Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present

This scholarly yet accessible survey focuses on the history of food in Europe and the Mediterranean, with some inclusion of the Middle East as a source of inspiration and ingredients, and a nod to North America. It explicitly does not address the history of food in other parts of the world. The book is divided into forty chapters in seven parts of uneven length, written by a broad range of scholars. Each part is introduced by either Jean-Louis Flandrin or Massimo Montanari, who by now are very much the grand old men of European culinary history, between them largely responsible for the original respectability of the field and its enormous expansion in recent years. These introductory essays, taken together, provide an excellent overview of European food history, as editor Albert Sonnenfeld notes (xviii).