Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Book recommendation

Hi everybody,

I hope that things are going well for everybody in the food writing world!

Me, being the food history buff that I am, have found a fantastic book that some of you may be interested in having a look at. It's called "Food: The History of Taste". It's edited by Paul Freedman and published by the University of California Press. I found it at the U of A bookstore. It's a collection of essays written by food history scholars. Each chapter focuses on a different period of time: it runs the gamut from the hunter-gatherers of pre-history up to the molecular cuisine movement of the 1990's.

One of the interesting points of the book is the exploration of the sweet/savoury dichotomy. (I believe that it was JoLynn who was interested in this?) As it turns out, there was traditionally no distinction between the two before the mid-seventeenth century. During the medieval and Renaissance times, sugar was such an expensive and rare commodity that it was added to absolutely everything, including things that we would think of now as inherently savory, like stews, soups, and even roast meats. The distinction between sweet and savoury really took off when sugar cane began to be imported from the Carribean in mass quantities. As the author puts it, "...one of the odder consequences... was that sweetness was increasingly relegated to fewer dishes, although a much greater amount of sugar was now used in those dishes that were thought of as 'sweet' ".

Happy reading!

Lisa

1 comment:

foodgirl said...

Hi Lisa,
Thanks for this recommendation. Sounds interesting. I am just finishing Carol Off's Bitter Chocolate, a book about the dark side of the chocolate trade. Frankly, it's a bit depressing as a chocoholic, but as someone who eats a lot of chocolate...it's definitely opening my eyes. It won a Cuisine Canada food book award this year. I'll track down the list of this year's food media and food book winners and post it when I find it.

Jennifer