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Academic discussions of ethnic food have tended to focus on the attitudes of consumers, rather than the creators and producers. In this ground-breaking new book, Krishnendu Ray reverses this trend by exploring the culinary world from the perspective of the ethnic restaurateur. Focusing on New York City, he examines the lived experience, work, memories, and aspirations of immigrants working in the food industry. He shows how migrants become established in new places, creating a taste of home and playing a key role in influencing food cultures as a result of transactions between producers, consumers and commentators. Based on extensive interviews with immigrant restaurateurs and students, chef...
To most of us the food that we associate with home-our national and familial homes-is an essential part of our cultural heritage. In this book, Krishnendu Ray examines the changing food habits of Bengali immigrants to the United States as they deal with the tension between their nostalgia for home and their desire to escape from its confinements.
Although South Asian cookery and gastronomy has transformed contemporary urban foodscape all over the world, social scientists have paid scant attention to this phenomenon. Curried Cultures–a wide-ranging collection of essays–explores the relationship between globalization and South Asia through food, covering the cuisine of the colonial period to the contemporary era, investigating its material and symbolic meanings. Curried Cultures challenges disciplinary boundaries in considering South Asian gastronomy by assuming a proximity to dishes and diets that is often missing when food is a lens to investigate other topics. The book’s established scholarly contributors examine food to comment on a range of cultural activities as they argue that the practice of cooking and eating matter as an important way of knowing the world and acting on it.
Food and cuisine are important subjects for historians across many areas of study. Food, after all, is one of the most basic human needs and a foundational part of social and cultural histories. Such topics as famines, food supply, nutrition, and public health are addressed by historians specializing in every era and every nation. Food in Time and Place delivers an unprecedented review of the state of historical research on food, endorsed by the American Historical Association, providing readers with a geographically, chronologically, and topically broad understanding of food culturesÑfrom ancient Mediterranean and medieval societies to France and its domination of haute cuisine. Teachers, students, and scholars in food history will appreciate coverage of different thematic concerns, such as transfers of crops, conquest, colonization, immigration, and modern forms of globalization.
Pleck examines changes in the way Americans celebrate holidays like Christmas or birthdays.
French cuisine is such a staple in our understanding of fine food that we forget the accidents of history that led to its creation. Accounting for Taste brings these "accidents" to the surface, illuminating the magic of French cuisine and the mystery behind its historical development. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson explains how the food of France became French cuisine. This momentous culinary journey begins with Ancien Régime cookbooks and ends with twenty-first-century cooking programs. It takes us from Carême, the "inventor" of modern French cuisine in the early nineteenth century, to top chefs today, such as Daniel Boulud and Jacques Pépin. Not a history of French cuisine, Accounting for...
For most people, grocery shopping is a mundane activity. Few stop to think about the massive, global infrastructure that makes it possible to buy Chilean grapes in a Philadelphia supermarket in the middle of winter. Yet every piece of food represents an interlocking system of agriculture, manufacturing, shipping, logistics, retailing, and nonprofits that controls what we eat—or don’t. The Problem with Feeding Cities is a sociological and historical examination of how this remarkable network of abundance and convenience came into being over the last century. It looks at how the US food system transformed from feeding communities to feeding the entire nation, and it reveals how a process t...
This book is about the creative work of chefs at top restaurants in New York and San Francisco. Based on interviews with chefs and observation in restaurant kitchens, the book explores the question of how and why chefs make choices about the dishes they put on their menus. It answers this question by examining a whole range of areas, including chefs' careers, restaurant ratings and reviews, social networks, how chefs think about food and go about creating new dishes, and how status influences their work and careers. Chefs at top restaurants face competing pressures to deliver complex and creative dishes, and navigate market forces to run a profitable business in an industry with exceptionall...
Moveable Gardens explores the ways people make sanctuaries with plants and other traveling companions in the midst of ongoing displacement in today's world. This volume addresses how the destruction of homelands, fragmentation of habitats, and post-capitalist conditions of modernity are countered by the remembrance of tradition and the migration of seeds, which are embodied in gardening, cooking, and community building.
This book focuses on the fiction of four postcolonial authors: V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Timothy Mo and Salman Rushdie. It argues that meals in their novels act as sites where the relationships between the individual subject and the social identities of race, class and gender are enacted. Drawing upon a variety of academic fields and disciplines — including postcolonial theory, historical research, food studies and recent attempts to rethink the concept of world literature — it dedicates a chapter to each author, tracing the literary, cultural and historical contexts in which their texts are located and exploring the ways in which food and the act of eating acquire meanings and how those meanings might clash, collide and be disputed. Not only does this book offer suggestive new readings of the work of its four key authors, but it challenges the reader to consider the significance of food in postcolonial fiction more generally.