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 | | History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, Anthea Bell (Translator) ISBN-10: 9780631177418 ISBN-10: 0-631-17741-8 ISBN-13: 9780631177418 ISBN-13: 978-0-631-17741-8 Hardcover 1992-11 Blackwell Pub Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description This history of foodstuffs, the story of cuisine, and the social history of eating are covered here in one volume. From the origins of mankind, and the transition from a vegetable to an increasingly carnivorous diet, the story unfolds of the interrelationship between people and diet, between particular foods and social mores, between dietary custom and cuisine. Bees and honey, pulses, soya, fungi, cereals, and the sources of vegetable oils are discussed and examined, as are game and meat of all kinds from poultry to horsemeat, to fruits of the sea. Foods of pleasure, from confectionary to wine, coffee to caviar are also covered. 100 illustrations. | ||
Reviews | ||
Lovely and Comprehensive - Read like a tapas This is a most comprehensive book, full of tasty bits of information and insight. Do not try to read all at once - it's most useful to either use the table of contents for specific times in history or foods, etc., or read one chapter at a time with a good red wine, Stilton cheese and whole grain crackers. Highly recommend this book if you love food, politics, history and people! This is not for beach reading. It's a keeper. | ||
Amusing but completely unreliable This fat volume about food and cooking, packed with anecdotes and trivia and stories, is amusing but completely unreliable. As a source of information about the history of food, it is useless. Many of the assertions of fact here are questionable, and none of them are footnoted so you can check them out. The author seems to have taken snippets from here and there (mostly, apparently, from French sources), sorted them thematically, and uncritically assembled them into a continuous text. No doubt a large proportion of the assertions here are true, but there is no way of telling the difference between the true ones and the others! What's more, the translation is poor. Not only are some gallicisms rendered word-for-word (and so only intelligible if you translate them back into French), but there are no translator's notes for topical references. I cannot recommend this book for anyone seriously interested in the history of food. | ||
Charming, informative, and disorganized This charming book is very readable, full of interesting facts, and is certainly worth picking up. It is organized, however, by food rather than by chronology. Within the food sections, it also does not follow chronology very well, so it is difficult to find information when using the book as a reference. The book feels quite like an oral history. It seems as if the author simply sat down and started writing about apples or truffles or whatever without thought to much organization. It makes for very engaging reading, but a poor reference text. | ||
Poor evidence of sources Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat provides a rather feeble excuse for her limited bibliography and fails to provide adequate citations for many of her assertions. There is an obvious French slant on history throughout the book. And in some cases there appear to be insertions of "local legends" or Francophile dreams for which there is no other evidence than Toussaint-Samat's statement (i.e., fabricated quotations attributed to Charlemagne's biographer in the cheese story on pages 116-117 - look it up!). In a generalized, broad-spectrum work such as this it would be all but impossible to check every fact. But, that being said, the book contains hundreds if not thousands statements of fact and her uncritical (at best!) inclusion of information for which there is no evidence in the source cited brings the whole book, as an authoritative source, into question. | ||
It shows its age I have serious misgivings about the facts presented in this book. The original French text was written in the 20's. I was given this book as I am working on a masterwork on the cultural history of Olives and Olive oil. In this respect she often jumps to the wrong conculsion, and makes broad judgements that have been discounted by anthropology since the 1960's. For instance she lists oil stores in ancient Babylonia as being olive oil. We know from further scholership that this would have been sesame oil, and that olive oil was a fuel and not a consumptive in that culture at the time. This causes me to question the entire book. This may be an interesting read, but at least with respect to Olives and Olive oil, there is much better out there. | ||