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Food & Cooking

2012

Cooking and Dining in Medieval England
by Peter Brears
The history of medieval food and cookery has received a fair amount of attention from the point of view of recipes (of which many survive)and of the general context of feasts and feasting. It has never, as yet, been studied with an eye to the real mechanics of food production and service: the equipment used, the household organisation, the architectural arrangements for kitchens, store-rooms, pantries, larders, cellars, and domestic ...
Hardback. Price GB £30.00

Food and Drink in Archaeology 3
edited by Dave Collard, James Morris and Elisa Perego
Topics covered include: Psychoactive consumption in Cypriot Bronze Age mortuary ritual; food consumption and ritual at the Early Iron Age tholos cemetery of Moni Odigitria, south-east Greece; elite ideology and feasting practices in Early Iron Age Greece; intoxicating drinks and drunkards in ancient Indian art and literature; sixteenth-century polemics about cold-drinking; food in prehistoric coastal southern Brazil; the deceased as metaphorical ...
Paperback. Price GB £30.00

2011

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner: Feasting Rituals in the Prehistoric Societies of Europe and the Near East
edited by Gonzalo Aranda Jiménez, Sandra Montón-Subias and Margarita Sánchez Romero
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner examines how specific types of food were prepared and eaten during feasting rituals in prehistoric Europe and the Near East. Such rituals allowed people to build and maintain their power and prestige and to maintain or contest the status quo. At the same time, they also contributed to the inner cohesion and sense of community of a group. When eating and drinking together, people share thoughts and beliefs and ...
Paperback. Price GB £40.00

2010

Table Settings: The Material Culture and Social Context of Dining, AD 1700-1900
edited by James Symonds
Fernand Braudel famously observed that the 'mere smell of cooking can evoke a whole civilization'. The way that food is prepared, served, and eaten reveals a great deal about the structure and workings of any society. It is therefore not surprising that food, and the culturally specific etiquettes and equipment that surround the act of eating have been studied by scholars from a wide range of disciplines.

The papers in this volume ...
Hardback. Price GB £38.00

Taste or Taboo: Dietary Choices in Antiquity
by Michael Beer
This book looks at the way in which food was employed in Greek and Roman literature to impart identity, whether social, individual, religious or ethnic. In many instances, these markers are laid down in the way that foods were restricted, in other words, by looking at the negatives instead of the positives of what was consumed. Michael Beer looks at several aspects of food restriction in antiquity, for example: the way in which they eschewed ...
Paperback. Price GB £12.00

Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer and Other Alcoholic Beverages
by Patrick E. McGovern
In a lively tour around the world and through the millennia, "Uncorking the Past" tells the compelling story of humanity's ingenious, intoxicating quest for the perfect drink. Following a tantalizing trail of archaeological, chemical, artistic, and textual clues, Patrick E. McGovern, the leading authority on ancient alcoholic beverages, brings us up to date on what we now know about how humans created and enjoyed fermented beverages across ...
Paperback. Price GB £12.95
Hardback. Price GB £34.95

The Way We Ate: Memories of Maltese Meals
by Matty Cremona
What is Maltese food? Like the food of all nations it moves with the times and food fashions or fads are quick to come and go. It is the signature dishes - the tried and tested dishes - that endure to become "traditional". But even these are subject to change and availability. Imagine if food purists sneered when potatoes were woven into the tapestry of Maltese food? What then of our famous patata Maltija, patata fgat or patata fil-forn? Or our ...
Hardback. Not yet published - advance orders taken. Price GB £50.00

2009

Exploring the Food Chain: Food Production and Food Processing in Western Europe, 1850-1990
edited by Y. Segers, J. Bieleman and E. Buyst
Until the late 19th century the food industry was restricted to a few activities, usually based on small scale industries. The links between agriculture and food processing were very tight. Due to increased purchasing power, population growth and urbanisation, the demand for food grew substantially. This was not only the case for basis products as corn and potatoes, but also and especially for more expensive, quality products as meat, fish and ...
Paperback. Price GB £58.00

Good Wife's Guide (Le Menagier de Paris)
translated by Gina L. Greco & Christine M. Rose
In the closing years of the fourteenth century, an anonymous French writer compiled a book addressed to a fifteen-year-old bride, narrated in the voice of her husband, a wealthy, aging Parisian. The book was designed to teach this young wife the moral attributes, duties, and conduct befitting a woman of her station in society, in the almost certain event of her widowhood and subsequent remarriage. The work also provides a rich assembly of ...
Paperback. Price GB £20.50

2008

Feast: From Hunter-Gatherers to TV Dinners
by Martin Jones
The act of sitting down to share a meal is, this book argues, one of the defining features of human behaviour and of great importance in the evolution of what we might call civilization. In animal cultures food is a source of conflict and tension, and even for great apes, the act of sitting face to face while eating, or sharing food from a common bowl would be seen as a deeply threatening situation. Using a vast range of archaeological ...
Paperback. Price GB £12.99
Hardback. Price GB £20.00

2007

Cooking up the Past
edited by Christopher Mee and Josette Renard
This volume focuses on the ways in which the production and consumption of food developed in the Aegean region in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, to see how this was linked to the appearance of more complex forms of social organisation. Sites from Macedonia in the north of Greece down to Crete are discussed and chronologically the papers cover not only the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age but extend into the Middle and Late Bronze Age and ...
Paperback. Publisher's Price GB £35.00, Our Price GB £12.95

The Evolution of the Human Diet
edited by Peter S. Ungar
This volume brings together authorities from disparate fields to offer new insights into the diets of our ancestors. Paleontologists, archaeologists, primatologists, nutritionists and other researchers all contribute pieces to the puzzle. This volume has at its core four main sections: reconstructed diets based on hominin fossils - tooth size, shape, structure, wear, and chemistry, mandibular biomechanics; archaeological evidence of subsistence - ...
Paperback. Print on Demand. Price GB £40.00

Food: The History of Taste
edited by Paul Freedman
This fascinating book brings together a team of scholars to tell the story of our love affair with food. Chapters focus primarily on Europe from prehistory to the present day, although there are diversions to savour the development of medieval Islamic cookery and Imperial Chinese cuisine. As the title suggests flavour and spicing is a recurrent theme, with cookery viewed very much in it's cultural context, as Paul Freedman considers how the ...
Hardback. Price GB £24.95

Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes
by Lilia Zaouali
Vinegar and sugar, dried fruit, rose water, spices from India and China, sweet wine made from raisins and dates - these are the flavors of the golden age of Arab cuisine. This book, a delightful culinary adventure that is part history and part cookbook, surveys the gastronomical art that developed at the Caliph's sumptuous palaces in ninth-and tenth-century Baghdad, drew inspiration from Persian, Greco-Roman, and Turkish cooking, and rapidly ...
Paperback. Price GB £17.95

Spices and Comfits: Collected Papers on Medieval Food
by Johnna Maria Van Winter
The topics discussed here include: fasting and asceticism, fish recipes in late medieval cookery books, the use of cannabis in two 15th century cookery books, food for invalidsin the 15th century, festive meals and dining as a means of communication. ...
Hardback. Price GB £40.00

2006

Apicius, A Critical Edition with an Introduction and English Translation
by Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger
Apicius is the sole remaining cookery book from the days of the Roman Empire. Though there were many ancient Greek and Latin works concerning food, this collection of recipes is unique. The editors suggest that it is a survival from many such collections maintained by working cooks and that the attribution to Apicius the man (a real-life Roman noble of the 2nd century AD) is a mere literary convention. There have been many English translations of ...
Hardback. Price GB £40.00

Cooking Apicius: Roman Recipes for Today
by Sally Grainger
To accompany the new scholarly edition of Apicius, Sally Grainger has gathered, in one convenient volume, her modern interpretations of 64 of the recipes in the original text. These are not recipes inspired by the old Romans but rather a serious effort to convert the extremely gnomic instructions in the Latin into something that can be reproduced in the modern kitchen and which actually gives some idea of what the Romans might have eaten. Sally ...
Paperback. Price GB £10.00

Water of Life : A History of Wine-Distilling and Spirits 500BC - AD2000
byC. Anne Wilson
The conventionally held historical view is that the distillation of wine was invented in the mid twelfth century by scholars at Salerno. This book contends that the process has a much more ancient history starting with Dionysian mystery cults in the fifth century BC. These early spirits far from being seen or used in contemporary 'booze' related terms, were seen as possesing magical fire based powers, and were later seen as giving life, youth and ...
Hardback. Price GB £30.00

2005

A Baghdad Cookery Book
by Muhammad Ibn Al-Hasan Al-Baghdadi, a new translation by Charles Perry
Al-Baghdadi's Kitab al-Tabikh was for a long time the only medieval Arabic Cookery book known to the English-speaking world, thanks to A.J Arberry's path-breaking 1939 translation as `A Baghdad Cookery Book' which was re-issued by Prospect Books in 2001 in Medieval Arab Cookery. For centuries, it has been the favourite Arab cookery book of the Turks. The original manuscript is still in Istanbul, and at some point a Turkish sultan commissioned a ...
Paperback. Price GB £10.00

Charlemagne's Tablecloth: A Piquant History of Feasting
by Nicola Fletcher
Charlemagne's Tablecloth is not the only dining accoutrement to appear in this book. It contains a collection of twenty-nine stories and `colourful anecdotes' of the successes and failures of feasting. Covering all extremes, from the flamboyant and eccentric to the pretty ordinary, Nichola Fletcher looks at what constitutes a feast or banquet, and explores whether it is to do with the dining environment and ambience, the food, the company, ...
Paperback. Price GB £8.99
Hardback. Price GB £20.00

Consuming Passions: Dining from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century
by Maureen Carroll, Dawn Hadley, Hugh Willmott
Oxbow says: Whilst the book claims to be a study of the dining experience over 2000 years of history, it is inevitably an eclectic mix of essays on more focused topics. The introduction whisks the reader through a brief history of dining from our ancient ancestors to ancient Egypt, the Near East, Greece and Etruria, to the Roman, medieval and early modern periods. Comprising nine essays, three in each chronological section (Roman, Middle ...
Paperback. Price GB £19.99

Dinner for Dickens. The Culinary History of Mrs Charless's Menu Books Including a Transcript of `What Shall We Have for Dinner?' by Lady Maria Clutterbuck
by Susan M Rossi-Wilcox
In an attempt to `rescue many fair friends from such domestic suffering' when faced with an onslaught of dinner guuests, Catherine Dickens wrote a pamphlet of suggested menus for meals and selected recipes. Dinner for Dickens publishes a transcript of the 1852 `new edition' of the book along with additional recipes added to the 1854 edition. More an efficient household manager than a domestic goddess, Rossi-Wilcox looks at the life of ...
Hardback. Price GB £25.00

Land, Shops and Kitchens: Technology in the Food Chain in Twentieth-Century Europe
edited by C. Sarasua, P. Scholliers and L. Van Molle
The book discusses the concept of the food chain from a new perspective, emphasizing the historical dimension and conflicts. The inclusion of technology, as a core element, is an original approach to food studies. Thus, technology is related to agricultural production, packaging, transport and storing, wholesale and retailing, catering, and cooking. Also, the so-called middle field, such as political interference, farmers' education and ...
Paperback. Price GB £54.00

2004

Barley, Malt and Ale in the Neolithic
by Merryn Dineley
Merryn Dineley's thesis is based on the premise that the `biochemical laws that govern the processes of malting, mashing and fermentation remain unchanged throughout the millennia'. She therefore uses the results of scientific experimentation to search ...
Paperback. Price GB £42.00

Feasting with the Ancestors: Cooking through the Ages
by Oswald Rivera
This book is the Anglicised version of the American Pharaoh's Feast, with cups translated into grams and other measures or names translated wherever possible. The rest of the book, however, is unchanged and represents the culmination of a cooking ...
Paperback. Price GB £9.99