In High on the Hog, Jessica B. Harris constructs an elegant narrative history that connects the culinary experiences of the African and American continents to show how African Americans shaped the country around them.
Category Archive: Review
Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900 is a cogent study of dairy production from the turn of the twentieth century to the present.
At a time when modern society is said to have left the kitchen for the couch, David Sutton’s latest book, Secrets from the Greek Kitchen, brings welcome empirical and theoretical depth previously lacking from the home cooking discourse.
Perhaps what each piece in this edited volume does best is identify, through ethnographic and archival research, what underlies, is experienced, or is even erased by use of the words “country” and “city” in conceptualizing foodways.
Andrew F. Smith’s Drinking History: Fifteen Turning Points in the Making of American Beverages demonstrates how America’s diverse and shifting beverage tastes intersect histories of politics, economics, social movements, and global influences.
Abigail Carroll’s Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal traces the evolution of the American meal from the colonial era to the present.
Charlotte Biltekoff explores the history of American dietary reform to reveal how culture, politics, and middle class moral ideologies have shaped our social understandings regarding what it means to “eat right” as an American.
In Wine and Culture, Black and Ulin curate a selection of oenocentric essays that aim to showcase how the subject of wine may fluently speak to important contemporary social and cultural discourses.
Bringing together insights drawn from nearly a decade of ethnographic research, Heather Paxson’s The Life of Cheese offers much to populate the theoretical landscape of artisanal cheese production in America.