes to food and to food ethics, in particular. It therefore traces the philosophic ideas which have shaped those attitudes and which were subsequently applied through science and technology, and reproduced by the modern food industry.
Roger Haden

Coates, Clive.  An Encyclopedia of the Wines and Domaines of France.  Berkeley: University of California, 2001.
Coates discusses every appellation and explains its character, distinguishes the best growers, and uses a star system to identify the finest estates.

Cockfield, Jamie H., ed. Black Lebeda: The Russian Famine Diary of ARA Kazan District Supervisor J. Rives Childs, 1921-1923. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2006.

Cohen Ferris, Marcie. Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
This is a well-researched book, lovingly told with personal anecdotes, illustrative visual materials, and unlike most scholarly works, historical and family recipes. Yet what is curiously absent from this book is a geographic definition of the Jewish South: Why are Texas and Florida, for example, not on Cohen Ferris’s southern Jewish map?
Lara I. Rabinovitch, Gastronomica

Colquhoun, K., Taste: The Story of Britain through Its Cooking. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.

Comet, Georges (ed.). L’outillage agricole médiéval et moderne et son histoire. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003.

Cool, H. E. M. Eating and Drinking in Roman Britain.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Copas, Liz.  A Somerset Pomona: The Cider Apples of Somerset.  Stanbridge: The Dovecote Press, 2002.
The first part of the book deals with the history of cider in Somerset . . . . The second part of the book contains descriptions and photographs of modern apples, with cross-sectional drawings, wonderful bits of local history and a vivid sense of an organic knowledge.
James Crowden, PPC

Counihan, Carole M.  The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender Meaning and Power.  New York: Routledge, 1999.
She brilliantly supports her contention that "foodways constitute an organized system, a language that . . . conveys meaning and contributes to the organization of the natural and social world."
Margaret Lael Milesell, Gastronomica

________. Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth-Century Florence. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Counihan effectively demonstrates the centrality of food and diet to the Florentine worldview and the extension of food into all aspects of Florentine culture.
Maura Hametz, Food, Culture, and Society

Counihan, Carole, and P/ Van Esterik, eds. (2008) Food and Culture: A Reader (second edition). New York: Routledge, 2008.

________(ed.).  Food in the USA: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Taken together, the essays attest to both the importance of bringing new questions about American culture to the table through food studies, and to the power of food studies to think through recurrent concerns anew.
Charlotte Biltekoff, Gastronomica

Courtwright, David D.  Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World.  Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 2001.
[This book examines how] "the big three" (alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine) and "the little three" (opium, cannabis, and coca) become items of global commerce . . . . an invaluable and brave attempt to synthesize global historical analysis of a complex field.
Virginia Burridge, American Historical Review

Coveney, John.  Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating.  London: Routledge, 2000.
See the review by Jennifer Hillier in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre
Crowden, James.  Cider: The Forgotten Miracle.  Somerton: Cyder Press, 1999.
James Crowden is the laureate of cider.
PPC

Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Cowan’s book is an important and beautifully produced work on the history of the coffeehouse, especially in its account of the masculine cast of coffeehouse sociability, the state regulation of coffeehouses, and the trade of coffeehouse keeping in London.
Markman Ellis, American Historical ReviewCooper, Artemis.  Writing at the Kitchen Table–The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David.  London: Michael Joseph, 1999.

Cullen, L. M.  The Brandy Trade under the Ancien Régime.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
This study of the brandy trade explores the origins, production and marketing of brandy from the Cognac region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cullen shows that the brandy trade was based on a sophisticated regional economy, which, by 1720, had become a key component of French involvement in the modern international trading system.

Curtis, Robert I.  Ancient Food Technology.  Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000.
Discusses innovations in food processing and preservation from the palaeolithic period through to the late Roman Empire.

Cwiertka, Katarzyna, and Boudewijn Walraven, eds. Asian Food: the Global and the Local. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001.
The collection investigates interconnections between globalization and food during the twentieth century; this it does by tracing changes in Asian foodways both inside and outside Asia.
Faruk Tabak, Gastronomica

________.  Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.

Dalby, Andrew.  Dangerous Tastes: Spices in History.  Berkeley: University of California, 2000.
Spices and aromatics–those powerful, pleasurable, sensual ingredients–have been some of the most sought-after substances in human history. Concentrating on traditional spices that are still part of world trade: cinnamon, closes, ginger, pepper, saffron, and chili, Dalby explores their captivating past. He gathered information from sources in many languages, interweaving history with the story of their discovery and various uses.

Dalby, Andrew.  Food in the Ancient World: An A-Z.  London: Routledge, 2002.
Daunton, Martin and Hilton, Matthew (eds.).  The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America.  New York: Berg, 2001.
Contains articles on rum and bread and milk.

Dalby, Andrew. Flavours of Byzantium. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2004.
This book is, in the author’s words, "an attempt to recreate the food culture of mediaeval Constantinople, as it was really experienced by those who inhabited or visited the city: it is based on what they themselves wrote about it." These writers include Liutprand of Cremona (the bishop of Cremona who visited Constantinople twice in the tenth century), Simeon Seth (who wrote a comprehensive treatise, On the Properties of Foods, in the eleventh century) and the anonymous seventh-century and twelfth-century authors of, respectively, De Cibis and the Prosodic Poems.
Barbara Santich

Daley, Ann Scarlett, Sweet on the West: How Candy Built a Colorado Treasure. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.

Daniel, Carolyn. Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children's Literature. Routledge, 2006.
Voracious Children explores food and the way it is used to seduce, to please, and to coerce not only the characters within children's literature but also its readers. This book reveals that food in fiction does far, far more that just create verisimilitude or merely address greedy readers’ desires. The author argues that the food trope in children’s literature actually teaches children how to be human through the imperative to eat “good” food in a “proper” controlled manner. Examining topics such as childhood obesity and anorexia, the author demonstrates how children’s literature routinely attempts to regulate childhood eating practices and only awards subjectivity and agency to those characters who demonstrate “normal” appetites.

Davidson, Alan, and Helen Saberi, eds. The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy: Twenty Years of the Best Food Writing from the Journal Petit Propos Culinaires. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2002.
Over the years PPC seems never to have shied away from the strange and esoteric or important, for example, Sophie Coe’s series on Mayan foodways. It has always had an international scope and interest in the past and present.
Sandra Oliver, Gastronomica

Davidson, Alan.  Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books, 1999.
The book was first published by the author in Vientiane, where he was British ambassador, in 1975. Laos is an inland country, the fish are freshwater species. A catalogue of many of those available in Lao markets is followed by some 50 recipes from Laos and its neighbours.

________. (ed.).  The Oxford Companion to Food.  Oxford: Oxford University, 1999.
The breadth of categories here is considerable . . . . But like every reader of this volume (I’m sure), I have some quibbles. Predictably enough, these have mostly to do with what’s in and what’s not, and with the editorial emphasis. The selection has a definite British tilt.
Colman Andrews, Gastronomica
See the review by Barbara Santich in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.

________.  The Penguin Companion to Food.  Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2002.
Davis, Irving.  A Catalan Cookery Book: A Collection of Impossible Recipes.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books.

Davis, Lance E., Gallman, Robert E.  and Gleitter, Karen.  In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816-1906.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Not even well chosen illustrations and maps can save this book from being a compilation of interest only to a narrow group of specialists.
René De La Pedraja, The American Historical Review

Davis, Belinda J. Homes Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Rather than thinking in terms of the amount of food that exists during a crisis, it is more useful to think about exactly who commands the food that does exist . . . . That at the height of wartime subsistence protests rich Germans had full bellies shows how the lack of food can also translate into power.
Kyri Watson Claflin, Gastronomica

Day, Ivan (ed.).  Eat, Drink & Be Merry–The British at Table, 1600-2000.  London: Wilson, 2000.

De Jean, Joan. The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication and Glamour. New York: Free Press, 2005.
The book is about the reign of Louis XIV. The author contends that the king and his court were essentially responsible for the style and sophistication that still characterize France. It’s an interesting idea.
James Reford, Gastronomica

Del Conte, Anna.  Gastronomy of Italy.  London: Chrysalis Books, 2001.
Praise for this masterwork has been universal.
PPC

Dembinska, Maria.  Food and Drink in Medieval Poland: Rediscovering a Cuisine of the Past.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
English translation of a book first published in 1963. Includes 35 reconstructed recipes.

Denker, Joel. The World on a Plate: A Tour Through the History of America’s Ethnic Cuisine. Boulder: Westview, 2003.
Denker traces the journeys of a wide array of foods, making clear by means of a range of individual food stories that Americans of many backgrounds owe a debt to the immigrants who brought these foods to their new home . . . . But for all of its assets as a piece of journalism, the book falls far short of being history, at least as a serious intellectual enterprise.
Hasia R. Diner, American Historical Review

De Silva, Cara, ed. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.

Derry, Margaret.  Ontario’s Cattle Kingdom: Purebred Breeders and Their World, 1870-1920.  Buffalo NY: University of Toronto, 2001.
This book is not exactly riveting reading.
Books Blevins, American Historical Review

DeSalvo, Louise, and Edvige Giunta, eds. Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. New York: The Feminist Press, 2003.
The editors have selected pieces that explore the contradiction Italian-American women face of gaining sustenance from a patriarchal culture that denigrates them.
Arlene Avakian, Gastronomica

Dietler, Michael and Hayden, Brian (eds.).  Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power.  Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute, 2001.
Feasts is a well-edited set of case studies set against a valuable discussion of contrasting theoretical approaches. However, in an academic world brimming with edited volumes, it is a pity that the editors did not write a book on feasting on their own account.
Brian Fagan, Gastronomica

Diner, Hasia R.  Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration.  Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 2001.
In this fascinating survey of the eating habits and influences of Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants, Diner . . . charts with wit and graceful prose the similarities and differences between these three distinct groups as they encountered mainstream American culture.
Publishers Weekly

Dillon, Patrick. Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madame Geneva. Boston: Justin, Charles & Co., 2003.
Dillon, a British architect and novelist with a passion for the history of London, has written a lively and detailed account of the gin craze, starting with the differences between the art of distilling liquor as opposed to brewing it.
Lisa Hiley, Gastronomica

Dixon, Jane.  The Changing Chicken: Chooks, Cooks and Culinary Culture.  Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002.
The strength of Jane Dixon's book is generated firstly from its disciplinary and theoretical underpinnings and secondly via its focus on chicken meat as a commodity. Through an analysis of cultural and economic ‘circuits' the author shows how components of the food system hang together by using a view from inside rather than outside the system. All this in the service of the author's primary objective of explaining how culinary cultures change.
Patricia Crotty

Dolphijn, Rick. Foodscapes: Toward a Deleuzian Ehtics of Consumption. Delft: Eburon Publishers, 2004.
Although he neglects explicitly to define his titular concept, readers quickly come to understand that, for Dolphijn, foodscapes are processes by which food, through its divers representations and consumption (or avoidance thereof), informs individual and global perceptions of identity, place, health, and power, among other concepts.
Pauline Adema, Gastronomica

Dorje, Rinjing.  Food in Tibetan Life.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books.
A collection of 'pure' Tibetan recipes, prefaced by ten chapters which describe Tibetan food habits.
Duis, Perry R.  The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880-1920.  Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Donahue, Brian. The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
This is a major work of environmental history. Donahue has fashioned a brilliant ecological narrative with powerful implications for our understanding not only of early American agriculture but also of such significant subjects as the transmission of English practices in the New World, the character of family and community in the world the Puritans made, and the attitudes and practices that enabled these New Englanders to forge a complex, attentive, and sustainable relationship with nature.
Robert A. Gross, American Historical Review

Donahue, John F. The Roman Community at Table during the Principate. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
The professional historian may well wonder why this book was written. Donahue repeatedly scores three basic points. Two of these are mere common sense. His third finding, that the Roman elite doled out unequal portions at festal events in order to acknowledge and reinforce class distinctions, is hardly new.
John K. Evans, American Historical Review

Donkin, R. A. Between East and West: The Moluccas and the Traffic in Spices up to the Arrival of Europeans. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003.

Dronin, Nikolai M., and Edward G. Bellinger. Climate Dependence and Food Problems in Russia, 1900-1990: The Interaction of Climate and Agricultural Policy and Their Effect on Food Problems. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005.
This book is a thorough and systematic attempt to assess the impact of climatic difficulties on Russian and Soviet agriculture since the late nineteenth century. It is written by two environmental historians.
David Christian, American Historical Review

Drouard, Alain. Histoire des cuisiniers en France, XIXe-XXe siècle. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2004.
The work is not, as one might expect, a compilation of dry erudition but a surprisingly exciting Paris-centered account of an emerging profession’s fight for status, recognition, and the economic advantages that come in tow.
Beatrice Fink, Gastronomica

Drowne, Kathleen. Spirits of Defiance: National Prohibition and Jazz Age Literature, 1920-1933. Columbia: Ohio State University, 2005.
Drowne has done an excellent job of compiling literary references to Prohibition-era drink culture, something no one has previously done in comparable detail. She provides insightful and colourful commentary on her sources, particularly regarding how class, race, and gender figured into the drinking experiences described in contemporary fiction.
Madelon Powers, American Historical Review

Duncan, Dorothy. Canadians at Table: Food, Fellowship, and Folklore. A Culinary History of Canada. Toronto: Dundurn, 2006.

Dunmire, William W. Gardens of New Spain: How Mediterranean Plants and Foods Changed America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.

DuPuis, E. Melanie. Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
DuPuis’ central point—that food policies are shaped by political as well as economic factors, and that milk’s high status in America is neither the product of its inherent perfection or of a big business conspiracy—is hardly surprising.
Harvey Levenstein, American Historical Review

Dyson, Laurel Evelyn.  How to Cook a Galah: Celebrating Australia's Culinary Heritage.  South Melbourne: Lothian Books, 2002.
This is an important book. It does not fit comfortably into the category 'recipe book' nor is it just 'food history' and its certainly not merely nostalgia for food past. Laurel Dyson has written a book which weaves together stories from Australian history, biographical and autobiographical accounts and recipes from Australia's colonial and more recent past. It stands out from other Australian books which traverse similar territory.
Patricia Crotty

Edge, John T. Donuts: An American Passion. New York: Penguin Group, 2006.
Traces the development of the donut from seasonal ethnic treat to proletarian breakfast fare.

Edgerton-Tarpley, Kathryn. Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Edmunds, Lowell.  Martini, Straight Up: The Classic American Cocktail.  Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, revised edition, 1999.

Effros, Bonnie.  Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul.  Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.
Egerton, John (ed.).  Cornbread Nation 1: The Best of South Food Writing.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2002.

Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2004.
Ellis has written a useful revisionist history of the coffeehouse, amending the story that prior social and cultural historians have given us.
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, Gastronomica

Ellis, William.  The Country Housewife's Family Companion [1750].  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books, 2000.
William Ellis lived and farmed at Little Gaddesden in Hertfordshire, although he was originally a London brewer. Ellis wrote about the farm and how to make money from its produce or how to cook it.

Ettlinger, Steve. Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Eubanks, Mary W.  Corn in Clay: Maize Paleoethnobotany in Pre-Columbian Art.  Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.
Corn in Clay offers an interesting look across disciplines at the Pre-Columbian evidence for corn, or maize.
Daphne Derven, Gastronomica

Faas, Patrick.  Around the Table of the Romans: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome.  Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.

Fegan, Melissa.  Literature and the Irish Famine, 1845-1919.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Explores the famine’s legacy to literature, tracing it in the work of contemporary writers and their successors, down to 1919.

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe.  Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food.  New York: Free Press, 2002.
I would, I fear, be an argumentative and disruptive guest at Fernández-Armesto’s dinner table.
Rachel Laudan, Gastronomica

Ferray, Jeannette. Out of the Kitchen: Adventures of a Food Writer. Mckinleyville: John Daniel & Co., 2004.

Ferrières, Madeleine. Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Demonstrates that humans have always been preoccupied with food in one way or another, arguing that in modern times fundamental fears about starvation have been replaced with worries over health risks.
Barbara Haber

Fisher, M. F. K. A Stew or a Story: An Assortment of Short Works by M. F. K. Fisher. Joan Reardon, ed. Emeryville: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2006.
Illuminates gastronomy as a means of self-construction as well as a powerful source of wisdom and imagination.
Alice McLean, Gastronomica

Fitzgerald, Seamus.  Mackerel and the Making of Baltimore, Co. Cork, 1879-1913.  Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999.

Flandrin, Jean-Louis.  L’ordre des mets.  Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002.
The book aims to decode the descriptions of meals served à la française and to trace how their imbedded structure, and its development over time, was translated to the new form of service à la russe.
PPC

Flandrin, Jean-Louis. Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
English translation of L’ordre des mets.

Flandrin, Jean-Louis and Montanari, Massimo (eds.).  Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
This uneven collection of essays, written by thirty-eight different contributors, is made coherent and valuable by means of its chronological structure and by the introductions to the various historical periods.
Alice Arndt, Gastronomica

Fleming, Stuart J. Vinum: The Story of Roman Wine. Glen Mills: Art Flair, 2001.
As an archaeologist with a special knowledge of archaeochemistry and of the history of glass, Fleming brings useful expertise to this field.
Andrew Dalby, Gastronomica

Floyd, Janet, and Laurel Forster, eds. The Recipe Reader. London: Ashgate Press, 2004.
Despite the work already done to uncover the many ways that recipes create and lend meaning to other forms of discourse, this book contributes some new subjects for analysis and presents new perspectives on works many of us have read before.
Anne Bower, Gastronomica

Food in the Arts: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 1998.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books.

Forth, Christopher E., and Ana Carden-Coyne, eds. Cultures of the Abdomen: Diet, Digestion, and Fat in the Modern World. New York: Palgrave, 2004.

Foss-Mollan, Kate.  Hard Water: Politics and Water Supply in Milwaukee, 1870-1995.  West Lafayette IN: Purdue University, 2001.

Fowler, Damon Lee, ed. Dining at Monticello: In Good Taste and Abundance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
This beautifully produced volume offers an introduction to the culinary history of Thomas Jefferson and his home, Monticello, through a series of food history essays and recipes.
Mitchell McNaylor, Gastronomica

Fowler, P. J.  Farming in the British Isles in the First Millennium AD.  Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2002.
Assembles and analyzes the latest evidence on farms, fields, technology, food, diet and society.
Frederic, Paul B.  Canning Gold: Northern New England’s Sweet Corn Industry: A Historical Geography.  Lanham MD: University Press of America, 2002.

Fox, Harold.  The Evolution of the Fishing Village: Landscape and Society along the South Devon Coast, 1086-1550.  Oxford: Leopard’s Head Press, 2002.
This is a learned yet accessible account of the development of fishing villages.
PPC

Freedman, P., Food: The History of Taste. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
Shows us that, since Homer, the foods we eat have reflected our culture’s most closely held values and understanding of our place in the world. The book reminds us that taste is an essential of civilization, and that it is something worth protecting from the homogenizing force of the modern, global food supply. A useful, culturally wide-ranging text, profusely illustrated. No bibliography (includes Further Reading).

Fuller, Robert C.  Religion and Wine: A Cultural History of Wine Drinking in the United States.  Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 2000.
[The author] examines not only the ways in which religious prohibitions of wine arose but also the production of wine by various religious organizations.
Library Journal

Eagleton, Janet, and Rosemary Hasner. The Maple Syrup Book. Erin: Boston Mills Press, 2006.

Ecott, Tom. Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

Edlin, Abraham. A Treatise on the Art of Bread-Making: Wherein, The Mealing Trade, Assize Laws, and Every Circumstance Connected With the Art, is Particularly Examined [1805]. Devon: Prospect Books, 2004.
Written by a nineteenth-century medical practitioner, the author’s preface explains the book grew out of a presentation he made to fellow doctors who met weekly at the Theater of Guy’s Hospital in London, where they gathered to share their latest exciting findings with each other and their students.
Peter Reinhart, Gastronomica

Eiche, Sabine. Presenting the Turkey: The Fabulous Story of a Flamboyant and Flavourful Bird. Florence: Centro Di, 2004.
In this delightful book art historian Sabine Eiche traces the fascinating history of the turkey, which originated in North America.
Andrew F. Smith, Gastronomica

Elliot, Alistair, trans. Roman Food Poems: A Modern Translation. Devon: Prospect Books, 2003.
The poems are in general well chosen, covering a broad spectrum of Roman life and avoiding the easy temptation of including too many poems about elite banquets or drinking parties. The translations are very fine indeed.
Peter O’Neill, Gastronomica

Farquhar, Judith. Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
Although Appetites ranges widely, it is held together by the twin themes of food and sex. For anyone interested not only in how the transformation of China since the death of Mao manifests itself on the ground level but also in the significance of these changes, this is a vital text and a good entry point on the topic.
Chris Berry, Gastronomica

Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Ferguson set out to explore why French cuisine seems to play a particularly key role in defining modern France, both to the French and to the rest of the world. Along the way, she treats us to a tour through the French imaginary, highlighting both the intimacy and intelligence of French culinary discourse.
Erica Peters, Food, Culture, and Society

Fine, Gary Alan. Morel Tales: The Culture of Mushrooming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Fischer, Edward F., and Peter Benson. Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.
In a surprising look at the hidden world of broccoli, this richly-drawn ethnography traces the global commodity chain between U.S. consumer and Maya farmer, examining the connections between desire and material production.

Fitzgerald, Deborah. Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
This book is the first to explain systematically the influence of industrialization on American agriculture . . . . Fitzgerald’s emphasis on the ideal makes the book seem somewhat like an intellectual history. Yet, as a historian of technology, she highlights the engineers and economist who grounded the ideal.
Mark Fiege, American Historical Review

Fletcher, Nichola. Charlemagne’s Tablecloth: A Piquant History of Feasting. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005.
Provides an eclectic, enthusiastic introduction to the history of the feast, focusing mainly on the ritual and celebratory aspects of the shared table.
Jason Sholl, Gastronomica

Flynn, Karen. Food, Culture, and Survival in an African City. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
An ethnographic study of the cultural economy of food provisioning in Mwanza, Tanzania, in the early 1990s. It provides a window into the networks and food-acquisition strategies used by several hundred individuals, from market vendors and wealthy families to street children and adults in a contemporary urban Africa setting.
Fran Osseo-Asare, Food, Culture, and Society

Fogel, Robert William. The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Fowler, Peter. Farming in the First Millennium AD: British Agriculture between Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Freeman, June. The Making of the Modern Kitchen: A Cultural History. Oxford: Berg, 2004.
Herein lies the book’s central problem: how does one define terms like “values,” taste,” and “fashion,” and how are these concepts formed? In her desire to allow the consumer a maximum degree of individuality, Freeman fails to consider seriously the myriad factors that shape such aesthetic and moral preferences.
Jennifer Raab, Gastronomica

Frick, John W. Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Frick, in this carefully researched work, examines the “cultural centrality of liquor” in the nineteenth century, the corresponding mass social movements formed to control or eradicate strong drink, and the dizzying array of temperance dramas and theatrical performances that sprang up to advance the “spirit of reform.”
John Hanners, American Historical Review

Friedberg, Suzanne. French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004.
Friedberg’s research goes a long way toward showing how present production and export practices in both post-colonial Burkino Faso and Zambia continue to be affected by the historical power of the wealthy nations who import their produce.
Riva Soucie, Gastronomica

Fussell, Betty. Masters of American Cookery: M. F. K. Fisher, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Julia Child. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Gabaccia, Donna R.  We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans.  Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
We Are What We Eat is a complex tale of ethnic mingling and borrowing, of entrepreneurship and connoisseurship, of food as a social and political symbol and weapon, and a history of the American culinary tradition of multiculturalism.

Gabler, James M. An Evening with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson: Dinner, Wine, and Conversation. Palm Beach: Bacchus Press, 2006.

Garrier, Gilbert.  Historie social et culturelle du vin.  Paris: Larousse-Bordas, 1998.
A cheaper edition of the 1995 original. Not a book anyone interested in wine should be without.
PPC

Germov, John and Williams, Lauren.  A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: Introducing the Social Appetite.  Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999.
See the review by Michael Symons in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.

Gigante, Denise. Taste: A Literary History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Gigante’s learned and erudite study is not merely a literary history of taste, it turns out, but an engaging philosophical and cultural history as well.
Ronald Le Blanc, Gastronomica

Glants, Musya and Toombe, Joyce (eds.).  Food in Russian History and Culture.  Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Stovelore in Russian Folklife; Food in the Rus' Primary Chronicle; Food in Catherinian St. Petersburg; Forced Hunger and Rational Restraint in Russian Peasant Culture at the Turn of the Century; Tolstoy's Way of No Flesh: Abstinence, Vegetarianism, and Christian Physiology; Is Hay Only for Horses? Highlights of Russian Vegetarianism at the Turn of the Century; An Appetite for Power: Predators, Carnivores, and Cannibals in Dostoevsky's Fiction; Strawberries and Chocolate: Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, and the Plight of the Hungry Poet; Communal Dining and State Cafeterias in Moscow and Petrograd, 1917-1921; The Beginnings of Soviet Culinary Arts; Food and National Identity in Soviet Armenia; Food as Art: Painting in Late Soviet Russia.
Glanville, Philippa and Young, Hilary (eds.).  Elegant Eating: Four Hundred Years of Dining in Style.  V & A Publications, 2002.
This book, by means of handsome illustrations and concentrated text, attacks the history of cookery via the hardware of the table.
PPS

Gold, Barbara K., and John F. Donahue (eds.) Roman Dining. A special edition of the American Journal of Philology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
This is a high-quality collection of essays that those interested in Roman food and Roman social history will want to consult. General readers, however, will perhaps find it somewhat too specialized in nature and might be advised to begin their enquiries into Roman dining elsewhere.
Peter O’Neill, Gastronomica

Goldstein, Darra.  The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory food of the Republic of Georgia.  Berkeley: University of California, 1999.
This superbly written book is part ethnography, part geography, and part cookbook. Ms. Goldstein describes the rugged topography and turbulent history of this region that was once a crossroad of trade between Asia and Europe. These cultural influences, along with a healthy variety of food-producing environments, have led to a rich native cuisine.
Anthony Dias Blue

Goldstein, Darra, and Kathrin Merkle, eds. Culinary Cultures of Europe: Identity, Diversity and Dialogue. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2005.
This collection of essays reflects many of the important transitions through which 40 European countries have passed, and in this sense it is a history book. It is also a colourful celebration of an enormously rich part of our cultural heritage.

Golden, Janet. Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Le goût: Actes du colloque.  Dijon: Campus Universitaire, 1998.
This massive volume, international in authorship, contains no fewer than 106 papers on a wide range of topics which deal with one or other aspect of Taste. Many are scientific papers about the chemistry and mechanisms of taste. Many others have to do with the evolution of national and regional tastes.
PPC

Goode, Jamie. The Science of Wine: From Vine to Glass. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
It offers in-depth explanations on numerous aspects of the biology, physics, and chemistry of wine, not to mention the history of winemaking and consumption from rudimentary ancient practices to current medical research.
Sharon Bowman, Gastronomica

Goyens, Tom. Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Shows anarchism focused in beer halls and saloons where political meetings, public lectures, discussion circles, fund-raising events, and theater groups were held.

Grant, Mark.  Galen on Food and Diet.  London: Routledge, 2000.
No slouch Galen, and this translation makes him readable. His catalogue of foods is wide-ranging and informative. Good stuff.
PPC

Grant, Michael Johnston.  Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation on the Great Plains, 1929-1945.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2002.

Gratzer, Walter. Terrors of the Table: The Curious History of Nutrition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Reviewers applaud the book’s breadth yet chronicle errors large and small; the overall impression is one of science by anecdote or “Readers Digest-style synopses.”
Ellen J. Fried, Gastronomica

Graves, Tomás.  Bread & Oil: Majorcan Culture's Last Stand.  Blackawton: Prospect Books, 2000.
See the review by Barbara Santich in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre

Gray, Patience. The Centaur’s Kitchen: A Book of French, Italian, Greek and Catalan Dishes for Ships’ Cooks on the Blue Funnel Line (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2005), pp. 137.

The Australian connection to this book is not so much its Mediterranean focus but rather the Centaur herself, which as one of the ships of the Blue Funnel fleet carried passengers and livestock between Fremantle and Singapore in the 1960s. Patience Gray delivered her typescript to the company in 1964 but, as a private commission for the benefit of the Chinese cooks on the Centaur, it was never published. Written after her collaboration with Primrose Boyd, Plats du Jour (1957), it abandons a French theme in favour of a more eclectic and certainly more personal collection of recipes, all written from a thoroughly practical viewpoint and all perfectly appropriate to a domestic kitchen today (Barbara Santich).

Gray, Peter.  Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843-50.  Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999.
In this outstanding book, Peter Gray examines the politics of Britain's policies toward Ireland in the 1840s. He analyzes the attitudes of English political society toward the Irish land question in the years before and during the Great Famine. He portrays the reaction of politicians to the collapse of the potato harvest from its first failure in the autumn of 1845.
Samuel Clark, American Historical Review

Grew, Raymond (ed.).  Food in Global History.  Boulder: Westview Press, 1999.

Grewe, Rudolph and Hieatt, Constance B. (eds.) and (trans.).  Libellus de Arte Coquinaria: An Early Northern Cookery Book.  Tempe AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2001.
One of the earliest medieval works devoted to cooking, dating from before 1300.

Gribben, Arthur (ed.).  The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America.  Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Gursoy, Deniz. Turkish Cuisine in Historical Perspective. Istanbul: Oglak Guzel Kitaplar, 2006. Joyce Mathews. Trans. A richly illustrated work, including recipes. 

Guthman, Julie. Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Everyone interested in food policy should read this book, especially if interested in how public policy, agricultural financial structures, consumer demand, and media-and-marketing concepts can dictate the processes of food production.
Janet Chrzan, Food, Culture, and Society

Guinness, Michelle.  Guinness Spirit.  London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999.

Gutierrez, C. Paige.  Cajun Foodways.  Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1992.

Gutzke, David W. Pubs and Progressives: Reinventing the Public House in England, 1896-1960. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005.

Guy, Kolleen M.  When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2002.  

Haber, Barbara.  From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals.  New York: Free Press,2002.

Halliday, James. Wine Atlas of Australia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Hannah, Jack.  You Will Not Taste Death: Jesus and Epicureanism.  Mansfield OH: Frank Publishing, 1997.
Hannah argues that the principles of Jesus were nearer to Epicureanism than to Judaism, Cynicism, or Stoicism, yet Epicureanism was the philosophy most disdained by Jewish and, later, Christian teachers because of its rejection of Providence and human immortality. While Epicureans tried to give comfort by saying, "Death is nothing to us," Jesus favored the expression, "You will not taste death."

Hanrahan, Maura and Ewtushik, Marg.  A Veritable Scoff: Sources on Foodways and Nutrition in Newfoundland and Labrador.  St. John’s NF: Flanker Press, 2002.

Harvey, Mark, Quilley, S., and Beynon, H.  Exploring the Tomato: Transformations of Nature, Society and Economy.  Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003.
The book explores the changing character of tomato from Aztec salsa to modern mass consumption, looking at how it is cultivated, distributed, traded, and consumed.

Harbury, Katharine E. Colonial Virginia’s Cooking Dynasty. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 2003.
Commentary on two early manuals of food preparation and entertaining in colonial America.

Harvey, Mark, Andrew McMeekin, and Alan Warde, eds. Qualities of Food. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.
This multidisciplinary, comparative work focuses on the field of food and broadly, to quote from the preface, on ‘various aspects of production and consumption.’ A collaborative effort produced as a result of a UK Economic and Social Research Council workshop held in 2002, the collection brings together essays from eminent contemporary social science theorists including Mara Miele, Alan Warde, Jukka Gronow, and Geneviève Teil. Tying the varied approaches and perspectives is a common theme, food quality.
Roger Haden

Hassan, Fekri A. (ed.).  Droughts, Food and Culture: Ecological Change and Food Security in Africa’s Later Prehistory.  Kluwer Academic, 2002.

Hassan, John.  A History of Water in Modern England.  New York: Manchester University, 1998.
Histories of water usage, supply, and management are rare. This book is remarkable for being interdisciplinary in the best sense.
Norman Pearson, American Historical Review

Hayes, Joanne Lamb.  Grandma’s Wartime Kitchen: World War II and the Way We Cooked.  New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.

Heller, Tamar, and Patricia Moran, eds. Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003
Eve’s eating of the apple forever links women to an ambiguous legacy, marking her within the patriarchal tradition as temptress yet also revealing the interconnection of appetite, oral tendencies, sexual desire, risk, and knowledge that distinguishes the “feminine” relation to eating. The essays in the collection explore various aspects of this connection.
Kathryn R. Kent, Gastronomica

Helstosky, Carol F. Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy. New York: Palgrave, 2006.
Helstosky shows that new war industries in Italy, as well as that nation’s participation in Allied food programs, led to worker prosperity and increased consumption of foods that had not been part of the popular diet before the war. Even with rampant inflation, the popular classes ate better than had ever been possible.
Kyri Watson Claflin, Gastronomica

Hemphill, Ian. The Spice and Herb Bible (second edition). n.p: Robert Rose, 2006.
Despite my quibbles, this encyclopaedic work is a good culinary reference for exploring the rich spectrum of herbs and spices, and a definitive resource for aspiring spice merchants.
Ammini Ramachandran, Gastronomica

Henisch, Bridget Ann.  The Medieval Calendar.  Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
It is a serious work offering new analysis and insight but presented with the lightness of touch and the deft wit for which the author is renowned.
PPS

Herlihy, Patricia.  The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia.  New York: Oxford University, 2001.
This book examines the prevalence of alcohol in Russian social, economic, religious, and political life. Herlihy looks at how the state, the church the military, doctors, lay societies, and the czar all tried to battle the problem of overconsumption of alcohol.

Herman, Judith, and Marguerite Shalett Herman, The Cornucopia: Being a Kitchen Entertainment and Cookbook. New Edition. Huntington Library Press, 2005.

Heuzenroeder, Angela.  Barossa Food.  Kent Town SA: Wakefield Press, 1999.
See the review by Barbara Santich in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.

Hietala, Marjatta, and Tania Vahtikari, eds. The Landscape of Food: The Food Relationship of Town and Country in Modern Times. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. 2003.

Hionidouo, Violetta. Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941-1944. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Hoffmann, Richard C.  Fisher's Craft and Lettered Art: Tracts on Fishing from the End of the Middle Ages.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

Hodgson, Godfrey. A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving. New York: Public Affairs, 2006.
Where the book could have been a fascinating exploration of the creation of a national symbol, it ends up being instead a layman’s history of the Pilgrim experience—useful and informative, but a bit dryer and blander than a Thanksgiving feast should be.
Margot Kaminski, Gastronomica

Hogan, David Gerard.  Selling 'em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food. New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Hogan tells the story of the White Castle fast-food restaurant chain from its 1921 beginnings to it present position as a small regional competitor with such major fast-food hamburger chains as McDonald's and Burger King. . . . The book is most successful as a boosterish corporate history.
Amy Bentley, American Historical Review

Hohenegger, Beatrice. Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006.

Holt, Georgina, and Matthew Reed, eds. Sociological Perspectives of Organic Agriculture: From Pioneer to Policy. Oxford: CABI International, 2006.
The essays in this book, taken from both economists and social scientists, are divided into five main themes: organic movements in northwest Europe, organic food quality and the consumer, problems for organic farmers around the globe, principles and practices of organic farming, and new directions for organic sector development.
Fiona Louden, Food, Culture, and Society

Holt, Mack P. (ed.). A Social and Cultural History of Alcohol. Oxford: Berg, 2006. This timely collection is an anthology of writing from scholars working in the field of drink and beverage history, and includes our own A. Lynn Martin, Mack Holt, Ken Albala. Diane Kirkby, Charles Ludington, Kim Munholland, Thomas Brennan, and others.

Hooker, William. Pomona Londinensis. Oakland: Octavo Editions, 2003.
Painted by William Hooker between 1813 and 1818, Pomona Londinensis was a field guide to the different fruits grown in London at that time. This edition opens with two well-written essays by botany historian Ian Jackson.
Craig Libman, Gastronomica

Hopley, Claire.  New England Cooking.  Lee MA: Berkshire House, 2001.
A book suffused with history.
PPC

Horn, Tammy. Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation. The University Press of Kentucky, 2005.
Traces the many paths of honey bee and human interaction in American and weaves them together for a colorful, intimate, and in-depth tale that grandly encompasses keen inventions, slavery, religion, war, economics, politics, and the global marketplace.
Kim Flottum, BeeCulture

Horowitz, Roger. Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
An important, unique, and splendidly written introduction to the history of meat production, distribution, and consumption in America.
Warren Belasco

Jamie Horwitz and Pauline Singley (eds.) Eating Architecture. MIT Press, 2004. "...an immensely original and fascinating work" (John Urry).

Hosking, Richard.  At the Japanese Table.  Hong Kong: Oxford University, 2000.
[This] is a useful book, and probably the best single-volume introduction to Japanese cuisine currently available. However, explanations of how the Japanese acquired their unique habits and preferences are limited.
John Kochevar, Gastronomica

Hudgins, Sharon. The Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East. Texas A & M University Press, 2003, paperback edition 2004.
This award-winning book covers daily life in the post-Soviet era, and her special interest in foods and foodways is apparent in her descriptions of multi-course meals washed down with champagne and vodka, often eaten by candlelight when the electricity failed.

Hughes, Kathryn. The Short Times and Long Life of Mrs. Beeton. New York: Random House, 2006.
In her extensive research Hughes found that Mrs. Beeton was, in fact, a plagiarist who had copied chunks of information and recipes from other sources. “Although she was a plagiarist she was adding value: She was an extraordinary innovator.”
Patsy Iddison, Gastronomica

Hughes-Hallet, Penelope. The Immortal Dinner: A Famous Evening of Genius and Laughter in Literary London, 1817.  Chicago: New Amsterdam Books, 2002.
The host was Benjamin Robert Haydon, the English history painter . . . .He gave this party to introduce the young and unknown John Keats to the elder poet William Wordsworth.
Elizabeth Riely, Gastronomica

Hundley, Norris Jr.  The Great Thirst: Californians and Water–A History.  Berkeley: University of California, 2000.
[Hundley] has given the reader a rich history buttressed with admirable objectivity. Above all, he has taken a subject of complexity and give it clarity.
Robert W. Righter, American Historical Review

Inness, Sherrie A. (ed.).  Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2001.

________.  Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture.  Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2000.
By exploring popular media, including cookbooks, magazines, and advertisements, Dinner Roles explores the relationship between women and food developed during the first half of the twentieth century.

________.  Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender and Class at the Dinner Table. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Inness’s arguments are basically two: that food writing and food talk are sites of cultural transformation and empowerment and that even seemingly recuperative, antifeminist depictions of home cookery can offer empowerment.
Gwen Hyman, Gastronomica

Issenberg, Sasha. The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy. New York: Penguin, 2007. Jacobs, Marc, and Peter Scholliers, eds. Eating Out in Europe: Picnics, Gourmet Dining and Snacks since the Late Eighteenth Century. New York: Berg, 2003.

Jakle, John A. and Sculle, Keith A.  Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
A survey of the origins, architecture, and commercial growth of wayside eateries in the United States over the past 100 years. The authors study the impact of the automobile on the restaurant business, how roadside restaurants came into their own, how the drive-in and drive-through came about, how the great franchises from White Castle to McDonald's came into existence and how roadside architecture and social mores were revolutionized.
Jekyll, Agnes.  Kitchen Essays.  London: Persephone Books, 2001.
This was first published in 1922, as a collection of pieces from The Times written by the sister-in-law of the great gardener Gertrude Jekyll.
PPC

James, Kenneth. Escoffier: King of Chefs. London: Hambledon and London, 2003.
What makes this book a noteworthy addition to the culinary history canon and different from other Escoffier accounts is the inclusion of what the author refers to as “interludes.” Punctuating the eighteen chapters that constitute the chef’s life story are seventeen freestanding essay-like mini-chapters on a variety of topics pertaining in varying degrees to the chapters preceding them.
Alexandra Leaf, Gastronomica

Jawary, Nita Tiffaha. The Perpetual Table: Cuisine of Judeo-Babylon and Old Baghdad (A CD-Rom of Food Art Video Music; stocklists can be found at www.nita.com.au/perp.html)
The Perpetual Table is an insight into the cuisine of the Judeo-Babylonian community of Old Baghdad. This cuisine reflects the different cooking styles of the north and south as well as conforming to Judaic food laws.  From the north came Turkish cooking practices and the use of sweet spices.  The south was influenced by both Persia and India with the custom of using dried fruits to give a sweet and sour flavour to dishes coming from Persia and hot chili dishes coming from India.
Dani Signorini

Jefford, Andrew. Peat, Smoke and Spirit: A Portrait of Islay and its Whiskies. London: Headline Book Publishing, 2004.
The ‘Introduction’ brings the reader to Islay via an airplane flight from Glasgow. It contains such purple prose that I seriously wondered if I could bear to read the entire book. What follows is ‘A word or two on whisky,’ twenty-one pages of such dense technical detail that I looked forward to more purple prose. An indication of the technical detail is the twelve-page glossary, with about one-fourth of one page explaining the meaning of foreshots. Then come eight chapters on Islay’s geography, early and recent history, peat, weather, nature, shipwrecks, and modern situation. In between each of these eight chapters is a ‘Glass,’ in effect a chapter, on one of the distilleries—a total of seven ‘Glasses’ in alphabetical order.
A. Lynn Martin

Jenkins, Virginia Scott.  Bananas: An American History.  Herndon VA: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.
Before 1880 most Americans had never seen a banana, but this exotic fruit quickly became a mainstay of jokes and songs, as well as a healthy staple of the modern American diet. Jenkins demonstrates how growers, importers, and promoters helped this fruit gain a secure place in the nation’s culture and grocery lists.

Jiménez, Patricia Varga. Con sabor a tertulia: Historia del consumo del café en Costa Rica (1840-1940). San José: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2004.
The spread of coffee production depended largely on international markets, but as this elegant and innovative book shows, local consumption did not simply percolate down from foreign elites. Jiménez demonstrates that Costa Rica developed a unique coffee culture, one that also provides invaluable comparative perspective on consumption patterns in Europe and the United States.
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, American Historical Review

Jing, Jun (ed.).  Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change.  Stanford: Stanford University, 2000.
[This book covers] everything children now eat, from infant formulas to fast foods and snacks. And it goes beyond the consideration of foods to the impact of public policies and modernization of Chinese children’s foods and eating patterns.
Nancy Jervis, Gastronomica

Johnson, Hugh. A Life Uncorked. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Part memoir, part lesson board, part comedy and part tragedy, the book is loaded with Johnson’s inimitable style, one that practically reads itself.

Jung, Moon-Ho. Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Jutte, Robert. History of the senses : from antiquity to cyberspace. Trans. James Lynn. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA, USA : Polity, 2005.
This book is focussed on Germany, or rather on German history and data derived from Germany, in a nonetheless broad-based approach to the senses which begins with the ancient world and tracks in a more or less chronological fashion, the twists and turns of "the senses" and their cultural construction. As part of this process, changes to taste and its relationship with science, technology, society and culture are dealt with admiraly by Jütte. Particularly useful in this context is Jütte's Europe-specific analysis which provides a wealth of scholarly references and insights providing potential contrast with changes in other countries and cultures. Arguably "the senses" require more research of a cross-cultural type. Jütte gives us a taste of the potential.

Johannsen, Kristin. Ginseng Dreams: The Secret World of America’s Most Valuable Plant. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006.

Kamp, David. The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation. New York: Broadway Books, 2006.
An attempt to solidify the story of America’s gastronomical growth over the past fifty years. Kamp endeavors to encompass the overall progress of American gourmet culture without becoming mired in one central food figure or particular food trend.
Sabrina Small, Food, Culture, and Society

Kaplan, Steven Laurence. Good Bread is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Katz, Sandor Ellis. The Revolution Will Not Be Mircrowaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006.
This insider’s guide is an excellent introduction to the burgeoning underground food movement in North America.
Katherine Dillon, Gastronomica

Katz, Solomon H., and William Woys Weaver, eds., Encyclopedia of Food and Culture: Scribner Library of Daily Life. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003.
More bothersome to me than this perhaps unavoidable Western tilt is a certain blandness that smothers the writing whenever the topic is a contentious one. Controversial or not, every subject deserves all the accuracy that research can muster, but when the going gets touch, these volumes start sounding like a junior high civics text.
Laura Shapiro, Gastronomica

Kaufman, Cathy K. Cooking in Ancient Civilizations. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2006.

Keay, John. The Spice Route: A History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Keay, John. The Spice Route: A History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Keay’s extensive narrative on the spice trade and the circuitous routes it has traversed for thousands of years is a scholarly work as well as a great read for anyone remotely interested in the history of food.
Ian Hemphill, Gastronomica

Kelly, Ian. Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Carême, the First Celebrity Chef. New York: Walker & Company, 2004.
The book offers a fascinating look not only at Carême’s personal life but also at the lives of those for whom he cooked. At the end the reader is left with a strong sense of the difference between Carême’s celebrity and that of the chefs working today: more than a century after his death, Carême’s influence remains palpable, while modern celebrity chefs are likely to disappear as soon as their ratings drop.
Carolyn Chapman, Gastronomica

Khare, R. S. (ed.).  The Eternal Food: Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of Hindus and Buddhists.  Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

Kimbrell, Andrew (ed.). Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. Washington: Covelo, 2002.
The book includes photographs of varieties of fruits and vegetables that most people have never seen, the survivors of mass extinctions caused by monoculture agriculture. Eighty to 90 percent of tomato, lettuce, corn, and apple varieties have been lost since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Lee Veniola, Gastronomica

Kincheloe, Joe L. The Sign of the Burger: McDonald’s and the Culture of Power. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
Much of the book consists of familiar claims about the pervasiveness of corporate influence, dressed up in jargon from cultural studies, postmodernism, and critical theory.
Barry Glassner, Gastronomica

King, Shirley, Dining With Marcel Proust: A Practical Guide to French Cuisine of the Belle Epoque. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

Kinro, Gerald Y. A Cup of Aloha: The Kona Coffee Epic. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003.
Recounts the roller-coaster history of Kona coffee, the prestigious American coffee grown in Hawai’i. . . . His story is a rich narrative of how coffee was taken to this area and of the dedicated immigrant families responsible for bring the coffee to market.
Mary Lou Heiss, Gastronomica

Kiple, Kenneth. A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Kiple, Kenneth F. and Omelas, Kriemhild Coneè (eds.).  The Campbridge World History of Food.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
This is a landmark reference. The editors’ slants are themselves worthy of discussion, and their ability to bring a monumental task to successful completion is something we can all be grateful for.
Rachel Laudan, Gastronomica

Kiple, Kenneth. A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Most of this book is dedicated to three periods: the transition from foraging to farming, the Columbian Exchange, and the twentieth century.
Rachel Laudan, Gastronomica

Kirkby, Diane.  Barmaids: A History of Women's Work in Pubs.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
An innovative mixture of labor history and cultural history, Barmaids traces the sexualization of the industry and the feminist and temperance debates about it. It covers women's demands for equal pay and drinking rights in the postwar period and concludes in the mid-1990s with changes in the labor market and drinking customs that saw the end of the old pub culture and the place of barmaids within it.

Kirkby, Diane, and Tanja Luckins, eds. Dining on Turtles: Food Feasts and Drinking in History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Kladstrup, Don and Petie.  Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure.  Doubleday, 2001.

Kline, Ronald R.  Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2002.

Knechtel, John, ed. Food. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.
Examines and imagines shifts in food habits with projects by writers and artists that exlore the cultural and emotional resonance of food.

Koeppel, Dan. Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Korsmeyer, Carolyn.  Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
As she insightfully establishes, philosophical tradition has not been able to find a place for gustatory taste within its framework, and it is a virtue of Korsmeyer’s eloquent little study that she establishes a strong possibility for a cognitively rich philosophy of food.
Dana Polan, Gastronomica

Korsmeyer, Carolyn (ed.). The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink. Oxford: Berg, 2005.
Any culture is a combination of nature and nurture, and the degree to which taste is a social construct is a leading theme of this collection of thirty-seven readings on the experience of food and drink. The material is arranged under eight perspectives: physiology and circumstance, taste cultures, flavours, body and soul, aesthetics, discernment and cultivation, emotion and memory, and artifice and authenticity.
Paul Wilkins

Korthals, Michiel. Before Dinner: Philosophy and Ethics of Food. Dordrecht: Springer, 2004.

Kulick, Don, and Anne Meneley, eds. Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession. New York: Penguin, 2005.
The book takes a refreshing approach: not to revile fat but to anatomize and understand it. Both accessible and thought provoking, its essays locate fat within specific cultural contexts, from Brazil, Tuscany, and Nigeria to your local Starbucks.
Stephanie Hartman, Gastronomica

Krass, Peter. Blood and Whiskey: The Life and Times of Jack Daniel. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2004.

Kroetsch, Laura and Symons, Michael (eds.).  Proceedings of the Wellington Symposium of Gastronomy: 11ath [sic] Symposium of Australian Gastronomy in Holiday Mood.  Wellington: Symposium of Australian Gastronomy, 2001.
See the review of Colin Sheringham in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre

Kuh, Patric.  The Last Days of Haute Cuisine: America’s Culinary Revolution.  New York: Viking, 2000.
See the review by Barbara Santich in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.

Kümin, Beat and Tlusty, B. Ann (eds.).  The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe.  London: Ashgate, 2002.
The subject of drink received a great deal of attention from early modern contemporaries, who produced a large body of literature addressing the drink problem. Preachers railed against it, urban and rural authorities published ordinances against it, and satirists extolled it. At the same time, the tavern was an institution central to the social, cultural and professional life of most of the male population of Europe. The multifaceted role of inns and taverns in early modern Europe is explored from an interdisciplinary perspective in this anthology.

Kümin, Beat. Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Kurlansky, Mark. The Big Oyster: new York in teh World: A Molluscular History. New York: Ballantine Books, 2006.
Peering through New York-colored glasses, Kurlansky avoids the fact that the North American oyster story is far larger than any one city.
Michael McKernan, Gastronomica. See review by Roger Haden in Newsletter No 43.

________.  Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World.  New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998.
A loving eulogy not only to a fish, but to the people whose lives have been shaped by the habits of the fish, and whose way of life is now at an end.
New York Newsday

________.  Salt: A World History.  Walker/Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2002.
In nearly 500 fact-laden pages he relates the stories of salt from pre-history to tomorrow.
PPC

Kurlansky, Mark (ed.).  Choice Cuts: A Savoury Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History.  New York: Ballantine, 2002.

La Cecla, F., Pasta and Pizza in the History of Italian Identity: An Anthropological Approach. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007.

Lambert-Goes, Miles. Greek Salad: A Dionysian Travelogue. Williamsburg: Ambeli Press, 2004.
As if mirroring the very essence of Greece, Lambert-Goes moves effortlessly between antiquity and the present, studding his beautifully written narrative with rare depth of knowledge, crisscrossing fluidly over millennia with the stroke of his pen.
Diane Kochilas, Gastronomica

Lambrecht, Bill. Dinner at the New Gene Café: How Genetic Engineering is Changing What We Eat, How We Live, and the Global Politics of Food. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
Lambrecht pulls no punches as he unveils the miscalculations of an industry intent on spreading a gospel of abundant food and full life through agricultural biotechnology. Lambrecht sets out to prove his contention that “Monsanto has genes for manipulation and secrecy in its corporate being.”
Lois Banta, Gastronomica

Lang, Tim and Millstone, Erik.  The Penguin Atlas of Food: Who Easts What, Where, and Why.  Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2003.

Langdon, John. Mills in the Medieval Economy: England, 1300-1450. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
The fact that everyone in England was a consumer of mill products allows Langdon to integrate the history of milling into broader economic developments.
S. H. Rigby, American Historical Review

Larousse Gastronomique.  London: Hamlyn, 2001.

Laszlo, Pierre.  Salt: Grain of Life.  New York: Columbia University, 2001.
Laszlo engages in a virtual stream-of-consciousness where anything he wants to say about salt (and about topics only partially relate to salt) comes pouring out in pell-mell fashion. He calls his work a deliberately "ignorant treatise" devoted to the "fantastical and whimsical."
Dana Polan, Gastronomica

Laszio, Pierre. Citrus: A History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Laurioux, Bruno. Une histoire culinaire du Moyen Age. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005.
The book will certainly delight researchers who are already immersed in a few particular shadowy enigmas of early food and cookery. But the vulgar unwashed who are eager to grasp, or to perceive more clearly, the outlines of its very rich but tangled history—a motley mosaic if ever there was one—may be happier with the same author’s Manger au Moyen Age (Paris: Hachette, 2002).
Terrence Scully, Food, Culture, and Society

Laurioux, B. Les Livres de cuisine médiévaux. Tunhout: Brepols, 1997.

Lehmann, Gilly.  The British Housewife: Cookery-Books, Cooking and Society in 18th-Century Britain.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books.
A study of the development of cookery in the 17th and 18th centuries, a discussion of the relationship between the authors of cookery books and their readers, a portrait of the British at table during the 18th century--manners, customs, mealtimes and intentions, and an annotated bibliography of the literature of cookery.

Lerner. Michael A. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.
This book is not only a finely grained study of New York City as the chief bastion of wet resistance to the Eighteenth Amendment, it is the best history of prohibition enforcement in an urban environment yet written.
Thomas R. Pegram, American Historical Review

Leslie, Eliza.  Miss Leslie's Directions for Cookery.  Dover, 1999.
A facsimile reprint edition of the most popular cookbook printed in America in the 19th century.
Levenson, Barry M.  Habeus Codfish: Reflections of Food and the Law.  Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2001.
Despite its flippant title, Habeus Codfish is an excellent overview of many of the ways food has inspired legal action and statutory regulation.
Jim Stark, Gastronomica

Levine, Susan. School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Laurioux, Bruno. Gastronomie, humanisme et société à Rome au milieu du XVe siècle: Autour du De honesta volupate de Platina. Sismel: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006.

Li, Leslie. Daughter of Heaven: A Memoir with Earthly Recipes. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2005.
Written in elegant prose, this heavenly memoir offers cultural and culinary perceptions amid the sights, smells, and tastes of two worlds, as seen through the eyes of two women.
Jacqueline M. Newman, Gastronomica

Li, Lillian M. Fighting Famine in North China: State, Market, and Environmental Decline, 1690s-1990s. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Liger-Belair, Gérard. Uncorked: The Science of Champagne. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Lignon-Darmaillac, Sophie. Les grandes maisons du vignoble de Jerez 91834-1992). Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2004.
Based on painstaking research in a number of private archives of the large bodegas as well as a myriad of local sources, both written and oral, Lignon-Darmaillac’s nicely written analysis offers a series of valuable insights into the close social world of the great sherry houses of Andalusia.
Joseph Harrison, American Historical Review

Livres en bouche: cinq siècles d'art culinaire français.  Paris: Bibliothèque de France, Hermann, 2001.
See the review by Barbara Santich in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.

Livingstone-Learmonth, John. The Wines of the Northern Rhône. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
This is a book for all seasons. If you are planning to visit the Northern Rhône, this is a guide to every possible vineyard and hillside slope, not to mention a collection of photographs to help you identify the owners and growers.
Morton Tavel, Gastronomica

Long, Lucy (ed.). Culinary Tourism. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004.
A frequent juxtaposition in this volume is between the cultural and the temporal. Culinary tourists often express dissatisfaction with the global influences on contemporary ethnic cuisines, and therefore they prefer traditional or pseudotraditional versions that are rarely found today within the originating societies.
Sun-Ki Chai, Gastronomica

Lovegren, Sylvia. Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
In often hilarious fashion, Lovegren chronicles hundreds of wacky fads as the nation’s cooks moved from frozen fish-sticks and fat-free brownies to Szechwan shrimp alfredo.
St. Louis Post-Despatch

Lukacs, Paul B.  American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

MacDonald, Janet. Feeding Nelson’s Navy: The True Story of Food at Sea in the Georgian Era. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole, 2004.

Macfarlane, Alan, and Iris Macfarlane. The Empire of Tea: The Remarkable History of the Plant That Took Over the World. New York: The Overlook Press, 2004.
Macfarlane tends to push evidence too far, most notably in the assertion that “without tea the British Empire and British industrialism could not have emerged.” . . . Equally egregious is Macfarlane’s discussion of the health benefits of tea, devoting the whole of chapter thirteen to the topic.
Claire Hopley, Gastronomica

Macinnis, Peter. Bittersweet: The Story of Sugar. Crowsnest: Allen & Unwin, 2002.

Madden, Etta M., and Martha L Finch, eds. Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
Thirteen essays that focus on the utopian impulse in American communities and, in particular, on “how lived food experiences both emanate from and contribute to ideas of perfection and improvement in American culture.”
Susan Wiggins, Gastronomica

McNamee, Gregory. Moveable Feasts: The History, Science and Lore of Food. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2006.
Among the 30 types of food discussed in the course of this alphabetically arranged work are the apple, the banana, chocolate coffee, corn, garlic, honey, millet, the olive, the peanut, the pineapple, the plum, rice, the soybean, the tomato, and the watermelon.

Magnusson, Roberta J. Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
What Magnusson charts in her book is the somewhat piecemeal sequence of adoptions and investment in conduits, drains, and fountains, showing that works by, for example, a friary, did not immediately result in additional provisioning elsewhere in a townscape.
Neil Christie, American Historical Review

Mallet, Gina. Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World. Milson's Point, NSW: Random House Australia, 2004. 236 pp. + index
The doom-laden title demands immediate attention; who among us has not, at some stage, bemoaned the lack of flavour in tomatoes and peaches, the blandness of most Australian cheddar, the vapidity of characterless chicken breasts? Not that Gina Mallet gives any answers or any cause for optimism in this book, whose message seems to be that things ain't what they used to be and we'd better enjoy what we can now, because they will only get worse. Her conclusion is that “unless consumers stick up for taste, there won't be any.”
Barbara Santich

Manning, Richard. Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization. New York: North Point Press, 2004.
Melding history, biology, agriculture, forensic anthropology, and archaeology, Manning reworks the popular understanding of human history and in so doing complicates and rewrites evolution’s heroes and villains. It is an engaging book, one that blends personal narrative with persuasive argumentation.
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Gastronomica

Machado, Eduardo, and Michael Domitrovich. Tastes like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Martin, A. Lynn and Barbara Santich, eds., Culinary History. Adelaide: East Street Publications, 2004.
Culinary History, selected papers from the Second International Conference of the Research Centre for the History of Food and Drink, begins with an excellent chapter from Andy Smith on the conceptualisation of culinary history. Handily combining an overview of the other papers in the publication with a grand summary of the field, Smith discusses methodology, topics and classification schemes, asserting that “culinary history should explain where humankind has been and perhaps suggest directions for the future.” The subsequent chapters certainly “explain where humankind has been”, tracking moments in food history through the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans right up to 1970s suburban Adelaide.
Sarah Black

Martin, A. Lynn, and Barbara Santich, eds., Gastronomic Encounters. Adelaide: East Street Publications, 2004.
This book contains the papers presented at the Research Centre's Symposium on Gastronomic Encounters in April 2002 as part of the celebrations of Encounter 2002 that commemorated the encounter between captains Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders near what is now Victor Harbor in 1802. The symposium began with historical examinations of the food cultures of the respective French and English ships and of eighteenth-century France. After consideration of the differing interactions between France and England and the foods of their colonies, papers focussed mainly on French influences on Anglo-Australian culture. The range of perspectives is diverse, and Harvey Levenstein’s chapter on American encounters with French cuisine gives an intriguing, different angle.
Sarah Black

Martino of Como. The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Mason, Laura (ed.). Food and the Rites of Passage. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2002.
The five essays concentrate on three transformation rituals in the British Isles—baptisms, weddings, and funerals—primarily within the confines of the Anglican Church. Essays span the early-modern period through the first half of the twentieth century, largely through a descriptive discussion of prepared foods, beverages, and ingredients.
Kevin T. McIntyre, Gastronomica

Matasar, Ann B. Women of Wine: The Rise of Women in the Global Wine Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
An engaging story that pays homage to the women at the crossroads of wine’s cultural history. With penetrating insight and deep affection, Matasaar tells the story of these pioneering women through fascinating oral histories.
Anne Rosenzweig

Matsuyama, Akira. The Traditional Dietary Culture of Southeast Asia: Its Formation and Pedigree. London: Kegan Paul, 2003.
This compendium on the culinary products and practices of Southeast Asia is not for the casual reader with a passing interest in Asian cuisines. Rather, it is for the specialist, the anthropologist or historian, who wants to delve into the specifics of cultural change as it relates to the foodways of Southeast Asia.
James M. Hastings, Gastronomica

McCann, James C. Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
McCann has written a compelling, meticulously documented, and elegant book. One of its great strengths is that it weaves a wealth of historical, botanical, cultural, and ethnographic information into a narrative that displays unexpected surprises and connections.
Michael J. Watts, American Historical Review

McFeely, Mary Drake.  Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century.  Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2000.
[The book] is at its best when it is comparative, situating the experiences of White middle-class women in relation to those of African-American women and poor women.
Alice P. Julier, Gastronomica

McGinty, Brian.  Strong Wine: The Life and Legend of Agoston Haraszthy.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

McGowan, Andrew.  Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
The early Eucharist has usually been seen as sacramental eating of token bread and wine in careful or even slavish imitation of Jesus and his earliest disciples. The evidence suggests, however, great diversity in its conduct, including the use of foods, in the first few hundred years. Eucharistic meals involving cheese, milk, salt, oil and vegetables are attested, and some have argued that even fish was used.

McGowan, Richard.  Government Regulation of the Alcohol Industry: The Search for Revenue and the Common Good.  London: Quorum Books, 1997.

McGee, Diane. Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early Twentienth-Century Women Writers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
Explores the role of dinner in works of fiction primarily by Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf. Her interest focuses mainly on how their fictional meals reflect some of the more important social changes that were taking place in turn-of-the-century Great Britain and the United States.
Ronald D. Le Blanc, Gastronomica

McGovern, Patrick E. Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

McKillop, Heather. Salt: White Gold of the Ancient Maya. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

McKnight, David.  From Hunting to Drinking: The Devastating Effects of Alcohol on an Australian Aboriginal Community.  London: Routledge, 2002.
This study reveals the social change witnessed over a period of 30 years by an anthropologist on Mornington Island, off the north Queensland coast, most notably the devastating effect that alcohol has had on this community.

McNamee, Thomas. Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revoluton. New York: Penguin, 2007.
A rich accounting of the Alice Waters opera in all of its glory, drama, trials and triumphs in vivid prose and tantalizing detail.
Tom Brokaw

McWilliams, James E. A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
McWilliams aims to explore “not only what colonial Americans ate but also why they ate it.” The result is an engagingly written book that examines culinary themes within the larger context of colonial development and, ultimately, revolution.
Virginia DeJohn Anderson, American Historical Review

Magennis, Hugh.  Anglo-Saxon Appetites: Food and Drink and their Consumption in Old English and Related Literature.  Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999.
This is an excellent supplement to Hagen's materialistic studies on Anglo-Saxon food and drink. The focus of this book is on the meaning of the consumption.

Martin, John.  The Development of Modern Agriculture: British Farming since 1931.  New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.
The book charts the fluctuations in agriculture’s fortunes, concentrating on the government intervention and protectionism that has shaped the sector not merely since the depressed years of the 1930s but during those very years.
American Historical Review

Martino of Como. The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Martino of Como. Maestro Martino: Libro de Arte Coquinaria, Rome, ca. 1465. Oakland: Octavo Editions, 2005.
For these two books on Martino of Como, as well as Terrence Scully’s edition of The Neapolitan Recipe Collection: Cuoco Napoletano (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), see the review article by Nancy Harmon Jenkins in Gastronomica (Spring 2007), pp. 97-103.

Mason, Laura.  Sugar-Plums and Sherbet: The Prehistory of Sweets.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books, 1998.
'Sugar is fantasy land', writes Laura Mason at the beginning of her book, the main purpose of which is 'to examine the hold which sugar, in the form of sweets, has on our subconscious'. Her attention is focused on Britain, the British fondness for 'sweeties' and traditional British sweets such as humbugs, acid drops and liquorice allsorts, for all of which she presents a fascinating history.
Barbara Santich

Mason, Laura and Brown, Catherine.  Traditional Foods of Britain.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books, 1999.
See the review by Barbara Santich in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.
Mattingly, Carol.  Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998.

May, Robert.  The Accomplisht Cook (1660).  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books, 2000.
May was a Catholic who was trained and cooked in the kitchens of noble households in Restoration England.

McClelland, Peter D.  Sowing Modernity: America's First Agricultural Revolution.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
[The author] examines temperate-climate agriculture in the early northern United States, paying some attention as well to the colonial period. He wishes to demonstrate that there was a revolution in agriculture immediately following the War of 1812. Although McClelland succeeds in showing that adoption of new agricultural technology was a sign of important change in this period, his contention that new machinery was the most important . . . element of that change is questionable.
Joyce E. Chaplin, American Historical Review

Menard, Russell R. Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2006.
Based on fresh archival research conducted on the island and in England, shows that Barbados was well on its way to becoming a plantation colony and a slave society before sugar emerged as the dominant crop.

Menzel, Peter, and Faith D’Aluisio. Hungry Planet: What The World Eats. Material World Books, 2005.
For two years photographer Menzel and writer D’Aluisio have visited ordinary families in 24 countries, exploring cooking and eating food. The book also contains essays by Eric K. Schlosser, Marion Nestle, Alfred W. Crosby, and Charles C. Mann.

Mersman, Joseph J. The Whiskey Merchant’s Diary: An Urban Life in the Emerging Midwest. Linda A. Fisher, ed. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007.

Mgbeoji, Ikechi. Global Piracy: Patents, Plants, and Indigenous Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Unearths the technicalities and subtleties of the issue of biopiracy and exposes the underappreciation of the role of women and farmers and masculinization of knowledge.
James T. Gathii

Michel, Dominique.  Vatel et la naissance de la gastronomie.  Paris: Fayard, 1999.
Vatel, son of a labourer in the north of France, rose to the summit of his profession (maitre d’hotel), but committed suicide and has lived on as the stereotypical subject of an anecdote which appears in virtually every work on history of French cuisine or gastronomy.
PPS

Miller, Judith A. Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700-1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Makes excellent and provocative new arguments about French economic history . . . The study brings a fresh perspective to the concerns of provisioning authorities before, during, and after the French Revolution by revealing that this watershed year of 1789 does not constitute the endpoint for analyzing defunct policies.
Kyri Watson Claflin, Gastronomica

Miracle, Preston, and Nicky Milner, eds. Consuming Passions and patterns of Consumption. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2003.
Archaeologists can certainly be described as having a fixation with garbage. Most of what is discovered at archaeological sites has been discarded, and much of that was food. Therefore, it is always a surprise to realize how little attention, until recently, was devoted to the study of food and cuisine.
Daphne Derven, Gastronomica

Montanari, Massimo. Food Is Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
The book is both edifying and enjoyable, philosophical without being daunting or onerous. Most importantly, the book’s broad scope exposes readers to a wide variety of ideas about and approaches to culinary history and actively encourages them to reassess their relationship to food.
Jolie Braun, Gastronomica

Montgomery, M. R., A Cow’s Life: The Surprising History of Cattle and How the Black Angus Came to Be Home on the Range. New York: Walker and Company, 2004.
A compelling tale of cattle, the people who breed them, and nothing less than the molding of human culture . . . . The surprising history of cattle, as the subtitle of this treatise presages, is that wherever civilization has advanced, cows and bulls have been there to pull the plow, provide the food and clothing, and sustain humanity.
Ellen Fried, Gastronomica

Morton, Tim (ed.).  Radical Food: The Culture and Politics of Eating and Drinking, 1790-1820.  London: Routledge, 2000.
This three-volume set examines the cultural and literary history of food in the eighteenth century.

Mulrooney, Margaret M. (ed.). Fleeing the Famine: North America and Irish Refugees, 1845-1851. Westport: Praeger, 2003.

Murdock, Catherine Gilbert.  Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Murdock deftly interweaves the histories of temperance, drinking customs and women's rights.
Jack Blocker

Nasser, Christiane Dabdoub.  Classic Palestinian Cookery.  Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.

Nargi, Lela. Around the Table: Women on Food, Cooking, Nourishment, Love . . . and the Mothers Who dished It up for Them. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Nestle, Marion.  Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influence Nutrition and Health.  Berkeley: University of California, 2002.
She vividly illustrates food politics in action: watered-down government dietary advice, schools pushing soft drinks, diet supplements promoted as if they were First Amendment rights.

Neuhaus, Jessamyn. Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
With this fine repast, concocted from an imaginative array of ingredients and served with gusto, cookbooks join other forms of prescriptive literature as markers of hetero-gender identity that further function as tropes of national health and well-being.
Eileen Boris, American Historical Review

Nierenberg, Danielle. Happier Meals: Rethinking the Global Meat Industry. Worldwatch Paper, September 2005.
Though the paper usefully provides a compendium of global statistics and chilling thumbnail sketches of what’s happening in countries like China, Brazil, India, and Mexico, the paper also reveals limits to the statistical method presented in such a condensed form.
Betty Fussell, Gastronomica

O’Brien, Charmaine. Recipes from an Urban Village: A Cookbook from Basti Hazrat Nizammuddin. New Delhi: The Hope Project/Charmaine O’Brien, 2003.
This was written in response to the offer of “putting together a cookbook for a NGO,” in this case a “Hope Project” based in the basti (“urban village”) of Hazrat Nizzamuddin in Delhi, named after a thirteenth-century Sufi saint. O’Brien admits she accepted the offer with enthusiasm. She underscores the theme of the relationship between Sufism (the esoteric arm of Islam) and Delhi culture, and that within the “urban village” food practices with the primary binding agents of “spirituality and hospitality” for the community.
Roger Haden

O’Brien, Charmaine. Flavours of Delhi: A Food Lover’s Guide (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003).
The sections of the book focus on broad historical periods, each including an excellent assortment of meticulously detailed recipes: “Flavours of Delhi” covers the Sultanate, Mughal, and British Delhi periods, then come “Delhi after Partition,” “Regional Cuisine” and chapters on “Festivals” and “Street Food, Snacks and Sweets.” An interest in the religious and cultural as well as culinary heritage of Delhi has steered O’Brien toward an arguably inexhaustible resource for study and commentary.
Roger Haden

Ochoa, Enrique C.  Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food since 1910.  Willmington DL: Scholarly Resources, 2000.
This book is the first serious political history of food distribution in twentieth-century Mexico.
Jonathan Fox, American Historical Review

Oddy, Derek J. From Plain Fare to Fusion Food: British Diet from the 1890s to the 1990s. Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2003.
This,the first serious study of diet in Britain throughout the twentieth century, is a timely book . . . Oddy has accomplished a remarkable feat in packing so much information into a relatively short space.
Laura Mason, Food, Culture, and Society

Olson, S. Douglas and Sens, Alexander (eds.).  Archestratos of Gela: Greek Culture and Cuisine in the Fourth Century BCE.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Osokina, Elena.  Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927-1941.  Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001.
The book . . . provides an insight into the economy of shortage from the perspective of a social historian. The archival data used to support the main theme of the book–the symbiotic relationship between centralized distribution and the market under socialism–are revealing in many ways.
V. Ledenava, American Historical Review

Paping, Richard, Eric Vanhaute, Cormac Ó Gráda, eds. When the Potato Failed: Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845-1850. Tunhout: Brepols, 2005.
This book offers a comparative perspective on the causes and the effects of what is sometimes considered the last European subsistence crisis.

Parkin, Katherine J. Food Is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Parkin "successfully couples solid scholarly analysis with advertising examples that are often amusing, sometimes, bizarre, and always effective in elucidating her points. The book’s single flaw is her occasional sarcastic commentary."
Christine Soriea Sheikh, Gastronomica

Parsons, Elaine Frantz.  Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in Nineteenth-Century United States.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2002.

Pate, J’Nell L. America’s Historic Stockyards: Livestock Hotels. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2005.

Patenaude, Bertrand M. The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Parker, Katherine J. Food Is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Pegram, Thomas R.  Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800-1933.  Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998.

Pennock, Pamela E. Advertising Sin and Sickness: the Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing, 1950-1990. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006.

Pennell, Elizabeth Robbins.  The Delights of Delicate Eating.  Urbana: University of Illinois, 2002.
A choice collection, originally published in 1896, of the culinary essays Pennell wrote for London’s Pall Mall Gazette.

Pépin, Jacques. The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003.
Jacques Pépin has written a memoir so charming that I pity people who aren’t reading it. They are missing an engrossing tale: the making of a master chef who helped revolutionize how we eat.
Diana Wylie, Gastronomica

Petmezas, Sokrates D. The Greek Rural Economy during the Nineteenth Century: The View from the Provinces. Herakleio: University of Crete, 2003.

Petrini, Carlo (ed.).  Slow Food: Collected Thoughts on Taste, Tradition, and the Honest Pleasure of the World.  White River Junction VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2001.
Essentially "the best" of Slow Food Magazine.

Phillips, Laura L.  Bolsheviks and the Bottle: Drink and Worker Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900-1929.  Dekalb: Northern Illinois University, 2000.
In this book Laura L. Phillips examines the social context, cultural and political significance, and gendered nature of working-class drinking practices in the city of St. Petersburg . . . . At 146 pages of text, the book is very brief. Still, even if it does not offer the last word on the topic of workers and drink, this solidly researched, well-written book represents a pioneering foray into this underexplored subject.
Barbara Alpern Engel, American Historical Review

Phillips, Rod.  A Short History of Wine.  London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 2000.
See the review by A. Lynn Martin in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.

Pilcher, Jeffrey.  ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

Pilcher, Jeffrey M. Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise, and Meat in Mexico City, 1890-1917. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.Pendergast, Mark.  Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World.  Basic Books, 1999.
The story of the economics, politics, and conquest of the world by coffee. Pendergast analyzes the dramatic growth of the industry throughout the world, the founders and exploiters of the business, its place in world social history, especially in the 20th century, the various controversies the drink has aroused, and its role in today's world.

Pillsbury, Richard.  No Foreign Food: The American Diet in Time and Place.  Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1998.
I would take issue with Pillsbury’s central assertion that there is no foreign food in the United States.
Amy Bentley, Gastronomica

Pinney, Thomas. A History of Wine in America: From Prohibition to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
The best sections present a through account of how America’s wine industry survived Prohibition and of the industry’s fitful reformation in the decades after . . . . However, after it has covered the Prohibition era and rebirth, much of this work seems choppy.
Dan Berger, Gastronomica

Pitte, Jean-Robert.  French Gastronomy: The History and Geography of a Passion.  New York: Columbia University, 2002.
A professor of geography fascinated with the establishment of cultural space, Pitte has explored the microclimates of France and their contribution to food culture, as well as the manner by which cultural geography frames our taste for food.
Ira B. Nadel, Gastronomica

Platina.  On Right Pleasure and Good Health: A Critical Edition and Translation of De honesta voluptate et valetudine.  Tempe AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1968.
The Renaissance classic, first published in 1470.

Pleij, Herman.  Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life.  New York: Columbia University, 2001.

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast Food World. London: Bloomsbury, 2006.
The book is a clear argument in favour of being informed about where our food comes from, or to borrow one of Eric Schlosser’s chapter headings, of knowing “what’s in the beef.” The book’s mantra is expressed in the form of a pledge: “to eat in full consciousness of everything involved in feeding myself,” a clear echo of Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 definition of gastronomy, as “the reasoned understanding of everything that concerns us, insofar as we sustain ourselves.”
Roger Haden

Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating. New York: Penguin, 2008.
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” These simple words provide the answer to what has become a confusing and fraught question for Americans: What should I eat?

Poole, Gaye. Real Meals, Set Meals: Food in Film and Theatre. Sydney: Currency Press, 1999.
A diligent, extensive, and insightful study of food in films and stage plays . . . . Poole’s work falters, however, in that she overindulges the reader with examples, and the eclectic smorgasbord leads to many moments of over-generalization.
Rebecca L. Epstein, Gastronomica

Pope, Peter C. Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
A nuanced reconstruction of the intersecting worlds of those who worked the Newfoundland fisheries and those who profited from their labor. Peter Pope succeeds gloriously in bringing this critical, intermeshed Atlantic trade and industry to life, deploying insights from archaeologists, anthropologists, and economists whenever the documentary sources are unwilling to divulge their secrets.
Nicholas Canny

Pottier, Johan.  Anthropology of Food: The Social Dynamics of Food Security.  Marston: Polity Press, 1999.

Powers, Madelon.  Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon, 1870-1920.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Powers' mastery of history and folklore enables us to experience and understand the workingman's saloon from within; to mingle with its denizens, hear their voice, and decipher their faces along the bar.
Lawrence W. Levine

Pradelle, Michele de la. Market Day in Provence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
An analysis of the social relations of market exchange at the famous Friday market in Carpentras in the south of France, it presents the market as a playful and utopian social space.
Zilkia Janer, Gastronomica

Presilla, Mericel E.  The New Taste of Chocolate: A Cultural and Natural History with Recipes.  Berekeley: Ten Speed Press, 2001.
It includes abundant photographs and illustrations, along with fifty pages of recipes.
Ellen M. Schnepel, Gastronomica

Publications du Centre Européen d’Etudes Bourguignonnes (XIVe-XVIe s.). Boire et manger en pays bourguignons (XIVe-XVIe siecles). Tunhout: Brepols, 2007.

Ragsdale, John G. Dutch Ovens Chronicled: Their Use in the United States. Fayetteville: Phoenix International, 2004.
Ragsdale does not succeed at his attempt to supply the first comprehensive history of Dutch oven use in the United States. So many essential subject areas are missing from his text that what is missing far outweighs what is included, making it impossible to glean from his book more than a tiny fraction of the Dutch oven story.
William Rubel, Gastronomica

Rain, Patricia. Vanilla: The Cultural History of the World’s Favorite Flavor and Fragrance. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2004.

Rambourg, Patrick. De la cuisine à la gastronomie: Histoire de la table française. Paris: Audibert, 2005.
Although the absence of a more fleshed-out critical apparatus is regrettable, Rambourg’s extensive references sustain his scholarship and solid mastery of subject while pointing to differing conceptions of key concepts such as regional cuisine.
Beatrice Fink, Gastronomica

Ravoire, F. and A. Dietrich, A., eds. La cuisine et la table dans la France de la fin du Moyen-Âge.  Tunhout: Brepols, 2007.

Ray, Krishnendu. The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.
This interesting work is the first book-length study of the food practices of South Asian immigrants in the United States. The purpose of the author is to reveal the changes made by immigration in the “deep structures of every day life,” especially food practices, and ultimately to find out what these changes tell us about the processes of globalization and modernization and how people adapt to them.
Colleen Taylor Sen, Food, Culture, and Society

Rebora, Giovanni.  Culture of the Fork: A Brief History of Food in Europe.  New York: Columbia University, 2001.
Rebora differs from many historians of the period in thinking that, although scarcity and fear of hunger certainly existed, most people had enough to eat.
Carol Field, Gastronomica

Redon, Odile,  Sabban, Françoise and Serventi, Silvano.  The Medieval Kitchen.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
This volume of medieval recipes adapted for the modern cook is both useable and informative. [The authors] have combined their knowledge of languages, food, and history to create this fascinating collection of 153 recipes, ranging from soup and pasta to meats, sauces, and deserts.
Library Journal

Redclift, Michael. Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Rich, Jeremy. A Workman is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
An explanation of how colonial rule intimately shaped African life and how African townspeople developed creative ways of coping with colonialism as European expansion threatened African self-sufficiency.

Riley, Gillian. The Oxford Companion to Italian Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Roberts, J. A. G. China to Chinatown: Chinese Food in the West. London: Reaktion Books, 2002.
Charts the migration of Chinese food to the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . . . . Ambitious in scope, the book has serious gaps. He appears to Europe, especially Britain, better than the United States. His coverage of the latter contains obvious mistakes.
Yong Chen, Gastronomica

Robinson, Jancis (ed.).  The Oxford Companion to Wine.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
See the review by Barbara Santich in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.
Rodinson, Maxime,  Arberrry, A. J. and Perry, Charles.  Medieval Arab Cookery.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books, 2000.
This is a most valuable book, for the scholar of the region as much as for the comparative historian of food and culture, and certainly for the curious gastronome.
Sami Zubaida, Gastronomica

Rögnvaldardóttir, Nanna.  Icelandic Food and Cookery.  New York: Hippocrene, 2002.
Combining the attributes of a food historian with those of an experienced Icelandic cook, the author has concocted a nicely balanced blend of history, culture, indigenous ingredients and traditions, foreign influences, and, of course, recipes.
Alan Davidson, PPC

Rosenblum, Mort. Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light. New York: North Point Press, 2005.
At a time when the public has a genuine interest in chocolate knowledge, it is hard to reconcile the engaging ambience of Chocolate with its pervasive carelessness.
Alice Medrich, Gastronomica

Rossant, Juliette. Super Chefs: The Making of the Great Modern Restaurant Empires. New York: Free Press, 2004.
The book may have accomplished what the author intended: to give a glimpse of the business empires of the super chefs. But the profiles often feel strangely incomplete . . . .The profiles in this book are too broadly painted and not examined through a critical lens.
Jeffrey Miller, Gastronomica

Rosset, Peter M. Food is Different: Why We Must Get the WTO Out of Agriculture. New York: Zed Books, 2006.
The book’s actual force derives from a careful analysis of historical context, definitions of key players, issues, and event in the development of the global trade in agriculture, and descriptions of alternative paradigms for its organization—all in a mere 163 pages.
Sharon Wyrrick, Gastronomica

Rossi-Willcox. Dinner for Dickens: The Culinary History of Mrs Charles Dickens's Menu Books including a transcript of What Shall We have For Dinner by 'Lady Maria Clutterbuck'. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2005.
Catherine Hogarth was born in 1815 , married Charles Dickens in 1836 and died in 1879,  nine years after Charles’ death and 21 years after he effectively ditched her in favour of a much younger actress. During her marriage she bore ten children, suffered two miscarriages, kept house and entertained in England, France, Switzerland and Italy, and, under the pseudonym of Lady Maria Clutterbuck, wrote a book of menus (Bills of Fare) first published in 1851 and republished, with revisions and additions, in 1852, 1854 and 1857.  It is this slim volume, What Shall We Have For Dinner, that engaged the attention of historian and museum curator Susan M. Rossi-Willcox.
Barbara Santich

Rosso, Maurizio, and Chris Meier. The Mystique of Barolo. Turin: Omega Arte, 2002.
Plunging into the complicated world of Italian wines becomes focused when a sense of time and place are part of the story. Here, Rosso weaves the story of the Nebbiolo grape into Piedmont’s and, ultimately, Italy’s history.
Heidi Haughy Cusick, Gastronomica

Rowse, Tim.  White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia.  Cambridge, Cambridge University, 2002.
The colonial practice of rationing goods to Aboriginal people has been neglected in the study of Australian frontiers. This book argues that much of the colonial experience in central Australia can be understood by seeing rationing as a fundamental, though flexible, instrument of colonial government.

Ruhlman, Michael. The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooks in the Age of Celebrity. New York: Penguin, 2007.
Examines the profound shift in American culture that has raised restaurant cooking to the level of performance art.

Rynne, Colin.  At the Sign of the Cow: The Cork Butter Market, 1770-1924.  Collins Press, 1998.

Sackman, Douglas Cazaux. Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
This book traces the rise of—and contradictions in—citrus farming in California from the arrival of the first Washington naval in Elizabeth Tibbets’ Riverside garden in 1878 to the beginning of World War II. Along the way Sackman traces how growers and others created an “Orange Empire” of myth and substance.
Don Mitchell, American Historical Review

Saffron, Inga. Caviar: The Strange History of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy. New York: Broadway Books, 2002.
Tells a wonderful story of romance and intrigue that extends over three continents. It is also a sad story about man’s rapaciousness and quest for profit with complete disregard for loss of biological diversity.
Darra Goldstein, Gastronomica

Saberi, Helen.  Noshe Djan: Afghan Food and Cookery.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books, 2000.
I was impressed with Saberi’s folkloric approach to documenting everyday foods as well as her portrayal of the of the central role of hospitality in Afghan foodways.
Glenn Mack, Gastronomica
See the review by Barbara Santich in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.

Saberi, Helen and Davidson, Alan.  The English Kitchen: Trifle.  Totnes, Prospect Books, 2001.
"A smile on every page."

Sack, Daniel.  Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture.  Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
[Sack] tells some important stories about whitebread Protestants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by examining their use of food in relation to liturgy, fellowship, hospitality, justice, and diet.
Fred Lyon, Gastronomica

Safran, Serge.  L’amour gourmand: Libertinage gastronomique au XVIIIe siècle.  Paris: Editions La Musardine, 2000.
Even readers attuned to classical French fiction will be surprised by the frequency with which authors abutted food and sex.
Andrew Dalby, PPC

Saint-Ange, Madame E. La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange: The Original Companion for French Home Cooking. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2005.
In 1927 a cookbook was published in Paris by Flammarion under the title of Le livre de cuisine de Madame Saint-Ange. It encompassed in more than a thousand pages the accumulated wisdom of a woman who had been writing articles for her husband’s weekly cookery newspaper since 1894 . . . . It is not clear whether the publisher and translator intended to publish this book as a historical document or a practical cookbook.
Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Gastronomica

Salinger, Sharon V.  Taverns and Drinking in Early America.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2001.

Sambrook, Pamela and Brears, Peter (eds.).  The Country House Kitchen, 1650-1900.  Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1997.
Survey of the provision of country houses, including brewing, baking, dairy-work, distilling, and ice-storage.

Santich, Barbara (ed.).  In the Land of the Magic Pudding: A Gastronomic Miscellany.  Kent Town SA: Wakefield Press, 2000.
Santich is trying to tell you about Australian food and manners, but the book is universal.
PPC

________.  McLaren Vale: Sea and Vines.  Kent Town SA: Wakefield Press, 1998.
See the review by Angela Heuzenroeder in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.

Satre, Lowell J. Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005.
Cadbury has long been associated in Britain with ethics and progressive social policy . . . . Satre challenges this image through a detailed examination of Cadbury’s use of cocoa beans farmed by slaves in the Portuguese island colonies.
Annmarie Adams, American Historical Review

Sceats, Sarah. Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Examines food and eating in the works of mainly postmodern women’s fiction from the second half of the twentieth century . . . . Sceats has selected novelists from the former British Commonwealth.
Ronald D. Le Blanc, Gastronomica

Schärer, Martin R. and Fenton, Alexander (eds.).  Food and Material Culture: Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium of the International Commission for Research into European Food History.  East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998.
Jena-François Bergier, "Food and material culture;" Martin R. Schärer, "Food and material culture--a museological approach;' Alexander Fenton, "Hearth and kitchen: the Scottish example;" Ulrike Thoms, "Changes in the kitchen range and the changes in food preparation techniques in German, 1850-1950;" Eszter Kisbán, "Metal and wheat: the kitchen range in a European periphery;" Maja Godina-Golija, "Oven-cooking stove-microwave: changes in the kitchen appliances in Slovenia;"Rudolph Weinhold, "Brown ceramics: rise and fall of a ceramic novelty in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;" Hans Ottomeyer, "Service à la française and service à la russe: or the evolution of the table between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries;" John Burnett, "Time, place and content: the changing structure of meals in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;" Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg, "The German Bourgeois family at the dining table: structural changes of meal manners, 1880-1930;" Thomas Schürmann, "Cutlery at the fine table: innovations and use in the nineteenth century;" Jakob Tanner, "The meal in the factory: food-related facilities in the industrial production in Switzerland (late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century);" Martin Bruegel, "From the shop floor to the home: advertising and food preservation in household in rural France, 1810-1930;" Adel P. den Hartog, "Serving the urban consumer: the development of modern food packaging with special reference to the milk bottle;" Lydia Petránová, "From traditional to industrial milk processing;" Derek J. and Judy R. Oddy, "The iceman cometh: the effect of low-temperature technology on the British diet;" Marjatta Hietala and Vuokko Lepistö, "Arctic Finland and the new technology of food preservation and refrigeration, 1850-1990;" Francesco Chiapparino, "Milk and fondant chocolate and the emergence of the Swiss chocolate industry at the turn of the twentieth century."

Schehr, Lawrence R. and Weiss, Allen S. (eds.).  French Food: On the Table, ON the Page, and In French Culture.  New York: Routledge.
This volume hones in on the ways that French food has intersected over the last two centuries with other media, primarily print forms, but also film and television.
Julia Abramson, Gastronomica

Schenone, Laura. A Thousand Years Over Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.  Winner of James Beard Award.

Schlosser, Eric.  Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
See the review by Sidney Mintz in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre

Schlosser, Eric, and Charles Wilson. Chew on This: Everything you Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
[After reading the book} you can rest assured that you won’t find me at McDonald’s for a long time. And if and when I do go back, I’ll know exactly what I’m putting into my mouth.
Leila Crawford, Gastronomica

Schneider, Elizabeth.  Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini: The Essential Reference.  New York: William Morrow, 2001.
An encyclopedia of 350 vegetables.

Scholliers, Peter, L. Van Molle, and C. Sarasua, eds. Land, Shops and Kitchens: Technology and the Food Chain in Twentieth-Century Europe. Brepols, 2005.
This collection of essays discusses the concept of the food chain from a new perspective, emphasising the historical dimension and conflicts. The inclusion of technology as a core element is an original approach to food studies. Thus, technology is related to agricultural production, packaging, transport and storing, wholesale and retailing, catering, and cooking. Also the book addresses the so-called middle field, such as political interference, farmers’ education, and scientific concerns and pays attention to the history of agriculture, including such varied themes as water supply, fertilisers, land use, greenhouses, and EU policy. It tackles the history of shopping, cooking, health concerns, and fast food eating-places.

Schoonover, David E.  (ed.).  Ladie Borlase’s Receiptes Booke.  Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2000.
An English manorial and culinary manuscript that has been in existence for at least 335 years. This manuscript, bearing dates from 1665 to 1822, provides a unique compendium of culinary history that opens a window to the aristocratic, social, agricultural, horticultural, economic, and medicinal aspects of English country life.

Schwartz, Stuart B. (ed.). Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Neither the introduction nor the essays provide a new conceptualization of either the Atlantic world or sugar’s contribution to it. Indeed, the essays are, with some exceptions, mostly rooted in the more familiar terrain of national and imperial historiographies.
Alan L. Karra, American Historical Review

Schweid, Richard.  Consider the Eel. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 2002.

________.  Hot Peppers: The Story of Cajuns and Capsicum.  Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 2002.

Scully, D. Eleanor and Scully, Terence.  Early French Cookery: Sources History, Orginal Recipes and Modern Adaptations.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1995.
Now available in paperback.

Scully, Terence.  The Neapolitan Recipe Collection: Cuoco Napoletano.  Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998.
This new edition of an anonymous fifteenth-century cookbook includes a commentary on the individual recipes, giving the reader a glimpse into the rich fare available to occupants and guests of one of the greatest houses of late medieval Italy.

Sereni, Emilio.  History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
An English translation of a book first published in 1961, Sereni's classic work is a synthesis of the agricultural history of Italy in its economic, social and ecological context, from antiquity to the mid-twentieth century.

Serventi, Silvio, and Françoise Sabban. Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
The author’s finding and opinions are obviously based on a considerable amount of research and deduction, and it seems that every snippet they came across found its way into these pages. . . . Its ideas and facts seldom join to create a thesis, but rather seem to make cameo appearances before fading away.
Fred Plotkin, Gastronomica

Shapiro, Laura. Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. New York, Viking, 2004.
Shapiro joins a growing number of writers and scholars who seek to complicate an overly simplistic view of domesticity, gender, and food in the 1950s. Shapiro sets out to debunk many of our myths about food and cooking in the 1950s, and does an admirable job of demonstrating how the postwar period encompassed a variety of contradictory culinary trends.
Jessamyn Neuhaus, Food, Culture, and Society

Shapiro, Laura. Julia Child. New York: Penguin, 2007.
An intimate profile of the culinary revolutionary and cultural icon, whose open-hearted approach to the kitchen served as a lesion in how to live.

Shephard, Sue.  Pickled, Potted and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
See the review by Angela Heuzenroeder in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.

Short, Frances. Kitchen Secrets: The Meaning of Cooking in Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2006.
The book is not statistical analysis but a qualitative look at how people view food and cooking. Using in-depth questionnaires and ethnography, she gains insights into how people have different definitions for, and perception of, what it means “to cook.”
Mimi Fix, Food, Culture, and Society 

Siler, Julia Flynn. The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty. New York: Penguin, 2007.
An epic scandal-plagued story of the immigrant family that built—and then spectacularly lost—a global wine empire.

Silva Lopes, Teresa da. Global Brands: The Evolution of Multinationals in Alcoholic Beverages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Sim, Alison.  Food and Feast in Tudor England.  Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 1997.
A competent, lively, and entertaining survey.

Simon, Michele. Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back. New York: Nation Books, 2006.
An uneven collection of war stories about nutritionists, lawyers, and public health researchers, as told by a lawyer who fought the food industry and lived to tell the tale.
Krishnendu Ray, Gastronomica

Simmonds, Peter Lund.  The Curiosities of Food.  Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2001.
With an introduction by Alan Davidson. First published in 1859, its author was a technical journalist.
PPC

Sing, Phia.  Traditional Recipes of Laos.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books.
Sing was the Master of Ceremonies and Chef at the royal place of Luang Prabang. After his death in 1967 Alan Davidson arranged for the translation of his notebooks including recipes.

Singer, Peter, and Jim Mason. The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Rodale, 2006.
This book does an excellent job at juxtaposing reality with possibility and weighing up the problems and benefits of acting responsibly with regard to food. “Isn’t it a sad thing when our morals become disposable”? asks one of the authors’ interviewees. Choosing three families as case studies Singer and Mason spotlight what they call SAD, the standard American diet, as much as the economic stranglehold it represents for lower socio-economic status families. The relatively low cost of (some) foods is what potentially outweighs all putatively ethical product choices with a ring of the till.
Roger Haden

Smil, Vaclav.  Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production.  Cambridge: MIT Press, n.d.
an almost exhaustingly detailed description of the discovery of the industrial synthesis of ammonia and its utilization as nitrogen fertilizer.
Corrina Hawkes, Gastronomica

Smith, Andrew F.  Peanuts: The Illustrious History of the Goober Pea.  Urbana: University of Illinois, 2002.
________.  Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

________.  Pure Ketchup: A History of America’s National Condiment.  Herndon VA: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

________.  Souper Tomatoes: The Story of America’s Favorite Food.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Andrew Smith has made a literary career out of the tomato. [This book] traces the impact of the fruit on New Jersey, home of the Campbell Soup Company.
PPS

________.  The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery.  Urbana, University of Illinois, 2002.
At last, at long last, the true history of the tomato in the United States is being told.
Karen Hess, Food Heritage Press

Smith, Andrew F. (ed.). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
This two-volume encyclopedia presents a comprehensive and delightful voyage through historical and contemporary US foodways. Easy to use as a reference work, these two volumes also make fascinating bedside table reading for food aficionados.
Carole Counihan, Gastronomica

Smith, Andy. Real American Food: Restaurants, Markets, and Shops Plus Favorite Hometown Recipes with Burt Wolf. New York: Rizzoli, 2006.

Smith, Andy. The Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006.

Smith, Andy. The Turkey: A Social History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
An engaging, in-depth survey of the natural, culinary, and social history of the turkey in the United States.
Kathleen Curtin

Smith, David F., and H. Lesley Diack, with T. Hugh Pennington and Elizabeth M. Russell. Food Poisoning, Policy and Politics: Corned Beef and Typhoid in Britain in the 1960s. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005.
The authors have set themselves a considerable task in attempting to explain the outbreaks of typhoid food poisoning caused by contaminated corn beef in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, and to indicate the lessons learned or unlearned because of these outbreaks. A point of particular importance here for modern democracies is the degree to which politicians respond to public concern over food safety.
Andrew Ratledge

Smith, David F. and Phillips, Jim (eds.).  Food, Science, Policy and Regulation in the Twentieth Century.  London: Routledge, 2000.

Smith, Edward, Foods. London: Kegan Paul, 2005.
Reprint of the book originally published in 1883.

Smith, Frederick H. Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.

Smith, Mark M. Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
A fine cultural history of the body, which takes Western and Eastern traditions and their texts quite seriously. Smith views a history of the senses not only from below but places it squarely in the historical imagination.
Sander L. Gilman

Smyth, Adam (ed.). A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004.
Smyth identifies three themes that emerge from seventeenth-century attitudes towards drinking: moral ambiguity, the connection between drink and sociability, and the connection between drink and politics. The essays document another them that is more pronounced than these three—that of the divisive nature of drink.
A. Lynn Martin, Food, Culture, and Society

Soluri, John. Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.
In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States.

Spencer, Colin. British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History. New York, Columbia University Press, 2003.
In addition to its linearity, the books lacks both a hierarchical structure of headings and a driving, balanced historical force . . . . While the title implies that the book represents all British food, only one chapter is devoted to non-English food.
Madge Griswold, Gastronomica

Spivey, Diane.  The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook: The Global Migration of African Cuisine.  Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Spurlock, Morgan. Don’t Eat this Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Backs up the findings of the famous film.

Squatriti, Paolo.  Water and Society in Early Medieval Italy, AD 400-1000.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
How a society manages and controls water, an essential element for all human life and communities, has been extensively studied in terms of classical antiquity but remains a relatively neglected topic for the European Middle Ages. This thoughtful and well-documented book is an attempt to fill that gap.
Harry B. Evans, American Historical Review

Standage, Tom. A History of the World in Six Glasses. New York: Walker & Company, 2005.
At its best, this way of looking at the world results in some original historical insights; at less than its best, a pleasant miscellany of drinks trivia. The six drinks—all of them modifications of water—have affected human history in various ways, large and small.
Alison Ryley, Gastronomica

Starkey, David J. (ed.).  England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300.  Chatham, 2001.

Stavely, Keith, and Kathleen Fitzgerald. America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Offers the best evidence of what and how early New Englanders ate and how this changed over three hundred years. It will become a standard work in culinary history.
Andrew F. Smith

Stearns, Peter N.  Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West.  New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Compares American habits and tendencies with those of the French . . . . Stearns gives women's special gender issues the complex treatment they deserve. He also notes that Men's Health magazine now features at least one diet article per issue, just like comparable women's magazines.
The Nation

Steckel, Richard H. and Waldron, Arthur (eds.).  The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere.  Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2002.

Stewart, Anita.  The Flavours of Canada: A Celebration of the Finest Regional Foods.  Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2001.
See the review by Joanna Jenkins in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre

Stoll, Steven.  The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California.  Berkeley: University of California, 1998.
This book is a fascinating tale of the California countryside that growers made as well as the detrimental consequences this new world had for the environment and labor relations, [and] how, between 1880 and 1930, an enterprising group of orchard capitalists made California the nation’s leading producer of fruit.
Jose M. Alamillo, American Historical Review

________.  Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America.  New York: Hill and Wang, 2002. Stoll’s narrative pits those who believed that permanence was the key to prosperity versus those who believed that prosperity could be unlocked through westward emigration. Stoll points out the ecological differences between the two philosophies.
Corinna Hawkins, Gastronomica

Stott, Rebecca. Oyster. London: Reaktion Books, 2004.
Stott’s book pleases the reader with its wealth of information, its prodigious research into the zoological aspects of the androgynous mollusk, and its sure-handed appraisal of oyster literature and lore, but unfortunately, it also vexes with its haphazard skipping from 200 million BC to 2003 as it sweeps everything into the path of oyster culture.
Joan Reardon, Gastronomica

Street, Richard Steven. Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Striffler, Steve.  In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900-1995.  Durham: Duke University, 2002.
The book’s strength is the sensitive way in which Striffler deals with the complex network of capital, ownership, politics, rurality, and multinationals.
Alf Rehn, Gastronomica

Striffler, Steve, and Mark Moberg, eds. Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
With this fine volume the banana joins sugar and coffee as starring actors in the international drama of world trade, domestic social formations, and the creation of power.
Steven Topic, American Historical Review

Strong, Roy. Feast: A History of Grand Eating. New York: Harcourt, 2002.
The historian may object to the lack of truly original argument or even, at times, critical viewpoint. At the same time, Feast performs the tremendous service of contributing to the popularization if not the canonization of a culinary and gastronomic bibliography for parts of western Europe.
Julie Abramson, Food, Culture, and Society

Studd, Will.  Chalk and Cheese.  South Melbourne VIC: Purple Egg, 1999.
He explores in depth the inviolability of the connection between food and place and explains how cheese in linked to the pastures, the climate, the seasons, the animal breeds, and the artistry of the cheesemaker.
Robert Kaufelt, Gastronomica

Sullivan, Charles. L. Zinfandel: A History of a Grape and Its Wine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Sullivan convincingly debunks the malarkey that “Count” Agostin Haraszthy introduced Zinfandel to California . . . . He also digs into the bigger mystery of Zinfandel’s original identity.
Wine Spectator

Summerhill, Thomas. Harvest of Dissent: Agrarianism in Nineteenth-Century New York. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.
Argues that agrarianism played a constant role in the major political, economic, and social transformations that marked the emergence of modern America, as farmers were gradually drawn into the capitalist marketplace.

Sutherland, Amy. COOKOFF: Recipe Fever in America: Heartbreak, Glory, and Big Money on the Competitive Cooking Circuit. New York: Viking/Penguin Group, 2003.
Food writer Amy Sutherland has written a charming and frustratingly nonanalytic book about the American cookoff phenomenon, recipe contests, and competitive amateur cooking.
Netta Davis, Gastronomica

Sutton, David.  Remembrance of Repasts: An Antrhopology of Food and Memory.  Oxford: Berg, 2001.
It is . . . an excellent ethnography and an even better opening into new theoretical work in anthropology.
Krishnendu Ray, Association for the Study of Food and Society, Newsletter

Symons, Michael. History of Cooks and Cooking.  Urbana: University of Illinois, 2000.
Michael Symons, scholar and restaurateur, has produced a stylistically readable, if capriciously organized, contribution to the burgeoning field of culinary history. This ambitious book, like many currently available, is about the culture of food, its preparation, its economy, its chronological evolution.
Albert Sonnenfeld, Gastronomica
See Robert Dare’s review of the Australian edition, entitled The Pudding That Took a Thousand Cooks: The Story of Cooking in Civilisation and Daily Life, in Reviews and Articles by Members of the Research Centre.

Szogyi, Alex (ed.).  Chocolate: Food of the Gods.  London: Greenwood Press, 1997.
This collection of papers comes from a conference that took place so many years ago that the editor is too embarrassed to mention the fact. Better late than never! It contains twenty papers divided into four sections: Chocolate and Psychology, Chocolate and Literature, Chocolate Commerce and Health, and Chocolate Lore.
Tapper, Richard and Zubaida, Sami (eds.).  A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East.  Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.
Revised edition

Szymanski, Ann-Marie E., Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes. Duke University Press, 2003.

Talwar, Jennifer Parker. Fast Food, Fast Track: Immigrants, Big Business, and the American Dream. Boulder: Westview, 2004.
Explores the role of fast-food restaurants—and the multinational parent companies that own them—in the lives and potential for economic advancement of first-generation immigrants in the United States. She questions whether working in fast-food establishments has advantages over other types of accessible employment.
Karen Karp, Gastronomica

Tames, Richard. Feeding London: A Taste of History. London: Historical Publications, Ltd., 2003.
I was impressed by a number of things in reading this book: (1) the vast appetite of London, even from earliest times . . . (2) the industries and products that resulted from this appetite . . . (3) the attraction of London for those seeking political and religious freedom, and the way that affected diet, cooking styles and the demand for products from abroad.
Louis J. Lyell, Gastronomica

Taylor, Joseph E.  Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis.  Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.
This book . . . describes the forces leading and responding to salmon decline in the Pacific Northwest. At the heart of the book is the century-long effort to replace dwindling runs through salmon propagation, overseen by hatchery managers and federal and state fishery officials. Efforts to "make salmon" failed miserably and actually exacerbated salmon decline.
Frieda Knobloch, American Historical Review

Terrio, Susan J.  Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate.  Berekely: University of California, 2000.
Her study of the craft community of chocolatiers in the Basque region and Paris moves easily among theory, ethnography, history, and vignettes.
Ellen M. Schnepel, Gastronomica

Theophano, Janet.  Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks they Wrote.  Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
The author mines the rich history of cookbook writing by women from the eighteenth century to the present day to reveal how these books provided an important forum for creativity and self-expression for women at a time when their choices and opportunities were limited.

This, Hervé. Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
The goal of this work is to take commonly accepted culinary knowledge or practices and test them using laboratory and scientific methods to see what holds and what does not.
Anne E. McBride, Food, Culture and Society

This, Hervé, and Pierre Gagnaire. La Cuisine c’est de l’amour, de l’art, de la technique. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006.
Arguably the most enticing conflation ever of literature, history of edeas, aesthetics, and cuisine, both theoretical and applied—not to mention bits of science, semiotics, and just plain fun.
Beatrice Fink, Gastronomica

Thompson, Peter.  Rum, Punch and Revolution: Tavern-going and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Thurmond, David L. A Handbook of Food Processing in Classical Rome. Leiden: Brill, 2003.
A careful analysis of Roman food processes, including those for cereals, olive oil, wine, other plant products, animal products, and condiments. The work combines analysis of literary and archaeological evidence with that of traditional comparative practices and modern food science.

Tickletooth, Tabitha.  The Dinner Question.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books.
This pseudonymous book was published in 1860, provoked by an exchange of correspondence in The Times in the previous year on the relative merits of English and French cookery and on the best system for arranging the service of dinner.

Tlusty, B. Ann.  Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany.  Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2001.

Toibin, Colm and Ferriter, Diarmaid.  The Irish Famine: A Documentary.  New York: St. Martin’s, 2002.

Tomasik, T.J., ed. At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Tunhout: Brepols, 2007.
This volume surveys recent studies of the metaphorical and material facets of food in medieval and early modern Europe.

Tower, Jeremy. California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.
The praise Tower accords himself for his seminal place in these various revolutions might be more plausible (palatable?) if it didn’t depend on deprecating someone else, usually Alice Waters.
Jeannette Ferrary, Gastronomica

Tracy, Sarah W. Alcoholism in America: From Reconstruction to Prohibition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
A meticulous and smart consideration of the significance of physicians’ attempts to define excessive drinking as primarily a medical problem, and to develop inebriate asylums to treat it.
Elaine Frantz Parson, American Historical Review

Transchel, Kate. Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895-1932. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.
This books attempts, and within a brief span of pages largely succeeds, in describing how the nonjoyful side—the “drink problem”—was conceptualised, defined, and to a degree dealt with in late tsarist and early Soviet Russia.
Walter D. Connor, American Historical Review

Trauffer, Regula (ed.).  Manger en Chine/Essen in China.  Vevey: Alimentarium Vevey, Musée de l'Alimentation, 1997.
Métailié, Georges and Tercier, Nicole Staüble.  Au Jardin Potager Chinois. Vevey: Alimentarium Vevey, Musée de l'Alimentation, 1997.
These two publications, the former bilingual (French & German), the second French, were written to accompany an exhibition on Chinese food and cuisine at the Alimentarium in Switzerland. Manger en Chine/Essen in China includes an historical section and a larger section on contemporary Chinese food and foodways, plus additional articles on vegetables, tea and soups. There is a small but useful bibliography. Au Jardin Potager Chinois describes the Chinese pleasure garden established as part of the exhibition, with brief descriptions and histories of the plants represented.
Reviewed by Barbara Santich

Trawick, Paul B.  The Struggle for Water in Peru: Comedy and Tragedy in the Andean Commons.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Trentmann, Frank, and Flemming Just, eds. Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Trubek, Amy.  Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2000.
Her subject is twofold: how it was that France was able to hold on so long to its domination of haute cuisine, and how the French chef in the nineteenth century struggled to achieve, yet failed to obtain, professional status.
Margaret Visser, London Review of Books

Tuchscherer, Michel (ed.).  Le commerce du café avant l’ère des plantations coloniales: Espaces, réseaux, sociétés.  Cairo: Institut Français d’Archáeologie Orientale, 2001.

Turner, Jack. Spice: The History of a Temptation. New York: Knopf, 2004.
Written obviously from a Western point of view, Spice is a dense read requiring patience, especially as the author indulges the outrageous and dispenses with chronology, jumping back and forth in time. But the book’s impressive scope makes it a must-read for food history buffs.
Any Boynton, Gastronomica

Ungar, Richard W. Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
The focus of the book is really on the brewing industry and how it changed and evolved over time, rather than on beer per se. As an economic historian, the author is much more interested in the production side of beer than the consumption side.
Mack P. Holt, Gastronomica

Unger, Friedrich. A King’s Confectioner in the Orient: Friedrich Unger, Court Confectioner to King Otto I of Greece. New York: Kegan Paul, 2003.
The author worked as a confectioner at the court of King Otto in the 1830s.

Valone, David A. and Kinealy, Christine (eds.).  Ireland’s Great Hunger: Silence, Memory, and Commemoration.  Lanham MD: University Press of America, 2002.
van Gelder, Geert Jan.  God’s Banquet: Food in Classical Arab Literature.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Food is a rich subject in Arabic literature, and while God’s Banquet by no means exhausts it, van Gelder covers the field admirably in 125 short pages of text.
Charles Perry, Gastronomica

van Willigen, John, and Anne van Willigen. Food and Everyday Life on Kentucky Family Farms, 1920-1950. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
Documents early twentieth-century Kentuckian rural families’ everyday cultural practices, activities and knowledge. In sum, this scholarship presents a very thorough and interesting qualitative study of rural foodways within the context of a changing culture and society and it catalogs these patterns with rich accounts of people’s remembered lives.
Marcus Aldredge, Food, Culture, and Society

van Winter, Johanna Maria. Spices and Comfits: Collected Papers on Medieval Food. Blackawton: Prospect Books, 2007.

Vaught, David.  Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 2002.

von Bueltzingsloewen, Isabelle, ed. “Morts d’inanition:” Famine et exclusions en France sous l’Occupation. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005.
This well-documented collection of essays focuses on the food shortages and dietary privations of those who were among the weakest and most marginalized groups during the German occupation of France in World War II.
Bertram M. Gordon, American Historical Review

von Hassell, Agostino, Herm Dillon, and Leslie Jean-Bart. Military High Life: Elegant Food Histories and Recipes. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2006.
While this conglomeration is impressive and far ranging, I am, on the whole, disappointed. The authors’ net has been too widely cast to allow sufficient support for any central theme.
John Rees, Gastronomica

Vernon, James. Hunger: A Modern History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Vincent, Stephen A.  Southern Seed, Northen Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765-1900.  Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2002.
Vincent’s book reflects a trend in US studies–"plowing" new interpretive ground–to ensure more inclusive ethnic and gender histories, with traditional interpretation revised.
Choice

Walker, Harland (ed.). Fish: Food from the Waters = Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 1997.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books, 1998.
This volume collects the 38 papers on the subject of fish (and foods close enough to be included in that category, such as oysters, caviar and sea urchins) presented at the 1997 Oxford Symposium. Some focused on particular species - such as the salmon of the river Wye; others addressed the topic indirectly, discussing when primates began eating fish or examining the symbolism in fish and fish-eating and representations of these in art.
Barbara Santich

Walker, Harland (ed.).  The Meal: Proceeding of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2001.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books, 2002.

Warner, Jessica. Craze: Gin and Debauchery in the Age of Reason. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002.
Warner takes as her central theme the question of “why people worry at some times and not at others. In the case of the gin craze, concerns over drunkenness bore very little correspondence to actual consumption.
Lisa Hiley, Gastronomica

Warren, Louis S.  The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Warren argues persuasively that a book about animals addresses issues of life and livelihood typified by hunting for the table and market stall. It also tackles a potent symbol of access to abundant game and open space in the American west.
Robin W. Doughty, American Historical Review

Watson, James L., and Melissa L. Caldwell (eds.). The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
This collection of seventeen largely anthropological essays, all previously published between 1994 and 2002, provides wonderful case studies that focus on local context to discuss broader implications of food—its production, distribution, and consumption.
Beth Marie Forrest, Gastronomica

Weaver, William Woys.  Sauerkraut Yankees: Pennsylvania Dutch Foods and Foodways.  Mechanicsburg PA: Stackpole Books, 2002.
The first edition, long out of print, was reviewed in PPC . . . and lavishly praised . . . . A model of pleasurable instruction.
PPC

Weaver, William Woys. Country Scrapple: An American Tradition. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2003.
The book is an exhaustive examination of scrapple’s old-country roots and components, the circumstances in which it was produced, and the names by which it was known, as well as the forms it has taken in America, its components, its functions, and the names it has acquired here.
Shirley Cherkasky, Gastronomica

Weinberg, Bennett Alan and Bealer, Bonnie K.  The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug.  New York: Routledge, 2001.
[The authors] have written a wide-ranging, well-written, and entertaining book. In fact, the volume seems to consist of two only vaguely related books, the first on the history of human consumption of coffee, tea, and cacao, the second of their medical consequences.
Steven Topic, Gastronomica

Weiss, Allen S. Feast and Folly: Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime. New York: SUNY Press, 2002.
Weiss seeks to discover the metaphysical premises implicit in French cuisine.
Richard Klein, Gastronomica

Welch, Evelyn. Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400-1600. New Haven: Yale University Press
Welch demonstrates that shopping was as important in the Renaissance as it is today and focuses on the marketplace and such related topics as middle-class to courtly consumption, the provision of foodstuffs, and the acquisition of antiquities and holy relics. The book investigates how men and women of different social classes went to the streets, squares, and shops to buy goods they needed and wanted.

White, Eileen.  Feeding a City: York, Papers Given to the Leeds Symposium on Food History.  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books.
The papers include discussions of the archaeological record; Anne Rycraft on the medieval diet and markets; Peter Brears on York guilds and on shopping in York and its supply of the hinterland; Eileen White on the domestic record of the 16th and 17th centuries; Laura Mason on the diet of the working class in Victorian York and on regional foods; W. B. Taylor on the emergence of the confectionery industry; and Hugh Murray on the 19th-century city and its food supplies.

Whorton, James C.  Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society.  New York: Oxford University, 2000.
This able work is abut food and culture as much as it is about constipation, health, and waste . . . . Anyone teaching courses in the history of health or the culture of food will find this book an important source and an effective assigned text. Those conducting research in those fields will find it an indispensable reference.
Harvey Green, American Historical Review

Widgren, Mats, and John E. G. Sutton, eds. Islands of Intensive Agriculture in Eastern Africa: Past and Present. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004.

Wilk, Richard. Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Bucaneers to Ecotourists. New York: Berg, 2006. Employing a chronological and thematic approach, the book contributes to the increasingly popular studies on food and identity that have emerged in the last decade.
Michael R. McDonald, Gastronomica

Wilkins, John.  The Boastful Chef: The Discourse of Food in Ancient Greek Comedy.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Serious stuff. To be pondered.
PPC

Williams, Howard. The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating [1883]. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Demonstrated quite convincingly how some of the greatest minds in the Western philosophical tradition—from Plato and Pythagoras in classical antiquity to Rousseau and Shelley in the early modern period—had come to see the wisdom of eliminating the use of meat in the human diet.
Ronald D. LeBland, Gastronomica

Williams, Leslie A. Daniel O’Connell, the British Press, and the Irish Famine: Killing Remarks. Burlington: Ashgate, 2003.
Williams’ fine study confirms that there is still much of value to say on this topic. William examines the Famine through British press reports both before and during the crisis, explaining that by 1845, when the potato blight first appeared, a “metropolitan mentality” was in place that viewed Irish people as inferior outsiders. This mindset had disastrous consequences on government relief policies during the Famine.
Christine Kinealy, American Historical Review

Williams, Susan. Food in the United States, 1820s-1890. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2006.
A concise overview of a sprawling topic—an examination of food production, eating habits, regional foodways, and views of diet and nutrition during the period when America grew from a largely rural nation of farmers in an increasingly urban, global industrial power … intended for a general audience.
Michael La Combe, Food, Culture, and Society

Williams, Susan.  Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts: Dining in Victorian America.  Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 2000.

Williams-Forson, Psyche A. Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black women, Food, and Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Using the preparation, sale, and consumption of chicken in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book examines African American women as cooks, entrepreneurs, consumers, objects of ridicule, subjects of oppression, and active agents on their own behalf.
Leni Sorensen, Gastronomica

Wilson, Bee. The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006.
Wilson is not so much interested in bees as in what we in Western society have thought about bees since classical times. The Hive is a work of great erudition.
J. H. Galloway, Gastronomica

Wilson, David S. and Gillespie, Angus K. (eds.).  Rooted in America: Foodlore and Popular Fruits and Vegetables.  Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1999.
Ten familiar cultivars–apples, bananas, corn, cranberries, peppers, oranges, pumpkins, tobacco, tomatoes, and watermelons–are examined to show how these foods have been shaped to express our cultural values and reflect the American imagination.
Jeanne Lemlin, Gastronomica

Wilt, Alan F.  Food for War: Agriculture and Rearmament in Britain before the Second World War.  New York: Oxford University, 2001.

Witt, Doris.  Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U. S. Identity.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Woloson, Wendy A.  Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2001.
In tracing the various ways that sugar became more widely accessible and more widely used, this book stands within the growing literature that deals with the origins and evolution of modern consumer culture.
Warren Belasco

Woolgar, C. M., D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron, eds. Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Woolley, Benjamin. The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Freedom. Hammersmith: Harper Perennial, 2005.
The chapters of the book bear the names of the various herbs Culpeper favoured in his treatments, and along with impressions of the original woodcuts the author includes Culpepper’s descriptions of the uses for various herbs and plants. Notable here are Culpeper’s astrological references, astrology being ‘the most prominent and controversial feature of his medical practice.’ Yet Woolley praises Culpeper for his holism in this regard and for his pharmacology based on the cycles of living things understood by observation within a natural order and which for millennia had taken reference to the stars and planets. Culpeper is portrayed as a man who studied nature empirically and who on the basis of this could never blindly accept the authority of the medical practice of the day.
Roger Haden

Woolley, Hannah.  The Gentlewomans Companion or A Guide to the Female Sex (1675). Caterina Albano (ed.).  Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books.
Contains recipes, medical prescriptions, advice to servants and governesses, hints on upbringing, cosmetics and education, rules of social comportment and conduct, instructions and model letters for correspondence.

Wright, Clifford A.  A Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Celebrated Cuisines of the Mediterranean, From the Merchants of Venice to the Barbary Corsairs, with More than 500 Recipes.  New York: William Morrow, 1999.
Whether totally right or partially wrong, Mr. Wright’s assertion that the essential difference between the ancient world of flat dough products and the modern world of dried pasta was brought about by the Arab agricultural and technological revolution of the ninth to the twelfth centuries . . . is to be taken quite seriously, if not hailed as conclusive evidence.
Luigi Ballerini, Gastronomica

Wright, Miriam.  A Fishery for Modern Times: The State and the Industrialization of the Newfoundland Fishery, 1934-1968.  New York: Oxford University, 2001.

Wright, Clare. Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia’s Female Publicans. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.
Clare Wright challenges the myth that the Australian pub was entirely male space and that female values and influence had no legitimate role there. The Australian pub is a cultural icon but one too often presented as male. This book reclaims the role of women in building this icon and firmly places women as masters in the pub, not mere servants.
Andrea Cast

Wright, James C. (ed.). The Mycenaean Feast. Princeton: The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2004.

Wyk, Ben-Erik van. Food Plants of the World: An Illustrated Guide. Portland: Timber Press, 2005.
A timely, easily used guide to over 350 plant foods. The book is a beautifully illustrated, scientifically correct reference for the botanically curious, the gourmet chef, and all who wish to enrich their culinary experiences.
John Edwards, Gastronomica

Wylie, Diana.  Starving on a Full Stomach: Hunger and the Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa.  Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2001.
The [book] brings together intellectual and medical history in an impressive way and has much that is new to say on the development of racism in South Africa, the impact on it of medical and social science research, and the politics of poverty and hunger.
Alan H. Jeeves

Yee, Alfred. Shopping at Giant Foods: Chinese American Supermarkets in Northern California. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.
Yee’s pioneering study represents a significant contribution. What makes the book of additional interest is the fact that the author has been in the supermarket business for many years.
Yong Chen, Gastronomica

Young, Carolin C. Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver: Stories of Dinner as a Work of Art. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.
Drawing on extensive primary source material, the book vividly recreates twelve historic dinner parties, ranging from a feast for some 1,400 cleric held at the Abbey at Cluny in 1132, to the souper intime used by a young nun to seduce Casanova in 1753.
Jason Sholl, Gastronomica

Yu, David Y. H. and Cheung, Sidney C. H.  (eds.)  The Globalization of Chinese Food.  Curzon, 2002.
The book contains papers given to the 5th Symposium on Chinese Dietary Culture in Hong Kong in 1997.
PPC

Zaouali, Lilia. Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Zimmerman, Jonathan.  Distilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America’s Public Schools, 1880-1925.  Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999.

Zuckerman, Larry.  The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World.  North Point, 1999.
Using Ireland, England, France, and the United States as examples, Zuckerman shows how daily life from the 1770s until World War I was changed by the potato, which functioned as fast food, famine insurance, fuel and labor saver, budget stretcher, and bank loan.

Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina.  Austerity in Britain: Rationing Controls, and Consumption, 1939-1955.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002