(Part 2) Best gastronomy history books according to redditors

Lord, the assumptions/priviledge that is in your post/responses...

The cuisine you're describing isn't an "old food fad" or "old food phenomenon." It's a multi-generation adaptation of a people's (the immigrant Chinese) cuisine in response to the to conditions, available ingredients, and demands of the people around them; in North America. To say that it isn't authentic, or calling it "fake crap," is condescending (and shows a lack of understanding) to the thousands of Chinese immigrants who have lived/worked/adapted/died in the U.S. and Canada for the past 200 hundred years. To think that this cuisine doesn't exist anymore (outside of of old menus) shows how sheltered/closed off you truly are. It is no greater/worse, nor is it less "authentic," than all the [regional] Chinese cuisine from China/Taiwan. It is a food style unto it's own; with it's own influences, responses, techniques and made by people who [usually] identify as Chinese.

If you want to try and know what you're talk about:

Books:

Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee

Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants by John Jung

Wu: Globalization of Chinese Food by David Y.H. Wu and Sidney C.H. Cheung

China to Chinatown: Chinese Food in the West by J.A.G. Roberts

Ethnic Regional Foodways United States: Performance Of Group Identity by Linda Keller Brown

The Chinese Takeout Cookbook: Quick and Easy Dishes to Prepare at Home by Diana Kuan

American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods by Bonnie Tsui

Documentary:

Chinese Restaurants directed by Cheuk Kwan (IMDB Overview)

I like thinking about culture. We tell the story of people, real and imaginary, and we should know where they come from.
I believe culture is driven by the head, the heart, and the belly. So if an idea comes into my head for a culture I ask five questions:

• What do they eat?
  
• What do they believe in?
  
• Where do they come from?
  
• Where are they going?
  
• What do they consider family?
  
• How do they court, marry, fu...nction in a relationship?
  
  You'd be amazed how much you can inform yourself there.
  
  That gives me a nice start. Then I start to ask other questions on themes. Ask the 5W1H (Who What When Where Why How) questions about 6 random subjects based on what you now know
  
  For instance, Death:
  
  
• Who handles the body?
  
• What is done with the body?
  
• When is this done?
  
• Where do they put a body?
  
• Why do they do these things?
  
  It's a never fails way of going about things. Now come up with the life of five people living in a society based on this information. Use Proust's questionnaire and Gotham's questionnaire to frame them.
  
  Do all of this with first thoughts. Look it over. Think about it. Look at common travel questions like "What's the best place to eat?" or "what should I not do to piss off the locals"?
  
  You can get the true feel for a society in hours. Then put your characters who are in that culture through those same questionnaires, same random questions. You'll know them from head to heart to belly, and you're golden.
  
  EDIT: I just saw some other information. DO NOT READ GENRE FICTION FOR WORLD IDEAS. Read history, philosophy, anthropology. Pick up a history of food ,Guns, Germs, and Steel, other books that give you overviews on specific topics in history and anthropology.
  
  Tolkien wasn't reading Kingkiller Chronicle, he was learning about hillbillies, ancient languages, and living in WW1 England. Pratchett was a polymoth. Heinlein dug in on so many topics it's unbelievable. Inform with ideas, write from your head and not someone else's.

I think the restaurants apply a business model that their peers have proven to work.

It's about surviving in the restaurant business and making money, not introducing exotic plates to Americans.

There's a history of Chinese-American food, written by ANDREW COE, that is a revealing read for students of how we got to Ma Po Tofu and Orange Beef, or whatever.

http://www.amazon.com/Unexpected-Cookbook-Unofficial-Hobbit-Cookery-ebook/dp/B00X944TFG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1453809946&sr=8-1&keywords=Unexpected+cookbook

the thesis of Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham is that the use of fire to cook food was such a large fitness advantage for the human ancestors that did it that it spurred evolution of larger brains and more advanced societies.

the crux of the argument is that cooked food is sufficiently easier to digest and yields more of its calories before being eliminated that bodies that are adapted to eating cooked food can afford much more metabolically expensive organs (like big brains).

Wrangham's idea is not universally accepted, but even if his hypothesis is not correct in the broad evolutionary sense that he argues it is, he is definitely correct in his evidence that cooked foods yields more calories.

so to answer the original question: if you consider the most important nutrient of the food (the calories) than cooking is of significant benefit to this nutrient. if you consider only certain specific vitamins that can be destroyed by heating then it is not a benefit. in any case eating an entirely raw diet would be a huge step backwards in terms of nutrition.

One of the most interesting and classic Italian cookbooks is "Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well", written by Pellegrino Artusi in 1891. It's huge, a fascinating read, incredibly comprehensive, and literally laugh-out-loud funny. EDIT: another good one is "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking" by Marcella Hazan.

I have A Taste of Ancient Rome. There are several different books that are kind of the same idea. I went with this one after reading Amazon reviews, and it is pretty decent. Leaves a few things out, though. Could be that since the original book is in Italian, as an American I can't get some of the things she has on hand, and I'm not sure sometimes which things you can just buy in italy and which things are recreations from ancient sources.

Most of the recipes seem very doable, though. And most of them a prefaced by a translation of Apicius (whose recipes are basically just ingredient lists with no measurements).

There is also the Medieval Cookbook which I use for my "tavern meals" when I play medieval fantasy RPGs. It is very well researched and the recipes are quite good. There is some very surprising stuff in there.

I was assigned this book for a class I had on the crafting of Mexican national identity when I was in Uni. Its called Que Vivan Los Tamales: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity. Here's a link to the Amazon page for it: http://www.amazon.ca/Que-vivan-los-tamales-Identity/dp/0826318738
>Connections between what people eat and who they are--between cuisine and identity--reach deep into Mexican history, beginning with pre-Columbian inhabitants offering sacrifices of human flesh to maize gods in hope of securing plentiful crops. This cultural history of food in Mexico traces the influence of gender, race, and class on food preferences from Aztec times to the present and relates cuisine to the formation of national identity.

>The metate and mano, used by women for grinding corn and chiles since pre-Columbian times, remained essential to preparing such Mexican foods as tamales, tortillas, and mole poblano well into the twentieth century. Part of the ongoing effort by intellectuals and political leaders to Europeanize Mexico was an attempt to replace corn with wheat. But native foods and flavors persisted and became an essential part of indigenista ideology and what it meant to be authentically Mexican after 1940, when a growing urban middle class appropriated the popular native foods of the lower class and proclaimed them as national cuisine.

I know its more centered around Mexico than Peru and the Incas and focuses more on the blending of the Pre-Columbian and the Spanish traditions, but perhaps you could give it a skim and get at the writer's sources.

Sultan's Kitchen

Here is another link.

http://www.thecooksguide.com/articles/adulteration.html

Food adulteration is a fascinating subject.

Here is a great book, if you want to learn all about it.
https://www.amazon.com/Swindled-History-Poisoned-Counterfeit-Coffee/dp/0691138206

This book just came out this week and basically makes the case against "humane farms " and the growing compassionate carnivore justifications rather than typical factory farms.


I've only just started it but so far seems well written and researched.

I've been reading a very interesting book First Bite How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson. I goes over the history and research on how people develop taste preferences and food habits starting from infancy (as well as cultural preferences/standards and how they've developed). It's not actually a parenting book but I think it would be very helpful for you to look at. I'm actually reading it out parental curiosity and it has wonderful info in it that I think will help me when my baby is old enough.

One thing I've learned so far is you don't need to accept defeat that your child just won't like these things (at least at such a young age). Even children with an extremely restricted diet (one all the way to feeding tube) can learn to vastly expand the things they are willing to eat with the right dedicated program. If it's a severe enough problem there are therapies and centers for it that are very effective (there are probably bad ones too). It's also important to change habits now as apparently what you eat as a toddler is very strongly correlated to what/how well you will eat as an adult.

There are things parents can do themselves just in terms of approach/parenting style. One program that was discussed briefly in the book but is more accessible to you then therapy/a center (I'm guessing?) was Tiny Tastes. The researcher had found that when parents constantly battle children over food/meal times this creates a stressful/emotional unpleasant situation for the child where they have a harder time learning to like new things. Pressure basically was counterproductive but so is just giving up. Likewise, bribing with a "yummyer" food (eat veggie to get ice cream) is also problematic. She developed a program where toddlers have the option to try a pea sized amount of a food they dislike (which they choose from some options) during a non-meal non-stressful time. They try the same food for many days in a row to get used to the flavor without so much of it that the it's upsetting. (Eating a lot of something you dislike creates an unpleasant memory and feels daunting.) They are offered a small non-food reward (she used a sticker) to motivate them to try but not enough that they attribute liking it to the reward. Apparently this was very successful in getting toddlers to like new/more foods (though not every food). It looks like you can buy more detailed directions and description online and it's not too expensive.

Hi, I'm a farmer although I do not have pigs. This is a really smart question to ask instead of jumping to conclusions.
I'm going to massively over simplify things there but...

Animals don't really have a "role in society" like you put but they do serve a function in an ecosystem. No ecosystem on earth exists without animals.

In nature when you have a monoculture (one species) that is how you spread disease. Nature loves diversity but in our farming practices because of industrialization we have massive farms with one crop so we can use machines efficiently.

You need to have diversity on a farm to break pathogen outbreaks. Imagine you had cows in a barn and they got sick and pooped everywhere all winter. Well if you bring in a new batch of cows they are just going to get the same disease. Most diseases don't transfer across species so if you bring in another species between cycles you can efficiently manage pathogens naturally.

A pig has the ability to root around and turn over ground. They are natures plow, their noses are absolutely amazing. They also eat anything so they can literally turn waste (food scrap or poop) into meat. Pigs tend to live in the forest in nature so they root around in the forest soil and turn over all sorts of things. They clear out waste and create space for new life to flourish, helping the forest or ecosystem stay healthy.

It is true what you say that farm animals have a purpose but they exist on the farm to be used for work then eaten. The domesticated animals we have now are very far removed from their wild ancestors.

One thing to think about with pigs is that they do not sweat, they control their body temperatures by creating mud wallows where they roll around in and cool off. But because they don't sweat toxins can accumulate in their body.

In Stoicism there is a word "Arete" that means excellent character. For a pig to have arete it would have to be outside with the ability to root around somewhere and socialize with other pigs. If someone does eat meat, as long as the pig got to live with arete and was killed in a humane manner it should be well within most peoples ethical frameworks to eat.

If you want to learn more there are 2 awesome books I have read on pigs. I really enjoyed Lesser Beasts, the author goes into detail about how much the ancient romans loved pork. He even mentions Seneca in it.

Lesser Beasts: https://www.amazon.ca/Lesser-Beasts-Snout-Tail-History/dp/0465052746

The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: https://www.amazon.ca/Marvelous-Pigness-Pigs-Respecting-Creation/dp/1455536970

We can guess:

As mentioned, waste disposal is somewhat addressed for Stormwind and Gilneas. The waste would probably collected in cisterns and either dumped into the canals or sold as nightsoil to fertilize the fields in Goldshire and Westfall. Technology is all over the place in WoW, but assuming they have not invented nitrogen-based fertilizers the urine of the poor would also be collected in order to fertilize the crops, too.

Farming for the horde seems to be less developed. But, they do have a lot of pigs. And the pigs seem to wander everywhere. Likely, the solid excrement is devoured by these pigs (along with other non-feces based waste), whom are then eaten by Orcs on the lower ends of society (read peons: Zug Zug). This sort of thing has been, and is still is in places, a very important part of our real life relationship with swine.

The closest human parallel to the Tauren citizens at Thunderbluff would be Native American Cliff Dwellers such as the citizens of Mesa Verde. If this comparison is accurate, they probably just dump it off the side of the bluff. On the other hand, Tauren are cows, so their nightsoil would probably bring the best prices in Azeroth.

Strangely, one of my favorite subjects: salt.

A layman's (confused) summary:

Up until the 1830s, the ability to create salt was effectively limited by weather, climate, fuel, and geography. Not every place has ready access to brine; so (even now) some nations have to mine rock salt (halite), crush it, use freshwater to create a brine, which is then purified and boiled. Even then, they may only have small sources and importing of foreign salt is cheaper and easier.

Even nations with a wide coast, and ready access to salty ocean water may not be able to effectively extract the salt. Either due to lacking fuel, geographical limitations for building larger saltworks, or an excessively damp, cold climate.

What changed during the Industrial Revolution was the application of steam power and coal to the brine boiling process, enabling more salt to be purified and created cheaply. Previously, forests near salt springs (a ready source of brine) would be denuded, increasing the cost of fuel transportation over the lifetime of saltworks. With the advent of rail, coal and steam power, fuel was more readily provided, greatly increasing the scale of production while driving down the cost of running the boilers.

When you combine a requirement for salt to preserve foods (remember, modern refrigeration technology isn't all that old), and other industrial applications (tanning hides, dying clothing), with the need of the mineral so you can live, and with the limited ability to easily create it: you have a valuable and rare commodity.

So, that's essentially why salt became common in recent history. Look before then and consider how difficult it could be to acquire or produce while still being necessary, and you'll begin to grasp why it was part of a Roman's soldier's pay (salarium, sal is Latin for salt), and why saltworks were strategically important to armies, and economically important to nations.

TL;DR: You need salt to live. It was for a long while practically the only way to preserve food. Salt was rare until industrialization eased production, by reducing reliance on climate and fuel sources.

A good pop-history read on salt is Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History. I found it pretty damn fun.

>cooking food is pretty tame

Tame enough to inspire books and a BBC series. There's a growing body of evidence that cooking meat is what allowed us to advance from the level of advanced primate to what we are. Without cooking, we quite possibly would still be flinging shit around at each other.

There was this book list that was posted on the Google+ SCA medieval brewing boards...perhaps it can be of some help.

I also have these books: 1, 2,3, which have been some amazing and helpful resources. The feast of ice and fire book is good because it shows common medieval recipes and then their current-age counterpart.

> This is probably because they 'self domesticated' themselves thousands of years ago, and have essentially thrown themselves in with us.

This is basically what pigs did, too. I wish I could link to an article, but here's a great book on the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Lesser-Beasts-Snout---Tail-History/dp/0465052746/

My new favourite book to just read and get lost in is Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton. If you want more technical reading, I like Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor by Herve This. My favourite food history book is A History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat. That should keep you going for a bit.

There's this, this or this - all have positive reviews. This is a very nice cookbook for Renaissance cooking.

It is a bad idea doing all this enriching. Some vitamins/minerals can hide the shortage of others, which makes more damage happen before the underlying condition is found. I strongly recommend reading Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee which has a chapter on this issue.

Unless you only eat highly processed foods, it is virtually impossible to end up deficient in nutrients. The solution is to eat less processed foods and have a greater proportion of the diet be plants. That is less profitable for the food industry who pay for congress/senate.

The term entered into English usage before the recent convention of trying to pronounce words the way they're pronounced in other languages. Tortilla was adopted later because American people didn't want to eat Mexican foods at first (yeah food racism was a thing!)

I found an unofficial Hobbit cookbook and used those recipes for the main dishes, and for desert I made red velvet cake balls and used frosting to make them look like little Eyes of Sauron. We also had Funyuns, which I'd never tried before and wouldn't use again tbh

All Under Heaven is a great resource. It's a cookbook with different sections for different regions of China. It has a section that includes lots of Shanxi and Xinjiang style food.

If you send me a PM I could send you a recipe or two I scanned from the book. :)

And, if you happen to be a college student check if your school library does interlibrary loans. This allows you to request any book you like and they'll send it to you from any library they're connected with. I've requested like 40 obscure cookbooks haha

If you liked this article, there is a whole book on the subject about human cultivation and its effects on the evolution of food: http://www.amazon.com/Edible-History-Humanity-Tom-Standage/dp/0802715885

I've used this for years with great results: https://www.amazon.com/Sultans-Kitchen-Cookbook-Ozcan-Ozan/dp/962593944X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1473091482&sr=1-1&keywords=turkish+cookbook

I agree with /u/againstthesky - China is a vast place with a long history and very different food traditions depending on where you are. You can see how distinct it is from the wikipedia article-- notice how the 8 regions of traditional Chinese cuisine are represented only by the yellow highlighted portions of the map and are extremely different - a few of them are known for being spicy, a few of them have almost no spicy dishes... You could find traditional dishes that include dairy in Guangdong and Inner Mongolia but they'd be hard to find elsewhere... As againstthesky mentioned, even the staples are different. And if you care to read a book, I like All Under Heaven which separates the cuisine into 35 discrete regions and also has context of the author being non-native Chinese.

Historically, breakfast didn’t come with its own list of prescribed foods, says Abigail Carroll. People simply ate whatever they had around for breakfast, which was often leftovers from the night before.

Source : Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal

I'm no food historian but I am immensely interested in the subject, so sorry to chime in!

A History of Food is a great book to start with, and really emphasizes the importance of grains and farming in our history.

Bite Size Vegan does a pretty great coverage of specifically vegans in history.

Jas Townsed & Son has a great channel about 18th century food history, and there are a lot of recipes that just happen to be veg or are very easy to veganize by using something like vegan butter.

The Hygeian Home Cookbook: palatable food without condiments, is the first known completely vegan cookbook and totally worth a read.

I have this book. If you want to know what daily life was like, try eating like the Romans. These are all ancient recipes left by Apicius, Juvenal etc. I have tried cooking some of these and what I tried was ok and interesting, but not great. They use fish sauce (garum) in almost all of their recipes. So, If you want to try these, you'll have to swing by an Asian store and ask for a recommendation on some Thai fish sauce to find an equivalent. https://www.amazon.com/Taste-Ancient-Ilaria-Gozzini-Giacosa/dp/0226290328

http://www.amazon.it/Chop-Suey-Cultural-History-Chinese/dp/0195331079/

Other good Roman recipe books for modern tables are A Taste of Ancient Rome - http://www.amazon.com/Taste-Ancient-Ilaria-Gozzini-Giacosa/dp/0226290328 - and Roman Cookery - http://www.amazon.com/Roman-Cookery-Ancient-Recipes-Kitchens/dp/1897959605/ref=pd_sim_b_2.

It's because if you accept the thesis that it was in fact cooking that turned us from homo erectus to homo sapiens, you would understand that the first people to try a cashew did NOT in fact try to eat it raw, but in fact threw it into the cooking fire like all the other food they were eating (cooked).

Source: http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/B004HEXSV8/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1313724365&sr=8-3

You may enjoy:

"The Dirt on Clean - An Unsanitized History"

also

"Salt: A World History"

http://www.amazon.com/Chop-Suey-Cultural-History-ebook/dp/B003D5DK0Q/ref=dp_kinlend_rdm_t

shameless plug for ignorance cure.

A video on the topic I thought was very interesting and well-explained:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKfR6bAXr-c
And since his sources are hidden behind a few clicks, here they are in one place instead of scattered across a blog article:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV3sBlRgzTI
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/361/4689958
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Squares-Invention-American-Meal/dp/0465025528
https://daneverettbooks.com/about-dan/about-the-pirahas/
https://youtu.be/2PdJFbjWHEU?t=1h2m31s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UkZAwKoCP8
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1464156/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2649682/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSH4vBBSDmg

The Oxen at the Intersection: A Collision (or, Bill and Lou Must Die: A Real-Life Murder Mystery from the Green Mountains of Vermont)

I love this book because it is short but very thoughtfully written. It discusses a pretty recent conflict between localvores and animal rights activists, and it covers how the attitudes and politics toward food and animals have been shaped over many generations. Here's a review of the book and a bit more about the situation.

Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals is being released in a few days. I pre-ordered it because I know he concerns himself with the environmental as well as ethical problems with eating animals. He has a pretty active blog: www.james-mcwilliams.com

Also, the Food Empowerment Project is an amazing organization with lots of material on their site. They are concerned with animal exploitation, access to healthy food, and the marginalization and mistreatment of workers in the global food industries, especially women and POC. Their latest victory is getting Clif to disclose the countries of origin for their chocolate, which is frequently sourced with slave and child labor.

I'm not an Anthropologist, but I found this book really interesting. It's specific to the meal in America though. Sort of along the lines of what you're asking about though.

It's a "classic" in Italian cooking.

Free PDF here.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/141612498/Science-in-the-Kitchen-and-the-Art-of-Eating-WellScience-in-the-Kitchen-and-the-Art-of-Eating-Well#scribd

If you read Italian... http://www.casartusi.it/sites/artusi/files/libro%20artusi.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Science-Kitchen-Lorenzo-Italian-Library/dp/0802086578

Give this a read

This sounds familiar! We have a 12-year-old that, among her MANY dislikes, won't even eat strawberries (WTF kid, no fruit?) and also 13-year-old diagnosed with anorexia at age 10. You daughter sounds like she may have something that falls into the eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS) category, or she may just be really picky.

In perusing reddit, I found this thread a few weeks back. That led me to a book, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, which discusses how we learn to eat in the first place, and how to begin re-training an overly-sensitive/picky eater. It's not a solution, but it is a place to start.

This book cites a TON of different research and is generally an interesting read. Looking at her bibliography might lead you to something https://www.amazon.com/First-Bite-How-Learn-Eat/dp/0465064981

add this too

http://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky/dp/0802713734

From my library there are more but I am moving so everything is boxed up


Cant recommend this one enough
http://www.amazon.ca/An-Edible-History-Of-Humanity/dp/0802715885/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334677961&sr=8-1-spell

http://www.amazon.ca/Atlas-Lost-Cults-Mystery-Religions/dp/1841813346/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334677994&sr=1-2

http://www.amazon.ca/Cities-Destiny-Arnold-J-Toynbee/dp/B000NX7OIA/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1334678017&sr=1-2-spell

You might like An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage

I have this cookbook... and I love using it -- it's very authentic, but kind-of time consuming to cook from. Maybe some of the snacks or roasts could be a tabletop games night meal?

>The thing is, that I would not mind slaughtering and eating my own livestock in order to put food on the table for my family.

Actually, people who say this usually do mind. I recommend you read The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals. The book analyses accounts of backyard slaughters on homestead blogs. One central result is that there is a distinct psychological process these people go through – and these are people who, at the end of the day, claim like you not to mind killing these animals. You'll see there's a great deal of self-delusion going on there.

Chop Suey by Andrew Coe was an excellent read and goes in even more depth.

It's great to see more people learning about this history to understand how cuisines are adapted by the people cooking it. Hopefully more people will get more informed about Chinese and Chinese-American cuisine and stop thinking in the negative stereotypes that abound.

This book by Bee Wilson explains it wonderfully. Basically our taste for certain foods is learned, not inherited.

https://www.amazon.com/First-Bite-How-Learn-Eat/dp/0465064981