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Loading... Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking (2007)by Kate Colquhoun
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. An absolutely fantastic history of food in England, beginning in the Stone Age up through the ages as the British learned to cook and refine ingredients. ( ) It might seem trite to say so but this book is a delicious read. Through beautifully written prose the author takes the reader on a comprehensive review of British history through its food, fashions in eating and cookery. It helps if you are already a history reader and have some additional knowledge of the periods and characters from history that Kate uses to illustrate her points (including those of my beloved Pepys) and of the culinary art itself. But even read as a straightforward historical account it is a valuable read. Highly recommended. Comprehensive look at British history through its food. This does a good job of explaining how different events and societal influences affected what food was available, and has plenty of details and footnotes. The one major flaw is that there is so much information that I sometimes found it hard to keep track of which foods were popular when.
Of course, the evidence for what much earlier people ate is not in tidy records such as recipe books, but the archaeological record and agricultural history. Colquhoun recognises this, and has a few pages on prehistory, a good deal on the evidence of diet in Roman times, and still more on that of the Middle Ages. Until the first real English cookery book, The Forme of Cury, compiled around 1390 by the cooks of Richard II, we can't, broadly speaking, really have a history of cooking, only a history of growing or importing food and its consumption. Colquhoun comes into her own when the written record starts to include recipes. The spices that disappeared from the British diet when the Romans left returned with the Crusaders - and were used because of their flavour, not (in the long-discredited shibboleth) to disguise tainted meat. She says: 'If so much about the European Middle Ages seems bewilderingly remote, contemporary Moroccan food, robust and subtle by degrees, broadly unchanged for centuries, offers a hint of our own culinary past.'
Chronicles the social history of Britain through the evolution of its food, tracing the development of aristocratic tastes and street food across the country from pre-Roman times to the present day. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)641.5941Technology Home and family management Food And Drink Cooking, cookbooks Cooking characteristic of specific geographic environments, ethnic cooking Europe British IslesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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