From the prehistoric era to the present, food culture has helped to define civilizations. This reference surveys food culture and cooking from antiquity to the modern era, providing background information along with menus and recipes. Food culture has been central to world civilizations since prehistory. While early societies were limited in terms of their resources and cooking technology, methods of food preparation have flourished throughout history, with food central to social gatherings, celebrations, religious functions, and other aspects of daily life. This book surveys the history of cooking from the ancient world through the modern era. The first volume looks at the history of cooking from antiquity through the Early Modern era, while the second focuses on the modern world. Each volume includes a chronology, historical introduction, and topical chapters on foodstuffs, food preparation, eating habits, and other subjects. Sections on particular civilizations follow, with each section offering a historical overview, recipes, menus, primary source documents, and suggestions for further reading. The work closes with a selected, general bibliography of resources suitable for student research.

A year's worth of fascinating menus from significant occasions in history around the world offer a thoroughly delightful way to learn more about noteworthy events and people, social classes, and morés. Menus from History: Historic Meals and Recipes for Every Day of the Year offers a fascinating exploration of dining history through historic menus from more than 35 countries. Ranging from discussion of a Roman banquet in A.D. 70 to a meal for former South African President Nelson Mandela in the 1990s, the menus offer students and general readers a thoroughly delightful way to learn more about events and the cultures in which they occurred. Royal feasts, soldier grub, shipboard and spaceship meals, and state dinners are just some of the occasions discussed. Arranged chronologically, each entry covers a day of the year and provides a menu from a significant meal that took place. An entry begins with the name, location, and date of the event, plus a brief explanation of its significance. Next comes the menu, followed by an analysis and, where possible, several recipes from the menu.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The definitive cookbook on French cuisine for American readers: "What a cookbook should be: packed with sumptuous recipes, detailed instructions, and precise line drawings. Some of the instructions look daunting, but as Child herself says in the introduction, 'If you can read, you can cook.'" —Entertainment Weekly “I only wish that I had written it myself.” —James Beard Featuring 524 delicious recipes and over 100 instructive illustrations to guide readers every step of the way, Mastering the Art of French Cooking offers something for everyone, from seasoned experts to beginners who love good food and long to reproduce the savory delights of French cuisine. Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle break down the classic foods of France into a logical sequence of themes and variations rather than presenting an endless and diffuse catalogue of dishes—from historic Gallic masterpieces to the seemingly artless perfection of a dish of spring-green peas. Throughout, the focus is on key recipes that form the backbone of French cookery and lend themselves to an infinite number of elaborations—bound to increase anyone’s culinary repertoire. “Julia has slowly but surely altered our way of thinking about food. She has taken the fear out of the term ‘haute cuisine.’ She has increased gastronomic awareness a thousandfold by stressing the importance of good foundation and technique, and she has elevated our consciousness to the refined pleasures of dining." —Thomas Keller, The French Laundry

From the prehistoric era to the present, food culture has helped to define civilizations. This reference surveys food culture and cooking from antiquity to the modern era, providing background information along with menus and recipes. Food culture has been central to world civilizations since prehistory. While early societies were limited in terms of their resources and cooking technology, methods of food preparation have flourished throughout history, with food central to social gatherings, celebrations, religious functions, and other aspects of daily life. This book surveys the history of cooking from the ancient world through the modern era. The first volume looks at the history of cooking from antiquity through the Early Modern era, while the second focuses on the modern world. Each volume includes a chronology, historical introduction, and topical chapters on foodstuffs, food preparation, eating habits, and other subjects. Sections on particular civilizations follow, with each section offering a historical overview, recipes, menus, primary source documents, and suggestions for further reading. The work closes with a selected, general bibliography of resources suitable for student research.

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.

This richly illustrated book applies the discoveries of the new generation of food historians to the pleasures of dining and the culinary accomplishments of diverse civilizations, past and present. Freedman gathers essays by French, German, Belgian, American, and British historians to present a comprehensive, chronological history of taste.