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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
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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.
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