Why am I passionate about this?
My interest in medieval food and cookery combines two of my great passions in life, but I first started to become seriously interested in the combination when researching religious dietary ideas and practices. I am fascinated by the symbolic role played by food and drink in religious life, and by fasting and self-denial as part of a religious tradition, but also in the ways in which medieval communities feasted and how tastes in food and drink developed through trade and cultural exchange. I teach an undergraduate course on Feast, Fast, and Famine in the Middle Ages because questions about production, consumption, and sustainability are crucially important for us all.
Andrew's book list on food and drink in the Middle Ages
Why did Andrew love this book?
This book is about the early modern cooking revolution. Basing her investigation on a ground-breaking recipe book from 1651, Peterson examines the fundamental shift in European food tastes from the medieval preference for fragrant, heavily spiced dishes that combined sweet and savoury to the salt-acid followed by sweet that forms the basis of modern European cookery. This book was not written for an academic audience, so although it is well-informed it is not a demanding read for non-experts. The book contains a few recipes that are worth trying, and as a whole itβs a colourful and compelling story.
1 author picked The Cookbook that Changed the World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In 1651 in Paris, the unknown cook, Francois Pierre de la Varenne published "Le Cuisinier Francois", and changed the course of culinary history. This book aims to reconstruct the seventeenth-century revolution in French cooking that explains why we eat as we do. It reveals how Varenne turned out to be the father of modern cuisine.