Six-year-old Sam, with his Liberian dad and African American mom, finds a way to bring everyone in his cross-cultural family together at the dinner table
Rice and okra soup: Sam’s auntie from Liberia made it, and it’s Dad’s favorite. Mom, homegrown in Minnesota, made spaghetti and meatballs. And Sam? He’s just hungry, but no matter what he chooses to eat, someone will be disappointed. Caught in the middle of his family’s African and American food fight, Sam gets a little help from his grumbling stomach—and readers of this seriously funny book by Shannon Gibney get a peek at cultures colliding in a family kitchen that work out in a very delicious way. Charly Palmer’s vibrant and captivating illustrations make this gentle lesson in getting along a bright and colorful visual feast as well.
Cassava leaf torbogee or homemade sausage pizza? Sam’s family recipes bring Sam and the Incredible African and American Food Fight to an apt and happy ending—and readers can decide which dinner is best. But, really, why not both?
The humble peanut butter and jelly or bologna and cheese or corned beef on rye—no matter your cooking expertise, chances are you’ve made and eaten countless sandwiches in your lifetime. It’s quick, it’s simple, and it’s open to infinite variety and inventiveness. If there’s something bread- or bun-like in your cupboard, there is a sandwich waiting to happen.
Though sandwiches are a near-universal food, their origin can be traced to a very precise historical figure: John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, who, sometime before 1762 being too busy to stop for dinner, asked for some cold beef to be brought to him between two slices of bread. In Sandwich,award-winning food writer Bee Wilson unravels the mystery of how the Earl invented this most elementary but delicious way of eating. Wilson explores what sandwiches might have been like before the eighteenth century, why the name sandwich stuck, and how the Earl’s invention took off so quickly around the globe.
Wilson brings together a wealth of material to trace how the sandwich has evolved, looking at sandwiches around the world, from the decadent meatball hoagie to the dainty cucumber tea sandwich. Loved the world over, this popular food has surprisingly never before been the subject of a book-length history until now.
Seasons of Plenty provides colorful descriptions, folk stories, appealing photgraphs and illustrations, excerpts from journals and ledgers, recipes for good food like savory dumpling soup, mashed potatoes with browned bread crumbs, Sauerbraten, and feather light apple fritters.
From the restorative powers of chicken soup on a sick day to the warmth of a bowl of chowder on a wintry night, there is no food quite as comforting and emblematic of home as soup. Soup, as Janet Clarkson tells us, is the first true culinary creation of humanity, and it has made a long journey from the prehistoric cave to the kitchen table and the white linens of Michelin-starred restaurants.
Tracing its myriad reinventions through history and across the globe, Clarkson argues in Soup that it is the only truly universal dish—every culture in the world makes soup, and it is widely valued as a dish adaptable for any situation. From the swill of the poorhouse to the most delicately crafted consommé, Clarkson explores how soup got its name and describes the different roles of soup in Eastern and Western cuisine. Featuring the national soups of many countries and including an assortment of anecdotes and recipes taken from seven centuries of culinary history, Soup entertains as much as it informs, telling of how the history of the restaurant itself is intricately interwoven with the very concept of soup.
“With enthusiasm and detailed research, Clarkson’s entertaining history is a nutrient-rich meal for the mind, sure to be devoured as happily as its subject”—Publishers Weekly, on Clarkson’s Pie
Part cookbook and part memoir, Southern Appalachian Farm Cooking blends staples of farm-fresh, Appalachian cuisine with stories of life on a large farm in East Tennessee, where homemade biscuits and harvest vegetables were the fruits of hard work and meager earnings. Robert G. Netherland begins with the family farm: a sprawling sixty acres of fertile, rolling hills located in the small town of Surgoinsville, Tennessee, situated between bends in the Holston River. From there, Netherland guides the reader through threshing wheat, churning butter, sharecroppers and country doctors, hunting and hog killing, and all the while sharing updated versions of his family’s recipes for authentic farm-to-table food.
From biscuits to cornbread, freshly shelled beans to red-ripe tomatoes, and savory meats to the sweetest cherry pies, Southern Appalachian Farm Cooking provides the home cook with recipes and historical asides to turn any trip to the farmer’s market into a delicious family affair. In sharing his experiences, Netherland reminds us of a time when prepackaged and plastic-wrapped food didn’t line our counters and fill our cabinets, but in its place were baskets of seasonal fruit, canned vegetables, fresh baked breads, and hot-from-the-oven cobblers. Southern Appalachian Farm Cooking is more than just a nostalgic memoir of farming and food, it’s also filled with healthy, simple, everyday eats for the modern cook.
The scent of oregano immediately conjures the comforts of Italian food, curry is synonymous with Indian flavor, and the fire of chili peppers ignites the cuisine of Latin America. Spices are often the overlooked essentials that define our greatest eating experiences. In this global history of spices, Fred Czarra tracks the path of these fundamental ingredients from the trade routes of the ancient world to the McCormick’s brand’s contemporary domination of the global spice market.
Focusing on the five premier spices—black pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and chili pepper—while also relating the story of many others along the way, Czarra describes how spices have been used in cooking throughout history and how their spread has influenced regional cuisines around the world. Chili peppers, for example, migrated west from the Americas with European sailors and spread rapidly in the Philippines and then to India and the rest of Asia, where the spice quickly became essential to local cuisines. The chili pepper also traveled west from India to Hungary, where it eventually became the national spice—paprika.
Mixing a wide range of spice fact with fascinating spice fable—such as giant birds building nests of cinnamon—Czarra details how the spice trade opened up the first age of globalization, prompting a cross-cultural exchange of culinary technique and tradition. This savory spice history will enliven any dinner table conversation—and give that meal an unforgettable dash of something extra.
From the arrival of Italian ice-cream vendors and German pork butchers, to the rise of Indian curry as the national dish, Spicing Up Britain uncovers the fascinating history of British food over the last 150 years. Panikos Panayi shows how a combination of immigration, increased wealth, and globalization have transformed the eating habits of the English from a culture of stereotypically bland food to a flavorful, international cuisine.
Along the way, Panayi challenges preconceptions about British identity, and raises questions about multiculturalism and the extent to which other cultures have entered British society through the portal of food. He argues that Britain has become a country of vast ethnic diversity, in which people of different backgrounds—but still British—are united by their readiness to sample a wide variety of foods produced by other ethnic groups. Taking in changes to home cooking, restaurants, grocery shops, delis, and cookbooks, Panayi’s flavorful account will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in ethnic cooking, food history, and the social history of Britain.
“Wearing his twin hats of foodie and social historian, Panikos Paniyi can appall as well as engender salivation on his tour d’horizon of the multicultural history of British food. His book demonstrates convincingly that whether drawing on its former colonial and imperial possessions . . . or on its European neighbors, the openness of British society has truly enriched its diet and produced its present-day variegated cuisine.”—Washington Times
Soul food has played a critical role in preserving Black history, community, and culinary genius. It is also a response to--and marker of--centuries of food injustice. Given the harm that our food production system inflicts upon Black people, what should soul food look like today?
Christopher Carter's answer to that question merges a history of Black American foodways with a Christian ethical response to food injustice. Carter reveals how racism and colonialism have long steered the development of US food policy. The very food we grow, distribute, and eat disproportionately harms Black people specifically and people of color among the global poor in general. Carter reflects on how people of color can eat in a way that reflects their cultural identities while remaining true to the principles of compassion, love, justice, and solidarity with the marginalized.
Both a timely mediation and a call to action, The Spirit of Soul Food places today's Black foodways at the crossroads of food justice and Christian practice.
Personal and simple, earthy and warm—recipes and stories from the Steger Wilderness Center in Minnesota’s north woods
The Steger Homestead Kitchen is an inspiring and down-to-earth collection of meals and memories gathered at the Homestead, the home of the Arctic explorer and environmental activist Will Steger, located in the north woods near Ely, Minnesota. Founded in 1988, the Steger Wilderness Center was established to model viable carbon-neutral solutions, teach ecological stewardship, and address climate change. In her role as the Homestead’s chef, Will’s niece Rita Mae creates delicious and hearty meals that become a cornerstone experience for visitors from all over the world, nourishing them as they learn and share their visions for a healthy and abundant future.
Now, with this new book, home chefs can make Rita Mae’s simple, hearty meals to share around their own homestead tables. Interwoven with dozens of mouth-watering recipes—for generous breakfasts (Almond Berry Griddlecakes), warming lunches (Northwoods Mushroom Wild Rice Soup), elegant dinners (Spatchcock Chicken with Blueberry Maple Glaze), desserts (Very Carrot Cake), and snacks (Steger Wilderness Bars)—are Will Steger’s exhilarating stories of epic adventures exploring the Earth’s most remote and endangered regions.
The Steger Homestead Kitchen opens up the Wilderness Center’s hospitality, its heart and hearth, providing the practical advice and inspiration to cook up a good life in harmony with nature.
You probably knew Molly Ivins as an unabashed civil libertarian who used her rapier wit and good ole Texas horse sense to excoriate political figures she deemed unworthy of our trust and respect. But did you also know that Molly was one helluva cook? And we're not just talking chili and chicken-fried steak, either. Molly Ivins honed her culinary skills on visits to France—often returning with perfected techniques for saumon en papillote or delectable clafouti aux cerises. Friends who had the privilege of sharing Molly's table got not only a heaping helping of her insights into the political shenanigans of the day, but also a mouth-watering meal, prepared from scratch with the finest ingredients and assembled with the same meticulous attention to detail that Molly devoted to skewering a political recalcitrant.
In Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins, her longtime friend, fellow reporter, and frequent sous-chef Ellen Sweets takes us into the kitchen with Molly and introduces us to the private woman behind the public figure. She serves up her own and others' favorite stories about Ivins as she recalls the fabulous meals they shared, complete with recipes for thirty-five of Molly's signature dishes. These stories reveal a woman who was even more fascinating and complex than the "professional Texan" she enjoyed playing in public. Friends who ate with Molly knew a cultured woman who was a fluent French speaker, voracious reader, rugged outdoors aficionado, music lover, loyal and loving friend, and surrogate mom to many of her friends' children, as well as to her super-spoiled poodle. They also came to revere the courageous woman who refused to let cancer stop her from doing what she wanted, when she wanted. This is the Molly you'll be delighted to meet in Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins.
Africa’s art of cooking is a key part of its history. All too often Africa is associated with famine, but in Stirring the Pot, James C. McCann describes how the ingredients, the practices, and the varied tastes of African cuisine comprise a body of historically gendered knowledge practiced and perfected in households across diverse human and ecological landscape. McCann reveals how tastes and culinary practices are integral to the understanding of history and more generally to the new literature on food as social history.
Stirring the Pot offers a chronology of African cuisine beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing from Africa’s original edible endowments to its globalization. McCann traces cooks’ use of new crops, spices, and tastes, including New World imports like maize, hot peppers, cassava, potatoes, tomatoes, and peanuts, as well as plantain, sugarcane, spices, Asian rice, and other ingredients from the Indian Ocean world. He analyzes recipes, not as fixed ahistorical documents,but as lively and living records of historical change in women’s knowledge and farmers’ experiments. A final chapter describes in sensuous detail the direct connections of African cooking to New Orleans jambalaya, Cuban rice and beans, and the cooking of African Americans’ “soul food.”
Stirring the Pot breaks new ground and makes clear the relationship between food and the culture, history, and national identity of Africans.
Ann Flesor Beck's charming personal account recreates the atmosphere of her grandfather's candy kitchen with its odors of chocolate and popcorn and the comings-and-goings of family members. "The Store" represented success while anchoring the business district of Gus's chosen home. It also embodied the Midwest émigré experience of chain migration, immigrant networking, resistance and outright threats by local townspeople, food-related entrepreneurship, and tensions over whether later generations would take over the business.
An engaging blend of family memoir and Midwest history, Sweet Greeks tells how Greeks became candy makers to the nation, one shop at a time.
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