Food History News - Editor's Notebook

Last Updated June 25, 2008

Welcome to Editor's Notebook and the world of food history. Here is where we post all the information that goes stale quickly in print. Come back weekly (at least). Here, too, you can read about your fellow subscribers to FHN. Be sure to page down for our conversations from the past two or so months. There are book comments at the bottom. If you have something to tell about, click on "Contact Us" above or right here at editor@foodhistorynews.com. I like hearing from you! Cheers -- Sandy Oliver.

June 25, 2009

In this issue: Ritz Crackers and Mock Apple Pie. Macaroni and cheese.

Ritz crackers are celebrating their 75th anniversary this year. No doubt they have been reformulated several times over the years, so the recipes devised in the test kitchens in the early days will have been revised, too. Ritz is only one of several crackers around which mock apple pie recipes were built over the years and you can find non-Ritz mock pies in mid-19th century cookbooks. With lemon and cinnamon you can evoke apple ie-ness. In the past a mock apple pie was more of a coping mechanism to deal with a lack of apples than the sport that new mock recipes developed to celebrate the 75th anniversary seem to be. Ritz has came up with Upside Down Mock Apple Pie and Chocolate Walnut Mock Apple Pie. All crackers.

Mary-Liz Shaw wrote a nice historical review of mocks and other fooded-ya dishes in the Milwaukie Journal Sentinel that you can read here. In one elegant summer household on our island, the exceedingly wealthy head of the family likes as hors d'ouvres peanut butter and chutney on Ritz crackers and also Ritz crackers wrapped in bacon and broiled until the bacon is crisp. I kid you not.

Macaroni and cheese turned up on the ALHFAM list-serve recently. This dish has been around quite some time and several folks sent along quotes and observations. Kimberley Costa, who portrays mid-18th century life, commented that she, "usually make[s] a flat noodle such as fetucinni. The pasta that was being imported out of Italy in mid century are long like spaghetti but have a hollow center. You can find them in the bigger grocery stores. Elbow will work as well."

Barbara Archer at Lincoln's New Salem, Illinois, sent along some material from the Cook's Own Book 1833 edition. Recipes in the cookbook include Macaroni gratin; macaroni napolitaine; macarnoi stewed; macaroni timbale all calling for cheese. She said, "I like the comment: 'The usual mode of dressing it in England is by adding a white sauce and parmesan or cheshire cheese, and burning it; but this makes a dish which is proverbially unwholesome; its bad qualities arise from the oiled and burnt cheese and the half dressed flour and butter put in the white sauce.'"

From the Cook's Own Book: To Make Macaroni Beat four eggs for eight to ten minutes, strain them and stir in flour till stiff enough to work into a paste upon a marble or stone slab. Add four till it be a stiff paste and work it well; cut off a small bit at a time; roll it out as thin as paper and cut it with a paste cutter or knife into very narrow strips; twist and lay them upon a clean cloth, in a dry warm place; in a few hours it will be perfectly hard; put into a box with white paper under and cover it. It may be cut into small stars or circles to be used for soup and does not require so much boiling as the Italian Macaroni.

From Monticello we had this link to a macaroni machine and a recipe in Thomas Jefferson's hand.

Then Martha Katz-Hyman offered up an ethnic twist with noodles and kugel. She wrote:

The Jewish Manual, the first Jewish cookbook published in English, in 1846 in London, has the following recipe for "Macaroni and Cheese:" "Boil some maccaroni in milk or water until tender, then drain them and place on a dish with bits of butter and grated Parmesan cheese; when the dish is filled grate more cheese over it and brown before the fire."

There is also a recipe for "Vermicelli and Maccaroni Pudding": "Boil till tender four ounces of either of above articles, in a pint of milk; flavor as directed in the preceding receipt [bread pudding, which calls for flavoring and sweetening to taste, "sometimes with a little wine or essence of lemon, or beaten almonds"], and boil in a mould, which may be lined with raisins. It should be served with any sweet pudding sauce."

This latter recipe is now more commonly known as "noodle kugle" or "lukschen [noodle] kugle." Nearly 30 years later, the first Jewish cookbook published in America, Jewish Cookery Book...," by Mrs. Esther Levy (1871), has a recipe for "a Luxion," which gives directions on how to make the noodles, and what to add in to make the pudding. The last line says, "It can be made with butter and milk for a butter dinner. Fat [suet is the fat given in the body of the recipe] should be used if for a meat dinner." So thought it doesn't say it, Mrs. Levy assumes that some of her readers will be keeping kosher and want to know how to make a recipe that's written with meat ingredients suitable for serving with dairy dinners.

Lovely material from the good folks in the living history corner.

June 18, 2009

In this issue: Clements Library News. 1849 Symposium. My wrist.

Clements Library, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the site of the Longone Culinary Collection and home to two fine symposia - 2005 and 2007 - is gearing up for some major renovations plus finding a new curator of the culinary collection to replace Jan Longone when she retires at the end of the year. Interviews are being conducted at the moment for her replacement.

I hear that there are no plans at the moment for a third symposium. A combination of the poor economy that made raising money to underwrite the symposium, plus all the much needed work at have put the symposium not only on the back burner, but maybe off the stove for the foreseeable future. The Library will close completely and all staff and materials will be moved to an off-campus facility and a temporary reading room will be set up in the main grad library. If you go to do research there, you will have to call-up your material in advance so it can be transported to he temporary reading room. All this, of course will require scholars to be very organized people.

1849 is the theme for the IACP symposium this October in California. Ken Albala and colleagues have pulled together an intriguing program centered on what was happening with around the globe in 1849 (this year being the 150th anniversary of the California Gold Rush.) (The optional activities list includes a visit to Sutter's Mill.) The conference will be in Lodi, October 8-10, at the Wine and Roses Inn, and according to the website "Scheduled at the end of the California grape harvest, the entire area will be redolent of fermentation, promising an intimate and wine-soaked weekend." Registration is open and I suspect you better get signed up quickly because there are limited slots.

Speakers include Andy Smith, Kyri Claflin, Dan Strehl (because it is California�in fact a whole dinner is based on is Encarnacion's Kitchen. Darra Goldstein, Jeff Pilcher will be there, Mark McWilliams, Andy Coe, and Roger Haden, Colleen Sen, Carol Helstosky. Each will tackle a difference part of he nation or the world from a food view point. This link tells all.

My wrist is broken. Jamie and I were dancing at a graduation party, doing swing dancing, and I tripped on his foot, landed on my left wrist, resulting in a fairly classic Colles fracture. It has only been a week since I had surgery to fix it and from all accounts, this is a slow heal. Needless to say I am doing all typing at present with my right hand (thank goodness I am a right hander-tho oddly enough I have always used a mouse with the left.) I will, I suspect, manage to do only the basics until I can speed up a bit, get off the mind blurring pain meds, and I hope you will adjust your expectations accordingly.

June 3, 2009

In this issue: Kurlansky and America Eats. Contributors & what else they do: Virginia Mescher. Karl Koster. Mary Margaret Pack. Martha Katz-Hyman.

Mark Kurlansky, in case you were wondering, did not discover the Works Progress Administration's America Eats! project, as some starry-eyed individual reported to me a week or so ago. He is doing a bang-up job of promoting it because, of course, he has emitted another book, Food of a Younger Land, and is out doing the necessary to get it off the shelves. Laura Shapiro has reviewed it for Slate, the online magazine. She notes the relentlessly upbeat prose of the original works, argues convincingly that the WPA writers engaged in this project were inventing a food writing genre of sorts, and notes, "Though many of these reports appear to capture long-lost foodways, there's no telling how accurate they are, especially because the editors encouraged writers to liven up their work by using the techniques of fiction." These days don't we call that "creative non-fiction"?

Meanwhile, for the record, let it be said that lots of writers have used America Eats! material in their work for all to see including Charles Camp, Anne Mendelson, William Woys Weaver, and recently Pat Willard in her America Eats: On the Road with the WPA.

Contributors and what else they do. Over the years Food History News has been fortunate to corner some wonderful contributors and pry fine work out of them. The next issue has a representative array. Here are some together with links to their work.

Virginia Mescher has written a lot of stuff for FHN over the years. She likes digging out piles of facts on such stuff as sugar and salt, and for this coming issue she has done tea. She plows through newspapers and cookbooks and similar kinds of sources and extracts descriptive details to create a portrait of a food stuff over time. She and her husband Michael do a lot of Civil War reenactment, and researching that era is her primary interest, though she delves into earlier and later stuff. Their website, the Ragged Soldier Sutlery and Vintage Volumes reflects their interests. On the website is a book some of you might be interested in, Did They Eat That?, described as "a listing of items in chronological order with a second listing by category and item cross-referenced to the first. � It starts with Kikkoman soy sauce more than three centuries ago and concludes with products first marketed in the mid-1990's. It is invaluable in guiding historical interpretation of kitchens and foods." She reports that the age of some products will startle baby boomers because the stuff has been around so long, and so have we baby boomers.

Karl Koster wrote about pemmican for FHN a couple years ago and is discussing wild rice this time. Karl also does reenactment of the mid 1700s to early 1800s Great Lakes Fur Trade and works for the National Park Service as an interpreter. You can see pictures of him together with historic fur trade food here. Check out the roasted moose snout.

Karl has an incredible nose for finding valuable details in all the records and narratives, and the moxie to recreate the food.

Mary Margaret Pack writes regularly for the Austin Chronicle. She'd rather do food history, but wisely, from an economic point of view, sticks to food writing and being a private chef, commuting as needed to San Francisco. Her food news writing is inflected with history as this piece indicates.

Martha Katz-Hyman worked as an associate curator at Colonial Williamsburg, and was responsible for preparing furnishing plans for several houses there, which put her in the historic kitchen fairly often. She also became expert on material culture of slaves. She is now an independent consultant, and is working on furnishing plans for various East Coast historic houses, including the Trent House in New Jersey where the issue of larding pans came up. Her piece in FHN79 shows her thought process on the pans.

May 28, 2009

In this issue: Wrangman book is out. Italian Cookbook biblio augmented. Andy Coe on Chop Suey. FHN79 in the works. Historic Recipe Workshop. Last two days to order online at this website.

Richard Wrangman's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human is out! A few weeks ago we mentioned the interview he had in the New York Times and said that the book would be out soon and June 1 is the day.

Wrangman makes the very interesting argument that cooking changed both our physical evolution and social structures. Physically, we are not well equipped with sharp teeth or claws for capturing animals and eating them raw, and our guts are smaller than other primates, adapted to digesting cooked food. We get more nutrients from cooked food, and so we obtain more energy from it quickly freeing us up for other activities. Women ended up as cooks, and, sadly, subject to hungry men so social structures that protected and subjugated women evolved as well.

Basic Books publicity wants the press to pick up on Wrangman's criticism of raw food diets; the contribution that processed and cooked foods contribute to obesity; that modern food labeling is misleading because it does not take into account variations in the body's absorption of different foods, i.e. cooked foods are absorbed more readily than raw; and the role of cooking in the origins of marriage and the division of male and female labor. But you can read it for yourself and decide what Wrangman says is most important.

It has 309 pages, published by Basic Books and costs $26.95. ISBN: 9780465013623 and ISBN-10: 0465013627 See this URL for more info. http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/basic/book_detail.jsp?isbn=0465013627

A bibliography of Italian cookbooks written in English and published in America based on the bib developed by Michelle Falk in an article a couple years ago in Food History News has appeared on Lynn Nelson's website. Lynn added more references and Robert W. Brower from El Sobrante, CA, added items to it, too. Then he wrote to say, "I am hoping that you might mention the bibliography to your loyal readers so that it can be further corrected and augmented." And I think that is a good idea, so loyal readers, here is where you can go see it.

Andy Coe is the author of a book called Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in America. It will be published in July. You know, one of the first questions shot over FHN's bows many years ago was "what is the origin of chop suey in America." I don't remember now who asked, but at the time I didn't know anyone working on it or Chinese food in the States, period. And now, here comes Andy tracing American exposure to Chinese food from the ship Empress of China's 1784 visit in China to the Chinese cooks in the Gold Rush, to city restaurants and food court take-out. Details forthcoming.

Chop suey, the dish, however, is a whole 'nother ballgame. Last fall at the historic recipe workshop in Ohio, Ellice Ronsheim did a fine job digging up some information on it.

Speaking of Historic Recipe Workshops, I'll be traveling to North Carolina in the fall to do one for the Foodways Guild of the Catawba Valley. I am looking forward to being with this courageous group of experienced hearth cooks. These are people who cooked bear meat historically and make salad dressing with bear fat, by god.

FHN79, the next to last issue, is in the works with all kinds of fascinating stuff from Wild Rice in the Fur Trade by Karl Koster, and stuff on tea by Virginia Mescher, a riff on larding pans by Martha Katz-Hyman, and hurrah! pralines by Mary Margaret Pack. It is going to be a luscious issue. For only two more days, today and tomorrow, you can be a subscriber by signing up on line. After that, the order pages are going to be removed from this website!

Also, this is the last chance to order back issues online. Do it by Friday 5:00 p.m.! Why? you may ask. Because as FHN winds down the print version, the expenses of maintaining a shopping cart online exceed the old cash flow which is now draining the reservoir. I can reduce the cost of the website by removing the shopping cart, and besides as it should be, fewer and fewer subscriptions are coming in as we creep towards the end.

We will continue to amuse and inform you on this website, however, even past print publication.

May 20, 2009

In this issue: Boston banquet. Betty Fussell inducted. Green and black tea. What would they have done.

The Boston Culinary Historians had their banquet on Sunday and I went for a change. It has been years. Kathleen Curtin and her mom gave me a place to stay and K.C., beloved co-author of Giving Thanks, and I traveled together, she hauling some nice 17th century cheese cakes (which look like they chocolate chips in them - it's the currants) from Robert May, and I a platter of boiled ham from one of our pigs. The theme was tavern food, late 1600s to the Revolution. A broad span of time. There was roasted chicken, baked shad, beans, boiled vegetables, celery, green succotash, cole slaw, thirded bread and pounded cheese, apple dumplings, Marlboro pudding, jumbals, mincemeat tarts, bread pudding, and a spectacular rum punch. There was other stuff but I forget what. And I got a visit in with long time subscriber Marian Walke, Beth Riely, and saw Anne Faulkner, and Agni Thurner, my traveling companions to Cyprus but I missed many of the old timers.

Betty Fussell was inducted into the James Beard Foundation Who's Who in Food and Beverage in America a couple of weeks ago. And richly deserved. I was thinking just this afternoon, after having picked up Betty's book The Story of Corn, to look up something, that Betty did a lot of exploring years and years ago on topics that others, myself included, are just getting to dubbing around in. But she got there first.

Jane Grigson was inducted, though posthumously, to the JBF Cookbook Hall of Fame and Betty spoke a tribute. You can read it and other of Betty's writings at this link.

Green tea, said Mark Zanger, at the CHoB banquet, was the tea drunk in America before the Revolution. I was startled because I had not heard that before. Our tea was China tea, and apparently green. I have not ever paid much attention to coffee and tea, having other fish to fry. Both topics have been widely treated with whole books written about them, and other works dedicated to describing tea equipage, and the meals when tea was served, etc. etc. Something about that statement bothered me, though. So I turned to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America and see that in the section dedicated to tea, Jan Whittaker (author of Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn) reports that green tea predominated though some black tea was available here. I felt better right away. Blanket statements, even the ones I make, leave me a little uncomfortable. Jan has a helluva fine restaurant history blog here. Check it out.

What would They have done? This is a troubling question and proposition. First we have to ask who "They" were and when did "They" live? Had we accurate answers to "what will They do?" we would not have made such a mess in Iraq. They are different. They were different. We are different from them and always have been. So when it comes to working with a period recipe, or a replication of a period meal, the "What would they have done" test is probably the most unreliable one we can apply to the situation unless we have spent a few decades studying them and absorbing their ethic, culture and habits. Which most of us have not done. Just a word of caution to those who are looking back and doing as was done. You can't assume that they would have done what you would do. At all.

May 15, 2009

In this issue: James Beard documentary. CFP: Food & Communication. Samp, hominy and frustration.

James Beard will be featured in a May 21 documentary on Oregon Public Broadcasting's "Oregon Experience." Jackie Williams gave us the heads-up on this, and you can read about it here. Called, "A Cuisine of Our Own," the program will tell how Beard always championed his home-state's food.

"Food as Communication/Communication as Food" is the topic for "an edited collection that will become the first text of its kind in the area of food as communication." The editors are Janet M. Cramer, Ph.D., Carlnita P. Greene, Ph.D., and Lynn M. Walters, M.S. Dr. Cramer is at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM [87131 505-277-9119/505-277-3854, and Email: jcramer@unm.edu].

The Call for Papers says, "Food has increasingly become a subject for academic inquiry, especially in its relationship to culture, identity, and myriad social, economic, and political structures. Although food cultures have been widely studied within the fields of anthropology, sociology, and cultural history, it is only just beginning to be studied within the field of communication. With the recent increase in public attention to food, agriculture, global activism, and the political and cultural dimensions of food production and consumption, there is a need for communication scholars to apply our unique methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of food."

For specifics see the online CFP here. They are looking for completed manuscripts by June 1.

Samp and hominy, and posole, too, for that matter have long interested me. While the words samp and hominy are applied to a pretty broad range of prepared dishes and the words' meaning seems to change over time. They refer sometimes to a porridge of ground up corn. In actual fact samp, hominy and posole are all names for the same item even though Southerners will say Northerners don't know hominy, and Northerners will say samp is not found in the South.

The terms refer to hulled, soaked and cooked corn, usually prepared by a process of wood ashes, lime, or lye in the soaking water often called nixtamalization. That tended to loosen the kernel's hull which was then rubbed off and that allowed the corn to swell up. I've done this myself.

The alkaline allows niacin in corn in the corn to be released, which makes it a more wholesome product. Ancient Native American populations knew this process and the technology traveled with the corn except from the New World to the Old, where people forced to rely on corn as a primary food stuff, suffered from pellagra, preventable by nixtamalization or by a more varied diet.

The question that has plagued me is how and when did the process cross over from the Native American nations in across North America to settlers. By the middle 1800s the process seems pretty widespread. When I read early accounts about how hominy was prepared, I don't see explicit description of wood ashes introduced to the process. I am looking for, and will rejoice in finding some tiny nugget that suggests that some settler, male or female, observed and learned from some Native American, between first settlement and 1800, how to add wood ash to the boiling water for corn. I've asked for help from lots of smart people and am chasing down leads. If you have one to add, let me know.

I think that it is going to take the most tedious sort of combing through lots of travels and description, letters, diaries, etc. etc. It's elusive but I know it is out there.

April 29, 2009

In this issue: Jeri Quinzio and her ice cream book. Gary Allen's new website. Culinary Historians of North Carolina revealed.

Jeri Quinzio (our own Jeri of the Culinary Historians of Boston and one of a dozen companions on a trip to Cyprus many years ago) has been working on this book about ice cream for a while, and we are happy to see in print Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Making Ice Cream. Of course, we are probably not as happy as Jeri herself is to have this book out. University of California Press is the publisher, and this is #25 in the Studies in Food and Culture Series. There are endnotes, bibliography and very decent index-all those reassuring signs of a trustworthy piece of work. And I am here to tell you we sure need one because ice cream has attracted an awful lot of fake lore over the years, the most virulent of which she disposes of in the preface.

Jeri then goes on to a chronological account of the development of ices and ice creams with side trips into the ice industry, development of cheaper sugar, of ice cream churns, and all the others things that spread ice cream from the table of royalty to ordinary households. I haven't read the whole thing, but I did read the chapter entitled Modern Times, about ice cream in the twentieth century and all the fabulous forms ice cream and frozen desserts took, all the wild sundae combinations, popsicles, Dixie Cups which were a treat beyond imagining at school lunch when I was a kid, and more. Fascinating.

The details: Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Making Ice Cream by Jeri Quinzio, http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10659.php; $24.95, �14.95 hardcover. ISBN 978-0-520-24861-8, 304 pages, 6 x 8 inches, 18 color illustrations, University of California Press, Berkley, May 2009, available now and worldwide.

Gary Allen, a food writer and more than merely occasional digger into food history, has been camping out on the web in corners of David Leite's Leitesculinaria and Marty Matindale's Food Site of the Day. Now he has his very own website called On the Table from which he will emit his ever useful Food Sites info, as well as post his collected writings culled from previous entries on the web, and a blog called "Just Served" to which you can subscribe, made available in your email in-box, a service which increasingly I find myself inclined to use because I seem to forget about visiting all the different, interesting and useful sites and blogs out there.

The Culinary Historians of North Carolina are a fairy new group begun by Detra "Denay" Davis. Denay used to belong the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor. Their website says, "We meet in Cary, North Carolina, on the second Sunday of the month (unless otherwise announced). Twice a year, in mid-summer and early December, the Culinary Historians of North Carolina will host a participatory meeting with a theme. Members and guests bring a dish appropriate to the theme. Membership in the Culinary Historians of North Carolina is open to anyone interested in culinary history. Cornbread, a quarterly online newsletter/Blog, is the official publication of CHNC. Besides announcements of future meetings and reports of past meetings, it also contains feature articles, book reviews, and a calendar of upcoming events of culinary interest."

Like most CH groups membership is a mix of food professionals and curious people. Their next meeting is set for May 17 at 2 p.m. at the Cameron Village Library, 1930 Clark Ave., Raleigh, NC 27605, (919) 856-6710. The speaker is Donald Williamson on barbecue.

April 22, 2009

In this issue:Cooking made us human. Joe Booker stew and other recipes with names.

Cooking made us human, says Richard Wrangman, in an interview in the New York Times. He believes we learned how to cook 1.8 million years ago though the archaeological evidence of fireplaces has not yet surfaced. It is the changed body shapes of that era that convinced Wrangman that we were cooking by then. He says, "Our large brain and the shape of our bodies are the product of a rich diet that was only available to us after we began cooking our foods. It was cooking that provided our bodies with more energy than we'd previously obtained as foraging animals eating raw food."

An anthropologist and primatologist, Wrangman is a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard. I was lucky enough to hear him speak at a conference a number of years ago, and found his ideas pretty compelling. His new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human is to be published soon.

A Joe Booker stew query ended up on Lynne Olver's desk. She is the creator/maintainer of the Food Timeline and gets this kind of stuff all the time. Because there was Maine connection, Lynne sent me what she turned up on the stew. She wrote, "We've only been able to confirm the name (in print) to 1939. We read your stew notes in Saltwater Foodways. The recipe is certainly traditional New England fare. The name, however, appears to be a recent label meant to conjure up "the old-fashioned" days. Not unlike Snickerdoodles." Exactly.

Lynne further wrote: "Our survey of historic newspapers revealed two famous Joe Bookers: (1) Southern military figure circa Civil War and (2) Chicago gangster, circa late 1920s. Neither seems a likely candidate for Maine stew title. But, hey, weirder things can happen in the world of culinary history." And they do.

Lynne then cited Imogene Wolcott's The New England Yankee Cook Book, facsimile 1939 reprint [Cookbook Collectors Library: Favorite Recipes Press], p. 75: "When the men came in from cutting ice or chopping trees, "Joe Booker" was their favorite dish. Elderly residents of Booth Bay Harbor cannot recall for whom or by whom the dish was named, but the stew is still popular in Maine." Andy Smith cited this source in his description in the Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.

The recipe was for an ordinary veal or beef stew with turnips, carrots in it. Just a plain old stew. I checked all my Maine cookbooks for Joe Booker stew -- community cookbooks, Cooking Downeast and all---no Joe Booker. So any assertion about Joe Booker being a popular Maine dish is crock. Imogene Wolcott made that up, I think. In Boothbay, according to resident food writer Karyl Bannister, Joe Booker is remembered as a Revolutionary era soldier and locals believe the stew was named for him. It is a hyper-local dish. If you go as far as New Harbor or Bath no one will know it. The parsley dumplings that are suggested in some versions are a 20th century fillip.

Named Dishes. I am always suspicious about dishes like Joe Booker stew. Lots of cute names are corruptions of foreign names (The Scottish pastry Petticoat Tails for instance is a probably a corruption of petite gateaux. Most of the early cookbooks don't name things but rather use phrases: "to fricassee mushrooms" or "to roast potatoes." Sometimes the names are merely an adjective with noun "Pumpkin Pudding, or "Veal Soup." Sometimes dishes have a memorial name and often then it seems to me that a recipe is arbitrarily adorned with the name. Lafayette Gingerbread, named for America's famous French ally in the Revolution, is a fairly common gingerbread recipe. Eliza Leslie's Columbian Pudding is a nice baked pudding made with almond sponge cake decorated with citron stars "as many as there are states in the Union" and also rays cut from citron. It's like the modern Fourth of July Cake that is almost any old cake with white frosting and strawberries and blueberries organized flag-fashion.

I hope someone does a good paper on recipe names for the Oxford Symposium this year. (The theme is food and language.) I have not made a formal study of this but more elaborate naming seems to be more of a late 19th through 20th century phenomenon and is often connected to rising regional or ethnic awareness, with a strong commercial influence contribution, too.

Meanwhile, here is the recipe for Joe Booker in case you are interested:

"Joe Booker'
[A stew famous in the vicinity of Booth Bay Harbor, Maine.]
1/2 pound salt pork, diced
2 cups lean veal or beef, diced
2 cups turnip, diced
1 cup onions, sliced
2 cups carrots, diced
8 cups water
salt and pepper.
Try [sic] out salt pork; remove the cracklings. Add to the fat the meat, vegetables, and water. Simmer 2 hours, or until meat is tender. Season to taste. This hearty stew may be served with dumplings or not, as desired. Serves 8."
---The New England Yankee Cook Book, Imogene Wolcott, facsimile 1939 reprint [Cookbook Collectors Library: Favorite Recipes Press] (p. 75)

April 15, 2009

In this issue: John de Garlande online. More on Greg Patent. Quebecois bread ovens. William Rubel's Magic of Fire.

John de Garlande's Dictionarius is available online now partly due to the good offices of longtime FHN reader Marian Walke whose mother translated the book in 1980. Marian wrote in a note to the Cuinary Historian of Boston list: "This lovely little volume is a guide to the Latin Quarter in early 13th C. Paris, back when students were supposed to speak Latin all the time. It provides the vocabulary you won't find in Caesar or Cicero, taking you on a tour of the neighborhood, including mention of who sells what, with many culinary references, such as: "Street-criers...call out through the night, selling waffles and wafers and meat pies in baskets covered with a white towel; and the baskets are often hung by the windows of clerks who are damned by dice." Now Thomas Gloning has included it on his web site of Medieval cookery texts, at http://www.uni-giessen.de/gloning/kobu.htm." Click then page down if you can bear to pass up all the other material described there.

Greg Patent's book The Baker's Odyssey that we mentioned last time could serve as an education in ethnic American baking. Besides the pasties that brought this whole conversation about, there are dozens of other sweet and savory items from Lebanese, Polish, Scandinavian, German, Mexican, Nigerian, Iraqi, Asians by the dozens, Italian, etc. etc., families and individuals. Furthermore, Greg has a DVD tucked into the book so you can watch him make a few of the recipes, and he says he has posted them online at his website and on YouTube!

Quebecois bread oven building directions cropped up in the ALHFAM list serve this past week sent by Harry Needham who now lives in Kanata, ON, and wrote: "As a boy in Quebec City, I often accompanied my parents on Sunday drives along the north shore of the St. Lawrence to Montmorency Falls and the shrine at Ste. Anne de Beaupre. Almost every farm along the road still had its traditional beehive oven, built of fieldstone and clay, and many of the farmers sold the bread by the roadside. The loaves were round, perhaps a foot or so across, and were generally a white "French" (baguette) bread. We would devour the still-hot loaves as we drove and none of them ever survived the trip! Sue says I remember my travels chiefly by memorable things I ate; those wonderful loaves of bread are among my favourite boyhood memories." He included a link for directions for building such an oven which I think is pretty interesting.

William Rubel's book The Magic of Fire also came up on the ALHFAM list this week. Now goodness knows this is a modern book, and ALHFAM (Association for Living History, Farm, and Agriculture Museums) is a group of serious museum professionals. It is also true that right now, and for the past few years, outdoor history museums have had a very tough go of it. One reaction to the Rubel book summed up in my mind one reason museums are struggling. The writer described the book as useless.

From a die-hard historian's point of view, I suppose that is true. Thank goodness some other listers leapt to the books defense, one of them pointing out that it helped her work with a board of trustees who were dubious about anyone ever being able to cook in fireplaces, period.

I know William Rubel and know him to be a serious and diligent writer, and passionate about cooking with fire. He did a great job of bringing fireplace cookery to modern people, showing how to use a variety of equipment in a fairly ordinary home fireplace. The sad thing is that museums could have done this if they had be willing to open up to the idea that modern people may not want to make authentic period recipes on authentic historic hearths using antiques or excruciatingly correct fireplace equipment. If history has no relevance to modern life, or to a wider cross section of the population, it isn't going to be supported. We can all go down in glory with our historical correctness and authenticity intact but we will surely go down if we can't make what we do matter.

April 7, 2009

In this issue: Conference on 1849. A symposium on Laurie Colwin. Flavor of Wisconsin (it isn't just cheese.) Grep Patent on pasties in Montana. Italian Food in paperback. When Eden was in Oregon

1849 is the theme for the Fourth (ever) Food History Conference of the Food History Committee of the International Association of Culinary Professions. "All Things Culinary Around the World in 1849 and Their Convergence upon California." It is scheduled for Thursday October 7th -Saturday 9th, 2009 and will be held at the Historic Wine and Roses Inn at Lodi, California, (btw in the heart of the Lodi Wine Appellation one half hour south of Sacramento.) Ken Albala of University of the Pacific organized it. Among speakers are Warren Belasco, Darra Goldstein, Andrew F. Smith, Jeffrey Pilcher, Dan Strehl, Andrew Coe, Colleen Sen, Kyri Claflin, Roger Haden and Carol Helstosky.

Ought to be pretty interesting. It is an intriguing way to connect topics, picking a year like that. Further info goes on to say: "The cost will be $450 registration (includes food and local wine-related events) and $149-229 for lodging depending on desired opulence, and if you'ld like a fireplace, for two nights. Room sharing is also a possibility if you like. The conference is limited to 50 participants, so it promises to be an intimate and wine-soaked weekend. Informative and entertaining. Registration information can be found at www.iacp." Whew.

One of the dinner themes is 1849 Gold Rush California. Optional tour of Gold Rush country is also possible.

Laurie Colwin, is, alas, history, and often remembered for her food writing in Gourmet Magazine which became a couple of books: Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. The New Haven Review is organizing a symposium on Colwin. Publisher Bennett Lovett-Graff writes: "Celebrating the literary achievements of novelist, short story author, and food writer, Laurie Colwin, New Haven Review brings together a collection of unpublished public tributes on her tragic death in 1991 and new, personally inspired essays on her work." To read about the New Haven Review check out this link.

The symposium will feature contributions from Colwin's daughter Rosa Jurjevics who was seven when her mother died, as well as "short story writers Tessa Brown and Deborah Eisenberg, essayist and Southwest Review editor Willard Spiegelman, former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, novelist Thisbe Nissen, former New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn, and even Colwin's book illustrator Anna Shapiro."

The Flavor of Wisconsin: An Informal Guide to Food and Eating in the Badger State is an entry in the not so distant history department. This cookbook, originally authored by Harva Hatchen has been released by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press with Terese Allen's revisions and expansions. (ISBN: 978-0-87020-404-3; $29.95). The publisher says that the book "remains the authoritative history of Wisconsin's culinary" traditions. Author Harva Hachten produced a truly remarkable exploration of "the taste of this place," pairing fascinating essays on our state's food history with more than 400 carefully chosen recipes from Wisconsin kitchens past and present - from lefse to pierogi, Cornish pasties to Chippewa wild rice, fruit soup to sauerbraten." Hmmm-sounds riddled with ethnic strandings, to me.

The details: The Flavor of Wisconsin: An Informal History of Food and Eating in the Badger State. Revised and Expanded Edition with 460 Recipes. Harva Hachten and Terese Allen Hardcover: $29.95. 408 pages, 130 b/w photos, 8 1/8 x 9 1/4 ISBN: 978-0-87020-404-3.

The Oxford Companion to Italian Food by Gillian Riley will be available in paperback for the extremely affordable $17.95 after April 23 (Shakespeare's birthday). It will have 672 pages, and an ISBN number of 9780195387100. The hard back version was well received by such no-nonsense characters like Anne Mendelson and Russ Parsons. Reserve a copy.

Greg Patent, who lives in Montana, read about pasties in the latest Food History News and sent me an email saying that he had included pasties in is book, The Baker's Odessey. The recipe he used with its accompanying history was one he learned from a Butte native who's descended from Cornish grandparents. You can see more about his book here. Odessey is full of ethnic gems, well explained.

Eden used to be in Orgon. Richard Engeman's book, Eating It Up in Eden, was written to mark the 50th anniversary of the Oregon Century Farm and Ranch Program, founded in 1958 by the Oregon Historical Society and the Oregon Department of Agriculture. Our own Jackie Williams sent up the heads-up on this one. Richard Engeman is an archivist and historian, and studied family farms and ranches ("sesqucentennial" farms and ranches), in operation for 150 years. The Program solicited old or new favorite recipes from the more than a thousand families of these farms and ranches designated since 1958. Anecdotes and photos that came with the recipes illustrate the book.

Details: ISBN 978-0-97872-211-1; 124 pp.; illus.; index, $18.95; due out later this month, from White House Grocery Press. See the website, where there is an image of the book cover.

Jackie also sent this link to The Oregonian that tells about the book and interviews several of the contributors (great photos, too).

April 2, 2009

In this issue: Menu collection at SOFAB. Remembering Marie Meseroll. Our friends nominated for Beard Awards. Good Wife's Guide and Campbell Soup. Bean Suppah site. FHN back issues continue on sale. Cheap.

SOFAB, Southern Food and Beverage Museum wants menus. "We still want a menu at least once a year from every place that serves food in the South and from those places outside the South - the rest of the US and the whole world - that consider themselves Southern restaurants." They don't mind getting duplicates. They hope that if you eat at such a place, you will ask for a copy of the menu. If you have a menu from a take out place they hope you will send your out of date menus to them instead of pitching them out. Here is a blog where you can read about the project. To send menus, click here for contact info.

Marie Meseroll died in July, and we were sorry to hear that news this week when her daughter Barbara Smith reached us. Marie was a charter subscriber to Food History News, and one of the earliest of my F.H.N. friends. I met her at a Colonial Williamsburg symposium while she was still head of the Pennsbury Manor foodways program. Marie introduced me to my first taste of raspberry shrub which she made and served at her home. She told me all about making bread from barm which she did regularly. I saw her from time to time at Association for Living History, Farm, and Agricultural Museum annual meetings, and gave me a tour of Penn's house. She was one of our early practitioners, and a good soul. I am so sad she is gone.

The James Beard Award nominations were announced, and I am happy to say, as usual, some of our own friends have been recognized for their work. Anne Mendelson's fabulous book Milk has been nominated in the "Reference and Scholarship" section. Betty Fussell's Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef is in the "Writing and Literature" section (as is Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food.) Our own Kathleen Purvis of The Charlotte Observer is nominated for "Newspaper Feature Writing with Recipes" for her "In the Belly of the Beast." Laura Shapiro has also been recognized for some of her pieces in Gourmet. Stellar bunch of writers, nice people, too, every one.

The Good Wife's Guide, the new translation of Le Menagier de Paris, A Medieval Household Book, has just been released by Cornell University. Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose did the scholarly English translation of the entire text, added essays on the book about the book's background, the narrator, and the genre of household books. They added a glossary of culinary terms, and there is a grand and glorious index. I am not a French languagescholar, nor am I terribly familiar with medieval culinary history, so I am no judge of the quality of this book particularly the interpretations about its meaning. However, the information is there and reasonably affordable at $25 bucks. Gina L. Greco is Associate Professor of French at Portland State University. Christine M. Rose is Professor of English at Portland State University. Book details: $24.95s paper, 2009, 384 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 2 halftones ISBN: 978-0-8014-7474-3. Cornell Univ. Press.

While poking in the Cornell Press site, I also spotted Condensed Capitalisim: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century by Daniel Sidorick. This, the first book about the Campbell Soup Company also explores, they say, "strategies that companies have used to keep costs down besides relocating to cheap labor havens: lean production, flexible labor sourcing, and uncompromising anti-unionism." $29.95s cloth, 2009, 312 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 10 halftones ISBN: 978-0-8014-4726-6. On the web here.

Bean suppers, Grange and church suppers, or chicken and dumpling or Brunswick stew suppers are, in various parts of the country, an opportunity for community commensality as they have been for over a hundred years. One member of the Portland, Maine, Slow food group, Russell French is hoping to rebuild community through suppers, and he says, "We're trying to encourage use of heirloom food items that are part of our food history and also connect communities to farms." The vehicle for this is the website Bean Suppah. It is interesting; take a look and let me know if you have something like this happening in your corner.

FHN back issues are on sale for $1.50 each. This is a good time to fill in any missing issue you may need, or merely cheaply satisfy your curiosity on some topic. Only 51 out of 77 issues are still in print, and the favorites are going pretty quickly. Order soon, because I really want that filing cabinet space for other stuff.

March 25, 2009

In this issue: Nancy Crump's travels. Abby Carroll on Colonial Revival Food. Oxford Symposium taking registrations.

Now that Nancy Carter Crump's Hearthside Cooking is out in a second edition, Nancy is trotting about the countryside picking up accolades and giving talks. She is even standing in for Mary Randolph next Thursday when the Library of Virginia hands out its 2009 awards to Virginia Women in History. Randolph is being recognized and Nancy is accepting for her. Nice honor for both of them. I hope that Mary knows somehow. I'd tell you how to reserve for this but it is already too late.

Nancy also went off yesterday to University of North Carolina's Wilson Library and the Book Series of the Southern Historical Collection (where I, too, spent many happy hours). She used the collection in writing the book, and was invited to come and tell how. If you are a Facebook kind of person, you can become a fan of the SHC.

Abby Carroll, who is a PhD now, bless her, is speaking next Friday at Boston University on a topic I have been keenly interested in since the nation's Bicentennial when I encountered recreations of Vittles of the Ye Olden Tymes and "Lady Washington Teas." She has tackled the whole notion of Colonial Revival food. Her talk is entitled "Henry Ford, Colonial Kitchens, and the Performance of National Identity." It ought to be interesting, and I wish I could go. William Woys Weaver spoke on Pennsylvania Dutch cookery at the Second Biennial on American Food in Ann Arbor, 2007, and how it was romanticized in the early 20th century for tourism and since hearing his talk I have wondered if maybe a little of that happened in New England, only a little earlier - late 19th century from say, the founding of Memorial Hall in 1880 at Deerfield through Wallace Nutting.

Some early food history work was done in places like Deerfield Village, Greenfield Village, Colonial Williamsburg, Old Sturbridge Village, etc., even though now we might wish they hadn't bothered. Well, we all need our pioneers.

Abby is a good example of someone who has been able to major in food history, so to speak, by enrolling in the American and New England Studies Program at Boston University. She is teaching it now to the Gastronomy Program, and College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program.

Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, whose theme this year is Food and Language, has begun taking registrations for September 11-13 at St. Catherine's College, Oxford University, Oxford, England. Information from Patsy Iddison informs us that: "Simon Schama, the celebrated professor of art history from Columbia University and television presenter, has kindly agreed to open the proceedings. Other distinguished speakers who will lend their voices to our plenary panels include Dr. Tu Weiming, the Harvard-Yenching Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and Confucian Studies; emeritus Trustee Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, author of Savoring the Past; Judith Jones, Knopf's renowned food editor; and the Symposium editor, Susan Friedland, formerly food editor at HarperCollins.

To check out the programme (it is in England, after all) go here. You'll find registration info there. PS. If you do Facebook, you can become a fan of the Oxford Symposium, too!

March 18, 2009

In this issue: Whoopie Pies. East Brunswick Historical Society. ICREFH. Looking for John Rees. Primary Sources on-line like this Chinese food history. Grumping about the uninformed.

Whoopie Pies are in the headline in today's New York Times Dining section, and I am quoted. People always want to know the origins of whoopie pies. As far as I can tell they don't have any origin. I jest. They do, but it seems to be unknowable at present, though I wish someone would tackle the topic and find out and put this whole miserable question to rest. On their native heath, Maine being one, they are actually really terrible. I ate one once. I know. They have their adherents, however. The upscale version by the same name are not really whoopie pies.

The real, and interesting, issue here is that this great sprawling country of ours has so many climates, such a varied geography, and so many ethnicities and wildly varied income levels that it is hard to find an American Dish. Hamburgers come close. But the food that is truly shared up and down and all around are very often commercial products like Coca Cola, or Twinkies, or Fritos. No matter who you are in the U.S.A. you will know what they are and probably have swallowed them, and your experience was identical to everyone else's. So they are what we share as far as food history is concerned. Little wonder we are curious. Hence, in this region, the questions about Whoopie Pies.

What is a Whoopie Pie? The classic is two rounds the size of your palm of chocolate sponge cake held together with an odious mixture of confectionery sugar and Crisco, flavored with imitation vanilla extract.

East Brunswick (NJ) Historical Society will open an eleven month-long exhibit, "What's Cooking?" which features cooking equipment from Colonial era to the recent one, and will have programs accompanying it. Our own Susan Luczu, food historian, will talk about and demonstrate the use of cooking equipment in April when she discusses the 18th century in "Taste of the Hearth," and again in May when she tackles the 19th century in "Victoria Day Tea." See Calendar of Events for specifics. If you are in the area, why not attend.

ICREFH is the International Commission for Research into European Food History. This year's symposium is the eleventh and will be held in Paris, September 8-11, 2009 under the auspices of the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) and organized by Alain Drouard, President of ICREFH. The symposium's title is 'Food and War in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries'. The program is too long to offer in detail here, but addresses many of the issues you expect with such a topic: rationing, consumer strategies with food storages, social and health consequences of food shortages, and technological innovation. You can find the entire topic list here.

John U. Rees, the uncommon historian of the common soldier, columnist for Food History News for over half its publication history, and all around excellent fellow, can be read on line. John knows a heck of a lot about soldiers fare as he demonstrates in his column but that is but a tip of the old history iceberg. Here is the URL that will take you right to his careful scholarship. Here is a book review he wrote about "We Were Marching on Christmas Day".

Primary sources on line? Yes, Virginia (or Doubting Thomas) there are good, even primary, sources of information on line. And yes, a hundred or thousand times, yes, there is a lot of chewed over, strictly second hand, opinion-riddled junk, too. Gary Allen makes it his business to send out monthly resource information for food writers and among the gems this time was a transcription of a Spaniard's description of an early Chinese meal. It is a secondary source, but here also is a video of Jennifer 8. Lee talking about her hunt for the origins of familiar Chinese-American dishes including General Tso chicken. There are others.

Even Wikipedia has some excellent moments. We cannot continue to declare web sources to be bogus, though alas, many in my generation (60 plus) tend to be mighty skeptical even as many in the younger generation (40 and under) have yet to develop fully functioning on-line baloney detectors.

It is grumpy of me I know. I am so weary of the unqualified making pronouncements on food in history. The latest pebble in my shoe comes from fellow bloggers on the Maine Food and Life Style magazine weblog, Plating Up. These dear folks are fully competent chefs, restaurateurs, etc., and presume to fill everyone in on cookery in the past including a particularly egregious little number last month on the origins of soul food, and this week, a minor atrocity on New England Boiled Dinner. One thing that can get me going is the assumption that there was "a time when homesteaders cooked over the unregulated heat of woodstoves, which required dishes that were flexible about temperature and timing." Oh, let's hear it for the undoubted superiority of modern stoves. Honestly. Of course, woodstoves and hearth fires were regulated. They were regulated by skilled cooks who, unlike most modern people, knew how to pay attention.(Snort, derision.)

March 11, 2009

In this issue: Money and a job for food history scholar. FHN78and pasty history. A tale of two cheddars. More on evaporated milk!

Scholarship money is available to a food scholar with the Culinary Historians of New York annual $1000 grant. CHNY is taking applications now from "a student or scholar who demonstrates commitment to the field of culinary history and a current, well-developed project that will culminate in a book, article, paper, film, or other scholarly endeavor, including ephemera." The deadline is May 31, 2009. They ask that you come and give a talk to the group after you do your research. How hard is that? For details and an application form, check out this website.

Previous CHNY Scholar's Grant winners are: 2008: Willa Zhen, "The Transmission of Knowledge in Cantonese Cooking Schools." 2007: Megan J. Elias, "Cooking the Books: Nationalism, Regionalism, and American Cookbooks, 1865-1917." 2006: Elizabeth M. Simms, "Tuskegee Experiment Station / Papers of George Washington Carver" Project. 2005: Elizabeth Alsop, "America Eats."

The job for a food historian is at University of Michigan, Clements Library, in Ann Arbor, for Curator of American Culinary History. But wait, you might say, isn't that Jan Longone's job? And yes, it is, and Jan is retiring (and you thought FHN stopping print publication was bad news.)

To apply send a cover letter, three professional references, resume, and writing sample to Director, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, 909 South University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1190 or to email that information as an attachment to clements.library@umich.edu. The applicant must also apply at http://www.umich.edu/.

For a more detailed description on the necessary and desired job requirements, go to http://www.umich.edu/~jobs/ Enter site as a guest; click on 'start here' and enter the Job ID: 28911.

FHN78 is creaking towards completion-thank goodness. It is an eye opener because Susan Tax Freeman has written a fine essay on the pasties of Butte, Montana. There are a fair number of people out there who think that pasties are the regional food of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. And that is true. And furthermore, people in Butte, Montana think that pasties are the regional food of Butte, too, and are astonished that anyone is eating pasties and considering it their regional food in Michigan or in Mexico, or in New Mexico, or in parts of California. All these pasty-eaters think that the pasty is their very own.

Back along (FHN72) I wrote a persnickety essay on food regionalism, an idea which sometimes just doesn't hold up. The pasty is a case in point, because it has no organic (i.e. environmental) connection to the places it crops up in but it does have an ethnic connection: wherever Cornish miners moved to pursue mining of all sorts, the pasty appears, a fine example of something I call an "ethnic stranding" -- a particular dish that comes with a specific ethnic group and is adopted by the rest of the population to become a signature dish to the locality, outlasting sometimes, the people who brought it. You might want to read this. You can still subscribe to FHN and get a copy of this issue for your very own. Plus I do a quick overview of pasty history. Here are some 18th century beauties that Ivan Day has created.

This is a tale of two cheddars. You gotta love a guy who names his cheeses, as Ken Albala did two cheddars - one is Lincoln (created, or as Ken says, "born" on Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday) and the other is Valentino, made, you guessed it on Valentine's Day. Check his blog, Ken's Food Rant and page down to see cheese making, and further for a roasted pig, and bread made with whey (by-product of cheese making). Ken is working on a book and actually tries the things he puts into it, historic or not, but usually historic. For the cheddars he has as a guide a book written by Josiah Twamley in 1784, Dairying Exemplified, or The business of cheese-making: laid down from approved rules, collected from the most experienced dairy women... etc. (Warwick : Printed for the author by J. Sharp, and sold by Messrs. Rivington's and J. Taylor, London.)

Evaporated milk mentioned here a couple weeks ago reminded Ann Chandonnet of something she saw in Alaska when she and husband Fernand lived there. Ann has a piece in the next FHN about Kasaan potatoes and here is what she wrote about the milk:

Old timers in Alaska who had spent time in The Bush in cabins would order all their groceries for one year at a time. When I moved to Chugiak, Alaska, in 1973, I was privileged to have such a couple as neighbors. Their kitchen table always had an open can of evaporated milk right next to the sugar bowl. It was called the canned cow. They had five kids while they were out there on the trapline, and provided a weekly candy bar to each kid. All 260 candy bars were stored in the root cellar with the potatoes, canned milk, etc.

March 2, 2009

In this issue: Janet finishes a book in Reaktion Books' Edible series. Let CHO eat cake.

Janet Clarkson, whose blog we sometimes mention here reported today on Facebook that she has just finished a book on soup: Soup: The Global History. This book will join others in Reaktion Books Edible Series. According to the British publisher, "Each of these gives a delectable history of the food or ingredient in question, providing a global overview, and are illustrated throughout with colour and black-and-white images." Janet also finished a history of pie for this series, and that is due out in April 2009.

Each of the books runs about 135-145 pages, occasionally more, and is written by competent, knowlegeable, and ambitious people with day jobs. Bruce Kraig did hot dogs, Andy Smith wrote hamburgers, Ken Albala covered pancakes, Fred Czarra did spices, and Carol Helstosky covered pizza. Reaktion describes these as "our extremely collectable series" which tells you about where they are going with this. The word global makes me queasy especially when it is in front of 145 pages.

CHO, Culinary Historians of Ontario are participating in an event called "An Evening of Stories, Song and Dance" which is a benefit for Toronto's First Post Office, operated by the Town of York Historical Society. It is planned for March 6, and while I doubt many of us in the rest of North America will be able to show up, I thought that this was a great idea and eminently worth imitating.

The event includes "175 Years in Cakes: Savouring and Celebrating Toronto's anniversary of incorporation through the city's culinary literature," in which CHO is working with George Brown College Chef School students. They intend that participants will sample eight cakes, from cookbooks published in Toronto or otherwise inspired by the city, representing different eras of the city's culinary history, from incorporation in 1834 to the present, Here is the line-up:

A Rich Plum Cake, The Frugal Housewifes Manual, 1840 (first cookbook compiled in English, in Canada)
Coffee Cake, The Home Cook Book, 1877 (Canada's first community cookbook, a fundraiser for the new Hospital for Sick Children)
Sponge Cake with Lemon Jelly Filling, The New Cook Book, 1905, by Grace Denison, columnist for Toronto's Saturday Night magazine
Fresh Coconut Cake, The Wimodausis Cook Book, 1934, by a Toronto social-service women's group
Strawberry Shortcake, Kate Aitkens Canadian Cook Book, 1950 edition, published by Toronto's Tamblyn drugstores
Devils Food Cake with Whipped Chocolate Frosting, The All New Purity Cook Book, 1967, from a Toronto flour miller
Edible Woman Cake, inspired by Margaret Atwood's novel
2009 cake inspired by Toronto's contemporary food scene

In case you can go: Friday, March 6, 2009, 7:30 p.m., St. Lawrence Hall, 157 King Street East, Toronto. Tickets are $25, available by reservation at (416)865-1833 or at the door.

Book Notices & Comment

An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage

Tom Standage has another book in the works. He is the author of The History of the World in Six Glasses, and his next will be An Edible History of Humanity, to be published by Walker and Company, New York, in which he traces the history of humankind via the production of food, with a particular eye towards various elements of food and technology. In promotional material sent out the publicist quotes Standage, "That food has been such an important ingredient in human affairs might seem strange, but it would be far ore surprising if it had not: after all, everything that every person has ever done, throughout history has literally been fueled by food." No! Feature that!

He goes over ground, for instance, covered more thoroughly but less readably by John Keay in Spice Routes and the like, but I see that he doesn't include Martin Jones' Feast in his chapters on social structure and food, and I think of Jones being one of the most fascinating and clear writers on the topic I have seen. Standage makes a lot of this stuff very accessible and we all have known for a long time what he is presenting here. I am not sorry that he is drawing attention to it. Advance reading copies are out and the book is due in May. Stay tuned.

Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue by John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed

John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed authored Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue. The whole first section of the book is dedicated to barbecue history, even pre-history, but then focuses down on North Carolina style 'cue even though John Shelton comes from Tennessee and I always thought Tennesseans didn't think that North Carolina BBQ counted as the real thing. The Reeds who believe that barbecue is a good deal like jazz, include how to do it, and offer portraits of current practitioners. They do a good job of staying away from fakelore or if they include they engage in truth in labeling. This is a University of North Carolina Press book, $30.00 cloth bound, ISBN: 978-0-8078-3243-1,

Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food by Andrew Warnes.

As an Englishman, Warnes brings a different perspective to BBQ, reporting on the Europeans' view of it as a primitive and even barbaric practice. He also sees the invention of BBQ tradition, something I see in the clam bake tradition of the northeastern U.S. I have not finished reading this book, but what I have so far strikes me as very thought provoking. So far nothing seems joltingly out of kilter though there are times when I think too much is made of something that might be less significant than it seems.

Andrew Warnes is Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at Leeds University. Savage Barbecue came out in August 2008. ISBN 0820331090 paper, $19.95, ISBN 0820328960 cloth $59.95. 6 x 9 in. 14 b&w photos. University of Georgia Press.

Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef by Betty Fussell.

I spotted this at Kitchen Arts and Letters in New York City, and bought it on the spot. I haven't read it yet but I think it promises to give me another perspective on the American beef industry that has gotten us and itself into so much trouble the past decade or so. The end of the book is clogged with endnotes, and that always warms my heart. The details: ISBN-13/EAN: 9780151012022 ; Price: $26.00, ISBN-10: 0151012024, Hardcover; 416 pages, Trim Size: 6 x 9. Harcourt, Inc.

Hearthside Cooking by Nancy Carter Crump

Nancy Carter Crump has revised Hearthside Cooking: Early American Southern Cuisine Updated for Today's Hearth and Cookstove, published by the University of North Carolina Press. I wrote the foreword to this edition, and happily. Since the first edition came out, Nancy has dug in on some interesting stuff about slave cooks and a lot other things that had no place in this book but which we, with crossed fingers, hope she will publish elsewhere (like in Food History News!) You can read an interview with Nancy Carter at this website. It is informative but doesn't quite capture Nancy's personal style which is a good deal more humorous and irreverent.

Here are all the details: ISBN 978-0-8078-3246-2, $30.00 hardcover Approx. 352 pp., 68 illus., notes, bibl., index. The University of North Carolina Press, 116 South Boundary Street, Chapel Hill, NC, 27514-3808 1-800-848-6224 (orders), 919-966-3829 (fax).

Mrs. Darwin's Recipe Book. Revived and Illustrated, by Dusha Bateson and Weslie Janeway

Charles Darwin is in the news lately because of the 200th anniversary of his birth. Last fall Mrs. Darwin's Recipe Book was published "Revived and Illustrated, by Dusha Bateson and Weslie Janeway" published by Glitterati Inc. Emma Darwin's recipes will not astonish anyone familiar with 19th century English gentry cookery, but this is a pleasant little volume. Food and Think, a blog on the Smithsonian site discusses it. For reviews you can check out this one at the Smithsonian website. Also you can read our own Cynthia Bertleson's take on the book at her food history blog Gherkins & Tomatoes. To see more about the book go to Glitterati -- and page down.

The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi, translated by Terence Scully

The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570): The Art and Craft of a Master Cook has been translated with commentary by Terence Scully. Scappi was the cook for cardinals and popes, wrote one of the most extensive cook books of his era which gives us a valuable perspective on Italian Renaissance food history. This is the first England translation of the work and Scully provides valuable context and comments. University of Toronto Press. ISBN: 0802096247 Hardcover, 787pp, $95.00. The book is described at this website page down a ways, and if you are interested in medieval cookery you will appreciate reading about the other books listed.

Gastropolis, Food and New York City, edited by Annie Hauck Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch

Gastropolis, Food and New York City, edited by our own Annie Hauck Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch has been published by Columbia University Press. The publisher describes it as an "irresistible sampling of the city's rich food heritage" that "explores the personal and historical relationship between New Yorkers and food." Chapters include:

"The Food and Drink of New York from 1624 to 1898"
"My Little Town: A Brooklyn Girl's Voice"
"The Chefs, the Entrepreneurs, and Their Patrons: The Avant-Garde Food Scene in New York City"
"Chow Fun City: Three Centuries of Chinese Cuisine in New York City"
"Hawkers and Gawkers: Peddling Markets in New York City"
"Livin' la Vida Sabrosa: Savoring Latino New York"
"From the Big Bagel to the Big Roti? The Evolution of New York City's Jewish Food Icons"
"Eating Out, Eating American: New York Restaurant Dining and Identity"

For more information you can also read the chapter "Fusion City: From Mt. Olympus to Puerto Rican Bagels and Beyond" an essay by our own Cara De Silva. Here are the details: publsihed November, 2008 Cloth, 368 pages, ISBN: 978-0-231-13653-2, $29.95 Columbia University Press, 61 W. 62nd Street, New York, NY 10023, 212.459.0600 ext. 7159.

America's Kitchens by Nancy Carlisle and Melinda Talbot Nasardinov

America's Kitchens by Nancy Carlisle and Melinda Talbot Nasardinov has been published, hooray. It is a luscious book, full of wonderful historic and current images of several centuries worth of kitchens from New England to the South to the Southwest. It's full of good solid, well-researched information. Oh, joy, oh joy.

After an introductory chapter, the book moves largely chronologically, beginning with the New England Hearth, 1720 to 1840, then the Southern Plantation, 1830 to 1860, followed by a chapter on cook stoves and servants, 1850 to 1890, then covers "Kitchens Along the Rio Grande, 1821 it 1912. The next chapter is the kitchen 1890 to 1945, then 1945 to the present comes last, tugging at the heart strings of those of us old enough to remember the 50s and 60s. No matter what era you are interested in, it is covered here and then you get the historical context to boot.

The book is the product of the research done to support what was to be a traveling exhibit created by Historic New England (formerly the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities). Sadly the exhibit was not funded to completion. Enroute to the exhibit and book, lots of our friends and colleagues helped out. Leni Sorensen advised on the plantation kitchens section. Cheryl Foote pitched in on the Southwest section. Donna Braden, Barbara Haber, Marcie Ferris, Laura Shapiro and many others contributed advice.

Tilbury House in Gardiner, Maine, is the publisher, 8700-582-1899, and here are the details: Publication date December 1; ISBN 978-0-88448-308-3, $34.95 in what is termed a deluxe paperback (very solid), 200 plus black and white and color illustrations. Put it on your Christmas wish list.

Milk by Anne Mendelson

Anne Mendelson's much anticipated (by me, at least) book on milk is out! I have a copy though I haven't read it all yet. I am so happy to know that finally a serious, careful researcher has tackled the topic, and that all those pesky questions about what is buttermilk anyway, and what is the deal on cheese, and all that are answered. I'll keep you posted as I read and let you know what I learn. Meanwhile, you can read food historian Rachel Lauden's take on the book here. Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages-Anne Mendelson. Hardcover. Knopf. 978-1-4000-4410-8 (1-4000-4410-3) | $29.95.

America Eats! On the Road with the WPA : The Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts that Define Real American Food by Pat Willard

Pat Willard's America Eats! On the Road with the WPA : The Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts that Define Real American Food is out. This is the food writing from the WPA (Works Progress Administration) Writers Project abandoned on the eve of World War II. Some of the material was stashed in the Library of Congress, and in various locations around the country. Pat went over a lot of it, then tracked down many of the events that are still being held in many places. This book is about what she found. Bloomsbury USA, $25.99. Visit Pat's website.

Feast,by Martin Jones

Feast, you will be pleased to know, by Martin Jones is available in paperback. This is a very fine piece of work on what archaeologists learned about people eating in groups, and is a fascinating read. Oxford University Press at $24.95 instead of the $49 needed for the hardcover. See the website.

The Spice Route by John Keay.

The Spice Route is one of several books on spices and their lore that have appeared in recent years. Written by John Keay, this is one from the University of California Press's California Studies in Food and Culture. I'll tell you, the guy has done his homework, and this book is a wickedly detailed piece of work on a mind-boggling topic. It is a rugged read, chock-full of unpronounceable nouns, and for those of us crippled by the American education system's weak preparation in world geography, a sentence like the following can reduce one to tears:

"To Barygaza comes cotton-cloth from Minnagara (Mandasor in Saurashtra) plus, courtesy of the trade-minded Shatavahanas, great wagon-trains of onyx and muslins from 'two important marts' in Dakshinabades (the Deccan), name Paithana (Paithan) and Tafgara (Ter.). More Himalaya spices are brought down from as far as Poklaius (Charsudda, near Peshawar) by way of Ozene (Ujjain), 'which was previously a seat of government.' In fact it was the capital of western India under the emperor Chandragupta and his Mauryan successors." (pg. 65.)

Right.

Keay has clearly tackled some very difficult sources, dealt with names that change over time, in ancient, obscure documents written in ancient languages. There are maps though not every place name appears on them. I have worked myself, slowly through 113 pages of 256 of text. I have absolutely thrilled to relations of some early spice-trade-driven maritime history. I hope as I work my way through I will derive more from the later chapters where I already have a working matrix that I can fit some of this material into. It hasn't been easy so far. This book is not for sissies or the impatient.

What I have learned so far is that the spice trade is much, much more ancient than we have previously imagined. That lots of things qualified in the trade besides pepper, ginger, and cloves, including incense, certain minerals, and cloth. That if you turn to even Roman and Greek sources for information about early spice trade, you can get in trouble because their information was pretty fuzzy; you have to look at much earlier stuff. Or at this book which does it for us. John Keay The Spice Route A History, California Studies in Food and Culture, 17, $40.00, hardcover 978-0-520-24896-0, available now. $16.95, paperback 978-0-520-25416-9, available now. http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10668.php - 19.7kb

Human Cuisinem edited by Gary Allen and Ken Albala

Cannibalism is for many an unsavory topic. As co-editors Gary Allen and Ken Albala note in the introduction to a Human Cuisine, discussion of eating our fellow human beings is likely to prompt nervous laughter: "Jokes are, in part, a way of hiding real anxiety about touchy subjects," they write. Ken and Gary have managed to assemble an anthology that no publisher was brave enough to take on, so they plan to self-publish.

Gary wrote: "Human Cuisine is an anthology of (mostly) new literary pieces about cannibalism. Short stories, essays, a poem, and part of a play explore different aspects of the subject treating it thoughtfully, playfully, frighteningly and sensitively. Approaches range from historical/mock historical, to Sci-Fi, and from memoir/confessional to sheer speculation. We were amazed by the quality and variety of works submitted. We've just seen the proofs, and were happy as those clams cited in the familiar proverb. You can find out more about the book at this website.

Spices and Comfits: Collected Papers on Medieval Food, Johanna Maria van Winter

Spices and Comfits: Collected Papers on Medieval Food has been released by Prospect Books, that venerable and dedicated publisher in England, headed by Tom Jaine. Johanna Maria van Winter is the author of the essays which address such topics as fasting and asceticism in the Middle Ages, fifteenth century invalid food, green salads in the Renaissance. Essentially the subjects are grouped into Medieval Food Habits, the Netherlands and their Neighbors; Fasting and Feasting, and Food and Health. There are twenty-eight essays in all, three indices (food and ingredients, persons, and places). Endnotes with bibliography appear at the end of chapters. Some essays, not many, are in French or German.

Ms. van Winter is a retired professor of Medieval History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She received her doctorate with work on the Knights Hospitallers if St. John of Jerusalem in the Netherlands, but she was always interested in food. I can't help wondering if she had been born thirty years later if she would not have merely addressed food history. She has been retired since 1989 and has continued research and writing.

Details: Prospect Books, hardback, ISBN 1-903018-45-5; 978-1-903018-45-5; 440 pages, 9 black and white illustrations, 2007. $80 US. You can order it from Oxbow Books or from Amazon, if you must.

Mouth Wide Open: A Cook and His Appetite, by John Thorne.

Mouth Wide Open: A Cook and His Appetite is another collection of our own John Thorne's lucid writing. He starts with marrow and ends with Fried Kielbasa-Casing Po'Boy (don't ask, you have to read it to get it) plus another chapter of book reviews. In between there are, of course, recipes, but with John Thorne, a food book isn't about the recipes but John's relationship to food, recipes, other cooks, the store, the time of day, professional chefs, and so on. One of the things I have always admired about John is what is simple about cooking and his newsletter Simple Cooking. John has favorite ways to fix many of the dishes he really enjoys, but he not doctrinaire about his approach to cooking and has a healthy skepticism about the various swings in food phobias and foibles. It is officially published today, by North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ISBN-13: 978-0-86547-628- and ISBN-10: 0-86547-628-4, and in hardcover at $26.00. Start here and do a search on the author name.

Imbibe!: From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar by David Wondrich

Imbibe!: From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar by David Wondrich is now available. This is both a recipe book for some classic American cocktails and a history of Jerry Thomas. Dave told me that he had a section on punches which were left out ultimately, though he hopes he can work them into some other work. We talked about how wonderful some of the old punches, (shrubs, Negus, Bishop, etc.) were and what an important part they played in American drink history, what with their rich material culture associations--all those punch bowls! This is bound to be a good piece of work. Lots of places have it, but here is the connection to dear old Powell's in Portland. ISBN13: 9780399532870 and ISBN10: 0399532870, Perigee Books, 317 pages, hardcover, $23.95.

Kitchen Literacy, How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get it Back by Ann Vileisis.

Kitchen Literacy, How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get it Back by Ann Vileisis appeared on my desk as so many new books do, but this one is different. Ann, who lives in Port Orford, OR, is new to food history, and proves to have a real instinct for it. She studied history and environment and her first book was a history of wetlands which introduced her to the history of agriculture, hence food. That, plus her mentor, William Cronin (Changes in the Land), who interested her in milling and meat packing, moved her towards examining the history of food from a consumers point of view, abut how food is the central aspect of our relationship with the world.

The first few chapters are a history of how "foodsheds" (think watersheds) changed over time. She begins by examining Maine midwife Martha Ballard's late 18th and early 19th century diary, observing where Martha reported her food came from and how she handled, stored, cooked it. She moves on into the 19th century and describes how commerce and industry changed our relationship to food, sometimes against consumers' instincts and better judgment, why and how the Pure Food and Drug laws were developed, and so on into the present where so much of our food comes from extraordinarily long distances. In particular she addresses the very tricky question of food for cities from the 19th century into the 20th.

The outstanding thing about this book is that Ann who has not immersed herself in food history until now, treads sure-footedly through the material and interprets it accurately. Not everyone who comes fresh to this field manages that. For example, she uses the Dreaded Beechers as a source but instead of accepting their advice as a description of what happened, she perceives the anxiety of the housewife in the kitchen trying to control the activity, and the ominous hovering that resulted. She reads the advertisements for canned foods and understands the odd combination of fear and reassurance that they conveyed: "be afraid of other people's products but trust ours."

I really like the way she brings food history to bear on the present. I have always felt that the past wasn't behind me as much as it swirls around me, that using good ideas from the past isn't regression but having a deeper menu of choices. Ann sees this, too, describing how ideas circle around again. She said in a conversation, "We may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater back there but we don't have to do that again." If we don't see what happened once we might not recognize when it happens again.

Go buy this book. Here is her website and book information. $26.95 ISBN 1-59726-373-7. It has an index, great pictures, and all that good stuff.

Food and the City in Europe since 1800 edited by Peter J. Atkins, Peter Lummel and Derek J. Oddy has been published by Ashgate. It contains several essays by European scholars, organized in four sections--Feeding the Multitude: Urbanization and nutrition; Food Regulation: Food fraud and the big city; Food Innovation; Eating Fashions: the consumer perspective. London, Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Corinna, Brussels, Prague, Amsterdam, Oslo, Bordeaux and others are represented, and canned milk, water porridge, turtle soup, festive meals, adulteration, immigrants and scientists are discussed. ISBN 978 0 7546 7989 2. Pages number 276. Price (sit down for this one�) $99.95. Send to Ashgatge, 101 Cherry St., Ste. 420, Burlington, VT, 05401; phone (802) 865-7641, (802) 865-7847; email is info@ashgate.com.

The United States of Arugula by David Kamp

The United States of Arugula: the Sun Dried, Cold Pressed, Dark Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution by David Kamp, comes recommended highly by our own Nancy Carter Crump. It is a solid little history of more recent American food habits. One thing Nancy said about it is that it really puts our current cookery into perspective. If you are a young food historian, say 35 or younger, it might be a really good thing to take a look at this book, in order to understand the great changes that have occurred over just your lifetime. Oddly enough, Arugula is categorized among Current Affairs books!

In his website, Kamp writes: "One of my stock lines in describing The United States of Arugula is that it's the story of "how we went from Velveeta and Wonder Bread to chevre and artisanal loaves."

US of Arugula is available in paperback now, from Broadway Books, at $26.00 ISBN 0-7679-1579-3. Trade Paperback, 416 pages.

Three Meals a Day, A Collection of Valuable and Reliable Recipes in All Classes of Cookery by Maud C. Cooke.

Three Meals a Day, A Collection of Valuable and Reliable Recipes in All Classes of Cookery, by Maud C. Cooke, originally published in 1890, Chicago by the Acme Publishing House, has been reprinted in facsimile by St. Johann Press in Haworth, New Jersey. The cookery section is full of familiarly user-friendly late 19th century recipes, there is a section of laying the table, and instructions for how to order serving the meal. A section devoted to hygiene and health may prove useful for living history museums recreating the time period.

I asked the publisher, David Biesel, why they chose this book. The story of its publication, is, I think interesting: This is what he wrote: "The book has an interesting history. It was given to me (David) by a friend of the family at a family get together in 1976 or 1977. He knew I was in publishing (Macmillian at the time) and he asked why couldn't publishers publish good books like Three Meals a Day. It had been in his family for a long time, shortly after publication. I looked at it, liked it, but realized that to reset, etc. would be expensive (remember this is 1970s) and probably not profitable. He gave me the copy (he was late 70s) and said maybe someday I could get it republished."

"Fast forward through my publishing career, �. In 1991, I decided to go out on my own as a 'book packager', Diane gave us the name St. Johann Press which is named for the old town section of Saarbrucken from where the Biesels came from in 1848 as saddlers to New York City. About 1998, John Spong (the now retired bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark) asked if we would be interested in reprinting his earlier works � and we said yes. Then if John Spong why not Maud Cooke? Thus started St. Johann Press as a book publisher."

"But without an author to call up and ask how are things going (I sent my pages back yesterday -- where is the book) the book took a slow road. It was in terrible shape, but our friends (35 years) at G&H Soho took it as a challenge to show what they could do with such a problem. (Including recreating words that were illegible by electronically "moving" other words or letters.) People ask what type of books do you publish (including our own family!) and Diane's response is "Books we like." (She is a retired school librarian.) Diane is a great cook and I love the "home economics" (look for the ringworm cure). We try to publish books that we call 'evergreen or archival.'"

It is available for $24.95 in paperback from St. Johann Press, 315 Schraalenburgh Rd., P. O. Box 241, Haworth, NJ, 07641. You can call them at 201-387-1529, or fax them at 201-501-0698. If you wish to reach the publishers by email, this is the address: d.biesel@att.net. ISBN #1-878282-02-6

Feast: Why Humans Share Food by Martin Jones

Feast: Why Humans Share Food by Martin Jones, professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Cambridge, England, points out that humans and their nearest relatives in the animal kingdom, share food socially instead of snapping and growling and stealing one another's food - well, at least after it is on the table. He brings the archaeologist's science to the topic, turning to ancient evidence of hearths and cooking, the behavior of chimpanzees, the development of tools for handling food, and the development of social customs. He believes that our habits of cooking and eating together advanced human capacity to evolve cultures.

Feast has proved to be a gripping read. Published by Oxford Univ. Press, it takes a very long view of humans eating together. It is a habit we have in common with certain of our wild relatives, and have engaged in at least half a million years, even before we learned to cook. He reports on the archaeological evidence, including the new and fascinating evidence that comes from sophisticated chemical analysis of residues in human bone and hair, in coprolites (fossilized feces), and in the traces of food oils, seeds, wine, found in pottery and around food storage places, early kitchens, milling equipment, and so on. Jones brings us up through time, interpreting scenarios imagined and recorded ones, derived from the artifacts uncovered with specific sites. The final chapter is about TV dinners. Of course, I don't know enough about the subject matter to be a very effective critical thinker but the book turned my mind around about a few things, always a useful experience.

Food and the City in Europe since 1800. Edited by Peter Atkins, Peter Lummel, and Derek J. Oddy.

Food and the City in Europe since 1800 is the proceedings of the 19th symposium of The International Commission for Research on European Food History, held in Berlin in 2005. Editors are Peter Atkins, Peter Lummel and Derek J. Oddy, to be published 5th July 2007 in Aldershot by Ashgate. International Standard Book Number: 0 7546 4989 X, price Price: 55. To place an order, please contact Bookpoint Ltd, Ashgate Publishing Direct Sales, 130 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4SB, United Kingdom, Tel:+44 (0) 1235 827730, Fax:+44 (0) 1235 400454.

The Herbalist in the Kitchen by Gary Allen.

Hebalist Gary Allen said, "it only took a dozen years or so to make it from initial research into print." It is The Herbalist in the Kitchen, 576 pages, 6 x 9 inches. 56 line drawings. Cloth, ISBN 0-252-03162-8. $65.00. You can purchase it here http://www.press.uillinois.edu/s07/allen.html. More information about it and even some samples are at this website. Check it out.

To read a British review of this book you can click here. Click here to order the book from Oxford Univ. Press of America. Here are the details: ISBN13: 9780199209019ISBN10: 0199209014 hardback, 368 pages, $35.00 (01) 368 pages; 40 halftones; 6-1/4 x 9-3/8; ISBN13: 978-0-19-920901-9ISBN10: 0-19-920901-4

Curry: a Tale of Cooks & Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham

Curry: a Tale of Cooks & Conquerors, by Lizzie Collingham (Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN-978-0-19-532001-5) is now available in paperback for $15.95. Our friend and subscriber Marian Walke commented on this book for us a while ago: "Collingham includes a wonderful collection of well-documented tidbits, including Eliza Acton's recipe for curry powder -- a decade after Mrs. Randolph (and MUCH milder!); the introduction of chillies and tomatoes into southern India by Portuguese traders before 1600; the difference between Indian, English, and Anglo-Indian "curry"; a brief exploration of ketchup; and the amazing (to me, at least) news that while coffee conquered Europe in the 17th century and tea in the 18th, the Indian subcontinent did not develop a taste for tea until the 20th century, and then only after a concerted marketing campaign by the British. Oh, yes, and the difficulties young Gandhi experienced as a law student trying to maintain a vegetarian diet in Victorian London. I highly recommend this book."

The Oxford Companion to American Food And Drink

The Oxford Companion to American Food And Drink has appeared in print. Remember the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink that came out a couple of years ago? Well, this is a concise form of that, with errors of the last one corrected and more entries. [One of the good things about publishing is that the author/editor gets corrections sent to them because people love to find mistakes and straighten out the author.] I expect that this will be useful to some of you, particularly those with a casual interest or a beginner's curiosity about things, but who cannot afford the big two volume set, since this one will see for an affordable $49. something, and even cheaper at Amazon. It may settle an argument, or provide a sentence of background for the food writer. People with a serious interest in a topic really must look beyond either of these two works, using the bibliographies suggested, to more specific and in-depth material. How do I know? Because I wrote some of the entries, and so I have a close up and personal familiarity with the project .

I keep saying this but no one pays attention. IF YOU ARE A FOOD WRITER, and want to say something about the history of a dish, do us a favor: buy this book -- it is not that expensive, and before you call, write, or email me or my food history colleagues with a question, look it up in this book. Because guess where I will look first if you ask me? Just think how quickly you can get an answer this way....deadline looming and all that. The Companion has 608 pages, lots of gorgeous illustrations, and will cost $49.95, (ISBN 1-978-0195307962 and ISBN 019-5307968 - obviously one a hardcover the other soft, but the promo material doesn't say which is which.

The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe by Ken Albala.

The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe by our own Ken Albala comes from the University of Illinois Press. Ken is another of those very industrious sorts, and with the work he has done on other aspects of Medieval and Renaissance food history, this is a natural product. The book covers Western Europe 1520 through 1660 and Ken describes the transition from the heavily spiced and ornamented dish of the Medieval to the lighter fare of the Renaissance. This is a nice companion, in its way, to Nichola Fletcher's Charlemagne's Tablecloth. Ken describes the story of the ingredients of the dishes served at banquets with their specific meanings in the period, the staging of the banquet, national habits, and addresses such fascinating details as the carver's responsibility to match the humors of the food and his master's flesh.

This is available in cloth, 248 pages, for $40, ISBN 978-0-252-03133-5. University of Illinois Press has been publishing their Food Series for a few years now. Apparently no ladies have submitted manuscripts to them for their consideration.

Military High Life: Elegant Food Histories and Recipes. Agostino von Hassell, Herm Dillon.

Military High Life: Elegant Food Histories and Recipes showed up at my house, a big gorgeous book with lots of stunning illustrations, written by Agostino von Hassell and Herm Dillon and published by University Press of the South, New Orleans. Right away I thought this is one for John Rees, FHN's official military food columnist, and so shipped it off to him for his comments. I didn't know that Darra Goldstein of Gastronomica, had in her wisdom also asked him to review it. So now John has two copies of a book he doesn't admire very much. Why not?

Basically, John found it wasn't carefully researched, is thin, unbalanced in content, and riddled with misinformation. A few examples of factual mistakes John gave include that it was not the Emperor Napoleon who offered a prize for the development of a way to preserve food that lead to Nicholas Appert inventing a canning method but the French Directorate in 1795. (And if truth be known, Appert based his invention on even earlier preserving techniques.) Or that awful old saw about pepperpot soup and the troops at Valley Forge. And long time readers of FHN will recognize the story behind the other old saw about "the army marches on its belly" being attributed to Napoleon but, as John wrote years ago for us, the actual source was probably Frederick the Great, who wrote, "Understand that the foundation of an army is the belly." And one of these days we will run a piece on that venerable item, portable soup, which John points out the authors of Military High Life claimed to have been "likely concocted under the command of Admiral Nelson." And there were other problems.

Alas, we have here another example of a publisher, the University Press of the South, who ought to know better, jumping on the food history bandwagon, but not taking food history seriously enough to help the authors do a really good job. This book could have been vetted (by our own John Rees) and come out minus at least some glaring errors and perhaps with some ideas how to cover the topic more adequately. Just because a university press publishes something doesn't mean it is necessarily reliable; we don't expect better from commercial houses. Ah, well. Buy the book because "part of the proceeds are being donated to the Samaritan Village Veterans Program, New York City to help feed some of the more than 240,000 U.S. homeless veterans" which (since the gummint clearly isn't up to the task) is a very good reason to pay $35. Give the book to someone with a vast interest in the military who might also like to cook, but make sure they have a short memory, Military High Life: Elegant Food Histories and Recipes. Agostino von Hassell, Herm Dillon. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2006. 162 pp. Illustrations. $34.95 (cloth). ISBN 1931948607. 1931948607

Fighting Old Nep: The Foodways of Enslaved Afro-Marylanders, 1634-1864, by Michael Twitty

Fighting Old Nep: The Foodways of Enslaved Afro-Marylanders, 1634-1864, by Michael Twitty, Director of Interpretation of the Menare Foundation Inc.'s living history project. From the information Michael sent comes this: "Fighting Old Nep is the only recent, comprehensive and full-length text to examine in depth the rise and development of African American cuisine in Maryland during slavery. An invaluable resource for culinary historians studying the foodways of Maryland, the Chesapeake, Upper South and Mid-Atlantic, and enthusiastic eaters interested in the legacy of African American foodways in American culture!" There are thirty-one recipes, mainly of lost dishes, plus those using heirloom crops, wild foods, that come from historic antebellum African American community traditions, for example Red Straw Persimmon Beer, Ashcakes in Poplar Leaves, Cow Horn Okra Soup, Fish Pepper Sauce, and Guinea Keat in Cabbage Leaves.

The book has 80 pages, traces specific ethnic links to West and Central Africa, the relationship between African foodways and those of Native America and Europe, the adjustment of African foodways in early Maryland and the development of Afro-Marylander cooking during The Peculiar Institution. The quotes, statistics, and n narratives drawn from over 50 primary and secondary sources. Michael says he includes sidebars about rice growing in Maryland, the real story behind yams vs. sweet potatoes, African contributions to Maryland agriculture and animal husbandry, plus the identity of Old Nep and how he inadvertently helped spark a national hero to fight to end slavery.

Ordering Information: Currently available for $7.00 (plus 2.50 shipping and handling) Living history museums can order books in blocks of 5, 40% discount per copy for gift shop sales. Mail order with check to Michael Twitty, 913 Maple Avenue, Rockville, Maryland 20851. For all inquiries including speaking engagements and larger orders, contact Michael at Proff97@aol.com. Preview copies for museums or cultural centers considering selling the book, are available in excerpt form in protected PDF format or may be purchased as directed above.

Turkey: An American Story by Andy Smith

The Turkey: An American Story by Andrew Smith has just been released in time for Thanksgiving. You'll note that Kathleen Curtin and I both blurbed the book for Andy, who, now that he is retired, is churning books out faster than ever before. This is one of three more or less just out. Now the good thing about Andy is that he is not stuck in the perfectionist's trap of never saying anything until he is dead certain of it. He figures that if he is wrong someone will let him know, and they do, and he always footnotes things so that if your find your eyebrows rising you can always go look for yourself. Turkey is another in his series of single topic books that comprise a group portrait he is working towards, he says. It is good topic and this book certainly straightens out some common misconceptions. Published by University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2006.

The Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food, by Andy Smith

Andy also has out The Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food. This is another Greenwood Book, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006, and I hope every foodwriter and newspaper food reporter all across the country will buy this so that they will have at their fingertips the scoop on everything from chips to Twinkies. Those "who invented the Devil Dog" questions drive me up the wall even as I am aware that these are the foods that we all have in common no matter where in the country we live, or what our ethnic background is, or what social class we belong to. I just don't warm up to the topic and now I have a place to send them, hurrah.

Andy also has out Real American Food: Restaurants, Markets, and Shops Plus Favorite Hometown Recipes with Burt Wolf. New York: Rizzoli, 2006. You can visit Andy's website here.

The Encyclopedia of Cajun and Creole Cuisine by John Folse

John Folse published one heck of a tome back a while, entitled The Encyclopedia of Cajun and Creole Cuisine. I suppose folks in Louisiana have heard of it, but somehow I missed out on it, possibly because it was published by Folse's own publishing company, and because it is a huge, picture filled thing, unlikely to be bought casually by bookstore to have on hand in case someone might want it. It appears to me to be a thorough going examination of Louisiana's distinctive cookery. It was my pleasure to learn about this book from an interesting Louisiana native I met on Nantucket last week, Donna Leigh Emden, with whom I cooked for an event I spoke at. Donna Leigh and I had a grand time whipping up a few historic fish dishes including a couple out of Hannah Glasse, a lobster sauced baked codfish, and broiled oysters on the half shell, plus good old Yankee salt cod fish cakes made in appetizer size.

Folse's book was published by Chef John Folse and Company Publishing, 2517 South Phillippe Ave., Gonzales, LA, 70737, www.jfolse.com. Phone 225-644-6000.

A Handbook of Food Processing in Classical Rome by David L. Thurmond.

A Handbook of Food Processing in Classical Rome by David L. Thurmond is available or will be soon from Brill. If you have money to spend, I bet this one is going to be a tad more useful than Cooking with the Bible. The description says that it is "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." The emphasis is on grains, olive oil, and wines. Here is the content of Chapter One, Cereals: "Roman Cereal Grains, Parching, Threshing, Winnowing, Ensilage, Braying of Porridge Grains, Milling of Bread Grains, Bolting, Breadmaking, Leavening, Kneading." I hope the author got around to baking, too, but you can see the drift. David L. Thurmond received the Ph.D. in Classical Philology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992. Research interests include archaic Roman religion, Roman social history, and Greek and Roman technology. He currently resides in Durham, NC. ISBN: 90 04 15236 9. See the website.

Cooking with the Bible: Biblical Food, Feasts, and Lore by Anthony Chiffolo and The Rev. Dr. Rayner W. Hesse, Jr.

is a new product from Greenwood Press. Pardon my cynicism, but to me it looks aimed at religious home schoolers. The description of the book says, "Since biblical times, the Judeo-Christian lifestyle has centered on meals. Extending hospitality to both friends and strangers was a divine command, and an invitation to dine was sacred." Eighteen meals are featured and then a brief essay describing the theological, historical, and cultural significance of the feast follows. Next come separate recipes for the dishes served in the meal, followed by more commentary on the dish itself, preparation methods used in biblical times, how the dish was served, and the lore surrounding individual ingredients and dishes. The recipes are modified for modern people, with use of modern appliances, ingredients, etc. Chapters include the following: Entertaining Angels Unaware, Esther Saves Her People, Jesus Dines with the Pharisee, and Joseph Dines with His Brothers, The authors are Anthony Chiffolo and The Rev. Dr. Rayner W. Hesse, Jr. who have both published on religious topics, but not food history. As usual, Greenwood wants a lot for this book: $75 to be precise. ISBN: 0-313-33410-2. 416 pages, photos, maps. Greenwood Press, Publication Date: 10/30/2006.

I realize this is excessively grumpy of me, but I would like to point out that it was not just the Judeo-Christian "life-style"---man, I hate that word---that centered on meals, but rather it has been the human condition, all cultures, for most of recorded and unrecorded time, that centered on meals.

Curry: a Tale of Cooks & Conquerors, by Lizzie Collingham

There are curry recipes in the current FHN, in the piece on Northern/Southern seasonings. Longtime subscriber Marian Walke wrote to say she enjoyed the article and further said, "I have since been reading Curry: a Tale of Cooks & Conquerors, by Lizzie Collingham (Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN-13: 9780195172416 and ISBN-10: 0195172418)." For a Times review of the book check this out.

Marian goes on: "Collingham includes a wonderful collection of well-documented tidbits, including Eliza Acton's recipe for curry powder -- a decade after Mrs Randolph (and MUCH milder!); the introduction of chillies and tomatoes into southern India by Portuguese traders before 1600; the difference between Indian, English, and Anglo-Indian "curry"; a brief exploration of ketchup; and the amazing (to me, at least) news that while coffee conquered Europe in the 17th century and tea in the 18th, the Indian subcontinent did not develop a taste for tea until the 20th century, and then only after a concerted marketing campaign by the British. Oh, yes, and the difficulties young Gandhi experienced as a law student trying to maintain a vegetarian diet in Victorian London. I highly recommend this book."

Hearth and Home: Women and the Art of Open Hearth Cooking by Fiona Lucas.

Fiona Lucas, long time friend of and subscriber to FHN, plus a co-founder of the Culinary Historians of Ontario, accomplished hearth cook, and all-round good egg, has a book. This may very well be the just the ticket to keep new or would be food historians with no hearth cooking experience out of as much trouble as they would get into without it. Entitled Hearth and Home: Women and the Art of Open Hearth Cooking was published in June by Lorimer. You can see it here. The description says, "Today the fireplace with its crackling logs is a romantic icon representing the heart of the home, but not so long ago its role was much more than symbolic. A hearth or fireplace was an essential first fixture in Canadian homes and its warmth sustained the family in many ways. Whether in a longhouse, a fishing shack, a log cabin, a manor home, or on a thriving farm, the kitchen was the main workplace of Canadian women within family centred households for generations. Its central feature is the focal point of Hearth and Home, a social history that evokes the sights, smells, and tastes of historic kitchens. This book tells the story of the women who worked back-breaking hours tending the fire and using its energy with skill and resourceful creativity to nourish their families or feed a hungry fort. Fiona Lucas, culinary historian and practiced hearth cook, synthesizes the shared experience of the family cook across decades and cultures, along the way introducing readers to fascinating dishes such as the hedgehog pudding and tools such as the salamander and the spider. The text is illustrated with photographs from historic sites including Black Creek Pioneer Village, Louisbourg, Kings Landing, Upper Canada Village, and many others. This is a book that will appeal to readers of Canadian history, and to anyone who has puzzled over the now unusual kitchen tools once common in 19th-century homes."

There is a nice interview with Fiona here at Spadina House one of several historic sites in Toronto where Fiona works as a historian and does much staff training in historic cookery. Here are the details: paperback, 72 pages, Lorimer, 2006, ISBN: 1550289217, $19.95.

The Blue Grass Cook Book, by Minnie C. Fox's 1904, with a introduction by Toni Tipton-Martin.

The Blue Grass Cook Book, a reprint of Minnie C. Fox's 1904 compilation, has just been published by The University Press of Kentucky, with a fine new introduction by Toni Tipton-Martin. University Press information reports, "In Fox's time, the culinary history of black women in the South was usually characterized by demoralizing portraits of servants toiling in "big house" kitchens. In contrast, The Blue Grass Cook Book, with its photographs of African American cooks at work and a passionate introduction by Fox's brother, respected Kentucky novelist John Fox Jr., reveals the vital role of black cooks in the preparation and service required to establish the well-known tradition of Southern hospitality." Ms. Martin provides biographical information about the Fox family, and puts the book into well-balanced social and historical persepctive. The cookbook is a good description of Kentucky (and generally Southern) cookery of the last third or so of the 19th century. Illustrated with wonderfully dignified, black and white photographs of black cooks as they go about their work, it was orginally introduced by Minnie's brother John Fox, Jr., the novelist, whose essay is also included. ISBN 0-8131-2381-X, in cloth, $29.95, 448 pages. Univ. Press of Kentucky, 663 South Limestone St., Lexington, KY 40508-4008, and here on the web.

Putting Meat on the American Table by Roger Horowitz

Putting Meat on the American Table by Roger Horowitz landed here this week. The subtitle is "Taste, Technology, Transformation," and there are chapters on beef, pork, hot dogs, chicken, and convenience meat. Lots of footnotes, suggested further reading and an index. I haven't read it yet, but it has a reliable look to it, and was blurbed by people who know what they are talking about. The book has been published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Details: $35.00 hardcover, ISBN 0-8018-8240-0, 2005, 192 pp. 29 halftones, 8 line drawings. $19.00 for the paperback, ISBN 0-8018-8241-9.

Bones:Recipes, History, and Lore by Jennifer McLagan

Bones are not sufficiently valued--certainly not as they were in the past. A couple years ago or so, Jennifer McLagan emailed and asked me if I knew anything aobut the wishbone ceremony. I didn't. Still don't, though if I buy and read her new book, Bones: Recipes, History, and Lore, I might find out. You can see it here. I recall seeing marrow spoons in a silver display at Colonail Willaimsburg a number of yers ago, and thought then what a difference in attitudes now towards bones and marrow. The idea of eating marrow today makes some moderns retch, but people in the past appreciated the unctousness so much. All good cooks know that bone carries flavor.

The Pineapple: King of Fruits by Francesca Beauman

Pineapples was Francesca Beauman's passion, and the cause of an email inquiry here a couple years ago, too. Her book is now out, and she emailed to tell me about it: "Just to let you know that my book about the history of the pineapple, entitled The Pineapple: King of Fruits, was published last week by Chatto & Windus, priced �16.99. It's available in most U.K. bookshops. Alternatively, for those outside the U.K., it's at this website." This is sure to be a good addition to the food biography literature.

La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. St. Ange: The Original Companion for French Home Cooking, translated by Paul Aratow.

La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. St. Ange: The Original Companion for French Home Cooking, translated by Paul Aratow and published by Ten Speed Press. Written by housewife and professional chef Evelyn St. Ange in 1927, it guided cooks like Julia Child and Madeleine Kammen through classic French cookery. It contains 1300 recipes for all the basics, like Coq au Vin, Quiche Lorraine, and Cassoulet, has the original instructional illustrations. ISBN 1-58008-605-5, $40 I hardcover, 800 !! pages. It will be released in December. Check it out here at Ten Speed.

Cornbread Nation's #3: Foods of the Mountain South. Ronni Lundy, editor.

Foods of the Mountain Southis Cornbread Nation's #3 offering. Ronni Lundy is the editor of this collection of 40 pieces, including poems, stories and essays on food of the Appalachians, Ozarks, and "hillbilly diaspora." I always look forward to Cornbread Nation, published by the Southern Foodways Alliance which is doing so much to gather and preserve information about traditional Southern cookery. University of North Carolina Press publishes it for SFA. Look for ISBN 0-8078-5656-8, at a reasonable $17.95 in paperback.

Cornucopia, Being a Kitchen Entertainment and Cookbook, appears to be a kind of salad of recipes, food lore, and facts drawn from the Huntington Library's rare book collections by Judith Herman and Marguerite Shalett Herman. The press information sent out included a few pages, appropriately enough for this time of year, about pumpkins. Included were the rhyme "Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater," and descriptions from the 1896 Smiley's Cook Book, and William Rhind's 1842 History of the Vegetable Kingdom, plus Josselyn's recipes for "New England's Ancient Standing Dish," that is, stewed pumpkin, plus a pumpkin butter recipe from the 1890s Maude Cooke, Three Meals a Day. Then we have Mrs. Rorer's directions for drying pumpkins, plus Charles Ranshoffer's directions for pumpkin fried in small sticks from 1894, and lastly three pie recipes from Hannah Wooley's 1673, to the Guide to Service, 1842, and finally The New Hydropathic Cook-Book, 1869. If I had to guess, this book is going to be most useful as a omnium gatherum for food writers and publicists who always need fun facts, and a great fun read for anyone interested in food. Because there are no page numbers, publishers or any of the rest of that citation stuff a lot of us need, it might be useful to the more serious food historian as a key to sources or an introduction to a topic. University of California Press, ISBN 087328-213-2, hardback at $29.95, for 318 pages prettily illustrated and designed.

Appalachian Home Cooking: History, Culture and Recipes by Mark F. Sohn

Appalachian Home Cooking: History, Culture and Recipes by Mark F. Sohn

Appalachian Home Cooking: History, Culture and Recipes written by Mark F. Sohn, and published by the University Press of Kentucky, it is another book dedicated to a regional foodway. I am going to read it eagerly in order to see what is distinctive about Appalachia because, listen to this, this is how the press release begins: "Biscuits and gravy, chicken and dumplings, cornbread, green beans, fried chicken, apple pie....These foods and many others are at the heart of _______________" --- well, in this case, Appalachian home cooking. My challenge to you is, how else might you have ended that sentence??? My friend Sharon from Missouri would have said, "Missouri home cooking!" I hope we get lots of books like this so we can do an honest to goodness cheek by jowl comparison of all our various "regional" cookeries to see what we have in common and what is truly different among us. Meanwhile, you will like this book, too, full of lore, history, and recipes. ISBN 0-8131-9153-X, paper, $26.00. The University Press of Kentucky is here.

Libro de arte coquinaria by Maestro Martino, translated by Gillian Riley

Maestro Martino's Libro de arte coquinaria is available on CD ROM. This is interesting, probably ideal for people with small apartments or few bookcases. Octavo produces this, and it and reports that it is "undoubtedly one of the most important surviving cookery books of the Renaissance. His recipes presage modern practices in many respects, and his cuisine had an enduring influence on European cooking. The Octavo Edition of this manuscript from the Library of Congress includes a commentary and English translation by Gillian Riley, a foreword by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, and essays by Bruno Laurioux and Paul Shaw. Available on CD-ROM (ISBN 1-891788-83-3). US$40." Check it out here.

Mistresses of the Transient Hearth by Robin Campbell

Robin Campbell, a very long time subscriber, has just seen her book into print. Entitled Mistresses of the Transient Hearth, it is the story of early American military wives who lugged their crockery and cookery all over the country following their husbands from one post to another. Robin earned her PhD with this work, and there are chapters about all aspects of domestic life, including clothing and furnishing. The chapters on food and cooking, dining and entertaining, are, of course, the ones we are most enthusiastic about and Robin has done a great job with them. We see in these accounts that army wives being transferred around the country, often to difficult posts, stayed in touch with people at home, kept up on the latest fashions, and did all they could to maintain an accustomed style. Their choices tell us what the mainstream valued, and are very informative.

This book is in the Studies in American Popular History and Culture Series published by Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0-415-97360-0; 192 pages, illustrations. List Price: $70.00. You can order it here. Or call 1-800-634-7064.

Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South, by Marcie Cohen Ferris

Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South, by our own Marcie Cohen Ferris, has just come out, the culmination of Marcie's dissertation work plus. Marcie, who grew up in Arkansas, began this study with an interest in her grandmother's recipes boxes where she noticed connections between Jewishness and Southerness, besides many family and friendship connections. The great strength of this book is that Marcie looked long and hard at the evidence of Jewish acculturation to living in the South, and observed the patterns that emerged. The book will have lasting value because of its authentic point of view. There is no forced grand theory of Jewish Southern cooking here, but rather a graceful description of what truly happened. Great illustrations, some recipes, oral history, and revealing annecdotes enrich the book.

Good old University of North Carolina Press came through with this one, ISBN 0-8078-2978-1, cloth, 344 pages, $29.95, available afer October 10. FMI check here. And Marcie has a blog you can check out as well.

Culinary Cultures of Europe: Identity, Diversity and Dialogue

The book Culinary Cultures of Europe: Identity, Diversity and Dialogue is just out, edited by Darra Goldstein and Kathrin Merkle. The announcement says: "There is nothing trivial about food: the study of culinary culture and its history provides an insight into broad social, political and economic changes in society. The present 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. The tastes and smells of a country�s traditional table are a meaningful route to an important part of its collective memory, accessible to everyone. Food is also one of the simplest and most direct ways to promote multicultural understanding. This book offers an excellent insight into the meaning of food culture and will be of interest to anyone who wishes to explore the diversity of our European cultural heritage."

Then they quote Tom Jaine, publisher, Petits Propos Culinaires and Prospect Books, whose judgement we trust: "We have ever identified our neighbours and friends by their culinary customs: here, in one book, is a ground breaking study, bringing to one table the infinity of dishes that make Europe today," he says. Hardcover, 500 pages! ISBN : 92-871-5744-8. Price 49 �/ 75 $ + 10% postage. (Gulp). Order here published by Council of Europe Publishing, Palais de l'Europe, 67075 Strasbourg Cedex, France.

Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa

The food of Sub-Saharan Africa is Fran Osseo-Asare's topic in the Greenwood Press's Food Culture Around the World series edited by our Ken Abala. I met Fran a few years ago at an IACP conference, and she told me of her interest in the topic, which thank goodness, she has been able to engage for all our benefits. Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa was released in June, and Fran's task was to cover 47 countries!! --- she took the regional approach, and like all the books in the series she covers historical and geographical features, major foods and ingredients, cooking techniques and equipment, social relations and food, typical and special occasion meals, and diet and health concerns. Now, I am going to cross my fingers that Fran will have the energy and live long enough to do a more exhaustive work on that territory than the Greenwood book can encompass. She is at work now on The Good Soup Comes from the Good Earth, a book about the regional cooking of Ghana. Please also visit her website, www.betumi.com.

Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Fran Osseo-Assare, Hardback, 224 pages, list price $49.95, ISBN 0-313-32488-3. (Hardback doesn't begin to describe it: these books can be dropped from a ten story window in front of a speeding semi and come out of it unscathed: they have a special library binding; that's why they cost so much.) Now, to buy the book you will have to go to the Greenwood website or call 1-800-225-5800. Greenwood thinks its market is libraries, schools, etc., and hasn't tumbled to the fact that there are tons of us out there passionately interested in this stuff, who would like to go to our friendly local independent bookstore and buy these books.

Food Culture in Russia and Central Asia

Glenn Mack and Asele Surina's Food Culture in Russia and Central Asia. Our own Glenn is a food historian who trained in the culinary arts in Uzbekistan, Russia, Italy, and the United States. He is the Director of Education for the Culinary Academy of Austin and founded the Historic Foodways Group of Austin. He co-authored this book with his wife Asele, a Russian native and former journalist who now works as a translator and interpreter, and as the family archaeologist has worked at the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Texas on joint projects with an archaeological museum in Crimea, Ukraine. This is another in the Greenwood series, which you can see at this link.

BTW Jackie Newman did the series book on China and Laura Mason did England. The other authors names in the group do not sound familiar to me, but I trust Ken's judgement. There are now 12 in all, and they all cost $50. So you could drop $600 and have a complete beginner's guide to the food cultures of the world, but there are more to come, I am sure.

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