Cuisine and Empire

Reviews / Votes

"During my forty year culinary career, there have been a select number of books that became touchstones, volumes that seemed to arrive just when inspiration was needed or direction was appropriate, books that somehow enhanced my sense of having found my calling. The newest addition to the list is a work of culinary history by Rachel Laudan." -- Virginia B. Wood The Austin Chronicle, on the range "It seems like every time you hear someone mention processed food, it's accompanied with the words 'bad' or 'unhealthy,' plus a shaking finger. Unless you're author Rachel Laudan." Los Angeles Times Daily Dish "Magnificent ... Some of Laudan's 'diffusion maps' of particular styles of cuisine are miniature masterpieces of cultural history." TLS "Epic in range... Its solidity and substance make a change from the day-to-day scatter of information delivered and consumed in tweets and sound bites." The Daily Spud "A fascinating account of the rise and fall of cuisines... Touching on all parts of the globe, Rachel explores human development through the vastly understated tool of food." Blue Lifestyle Minute "A new standard for global culinary history." Repast "To her impressively thorough research Laudan brings a lifetime that has included practical experience on the farm, in the kitchen, and in the classroom. This means that her exposition is as lucid as it is authoritative. Her bibliography and notes bear witness to her deep learning, and her book, in its scope and originality, gives deserved prominence to a long-neglected theme in world history. It is a triumph, pointing the way to a wholly new kind of historiography that can hold its own with more familiar work on political, economic, social, and intellectual history." -- G. W. Bowersock New York Review of Books "A remarkably detailed, generously illustrated and professionally written nonjudgmental history of the evolution of the world's cuisines ... Laudan enlivens the pages with specifics of familiar and unfamiliar foods." -- Harvey Finkel Massachusetts Beverage Business "Laudan has found not just a new way of telling some familiar stories but a whole new historiographical approach to what is now a copious literature, in a dynamic and exciting book written with the kind of crispness, concision, and eloquence that will make you squirm with delight... A triumphant historical synthesis." The World of Fine Wine "Innovative narrative... Impressively detailed, extraordinarily well-written, deftly organized and presented. Cuisine and Empure: Cooking in World History is a seminal work of outstanding scholarship, remarkably informed and informative." -- Helen Dumont The Midwest Book Review