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3.91 AVERAGE
3.91 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
informative
relaxing
medium-paced
I found this book fascinating. I am a food and history nerd, I first heard of Bee Wilson and this book on the podcast Gastropod (which I highly recommend!). I've been wanting to read it for a while and finally made time for it. My history teacher husband is going to read it over the summer. It is so interesting how technology for cooking has (and hasn't!) evolved over time. And some of the cooking tools we consider indispensable are so very recent. This book made me simultaneously want to clean out my kitchen down to the absolute essentials and also go get all of the latest state-of-the-art gadgets.
Another reason to mourn the lost food class, this is a charming study of the rapidly changing way that western people cook and eat. Using person experience and dedicated re-enactors, Wilson tracks down people who explain the knowledge needed to be a good spit roaster and control the ancient technology of open hearth cooking, tracks the taming of dinner knives (Norbert Elias was right--the French took the inherent violence of eating off the table and hid it in the kitchen, along with the pointy objects), tries to explicate the reason Americans don't like to measure by weight (historical lack of kitchen scales?) and follows the microwave revolution. Nicely researched, this has a few jaw-dropping insights, like the literal change in our bite pattern (end-to-end vs. overbite) related to the way we eat with utensils (and that the Chinese got there 1000 years earlier with chopsticks).
I just had to return it. I am thinking of buying it so I can finish it. The book seemed to be interesting.
informative
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
It is time to be honest with myself. I am never going to finish this book although I did get more than half way, so that’s something.. While I found the chapters on the fork, knives, and oven/stove to be interesting, the rest of the chapters on more modern instruments bored me. This book was unnecessarily repetitive and did not capitalize on its own opportunity. It would have fared better as a much shorter, less scholarly work, and should have been a bit more fun and fast paced.
5 stars for the research though!
5 stars for the research though!
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
Very interesting, but the attention given to chopsticks and Asian cuisine is slim and disappointing. The book devotes so much detail to so many varieties of forks and knives, yet the discussion of chopsticks is limited to a two-pager essentially complaining about disposable chopsticks in Japan? As if plastic cutlery anywhere else is much better? The book is still a good read, just with a heavy Western lean.
Entertaining and enlightening on the ways our culture drives and is driven by our food choices. I found it particularly enlightening when she compared the development of eating utensils and knives across different cultures. Oh, so THAT'S why steak knives are so awful and why "dinner knives" even exist! My minor quibble is that she didn't mention the Moka Pot but as a lover of that particular object, I'm used to finding it missing compared to other methods of brewing the elixir that is coffee.