front cover of The Taco Truck
The Taco Truck
How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City
Robert Lemon
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Icons of Mexican cultural identity and America's melting pot ideal, taco trucks have transformed cityscapes from coast to coast. The taco truck radiates Mexican culture within non-Mexican spaces with a presence—sometimes desired, sometimes resented—that turns a public street corner into a bustling business.

Drawing on interviews with taco truck workers and his own skills as a geographer, Robert Lemon illuminates new truths about foodways, community, and the unexpected places where ethnicity, class, and culture meet. Lemon focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and Columbus, Ohio, to show how the arrival of taco trucks challenge preconceived ideas of urban planning even as cities use them to reinvent whole neighborhoods. As Lemon charts the relationships between food practices and city spaces, he uncovers the many ways residents and politicians alike contest, celebrate, and influence not only where your favorite truck parks, but what's on the menu.

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The Tacos of Texas
By Mando Rayo and Jarod Neece
University of Texas Press, 2016

Rooted in tradición mexicana and infused with Texas food culture, tacos are some of Texans’ all-time favorite foods. In The Tacos of Texas, the taco journalists Mando Rayo and Jarod Neece take us on a muy sabroso taco tour around the state as they discover the traditions, recipes, stories, and personalities behind puffy tacos in San Antonio, trompo tacos in Dallas, breakfast tacos in Austin, carnitas tacos in El Paso, fish tacos in Corpus Christi, barbacoa in the Rio Grande Valley, and much more.

Starting with the basics—tortillas, fillings, and salsas—and how to make, order, and eat tacos, the authors highlight ten taco cities/regions of Texas. For each place, they describe what makes the tacos distinctive, name their top five places to eat, and listen to the locals tell their taco stories. They hear from restaurant owners, taqueros, abuelitas, chefs, and patrons—both well-known and everyday folks—who talk about their local taco history and culture while sharing authentic recipes and recommendations for the best taco purveyors.

Whether you can’t imagine a day without tacos or you’re just learning your way around the trailers, trucks, and taqueros that make tacos happen, The Tacos of Texas is the indispensable guidebook, cookbook, and testimonio.

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Tales from a Free-Range Childhood
Donald Davis
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2022
A cycle of twenty stories, each of which is focused on childhood friends, the antics of his neighborhood and school chums, and the mysteries of adult life seen through a child’s unerring eye.
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Taproots of Tennessee
Historic Sites and Timeless Recipes
Lynne Drysdale Patterson
University of Tennessee Press, 2019

What was served at President James K. Polk’s White House dinners? What foods graced the table of John Sevier, Tennessee’s First Governor? In Taproots of Tennessee, Lynne Drysdale Patterson answers these questions and more, exploring nearly two centuries of Tennessee foodways. Readers will discover that Tennessee taste encompasses the exquisite, such as President Polk’s French-inspired Croquettes Poulet with Bechamel Sauce and General James Winchester’s spoils-of-the-hunt Roast Goode with Wild Rice and Wild Fox Grape Stuffing, to simpler fair, including Dr. Humphrey Howell Bate’s fried pies and Alex Haley’s boyhood menu of sweet tea and Southern staples.

Patterson takes readers on a historical and culinary tour of the Tennessee Historical Commission’s seventeen state historic sites with a collection of period foods from each site and menus with updated recipes for the twenty-first century food enthusiast. Patterson’s site histories provide readers with a journey through the accounts of Tennessee’s early settlers, their homesteads, cookery, schoolhouses, stage coach stops, and religious life. Her site recipes range from historic offerings, such as peaches from General Daniel Smith’s Rock Castle State Historic Site orchard fashioned into a delectable peach pound cake-potentially shared with neighbors Andrew and Rachel Donelson Jackson-to more modern representations of historic foodways, such as Scottish-influenced Scotch Barley Soup and Scotch Egg likely eaten by Sam Houston.

From homes of Tennessee’s first families to stagecoach stops in the 1830s, from Civil War command posts to rural schoolhouses, foodies and academics alike will delight in this compendium of Southern recipes, served with a generous helping of history.

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Texas on the Table
People, Places, and Recipes Celebrating the Flavors of the Lone Star State
By Terry Thompson-Anderson, Photos by Sandy Wilson
University of Texas Press, 2014

With a bounty of locally grown meats and produce, artisanal cheeses, and a flourishing wine culture, it’s a luscious time to be cooking in Texas. From restaurant chefs to home cooks, Texans are going to local dairies, orchards, farmers’ markets, ranches, vineyards, and seafood sellers to buy the very freshest ingredients, whether we’re cooking traditional favorites or the latest haute cuisine. We’ve discovered that Texas terroir—our rich variety of climates and soils, as well as our diverse ethnic cultures—creates a unique “taste of place” that gives Texas food a flavor all its own.

Written by one of Texas’s leading cookbook authors, Terry Thompson-Anderson, Texas on the Table presents 150 new and classic recipes, along with stories of the people—farmers, ranchers, shrimpers, cheesemakers, winemakers, and chefs—who inspired so many of them and who are changing the taste of Texas food. The recipes span the full range from finger foods and first courses to soups and breads, salads, seafood, chicken, meat (including wild game), sides and vegetarian dishes, and sweets. Some of the recipes come from the state’s most renowned chefs, and all are user-friendly for home cooks. Finally, the authors and winemakers tell which recipes they turn to when opening their favorite wines.

This delicious compilation of recipes and stories of the people behind them, illustrated with Sandy Wilson’s beautiful photographs, makes Texas on the Table the must-have cookbook for everyone who relishes the flavors of the Lone Star State.

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True to the Land
A History of Food in Australia
Paul van Reyk
Reaktion Books, 2022
Spanning 65,000 years, this book provides a history of food in Australia from its beginnings, with the arrival of the first peoples and their stewardship of the land, to a present where the production and consumption of food is fraught with anxieties and competing priorities. It describes how food production in Australia is subject to the constraints of climate, water, and soil, leading to centuries of unsustainable agricultural practices post-colonization. Australian food history is also the story of its xenophobia and the immigration policies pursued, which continue to undermine the image of Australia as a model multicultural society. This history of Australian food ends on a positive note, however, as Indigenous peoples take increasing control of how their food is interpreted and marketed.
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