A chronicle of the beloved base ingredient, from its origins, agricultural riches, and controversy to the passion, pride, and nostalgia it inspires today.Over time, the tomato has embodied a range of values and meanings. From its domestication in Central America, it has traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, powering a story of aspiration and growth, agriculture and industry, class and identity, and global transition. In this entertaining, organic history, Da...

Italy, like the rest of Europe, owes a lot to the 'Columbian exchange'. As a result of this process, in addition to potatoes, Europe acquired maize, tomatoes and most types of beans. All are basic elements of European diet and cookery today. The international importance of the potato today as the world's most cultivated vegetable highlights its place in the Columbian exchange.While the history of the potato in the United States, Ireland, Britain and other parts of northern Europe i...

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2016Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is both a history of food practices and a history of the medical discourse about that food. It is also an exploration of the interaction between the two: the relationship between evolving foodways and shifting medical advice on what to eat in order to stay healthy. It provides the first in-depth study of printed dietary advice covering the entire early modern period, from...

Proteins, Pathologies and Politics presents an international and historical approach to dietary change and health, contrasting current concerns with how issues such as diabetes, cancer, vitamins, sugar and fat, and food allergies were perceived in the 19th and 20th centuries. Though what we eat and what we shouldn't eat has become a topic of increased scrutiny in the current century, the link between dietary innovation and health/disease is not a new one. From new fads in foodstuf...

This open access book explores the history of pellagra, a vitamin deficiency disease brought about by a shift in agriculture to maize, and which was first identified in Italy in the 1760s. With a focus on the insanity that was caused by the disease, the authors examine how thousands of patients were treated in Italian psychiatric asylums, shedding light on the sufferer’s point of view. Setting pellagrous insanity in a wider context of man-made or societal (anthropogenic) disease, where pov...

“A beautifully written . . . and illustrated history of the Food of the Gods, from the Olmecs to present-day developments.”—ChocolatierThis delightful tale of one of the world’s favorite foods draws on botany, archaeology, and culinary history to present a complete and accurate history of chocolate.It begins some 4,000 years ago in the jungles of Mexico and Central America with the chocolate tree, Theobroma Cacao, and the complex processes necessary to tra...

"Fans of Donna Leon's mysteries set in Venice and starring her cosmopolitan detective, Commissario Guido Brunetti, will be delighted to have this cookbook" ( Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).Aside from their puzzling mysteries, Donna Leon's novels featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti have long been celebrated for their mouth-watering descriptions of food: multicourse lunches at home with Paola and the children, snacks grabbed at a bar with a glass of wine or tw...

In this brilliant, engrossing work, Jack Turner explores an era—from ancient times through the Renaissance—when what we now consider common condiments were valued in gold and blood.Spices made sour medieval wines palatable, camouflaged the smell of corpses, and served as wedding night aphrodisiacs. Indispensible for cooking, medicine, worship, and the arts of love, they were thought to have magical properties and were so valuable that they were often kept under lock and key. For so...

Italy’s tumultuous history can be traced through its food. In an epic scooter trip from the Ionian Sea to the far north, distiguished food writer Matthew Fort explores the local gastronomy and culinary culture of a country where regional differences are vibrantly alive.In no other country is food so much a part of everyday life as it is in Italy. Matthew Fort's plan is a simple one: to travel by scooter from Melito di Porto Salvo – the southernmost town in Italy and where Garibaldi...

From one of America's most beloved chefs and authors, a road trip into the heart of Italian American cooking today—from Chicago deep-dish pizza to the Bronx's eggplant parm—celebrating the communities that redefined what we know as Italian food.As she explores this utterly delectable and distinctive cuisine, Lidia shows us that every kitchen is different, every Italian community distinct, and little clues are buried in each dish: the Sicilian-style semolina bread a...

Featuring 140 mouthwatering new recipes, a gastronomic journey of the Italian regions that have inspired and informed Lidia Bastianich's legendary cooking.For the home cook and the armchair traveler alike, Lidia's Italy offers a short introduction to ten regions of Italy—from Piemonte to Puglia—with commentary on nearby cultural treasures by Lidia's daughter Tanya, an art historian.· In Istria, now part of Croatia, where Lidia grew up, she forages ...

The Naming of Names traces the search for order in the natural world, a search that for hundreds of years occupied some of the most brilliant minds in Europe, reaching its apex during the renaissance.Anna Pavord takes us on a thrilling adventure into botanical history, travelling from Athens in the third century BC, through Constantinople, Venice, the medical school at Salerno to the universities of Pisa and Padua. The journey, traced here for the first time, involves the c...