What role sugar and salt played in world culture – and other important questions
Felipe Fernández-Armesto. “Near a Thousand Tables. A History of Food” (2002)
Food history is a relatively new discipline, and no perfect introduction to the subject has yet been written. However, almost every research paper writer has encountered such an assignment. We are sure that your college essay will not be without the subject of food. Therefore, this article will be a good refresher for you.
The book About a Thousand Tables is one of the few books on the subject that adheres to a certain methodology and has its own internal logic. The author is an Oxford historian who has previously written short biographies of religion, human civilization, and separately of the last millennium, so he knows how to squeeze huge topics into modest volumes (this book is only 200 pages). His history of food is the story of eight revolutions.
The invention of cooking over a fire, which may have turned the monkey into a man. The transformation of food into a magical ritual. The emergence of farming and cattle breeding. The birth of inequality, which led to the emergence of haute cuisine.
- The first cross-cultural journeys of food, from the first experiences with foreign foods to the great post-Columbian migrations of plants from continent to continent.
- And finally, the industrialization and globalization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This not-so-obvious division comes with a host of caveats, and there is a separate, far more compelling book on each of the topics.
- For example, about the food of the ancients, “Lighting the Fire. How Cooking Made Us Human” by Richard Rangem (it is available in Russian, though the print run seems to have sold out long ago), and about globalization and food travel – “A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization. But as a brief, upbeat, and no-nonsense introduction, “Near a Thousand Tables” is excellent.
Massimo Montanari. “Hunger and Abundance. A History of Food in Europe” (2009)
This brilliant study by the Italian medieval historian focuses on how the food habits of Europeans evolved. For Montanari, this is primarily a history of alternating hungry and more or less abundant eras, of gastronomic freezes and thaws. Binary oppositions are his favorite device: wine culture – beer culture, forest – city, aristocratic – common people, honey – sugar, olive oil – butter. He does not forget to look back to the 21st century: what today is considered a healthy and prestigious food – herbs, vegetables, wholemeal bread – in the Middle Ages was the food of the poor, and the fashion for seasonal dishes is not a return to the roots, but on the contrary, the elite consumption that finally became available.
- Traditional food, on the other hand, which everyone once ate, was food that had been stored for a long time: stale bread, stone chestnuts, corned beef. “Fresh food in season is a luxury that has only now appeared on most people’s tables. <…> The poor taste of convenience foods and the depressing monotony of certain types of fast food reproduce better than the ‘flavors of the seasons’ of the food culture from which we mostly come.
The most interesting thing about the history of food, however, cannot be fully explained either by the hungry years or by historical circumstances.
- The “mutation of taste” that occurred between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when olive oil was universally replaced by butter in Europe, all the ancient sauces were forgotten, and the pungent, spicy and lean medieval cuisine was replaced by fat and restrained cuisine, seems a mystery even to Montanari himself. This is just a bizarre caprice of gastronomic fashion – one of those for which you can think of a dozen explanations, and they all turn out to be only partly true. In Russian there is also a wonderful history of Italian cuisine, written by Montanari in collaboration with the linguist Alberto Cappati (“Italian Cuisine. A History of One Culture”); and in French and English there is a large-scale, though very Eurocentric, history of food in general that he compiled with the historians Jean-Louis Flandren and Albert Sonnenfeld.
Michael Krondl. “Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert” (2011)
Sugar occupies a special place in the study of food history. This interest fits in perfectly with the postcolonial studies and the relatively recent worldwide sugar craze: perhaps the only other place where more attention has been given to sugar is spices (see for example the remarkable work by the same author, “The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice.) “Sweet Invention” stands apart in the list of sugar biographies because of its emphasis on desserts, the most optional, unhelpful and, until recently, expensive part of our diet. There’s a lot missing here, such as leaving out almost all of Asia’s sweet history, but all the key countries and heroes are there.
- From ancient India, where an early version of refined sugar was invented (the Sanskrit “sarkara” inherits the name sugar in most European languages, from there the Persian “shakar” and the Arabic “sukkar”), through Middle Eastern syrupy rivers to the French and Italian sugar monblanches, Vienna strudels and finally Pierre Hermé’s cupcakes and macaroons. Perhaps the most curious part is about the early history of sweets, with recipes for the sacred candies that were fed to the pigeons in the temples of the goddess Ishtar.
Eric C. Rath. “Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan” (2010)
The American researcher tells the story of Japanese food from 1400-1860, based on what the Japanese did not eat, or rather, what they did not eat. Japanese gastronomic culture is quite full of these things, from inedible snacks-rebukes to conventionally edible sculptures at ceremonial banquets, which were meant to be viewed rather than eaten. And this is not a story of food taboos (of which the Japanese also had plenty) – it is a story of the gap between archival descriptions of food and real food practices, which not everyone realizes; of fantasies and hallucinations, of rivers of milk and acidic shores, without which the art of gastronomy does not exist. This book shows in great detail that the historical descriptions of fantastical banquets and supernatural recipes by which medieval Japanese aristocratic cuisine is commonly judged have little to do with how the daimyo actually ate and the Shogun.
- The way the author extracts absurdist recipes from banquet menus and reference books, which obviously no one cooked with, in itself, pulls on a real culinary detective. The result is the best book on Japanese food in the world (much more curious than Naomichi Ishige’s textbook The History and Culture of Japanese Food) – and hardly the best introduction to Japanese aesthetics and culture.
Mark Kurlansky. “A General History of Salt” (2007)
There are too many mono-studies devoted to any particular edible object. Reaktion Books’ “Edible” series alone already has 64 volumes, from the history of apples to the history of edible flowers. “A General History of Salt” by Mark Kurlansky is one of the best examples of the genre; not so much an adventure of salt as an attempt to look at the fate of humanity through a salt crystal.
- “Divine substance” (Homer), universal currency, powder for divination practices and oaths, preservation agent (notably, all Egyptian mummies are well salted), flavor enhancer, substance that can create and destroy empires: salt for Kurlansky is the lever by which he energetically piles the whole of world history on the scales.
- It all has as much to do with food as it does with economics or chemistry (and on Amazon, it’s even a bestseller in the Geology section), but that’s what makes the book good. Kurlansky’s biography of cod (which, of course, “changed the world”) is also worth reading.
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