New Books in Food

Taste is a subjective experience. We know this because eggs pickled in human urine, cheese with live maggots living in it, fertilized and mostly-developed duck eggs, rotten shark, calf blood and cheese whiz are all delicacies somewhere. But there is a flavor that we can measure and compare objectively. Kind of.This episode was produced by Andrew Middleton and Liya Rechtman.Special thanks to our taste-testers: Brian Sexton, Daniel Siegel, Grace Gouddis, Gregory Fredle, Lois Rosson, Maiya Zwerling, Michelle Tigchelaar, Simon Brown, and Val McGraw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Jews are ritually obligated to eat matzah during Passover. But how much matzah? Well, that depends on your views on the size of an olive. This episode was produced by Andrew Middleton and Liya Rechtman. Special thanks to Rabbi Natan Slifkin, founder of RationalistJudaism.com for his work on olives and biblical measurements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

While every cultures cuisine tells a story, there are few foods that carry as much history and meaning as do those on the Passover Seder plate. Haroset: A Taste of Jewish History (Toby Press, 2019) is the first book ever written about this traditional Passover seder food. In a captivating historical journey, food historian Dr Susan Weingarten traces the development of this ancient dish through a tapestry of social, religious and cultural contexts.Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Vermont—arguably the OG farm-to-table state—is celebrated through 100+ recipes and stories from celebrated pastry chef Gesine Bullock-Prado.When Gesine Bullock-Prado left her Hollywood life in 2004 and moved to Vermont, she fell in love with the Green Mountain State’s flavors and six unique seasons. Spring, summer, fall, and winter all claim their place at this table, but a true Vermonter holds extra space for maple-forward mud season—that time of year before spring when thawing ice makes way for mucky roads—and stick season, a notable period of bare trees and gourds galore prior to winter.In My Vermont Table: Recipes for All (Six) Seasons (Countryman Press, 2023), Bullock-Prado takes readers on a sweet and savory journey through each of these special seasons. Recipes like Blackberry Cornmeal Cake, Vermont Cheddar Soup, Shaved Asparagus Toasts, and Maple Pulled Pork Sliders utilize local produce, dairy, wine, and flour. And quintessential Vermont flavors are updated with ingredients and spices from Bullock-Prado’s own backyard. With stunning photography, Vermonters and visitors alike will revel in a seat at this table.Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at Vittlesvamp.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

From whiskey in the American Revolution to Spam in WWII, food reveals a great deal about the society in which it exists. Selecting 15 foods that represent key moments in the history of the United States, this book takes readers from before European colonization to the present, narrating major turning points along the way, with food as a guide.US History in 15 Foods (Bloomsbury, 2023) takes everyday items like wheat bread, peanuts, and chicken nuggets, and shows the part they played in the making of America. What did the British colonists think about the corn they observed Indigenous people growing? How are oranges connected to Roosevelt's New Deal? And what can green bean casserole tell us about gender roles in the mid-20th century? Weaving food into colonialism, globalization, racism, economic depression, environmental change and more, Anna Zeide shows how America has evolved through the food it eats.Anna Zeide is Associate Professor of History and the founding director of the Food Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences at Virginia Tech, USA. She has previously written Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (2018), which won a 2019 James Beard Media Award, and co-edited Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food (2021). Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Dr. Azzan Yadin-Israel presents a journey into the mystery behind why the forbidden fruit became an apple, upending an explanation that stood for centuries.Dr. Yadin-Israel reveals that Eden’s fruit, once thought to be a fig or a grape, first appears as an apple in twelfth-century French art. He then traces this image back to its source in medieval storytelling. Though scholars often blame theologians for the apple, accounts of the Fall written in commonly spoken languages—French, German, and English—influenced a broader audience than cloistered Latin commentators. Dr. Yadin-Israel shows that, over time, the words for “fruit” in these languages narrowed until an apple in the Garden became self-evident. A wide-ranging study of early Christian thought, Renaissance art, and medieval languages, Temptation Transformed offers an eye-opening revisionist history of a central religious icon.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

From Gail Borden’s meat biscuit to John Harvey Kellogg’s peptogenic foods for race betterment and Fleishmann’s yeast as both technology of empire and imperfect tool of the global struggle with malnutrition, Lisa Haushofer’s Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition (University of California Press, 2022) brings together case studies of American and British foods developed and marketed in the century 1840-1940 as modern, scientific miracles of nutritional efficiency―of “doing more.” Wonder Foods deepens our understanding of the dramatic transformations of science, commerce, and their relationship during that century; the effects that those changes had on how food was conceptualized and consumed; and the ways in which these foods were entangled with destructive forces including imperialism and eugenics, racism and sexism. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The Salt Roads: How Fish Made a Culture (Birlinn, 2022) by John Goodlad is the extraordinary story of how salt fish from Shetland became one of the staple foods of Europe, powered an economic boom and inspired artists, writers and musicians.It ranges from the wild waters of the North Atlantic, the ice-filled fjords of Greenland and the remote islands of Faroe to the dining tables of London’s middle classes, the bacalao restaurants of Spain and the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe.As well as following the historical thread and exploring how very different cultures were drawn together by the salt fish trade, Goodlad meets those whose lives revolve around the industry in the twenty-first century and addresses today’s pressing themes of sustainability, climate change and food choices.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Egyptians often say that bread is life; most eat this staple multiple times a day, many relying on the cheap bread subsidized by the government. In Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt (Duke UP, 2022), Jessica Barnes explores the process of sourcing domestic and foreign wheat for the production of bread and its consumption across urban and rural settings. She traces the anxiety that pervades Egyptian society surrounding the possibility that the nation could run out of wheat or that people might not have enough good bread to eat, and the daily efforts to ensure that this does not happen. With rich ethnographic detail, she takes us into the worlds of cultivating wheat, trading grain, and baking, buying, and eating bread. Linking global flows of grain and a national bread subsidy program with everyday household practices, Barnes theorizes the nexus between food and security, drawing attention to staples and the lengths to which people go to secure their consistent availability and quality.Jessica Barnes is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and the School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina. She is author of Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change.Amir Sayadabdi is a lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Buffalo isn't just a city full of great wings. There is a great hot dog tradition, from Greek- originated "Texas red hots" to year-round charcoal-grilling at Ted's that puts Manhattan's dirty water dogs to shame. This is also a city of great sandwiches. It's a place where capicola gets layered on grilled sausage, where sautéed dandelions traditionally make up the greens in a comestible called steak- in-the-grass, and chicken fingers pack into soft Costanzo's sub rolls with Provolone, tomato, lettuce, blue cheese dressing, and Frank's RedHot Sauce to become something truly naughty.Food and travel writer Arthur Bovino ate his research, taking the reader to the bars, the old-school Polish and Italian-American eateries, the Burmese restaurants, and the new-school restaurants tapping into the region's rich agricultural bounty. With Buffalo Everything: A Guide to Eating in Nickel City with 50 Recipes (Countryman Press, 2018), Bovino has created the essential guide to food in Buffalo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food