Let’s face it: roast beef and potatoes are all well and good, but for many of us, when it comes to gustatory delight, we’re all about dessert. Whether it’s a homemade strawberry shortcake in summer or a chef’s complex medley of sweets, dessert is the perfect finale to a meal. Most of us have a favorite, even those who seldom indulge. After all, sweet is one of the basic flavors—and one we seem hardwired to love.

Yet, as Jeri Quinzio reveals, while everyone has a taste for sweetness, not every culture enjoys a dessert course at the end of the meal. And desserts as we know them—the light sponge cakes of The Great British Baking Show, the ice creams, the steamed plum puddings—are neither as old nor as ubiquitous as many of us believe. Tracing the history of desserts and the way they, and the course itself, have evolved over time, Quinzio begins before dessert was a separate course—when sweets and savories were mixed on the table—and concludes in the present, when homey desserts are enjoying a revival, and as molecular gastronomists are creating desserts an alchemist would envy.

An indulgent, mouth-wateringly illustrated read featuring recipes; texts from chefs, writers, and diarists; and extracts (not the vanilla or almond variety) from cookbooks, menus, newspapers, and magazines, Dessert is a delectable happy ending for anyone with a curious mind—and an incorrigible sweet tooth.

Pudding usually brings to mind flavors like chocolate, vanilla, and tapioca, but prepackaged pudding cups don’t even scratch the surface of global pudding varieties—the term can denote dishes containing candied fruits and nuts or even frugal blends of little more than flour and suet. Pudding: A Global History explains how puddings developed from their early savory, sausage-like mixtures into the sweet and sticky confections we are now familiar with, and he describes how advances in kitchen equipment have changed puddings over time.

 

Tackling blood, bread, rice, batter, and vegetable puddings, Jeri Quinzio describes the diverse ways cooks around the world make their puddings and how versions from different countries vary—England’s rice pudding, for instance, is flavored with vanilla, nutmeg, or cinnamon, whereas in India it is made with nuts or raisins. In addition to investigating the history of puddings on the dining table, Quinzio also looks at the prominent place puddings have had in novels, poems, songs, and cartoons. He shows how authors and artists like Anthony Trollope, Robert Burns, and George Cruikshank have used puddings to illustrate their characters’ sorrows, joys, and even political leanings. Bursting with choice morsels about puddings past and present, this is a book for fans of blood pudding and plum pudding alike.

This incisive and illuminating biography follows the three themes that shaped the life of Leonardo da Vinci and, through him, forever changed Western art and imagination: nature, art, and self-fashioning.

Nature and art helped form Leonardo. He spent his first twelve years in the Tuscan countryside before entering the most reputed artistic workshop of Florence. There he blossomed as one of the most promising painters of his time and promptly applied his skills to explore and question the world through science and invention. Leonardo was also self-fashioned: he received only a basic education and grew up around peasants and artisans. But from the 1480s onwards, he transformed himself into a court artist and became a familiar of kings and rulers.

Following the chronology of Leonardo’s extraordinary life, this book examines Leonardo as artist, courtier, and thinker, and explores how these aspects found expression in his paintings, as well as in his work in sculpture, architecture, theater design, urban planning, engineering, anatomy, geology, and cartography. François Quiviger concludes with observations on Leonardo’s relevance today as a model of the multidisciplinary artist who combines imagination, art, and science—the original, and ultimate, Renaissance Man.

During the Renaissance, new ideas progressed alongside new ways of communicating them, and nowhere is this more visible than in the art of this period. In The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art, François Quiviger explores the ways in which the senses began to take on a new significance in the art of the sixteenth century. The book discusses the presence and function of sensation in Renaissance ideas and practices, investigating their link to mental imagery—namely, how Renaissance artists made touch, sound, and scent palpable to the minds of their audience. Quiviger points to the shifts in ideas and theories of representation, which were evolving throughout the sixteenth century, and explains how this shaped early modern notions of art, spectatorship, and artistic creation.

Featuring many beautiful images by artists such as Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Pontormo, Michelangelo, and Brueghel, The Sensory World of Renaissance Art presents a comprehensive study of Renaissance theories of art in the context of the actual works they influenced.  Beautifully illustrated and extensively researched, it will appeal to students and scholars of art history.