Only one of this year’s new releases in print cookbooks covers the cooking of Africa, unless you count books about Moroccan cooking by Fatéma Hal and Z. Guinaudeau, as well as Kittee Berns’s Teff Love: Adventures in Vegan Ethiopian Cooking. The rest only come in Kindle editions, a medium which is not my first choice…
Category: Bibliographies
Medieval England: Medicine as Food, Food as Medicine
Let food be thy medicine, and let thy medicine be food. ~Hippocrates Food and medicine, always intertwined in the human imagination. Because – obviously – the earliest English settlers brought their food habits and medicinal beliefs with them to what is now the United States, I relish books that provide background to the English way…
A Baker’s Dozen of British Cookbooks for the Christmas Season – Book #13
Throughout history, cooking shows up again and again as primarily women’s work. As a reviewer of Richard Wrangham’s thought-provoking Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009) summarizes, “Here, too, Wrangham apologetically explains, is probably where the global subjugation of women began. Women, he observes, do most of the cooking in most societies (he describes…
A Baker’s Dozen of British Cookbooks for the Christmas Season – Book #12
When I first propped open this massive, and glorious, paean to the history of British food, I came upon “Ryse Of Flessh” (Rice of Flesh). Blumenthal remarks that he had no clue “how early rice had become a part of the English diet. More than a hundred before The Forme of Cury was written, rice was already…
A Baker’s Dozen of British Cookbooks for the Christmas Season – Book #11
Mary-Anne Boermans stood out as a finalist on the British TV program, “The Great British Bake-Off,” in 2011. Since then, she’s shot to the top of culinary success with her stellar Great British Bakes: Forgotten Treasures for Modern Bakers, the heart-warming (and stomach-stuffing) product of years of research. And she is the real deal, a person with…
A Baker’s Dozen of British Cookbooks for the Christmas Season – Book #10
Brian Yarvin, an American author, stands out here as the only Yank on this list. And he’s writing about pub food, a very British institution. He aims his book at Americans and could perhaps be accused of dreaming the dream, or interpreting the pub through a lens of nostalgia. Or not? Up comes book #10: 2012 10. The…
A Baker’s Dozen of British Cookbooks for the Christmas Season – Book #9
One of the most interesting things about the two National Trust cookbooks on this extended “Elves’ Shelves” list is the lack of major curry dishes like Chicken Tikka Masala or Balti dishes. In the British countryside, the old ways do appear to remain front and center, as opposed to the more urban areas where curry houses…
A Baker’s Dozen of British Cookbooks for the Christmas Season – Book #8
There is, as you may have noticed, a huge gap time-wise between the first seven books on this list and the last six. That’s because there’s a time period where you see the beginning of the cult of the modern celebrity chef/cook, with a tremendous focus on innovations and experimentation in recipes and, well, celebrity. Television. Italian food….
A Baker’s Dozen of British Cookbooks for the Christmas Season – Book #7
Today you have Jane Grigson again, this time in full force behind the idea that British food is good and worthy of respect. History plays a larger role in this book than in Good Things, making it a delightful read as well as a valuable resource for study. It is one of several books worth looking at…
