A BRIEF HISTORY OF FOOD HISTORY
Food history is a new field. The first comprehensive work, British author Reay Tannahill’s Food in History, was not published until 1973.
Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s A History of Food appeared in 1987, but
her book was not translated into English (by Anthea Bell) until 1992.
The anthology, Food: a Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present,
edited by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, was published in
It took three years and seven translators for the English version
to appear. The focus of all of these books is European; the editors of the
latter two are Renaissance and medieval specialists, respectively.
In the years since the first edition of this book, there has been an
explosion of serious books about food. Chief among them is The Oxford
Companion to Food and Drink in America, edited by Andrew Smith and
with many entries written by him, in addition to all of his other books.
I incorporate as much of the new research as possible, but there are still
gaps in our knowledge either because sources are missing or because
they haven’t been translated yet. Until very recently, books that were
translated were also adapted for modern kitchens, like the 1958 version
of Poland’s The Universal Cook Book. Unfortunately, this reduces their
historical value. Even a book in English, like Martha Washington’s Cook
Book, originally from the eighteenth century but printed in 1940 to capitalize on the Southern plantation mania generated by Gone With The
Wind the previous year, was altered. The portions were too large, and
“some of the recipes are scarcely in accordance with modern taste or
practice.”3 It was not until Karen Hess’s edition and essay in 1981 that
historians could see the original and have it explaine