A History of Cooks and Cooking - Softcover

Symons, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903018072 ISBN 13: 9781903018071

Verlag: Prospect Books, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Named Best Culinary History Book at the Salon International du Livre Gourmand (Fifth World Cookbook Fair) Winner, Bronze Ladle in the Best Food Book division, World Food Media Awards 'Man is the Cooking Animal', said the biographer James Boswell. This sentiment is the foundation of a remarkable and innovative approach to human history by the Australian food critic and historian, Michael Symons. First published in Australia as The Pudding that Took a Thousand Cooks this is a stimulating reinterpretation of human history through the prism of the kitchen. Most food books are prescriptive, telling what or how to eat, or they analyse some minute aspect of the feeding process. This, by contrast, touches everyone's lives, and our perception of our past. Fueled by James Boswell's sentiments, Symons sets out to explore the civilizing role of cooks in history. His wanderings take us to the clay ovens of the prehistoric eastern Mediterranean and the bronze cauldrons of ancient China, to fabulous banquets in the temples and courts of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia, to medieval English cookshops and southeast Asian street markets, to palace kitchens, diners, and to moderns fast-food eateries. Symons samples conceptions and perceptions of cooks and cooking, from Plato and Descartes to Marx and Virginia Woolf, asking why cooks, despite their vital and central role in sustaining life, have remained in the shadows, unheralded, unregarded, and underappreciated. "People think of meals as occasions where you share food," he notes. "They rarely think of cooks as sharers of food." Considering such notions as the physical and political consequences of sauce, connections between food and love, and cooking as a regulator of clock and calendar, Symons provides a spirited and diverting defense of a cook-centered view of the world.People have tried to understand human development by charting the consequences of economics, political conflict and its resolution, intellectual creativity, or sexual and moral changes. Symons views the world via the stove-top and the cooking-pot. It puts a whole new angle on world history and, more important still, puts women at its centre. With delightfully speculative chapter-titles such as 'On the Physical and Political Consequences of Sauces' or 'A Good Bank Account, a Good Cook and a Good Digestion', Symons tries to see cooking as an existential act that takes in loving, sharing, distribution, and acquisition. He places cookery at the heart of civilisation: viewing, for example, ancient temples as sacred kitchens and interpreting the place of food and ritual dining in early political systems as well as in religions.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charlotte y Peter Fiell son dos autoridades en historia, teoría y crítica del diseño y han escrito más de sesenta libros sobre la materia, muchos de los cuales se han convertido en éxitos de ventas. También han impartido conferencias y cursos como profesores invitados, han comisariado exposiciones y asesorado a fabricantes, museos, salas de subastas y grandes coleccionistas privados de todo el mundo. Los Fiell han escrito numerosos libros para TASCHEN, entre los que se incluyen 1000 Chairs, Diseño del siglo XX, El diseño industrial de la A a la Z, Scandinavian Design y Diseño del siglo XXI.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Prospect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1903018072
• ISBN 13: 9781903018071
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar