‘Tis the Season: Ten Books and a Journal
No, these are not necessarily books published this year. In fact, most aren’t.
Nor are they necessarily the best. Best depends on what you are looking for.
What they are are books that caught my attention, that remained in my memory after I had scanned them. They’re mostly to do with food, because I’ve been looking at the world through that lens for the past several years.
For anyone interested in Chinese food history, no, for anyone interested in food, the great collection of recipe jottings of 18th century China, the greatest place on earth for food at the time. Yuan Mei’s Food Book, trans. by Beilei Pu and up on Krazy Kioti, the website of the distinguished anthropologist, E.N. (Gene) Anderson. Yuan Mei, as well as being a poet, was THE food connoisseur of mid-eighteenth century China. And you can read this FOR FREE. [While you are at it, look at the wealth of information in the Ethnobiology of the Mongol Empire: Medicinal Items Mentioned and Used in the Huihui Yaofang, a Yuan Dynasty Medical Encyclopedia of Near Eastern Medicine for Chinese Users. And the 16th century playwright Gao Lin’s Essays on Drinks and Delicacies for Medicinal Eating, translated by Sumei Yi. And Gene’s great Mayaland Cuisine. Not to mention a wealth of essays on everything from publishing to the history of anthropology. A model of the generous use of the web to advance knowledge.]
Back cover of Helen Leach’s Kitchens
For anyone interested in how the domestic kitchen has been transformed in the twentieth century, almost certainly the biggest transformation since the Neolithic : Kitchens: The New Zealand Kitchen in the Twentieth Century by Helen Leach published by the University of Otago Press (2014). Beautifully illustrated, full of personal observations as well as detailed research, this is far and away the best study of the twentieth-century kitchen in the English-speaking world.
For anyone who thinks that it’s about time we had a serious study of the universally-maligned industrial kitchen, Keith Farrer‘s To Feed a Nation: A History of Australian Food Science and Technology (Collingwood, Victoria, CSIRO, 2005). OK, so it’s not going to set the pulse racing. And OK, so it’s another book from the antipodes. But since there’s so little written in the northern hemisphere, go here to find out what happened in the crucial decades before World War I and around World War II.
For anyone curious about what happened when migrants from Southern Italy, Sicily, and other parts of the Italian peninsula, migrants who scarcely knew they were Italian, found themselves in a land where they could afford pasta, even meat, Almost Italian: A Cookbook and History of Italian Food in America by Skip Lombardi and Holly Chase. Originally a blog, this takes all the classics of American Italian food from the antipasto platter through chicken parmesan and spaghetti and meatballs to garlic bread, gives you the recipe, and explains how it came about. It has a fine introduction and excellent bibliography (not just books). You can now download the book from Kindle. In fact, you don’t need Kindle to get this book. You can simply download the free app to your computer.
For anyone who’s interested in the complex history of food in Texas, the self-published, spiral-bound Greek Food for Thought (2005) by Helen, Pat, Mary and Dimitra Anna Georgantonis, a tribute to their parents George Georgantonis and Athanasia Grammatikakis from Agios Demetrios who ended up in Amarillo, Texas, highway crossroads, meatpacking center, windiest city in the US, and Dustbowl capital. They raised their family and ran hotels and restaurants, helped found a Greek Orthodox Church, and ate a preserved cheese that makes today’s feta look wimpy. Small town American dining owes so much to the Greeks. Mine was a thrift store find but the link will take you to a website.
For anyone interested in the intertwined Spanish and British colonies in North America, John Tutino’s Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Duke, 2011). I love the cover photo that shows the walls of the mines of Guanajuato, where I walked daily with my dogs for fifteen years. I love even more how it argues that this part of New Spain was the cradle of global capitalism, the place that stimulated with world economy with silver, and that the American West is the Mexican North, not just in terms of territory but it terms of early lifestyle and relation to the land.
For anyone who thinks natural is better, Nathanael Johnson‘s All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover if the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing, and the Environment Really Keeps Us Healthier and Happier (New York: Rodale, 2013). Nate’s parents were so dedicated to the natural that they never put diapers on their babies. This is his account of how he fought his way to a more rounded understanding of the relations between nature, humans, and technology. Lots of food, needless to say. A model of how to figure things out for yourself, full of useful information, and hilarious too.
For anyone interested in how young women coped during the two World Wars, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (Penguin, 1978 for 1933), and “A Beautiful Story”: The War Letters of Verva and Sol Rocke (2014), edited by Alan Rocke. For some reason, I’d missed the first, the memoir of a young woman who lost her fiancé, who went to work as a nurse in Malta and at the front in France instead of finishing her degree at Oxford. My teachers in high school were women like this and I will never repay the debt I owe them.
Verva with Sol’s parents, 1944
The second consists of the 1300 letters Alan Rocke’s newly-wed parents exchanged between 1942 and 1945, beginning just a few months after their marriage when Sol was fighting in the Pacific. Sol, Jewish and Democrat came from Chicago, the son of Russian immigrants who got by with a newsstand, the father sickly, the mother smart but illiterate; Verva, Protestant and Republican, was raised in rural coal mining towns in eastern Kentucky, her father murdered in 1936 in a United Mine Workers conflict over corruption in the union. Following how they get to know each other through these letters seems almost intrusive but very moving.
John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, 15th Governor General of Canada
Finally, for anyone looks for a good read on the airplane. Searching for something to read on the many flights I took this year, I downloaded John Buchan’s novels to my Kindle, making my way again through thrillers I had read as a child: Prester John; The Thirty Nine Steps; The Island of Sheep; Greenmantle. I hadn’t realized until writing this post that John Buchan managed to write these and that the Guardian had recently put The Thirty Nine Steps on its list of a hundred best novels.
And then there’s the journal, Petits Propos Culinaires. It was started, on a bit of a lark, by Alan Davidson and chums, as a way to raise money for a new Waveney class lifeboat for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, lifeboats being a much bigger thing if you live on a small island like Britain and not a huge continent like the US. The booklet, with articles by Elizabeth David and Jeremiah Tower, among others, was so successful that it was decided to continue the venture.
For anyone who delights in the small, in the enterprises that are not gobbled up by large corporations, in ferreting out the rare and unusual be it a vegetable or a book or a restaurant, in finding humor and intellectual challenge in food, it’s highly recommended. The articles, which on first glance and taken one by one seem whimsical and obscure, in total add up to a tremendous contribution to our knowledge of food history. The authors are a who’s who of food and its history.
And for the past many years it has been edited by Tom Jaine, who in his youth spent much time in the kitchen of the pioneering restaurant, The Hole in the Wall, in Bath, England and studying history at Balliol College, Oxford, a perfectly paired combination for his future role.
Tom Jaine laboring on the practical aspects of our food
It’s been worth subscribing to PPC just for Tom’s pointed comments in his introduction and reviews. “A book that makes you feel good, and feel a little guilty as a reader when you interrogate the text for signs of beastliness, class status or self-awareness. Because, of course, that’s what really interests us.” Nothing here of the “incomprehensible, turgid or tendentious” that Tom fears if our world “falls too completely into the hands of serving academics.”
To listen to Tom Jaine on The Food Programme (broadcast on Radio 4 , November 2014) you can download the Podcast. So a huge vote of thanks to Tom who is now passing on PPC (and the equally wonderful Prospect Books). And a huge welcome to Catheryn Kilgarriff who is taking them on.
This is a lovely list, Rachel – thank you!