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A History of Cooks and Cooking (The Food Series)
by Michael Symons
Available from Amazon
$16.50
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Features
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: University of Illinois Press December 10, 2003
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0252071921
ISBN-13: 978-0252071928
Product Dimensions:
9 x 6.1 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
Book Description
Never has there been so little need to cook. Yet Michael Symons maintains that to be truly human we need to become better cooks: practical and generous sharers of food. Fueled by James Boswell's definition of humans as cooking animals (for "no beast can cook"), 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 modern 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.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: A History of Cooks and Cooking (The Food Series) (Hardcover)
Michael Symons has written a book that is both fascinating and seminal. Serious amateur cooks, professional cooks and cooking educators will find plenty of reinforcement for their roles in the craft that "distinguishes man from other animals." Symons addresses a wide variety of issues--the place of food in society and culture, the practical functions of cooking ("predigestion, detoxification; preservation), the thread through history of anti-consumption/anti-gastronomy philosphies; a conceptual framework for cooking technologies...if you have an interest, Symons probably addresses it). Carefully chosen excerpts from major food historians, chefs and writers add to the fascination of this very accessible work. At the end, I had a better understanding of why the "hearth" has been considered to be the "center" of the home and a more structured sense of why I love to cook for my family.
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A History of Cooks and Cooking (The Food Series)
by Michael Symons
Available from Amazon
$16.50
|
|
