Purchase

Amazon

Kindle

Barnes & Noble

Powell's Books

Books-A-Million

Indie BookShop

Ripped Bodice

Add to Wish List

Also by Rachel Laudan:

Cuisine And Empire, November 2013
Hardcover / e-Book

Cuisine And Empire
Rachel Laudan

Cooking in World History

University of California Press
November 2013
On Sale: November 10, 2013
488 pages
ISBN: 0520266455
EAN: 9780520266452
Kindle: B00FAI6XEY
Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List

Non-Fiction History | Non-Fiction Cooking / Food

Rachel Laudan tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world’s great cuisines—from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present—in this superbly researched book. Probing beneath the apparent confusion of dozens of cuisines to reveal the underlying simplicity of the culinary family tree, she shows how periodic seismic shifts in “culinary philosophy”—beliefs about health, the economy, politics, society and the gods—prompted the construction of new cuisines, a handful of which, chosen as the cuisines of empires, came to dominate the globe.

Cuisine and Empire shows how merchants, missionaries, and the military took cuisines over mountains, oceans, deserts, and across political frontiers. Laudan’s innovative narrative treats cuisine, like language, clothing, or architecture, as something constructed by humans. By emphasizing how cooking turns farm products into food and by taking the globe rather than the nation as the stage, she challenges the agrarian, romantic, and nationalistic myths that underlie the contemporary food movement.

Comments

No comments posted.

Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!