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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Chang-rae Lee on sea urchin in Seoul
Janet Malcolm reopens "The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook"
Julian Barnes on being a man in the kitchen
Nora Ephron on the perfect pastrami
Madhur Jaffrey on honey and green mangoes
Calvin Trillin on telling red wine from white
Adam Gopnik on a culinary game
Elizabeth Kolbert on the risks of dining out
From 1968, M. F. K. Fisher on her first taste of caviar
A tasting menu of food writing from the archive
A selection of food-related cartoons
Is it just me, or are all food histories fun to read? It's nice to find out that world-shaking events were caused not only by economics and religion but by somebody's dinner. And then, no matter how scholarly food historians aim to be, they always end up telling good stories: what Montezuma ate on a regular night (chicken, turkey, songbirds, doves, ducks, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, quail, and, according to a secondhand report, an adolescent boy or two, followed by tortillas and hot chocolate), not to speak of the dishes that Christopher Columbus, thinking he had arrived in India, found being served in what was in fact the Caribbean (spiders, worms, and a bread made of rotted zamia stems). Food historians have seen it all. Nothing impresses them; nothing frightens them.
Now this happy band has a new member, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, an English-educated Spaniard who teaches modern history at Oxford and has produced thirteen books, including "Religion" (1997), "Truth: A History" (1997), and "Civilizations" (2001). His new volume, "Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food" (Free Press; $25), is no less comprehensive. In the preface, Fernandez-Armesto tells us his aims:
To take a genuinely global perspective; to treat food history as a theme of world history . . . ; to treat evenhandedly the ecological, cultural and culinary concepts of the subject; to combine a broad conspectus with selectively detailed excursions into particular cases; to trace connections, at every stage, between the food of the past and the way we eat today; and to do all this briefly.
In fact, he does it in two hundred and twenty-four pages. The book belongs to that excellent British genre the "brief history," in which a professor who nevertheless can write--the species survives in England--gives us a short, lively rundown on the subject without saying anything really new. At one point, Fernandez-Armesto mentions that he is unusually well versed in the history of the banana. Why? Well, when he was a research fellow at St. John's College, Oxford, Sunday dinners posed a delicate problem. On those nights, the fellows invited ladies, and they...
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