Culinary Arts (CULA): Food & Culture

The food we enjoy while celebrating the joining of life partners helps bring us together, no matter what our differences. In this culinary history of wedding feasts, author Claire Stewart examines the various food customs associated with weddings around the world.

What's for dinner? Not just in America, but around the world? And how is it cooked, what's the historical significance of that food, how is it served and consumed, and who gets to clean up? This book provides fascinating insight into how dinner is defined in a variety of countries.

In this book, a Southern hostess shares the secrets of throwing the proper Southern funeral in this compilation of humor and recipes that answers such essential questions as: Can you be properly buried without tomato aspic?

This series presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. The set of six volumes covers nearly 3,000 years of food and its physical, spiritual, social, and cultural dimensions.

This book deconstructs and compares the foodways of people of African descent throughout the Americas, interprets the health legacies of Black culinary traditions, and explains the concept of soul itself, revealing soul food to be an amalgamation of West and Central African social and cultural influences, as well as the adaptations Blacks made to the conditions of slavery and freedom in the Americas. Sampling from travel accounts, periodicals, government reports on food and diet, and interviews with more than 30 people born before 1945, Opie reconstructs an interrelated history of Moorish influence on the Iberian Peninsula, the African slave trade, slavery in the Americas, the emergence of Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

While undeniably a "melting pot" of different cultures and cuisines, America's food habits have been shaped as much by technological innovations and industrial progress as by the intermingling and mixture of ethnic cultures. By studying what Americans have been eating since the colonial era, we are enlightened to the conflicting ways in which Americans have chosen to define themselves, their culture, their beliefs, and the changes those definitions have undergone over time.

This book draws on the Torah, the Talmud, and contemporary writings to explain the origins and developments of Jewish dietary traditions, while identifying kosher and non-kosher foods, and sharing instructions for creating a kosher kitchen.

Many of the foods we eat every day are unique to the regions of the United States in which we live. Some dishes popular in one region may even be unheard of in another region. This fascinating encyclopedia examines more than 100 foods that are unique to the United States, as well as dishes found only in specific American regions and individual states. Readers will enjoy the details on how each food is prepared and eaten, and insights into why and how each food is celebrated in American culture.

In this book, neuroscientist Rachel Herz examines the sensory, psychological, neuroscientific, and physiological factors that influence our eating habits. The book uncovers the fascinating and surprising facts that influence food consumption, such as why bringing reusable bags to the grocery store encourages us to buy more treats; how our beliefs can affect how many calories we burn; why television influences how much we eat; and how what we see and hear changes how food tastes. The author presents our relationship to food as a complicated recipe, whose ingredients -- taste, personality, and emotions -- combine to make eating a potent and pleasurable experience.

Ranging from the eating habits of our prehistoric ancestors to food-related policy issues we face today, this work covers the full spectrum of foods that have been hunted, gathered, cultivated, and domesticated; their nutritional makeup and uses; and their impact on cultures and demography.

An estimated 2 billion people worldwide regularly consume insects, yet bugs are rarely eaten in the West. Why are some disgusted at the thought of eating insects, while others find them delicious? This book provides a broad introduction to the role of insects as human food, from our prehistoric past to current food trends, and explores how they could be a solution to our current global food shortage. On the menu are beetles, butterflies, grasshoppers and grubs of many kinds, with stories that highlight traditional methods of insect collection, preparation, consumption and preservation, as well as the culinary uses of creepy-crawlies across many cultures.

Examines food in relationship to nutrition, world health issues, agriculture, environmental concerns, current events and political decision-making.

Thousands of entries provide coverage on every possible food, its history, cultural significance, and culinary usage.

The 27 essays in this book are organized into five basic sections: historiography and disciplinary approaches, as well as the production, circulation, and consumption of food.

More than 80 years before the invention of Coca-Cola, sweet carbonated drinks became popular around the world, provoking arguments remarkably similar to those heard today. Are they medicinally, morally, culturally, or nutritionally good or bad? They have been loved -- and hated -- for being cold or sweet or fizzy or stimulating. Many of their flavors are international -- lemon and ginger were more popular than cola until about 1920. Some are local: tarragon in Russia, cucumber in New York, red bean in Japan, and chinotto (exceedingly bitter orange) in Italy. This book looks at how something made from water, sugar, and gas became big business, but also became deeply important to people. Fizzy drinks' symbolic meanings are far more complex than the ingredients from which they are made.

With eye-catching shapes, interesting flavors and enticing textures, sweets and candy are much-loved worldwide by people of all ages. They provide minor treats, lessons in economics for children, and colorful novelties to mark festivities. Methods for making sweets can be traced back to the importance of sugar in Arabic medicine, and its probable origin in ancient India. But these seemingly inconsequential items are freighted with centuries of changing cultural attitudes, social and economic history, emotional attachments, and divergent views on the role of sugar in health. How did confectionery become so popular? Why do we value concentrated sweetness in such varied forms? Why persist in eating sweets? From marzipan pigs and nutty nougat to bubblegum and bonbons, this book looks behind the glamour and sparkle to explore the sticky history of confectionery. Author Laura Mason describes many of the bewildering varieties and the fascinating ways in which different cultures have made, consumed, valued, and adored sweets and candy throughout history. Featuring a selection of scrumptious recipes to try at home, this global history will appeal to sweet-toothed readers, as well as all those interested in the history of food.

When we eat, we eat the world: taking something from outside and making it part of us. But what does it taste of? Can we develop our taste? In this book, author Sarah Worth argues that taste is a sense that needs educating, for the real pleasures of eating only come with an understanding of what one really likes. From taste as an abstract concept to real examples of food, she explores how we can learn about and develop our sense of taste through themes ranging from pleasure, authenticity and food fraud, to visual images, recipes and food writing.