Reddit reviews Lobscouse and Spotted Dog: Which It's a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels

Not an answer to your question, but just to be sure that you are aware, there is a POB cookbook.

I am assuming that you are asking about the book "Lobscouse and Spotted Dog"? If so, yes, it is an outstanding book written by a mother and daughter team. Many food and drink recipes from the books and lots of great narration. Works as a great coffee table book too. And yes.. they even do Miller's in Onion Sauce.

I think a term that may be helpful for you here is foodway, a relative of folkway. To be lazy and lift it directly from Wikipedia,

> In social science, foodways are the cultural, social, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food. Foodways often refers to the intersection of food in culture, traditions, and history.

You might be interested in Louisiana's food history. The cajun vs creole dynamic is fascinating, drawing from indigenous, slave, domestic and aristocratic cuisines—the aristocracy in question being both American and French. Cajun cuisine is influenced more heavily by subsistence cooking, similar to northeast Thai cuisine (Isan cuisine is very spicy for the exact reasons mentioned by the other comment), while New Orleans' creole cuisine is much more heavily-influenced by the aristocracy of France and Spain, in the way that Thai cuisine in Bangkok orients itself around the royal court.

The most well-known older cajun cookbooks, River Road Recipes and Talk About Good!, are time capsules of mid-century American cooking that give us a snapshot of post-WWII, pre-Julia Child American cookery and also happen to provide a very on-the-ground view of Southern, and specifically Louisianian, cooking smack in the middle of the Civil Rights era. You can find used copies of both for cheap online, and while neither is especially useful for actual cooking in 2019 (shortening and salad oil, anyone?) both are a great look at the distinctly American foodways that Julia Child tried, more or less successfully, to smash with her great book, which introduced the idea of the "foodie" in the US. Speaking of cajun cuisine specifically, I don't know that Paul Prudhomme or Emeril Lagasse would exist without Julia's influence, and writers like George Graham are definite beneficiaries of her legacy.

But "food culture" is just history, and thinking about what that means can be endlessly interesting. English cuisine has this hilarious reputation of being absolute shit, and yet it's been shaped by so many amazing historical influences that you can't help but be fascinated by it. Baked beans and blood sausage for breakfast, the first popular Western curries, marmite, tea, and a limitless number of classist rules about who gets to eat what and when, and on what holidays. Why are French and English cheeses so different in 2019? The answer is WWII, but not for cheese snobs it's not. For them it's just the right way to make a particular cheese. Both are valid replies! Why does Whole Foods in the US sell Mulligatawny soup? Because of the British colonization of India that began to westernize south Asian food . Why is there a whole cookbook for Patrick O'Brian fans? Because of the same English navy that, in part, gave us Mulligatawny soup. These are all foodways, going back centuries and still on your supermarket shelf today.

Books like "Near A Thousand Tables" or "Salt" or "Cod" would probably be very interesting to you. "The Book of Jewish Food" by Claudia Roden is an incredible history of diasporic foodways. Cuban cuisine in Miami is an interesting example of diasporic food—Cuban immigrants have, for the most part, been able to hold on to the middle-class status they arrived with, and their food heritage is a cool example of ways that traditions have been maintained by a moneyed class, as opposed to something like Dhania chicken in Kenya, which is a curry that was invented by poor laborers imported from India who didn't have the money to bring their cuisine along with them. Dhania chicken is, by the way, one of the best things you'll ever taste.

Anyway, sorry for the essay and I hope some of that is of interest to you. Just the history of British curries could fill several volumes, and it covers so much ground that it might make a great place for you to start. Shit, I feel like "White Teeth" by Zadie Smith is basically a novel about curry, which it most certainly isn't, but it's a solid launchpad for the great mashup of cuisines that gives English food its horrible reputation, its romance, its colonial history and its obvious place at the intersection of East and West. There's no other cuisine that has representation, if only tendrils, in upstate New York, downtown Calcutta, and every grocery store in New Zealand, from baked beans to beer.

Pasting my comment from a recent thread:

>Dean King's Sea of Words and Harbors and High Seas are pretty essential, I find.
>
>I also like Patrick O'Brian's Navy: An Illustrated Guide to Jack Aubrey's World, though it's more 'additional reading' than a must-have, for me.
>
>And of course, Lobscouse and Spotted Dog is the essential culinary companion, if you've a mind to spend some time in the galley and want to shout "Which it'll be ready when it's ready!" as authentically as possible.
>
>I've heard good things about the Patrick O'Brian Muster Book, but I haven't used it so I can't speak to it personally.

Hey, it's no bother! I've been powering through all the novels (there are 20 of them) and my wife got me this cookbook that has recipes for all the food mentioned in the books: http://www.amazon.com/Lobscouse-Spotted-Dog-Gastronomic-Companion/dp/0393320944

Los gehts mein herr.

You might be interested in this book inspired by the Aubrey Maturin series of nautical novels. Perhaps the OP has a professional opinion about this work and the novels.

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