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Habeas Codfish
Reflections on Food and the Law
Barry M. Levenson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001

    From the McDonald’s hot coffee case to the cattle ranchers’ beef with Oprah Winfrey, from the old English "Assize of Bread" to current nutrition labeling laws, what we eat and how we eat are shaped as much by legal regulations as by personal taste. Barry M. Levenson, the curator of the world-famous (really!) Mount Horeb Mustard Museum and a self-proclaimed "recovering lawyer," offers in Habeas Codfish an entertaining and expert overview of the frustrating, frightening, and funny intersections of food and the law.
    Discover how Mr. Peanut shaped the law of trademark infringement for the entire food industry. Consider the plight of the restaurant owner besmirched by a journalist’s negative review. Find out how traditional Jewish laws of kashrut ran afoul of the First Amendment. Prison meals, butter vs. margarine, definitions of organic food, undercover ABC reporters at the Food Lion, the Massachusetts Supreme Court case that saved fish chowder, even recipes—it’s all in here, so tuck in!

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Hamburger
A Global History
Andrew F. Smith
Reaktion Books, 2008
McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc once said, “It requires a certain kind of mind to see beauty in a hamburger bun.” The hamburger has been a staple of American culture for the last century, both a source of gluttonous joy and a recurrent obstacle to healthy eating. Now the full beauty of the burger in all its forms is explored in Hamburger, a debut title in Reaktion Books’ new Edible series.

Andrew F. Smith traces the trajectory of hamburger history, from its humble beginnings as a nineteenth-century street food sold by American vendors, from which it soon spread to the menus of diners and restaurants. The sandwich came into its own with the 1921 opening of the first hamburger chain, White Castle, and subsequent successful food chains such as McDonald’s and Wendy’s ensured the burger’s success in the United States and around the world. The hamburger irrevocably changed American life, Smith argues, as the sandwich propelled the rise of fast food over home-cooked meals in Americans’ eating habits. At the same time, burgers were making inroads in American culture, as well as becoming a rich symbol in paintings, television, and movies. Smith also discusses the darker nutritional, economic, and cultural conflicts raised by the hamburger, such as the “McDonaldization” of international cultures.

A juicy and richly illustrated read, Hamburger will stimulate the taste buds of carnivores the world over.
 
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The Herb Garden Cookbook
The Complete Gardening and Gourmet Guide, Second Edition
By Lucinda Hutson
University of Texas Press, 2003

Indulge your senses with the lively flavors, vivid colors, and tantalizing aromas of fresh herbs. This comprehensive guide gives you creative, festive recipes as well as valuable gardening information. With Lucinda Hutson's expert advice you'll discover how to:

  • Grow robust and flavorful herbs using organic gardening techniques.
  • Harvest and store herbs.
  • Prepare more than 150 delicious and innovative recipes.
  • Create intensely flavored herb butters and savory vinegars.
  • Garnish and flavor recipes with beautiful edible flowers.
  • Grow and use exotic herbs from Mexico and Southeast Asia.
  • Design menus for special occasions such as a fiesta for friends or a feast for two.
  • Find the best sources, including websites, for buying plants, seeds, and gourmet products.

Savor the Tuscan-inspired Panzanella, the continental Celebratory Niçoise Salad, or the Southwestern-spirited Pollo Picado. Lucinda's suggested recipe variations will turn you into a kitchen quick-change artist. Ideas for dazzling presentations make your meals as pleasing to the eye as they are to the palate. From rosemary and thyme to Mexican mint marigold and Thai basil, this is an essential guide for cooks and gardeners alike!

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The Herbalist in the Kitchen
Gary Allen
University of Illinois Press, 2006

The foodie's ultimate herbal encyclopedia

Created as the ideal reference for anyone with a serious interest in cooking with herbs, spices, or related plant materials, The Herbalist in the Kitchen is truly encyclopedic in scope. It provides complete information about the uses, botany, toxicity, and flavor chemistry of herbs, as well as a listing for nearly every name that an ingredient is known by around the world.

Even including herbs and spices not yet seen in the United States (but likely to be featured in recipes for adventurous cooks soon), The Herbalist in the Kitchen is organized into one hundred and four sections, each consisting of a single botanical family. The book provides all available information about the chemical compounds responsible for a plant's characteristic taste and scent, which allows cooks to consider new subtleties and potential alternatives. For instance, the primary flavoring ingredient of cloves is eugenol; when a cook knows that bay leaves also contain eugenol, a range of exciting substitutions becomes clear. The Herbalist in the Kitchen also provides guidance about measuring herbs, enabling readers to understand the dated measuring standards from antique cookbooks.

A volume in The Food Series, edited by Andrew W. Smith

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Herbs
A Global History
Gary Allen
Reaktion Books, 2012

Salsa and guacamole wouldn’t be the same without cilantro, and you can’t make pizza without oregano or a mojito without mint. You can use peppermint to settle an upset stomach, ease arthritis pain with stinging nettle, and heal burns and wounds with aloe vera. And then there is cannabis—perhaps the most notorious and divisive herb of all. Despite the fact that herbs are often little more than weeds, cultures around the globe have found hundreds of uses for them, employing them in everything from ancient medicines to savory dishes. While much has been written on cooking and healing with herbs, little has been told about the history of the plants themselves and the incredible journeys they have made.

This book elucidates how these often overlooked plants have become a staple in our lives. Unlike spices that quickly traversed the globe through trade, Gary Allen shows that herbs were often hoarded by their cultivators and were central to distinctive regional dishes. He draws on his extensive knowledge of food history to examine herbs in new ways, making Herbs essential reading for any serious foodie. Filled with beautiful illustrations and delicious recipes, this book will complete the kitchen library.
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Herbs for the Gourmet Gardener
A Practical Resource from the Garden to the Table
Caroline Holmes
University of Chicago Press, 2014
The rise of the slow food movement and the return to home gardens mean cooks are donning gardening gloves as often as oven mitts. Modern cooking is heading back to its roots, with home cooks embracing local ingredients and down-to-earth recipes. With more and more of us discovering the delight of preparing and eating freshly harvested food, Herbs for the Gourmet Gardener is the indispensable guide to what to grow, cook, and eat.

A feast for the eyes and the table, this user-friendly resource traverses the realms of both the garden and the kitchen, addressing the cultivation, storage, and preparation of more than sixty herbs. Practical growing tips, fascinating histories, nutritional information, and classic recipes appear alongside botanical illustrations drawn from the Royal Horticultural Society’s cherished collection. With both familiar varieties and novel options, Herbs for the Gourmet Gardener will inspire you to create a world of new shapes, colors, and tastes.
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Herring
A Global History
Kathy Hunt
Reaktion Books, 2017
Though tiny, the herring has played an enormous role in history. Battles have been waged over it. International economic alliances have formed over it. Major cities owe their prosperity to it. Political powers have risen and fallen with herring’s own rise and fall in population. How can this all be attributed to this unassuming little animal?

In Herring: A Global History, Kathy Hunt looks at the environmental, historical, political, and culinary background of this prolific and easily caught fish. Over the centuries, herring have sustained populations in times of war and hardship, and the fish’s rich flavor, delicate texture, and nutritious meat have made it a culinary favorite. Its ease of preparation—just grill, broil, fry, pickle, salt, or smoke and serve—have won it further acclaim. Engaging and informative, the book features fifteen mouth-watering recipes. It will appeal to food lovers, history buffs, and anyone who has ever enjoyed a British kipper, German Bismarck, Dutch matjes, or Jewish chopped-herring.
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A History of Cooks and Cooking
Michael Symons
University of Illinois Press, 1998
Never has there been so little need to cook. Yet Michael Symons maintains that to be truly human we need to become better cooks: practical and generous sharers of food.
 
Fueled by James Boswell's definition of humans as cooking animals (for "no beast can cook"), Symons sets out to explore the civilizing role of cooks in history. His wanderings take us to the clay ovens of the prehistoric eastern Mediterranean and the bronze cauldrons of ancient China, to fabulous banquets in the temples and courts of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia, to medieval English cookshops and southeast Asian street markets, to palace kitchens, diners, and modern fast-food eateries.
 
Symons samples conceptions and perceptions of cooks and cooking from Plato and Descartes to Marx and Virginia Woolf, asking why cooks, despite their vital and central role in sustaining life, have remained in the shadows, unheralded, unregarded, and underappreciated. "People think of meals as occasions where you share food," he notes; "they rarely think of cooks as sharers of food."
 
Considering such notions as the physical and political consequences of sauce, connections between food and love, and cooking as a regulator of clock and calendar, Symons provides a spirited and diverting defense of a cook-centered view of the world.
 
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Honey
A Global History
Lucy M. Long
Reaktion Books, 2017
Whether drizzled into our tea or spread atop our terms of endearment, there’s one thing that is always true about honey: it is sweet. As Lucy M. Long shows in this book, while honey is definitely the natural sweetener par excellence, it has a long history in our world as much more, serving in different settings as a food, tonic, medicine, and even preservative. It features in many religions as a sacred food of the gods. In this luscious history, she traces the uses and meanings of honey in myriad cultures throughout time.
           
Long points to a crucial fact about honey: it can be enjoyed with very little human processing, which makes it one of the most natural foods we consume. Its nutritional qualities and flavors dramatically reflect the surroundings in which it is produced, and those who produce it—bees—are some of the most important insects in the world, the chief pollinators of wild plants and domesticated crops alike. Showing how honey has figured in politics, religion, economics, and popular culture, Long also directly explores its tastiest use—in our food and drink—offering a history of its culinary place in the world, one sweetened with an assortment of delicious recipes. Lively and engaged, her account will give even the saltiest of us an insatiable sweet tooth.
 
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Honey, I'm Homemade
Sweet Treats from the Beehive across the Centuries and around the World
Edited by May Berenbaum, Illustrated by Nils Cordes
University of Illinois Press, 2010
Honey, I'm Homemade: Sweet Treats from the Beehive across the Centuries and around the World showcases a wealth of recipes for cookies, breads, pies, puddings, and cakes that feature honey as an essential ingredient. Noted entomologist May Berenbaum also details the fascinating history of honey harvesting and consumption around the world, explains the honey bee's extraordinary capacity to process nectar into concentrated sweetness, and marvels at honey's diverse flavors and health benefits.
 
Honey is a unique food because of its power to evoke a particular time and place. Every time it is collected from a hive, honey takes on the nuanced flavors of a particular set of flowers--clover, orange blossoms, buckwheat, or others--at a certain point in time processed and stored by a particular group of bees. Honey is not just a snapshot of a time and place--it's the taste of a time and place, and it lends its flavors to the delectable baked goods and other treats found here.
 
More than a cookbook, Honey, I'm Homemade is a tribute to the remarkable work of Apis mellifera, the humble honey bee whose pollination services allow three-quarters of all flowering plant species to reproduce and flourish. Sales of the book will benefit the University of Illinois Pollinatarium--the first freestanding science outreach center in the nation devoted to flowering plants and their pollinators.
 
Because so much depends on honey bees, and because people have benefited from their labors for millennia, Honey, I'm Homemade is the perfect way to share and celebrate honey's sweetness and delight.
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Hopi Cookery
Juanita Tiger Kavena
University of Arizona Press, 1980
More than one hundred authentic recipes center around Hopi staples of beans, corn, wheat, chilies, meat, gourds, and native greens and fruits.
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Hot Dog
A Global History
Bruce Kraig
Reaktion Books, 2009
Char-grilled or boiled? Sauerkraut or chili? Mustard or ketchup? Vienna Beef or Sabrett? Only these questions could be raised about one of the world’s favorite backyard, picnic, ballgame, and street foods—the hotdog. Though nearly two billion hot dogs are consumed by Americans annually in the month of July alone, there is absolutely no consensus on which is the right way to serve up a hotdog. In Hot Dog, well known food historian Bruce Kraig recounts the history of this popular “tube steak” from the origin of the sausage 20,000 years ago to its central place in American culture today.

            Kraig discusses the many brands, including Hebrew National, Pearl, Sabrett, and Vienna Beef, and the regional variations that go along with them—like kosher-style New York dogs loaded with mustard and sauerkraut, New England dogs with Boston Baked Beans, and fully-loaded Chicago style hotdogs, complete with mustard, onion, relish, sport peppers, a dill pickle spear, a dash of celery salt, and tomato slices (but never, ever ketchup). Hot Dog covers the other international sausages, like bologna and bockwurst, as well, and explores some of the apocryphal tales of the hotdog in history—like the origin of its name and whether Queen Elizabeth II was truly served hotdogs on a visit to the White House.

            Packed with tasty facts and recipes, Hot Dog reveals the rich history and passionate opinions about this seemingly ordinary food.
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How to Dine in Style
The Art of Entertaining, 1920
J. Rey
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2013
The 1920s marked the high point of refined dining, when silver tray–bearing white-gloved waiters circulated among guests and starched linens and candlelit tables were de rigueur. For the decadent class that came to prominence during the post-war period, achieving a reputation for throwing the most recherché dinner parties meant instant social success, and many an enterprising host or hostess sought advice in J. Rey’s The Whole Art of Dining.

By turns a collection of practical advice and a catalog of eccentricities, The Whole Art of Dining, republished by the Bodleian Library as How to Dine in Style, contained everything the would-be socialite needed to know in order to elevate food to high art, from tricks for putting together a proper French menu or throwing a garden party to practical tips on serving wines in the correct order and at the right temperature. Throughout the book are stories of astonishing excess, such as the search for ever-more-elaborate themes and venues, and the more daring of the book’s devotees might have been tempted to emulate efforts like those of the intrepid hostess whose mountaineering-themed dinner party had guests rappel to the rooftop of her Chicago home or American millionaire George A. Kessler, whose infamous “Gondola Party” flooded— for the first and only time—the central courtyard of the Savoy.

A captivating glimpse into the golden age of fine dining, this book will be consumed with interest by discerning diners and fans of the Roaring Twenties—and it may even inspire readers to try their hand at throwing a stylish soiree of their own.

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How We Fell in Love with Italian Food
Diego Zancani
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2019
Pizza, pasta, and olive oil: today, it’s hard to imagine any supermarket without these items. But how did these foods—and many more Italian ingredients—become so widespread?

In this book, Diego Zancani maps the extraordinary progress of Italian food, from the legacy of the Roman invasion to its current, ever-increasing popularity. Starting with medieval manuscripts, he traces Italian recipes in Britain back to the thirteenth century, and draws on later travel diaries to explore British and American encounters with Italian food abroad. The book also shows how Italian immigrants, from ice-cream sellers and grocers to chefs and restauranteurs, had a transformative influence on the spread of the cuisine, championing Italian food at pivotal moments throughout history.

Lavishly illustrated with material from the archives of the Bodleian Library and elsewhere, this sumptuous book also includes Italian regional recipes that have come down to us through the centuries, and celebrates the enduring international appeal of delicatessens, pizzerias, trattorias, and the Mediterranean diet.
 
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Hummus
A Global History
Harriet Nussbaum
Reaktion Books, 2021
Complete with recipes, a mouthwatering look at the complicated origins and rise of the world’s favorite garbanzo bean spread and dip.
 
This is a global history of hummus bi-tahina, the delicious combination of chickpeas, tahini, lemon, and garlic that we know and love as hummus. The story begins in the medieval kitchens of the Near and Middle East and culminates with hummus’s rise in popularity in the Western world at the end of the twentieth century. This book also addresses the international controversy over ownership of the dish and illustrates the extent to which hummus has been embraced by Western food culture today. Though other Mediterranean dishes have become popular in the West, none can be compared to hummus, which can be found in any supermarket and in vast numbers of eating establishments. Hummus has become a global phenomenon and our very favorite dip.
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The Hunger Book
A Memoir from Communist Poland
Agata Izabela Brewer
The Ohio State University Press, 2023

“A searing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain, motherhood, addiction, and finding sustenance in the natural world.” —Kirkus

In The Hunger Book, Agata Izabela Brewer evokes her Polish childhood under Communism, where the warmth of her grandparents’ love and the scent of mushrooms drying in a tiny apartment are as potent as the deprivations and traumas of life with a terrifyingly unstable, alcoholic single mother. Brewer indelibly renders stories of foraging for food, homemade potato vodka (one of the Eastern Bloc’s more viable currencies), blood sausage, sparrows plucked and fried with linseed oil, and the respite of a country garden plot, all amid Stalinist-era apartment buildings, food shortages, martial law, and nuclear disaster in nearby Ukraine.

Brewer reflects on all of this from her immigrant’s vantage point, as she wryly tries to convince her children to enjoy the mushrooms she gathers from a roadside and grieves when they choose to go by Americanized versions of their Polish names. Hunting mushrooms, like her childhood, carried both reward and mortal peril. The Hunger Book, which includes recipes, is an unforgettable meditation on motherhood and addiction, resilience and love.

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The Hungry Soul
Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature
Leon R. Kass M.D.
University of Chicago Press, 1999
The Hungry Soul is a fascinating exploration of the natural and cultural act of eating. Kass brilliantly reveals how the various aspects of this phenomenon, and the customs, rituals, and taboos surrounding it, relate to universal and profound truths about the human animal and its deepest yearnings.

"Kass is a distinguished and graceful writer. . . . It is astonishing to discover how different is our world from that of the animals, even in that which most evidently betrays that we too are animals—our need and desire for food."—Roger Scruton, Times Literary Supplement

"Yum."—Miss Manners

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