World Food History: Six Food Histories I Found Essential

I love lists of good books, especially if they refrain from inflated claims about being the best books. There are so many good books out there, they are so diverse, that specifying any subset as best always seems just ridiculous.

So I thought I would list six books on food history that I found  (a) opened new perspectives on world history and (b) are perhaps less well known than they should be due to age, limited print runs, or high price.

Don’t think they will be a whiz to read or that they are cheap. You may have to fight your way through them. You may have to order them on inter library loan.  But I can guarantee the time and effort was worth it for me and perhaps for you too.

1. H. T. Huang,  Fermentations and Food Science. Vol. 6. Part V of Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Fermentation and Food Science

You probably already know about the extraordinary series of volumes on Chinese science and technology initiated by Joseph Needham, embryologist, Marxist, professor at Cambridge University. Some of the first volumes were perhaps overly dedicated to proving that China was first in everything, a necessary corrective forty years ago but less necessary now. As the volumes marched on, a more balanced perspective emerged.

This volume is by H. T. Huang,  born to a Chinese family in Malaya, was educated at the University of Hong Kong, and got caught up in the turmoil of World War II, which had the happy side effect of allowing him to observe traditional food processing in his ancestral Chinese village at first hand. For many years he worked in the food processing and pharmaceutical industries as a biochemist, becoming a Program Director for the National Science Foundation in Washington.

It’s hard to say too much about this book.  You want to a summary of distilling, east and west.  It’s here. Or pasta, ditto. Or tea, ditto.  Alcoholic fermentations and soybean fermentations form the heart of the book, treated with equal respect to ancient Chinese texts and modern knowledge of biochemistry.

And as you make your way through the nearly eight hundred pages, you realize that the raw materials, the plants and animals that are the basis of our food, in no way determine the actual tastes, textures or even the very nature of the final food products we put in our mouths.  Consider the grains. In the west, malting (sprouting) grains is assumed to be an intermediate step in the making of alcohol. In China, it is assumed to be an intermediate step in the making of a sweetener (malt sugar). To make alcohol from grains, the Chinese (and many other peoples of Asia) go a whole different route, beginning by allowing the grains to mold.

(2)  Carol Helstosky, Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy (2004). Few cuisines have been as romanticized as Italian.  Into this nostalgic mush wades historian Carol Helstosky with a study based on her Ph. D. in European history at Rutgers

that details the food available to Italians from the 1860s to the 1960s. “Refashioning and inventing Italian cuisine,” she says briskly in the conclusion, “has grown from a modest effort to commemorate Italian-American ethnicity to a multi-million dollar industry aimed at an American public hungry for nostalgia and simplicity.”

Drawing on a wide range of sources, Helstosky makes it very clear that few Italians during the first hundred years of a united national history “could consume a nutritionally adequate diet” thanks to a mixture of economic and political constraints.

The details about the links between politics and diet in Italy are fascinating. From the point of view of world food history, though, just as important are that these are typical of nations around the world during the century around 1900. A combination of factors, including industrialization, urbanization, and nationalism made those in power concerned for the first time with more than the ancient commitment of simply keeping their subjects alive.  Governments and charitable organizations were among the leaders in trying to ensure a diet abundant and varied enough that citizens were strong and healthy.  Helstosky’s book is an excellent introduction to just how hard that project was to pull off.

(3). Adam Maurizio. Histoire de l’alimentation végétale depuis la préhistorie jusqu’a nos jours (Paris, 1932).

Adam Maurizio, born in Switzerland was a ethnobotanist before the term or the avocation was popular, as well as honorary professor at the University of Warsaw in Poland.

When archaeologists were busy investigating the origins of farming, he understood clearly that farm products, notably the seeds and grains that formed the basis of the human diet from before farming to his own time, required extensive processing. He brought to this book his deep knowledge of different milling techniques, of the grain cookery of central and eastern Europe, and of the problems of famine in the wake of World War I.

The four parts deal with the plants eaten before agriculture, with the wild grains and soups/alcohol, of the earliest farmed grains and flatbreads, and milling and bread.

Although modern archaeologists would correct some of his claims, and although he deals almost entirely with Europe, there is still much to learn from this book because few apart from Maurizio have systematically looked at grain processing. It is also a reminder that central and eastern Europe had a great culinary tradition and great intellectuals, that it really is useful to read books in languages other than English, and that food history did not start yesterday.

(4).  Carolin Young.  Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver: Stories of Dinner as a Work of Art (Simon and Schuster, 2002).

Carolin Young has a degree in European history, studied with Barbara Wheaton, pioneering historian of French cuisine, was Chair of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery for a number of years, and moves easily between Paris and the East Coast of the United States.

Carolin dissects twelve dinners from a monkish one at Cluny in twelfth century Burgundy through a surrealist picnic in France in the 1930s. Her emphasis is on dining and art but she weaves many different stories together.  What tickles my fancy about her stories is that they completely undercut the cliché about dining bringing people closer together over the table. This may happen of course.  So may many other things.

I used two chapters extensively in my own work.  One describes a meal given for the young Louis XIV by his Superintendent of Finance, Nicholas Fouquet.  The other looks at the culinary maneuvering of the machiavellian Talleyrand in the course of his triumphant career as the leading diplomat of the early nineteenth century (or perhaps ever).

I wont spoil the fun by giving away the stories.  Carolin’s book is on sale on Amazon for a knock down price so buy it and see just how much more meals can mean than harmony over food and drink.

(5). Paul D. Buell and E.N.Anderson, A Soup for the Qan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-Hui’s Yin-shan Cheng-Yao. Introduction, translation, commentary, and Chinese text, with an afterword by Charles Perry (2000).

If you thought the Mongols just galloped about, sucking blood from their horses’ necks and drinking their milk, re think. The little I knew about the Mongols from my high school education was almost all wrong, I discovered.

This is the title page of the Mongol Chinese cookbook presented to the Emperor in 1330. The Mongols at the center of world history for a century or more (much longer than the British Empire).

In their commentary, Paul Buell, expert on the Mongols and much else, and Gene Anderson, anthropologist and historian of Chinese food and much else again, bring their formidable linguistic and analytical skills to unpacking what’s  going on in this cookbook. The head cooks (think master chefs) at the Mongol court assisted the emperors in exercising an elaborate culinary politics that reflected and reinforced the Mongols’ rule over Persia, China and regions far beyond.

Add a discussion of Turkic breads by Charles Perry and you have a fascinating glimpse into the role food could play in the Mongol (and other empires.

(6).  Christian Peters, ed. Andrew Jenkins. Bread and the British Economy, c. 1770-1870 (Scolar Press, 1995). 

Bread was the chief food of industrializing Britain. It sustained a population that increased threefold between 1770 and 1870. Bread was the fuel that powered the muscle and sinew of labour in ‘the workshop of the world.’

These opening words to the introduction explain just why bread was so important in world food history.  If bread fueled the industrial revolution, so inversely the industrialization of food changed the way we all eat.

There are lots of studies of food in the British Industrial Revolution and new ones appearing all the time. Christian Peters was a successful businessman and then a mature student. His approach was in the style of the great E.A. (Tony) Wrigley, who has carried out one pioneering study after another of the social and demographic history of the British Isles, finding all kinds of ways to quantify and thus confirm or correct vague claims.

Sad to say, Peters died before finishing this book, hence the editor.  Even so, this is packed with data about kinds of wheat, about changes in milling, about why the poor liked white bread, about the legalities and prices of bread. A gold mine.

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Your contributions welcome.  And of course there were also many world histories that were equally revealing.  But they’re not the subject of this post.

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