Today, I am happy to share something with you, a marvelous gift to the world of culinary history: Cuisine & Empire, by Rachel Laudan (University of California press, October 2013). I had the pleasure of reading some of the book while it was still in manuscript,* and that bit whetted my appetite so much that … More Cuisine & Empire: Cooking in World History, a Book You Simply Must Read
If you think that real cooking needs to be resurrected, you’d be right. You can’t exist on McNuggets alone, as the film Super Size Me proved. But if you think we should all go back to cooking everything just like our foremothers (and sometimes forefathers) did, you’d be a bit misguided. Romantic, yes, and it’s … More Forgotten Recipes and Forgotten Cooks
Spanish food enjoys some quite heady popularity right now. Trendy magazines and the international food punditry (for example, Matt Preston in Australia) say “Si” to Spanish cuisine and predict a continuing surge of enthusiasm for the food of the land of Don Quixote. Just about every grocery store, mundane as well as high-end, displays wedges … More Sugar, Saffron, Spices — The Arab Influence on Spanish Cuisine, a Brief Meditation