Delias Kitchen Garden or The Culture of Food

Delia's Kitchen Garden

Author: Delia Smith

Follow a year in the life of Delia’s kitchen garden while creating your own organic garden. With 56 enticing recipes and 300 colour photographs, it’s sure to be a labour of love.
Delia Smith is Britain’s bestselling food author whose priority has always been the quality and flavour of the ingredients she uses — and nothing comes fresher than produce from your own garden. So when the opportunity arose for her to work with garden expert Gay Search and create her own kitchen garden, she seized the chance.
This beginner’s guide, now in paperback, is for anyone interested in good food — free from pesticides — and who wants to try their hand at growing their own.
NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED. Delia devotes a chapter to each month, with detailed advice on sowing and planting, fruit and vegetable varieties, and how to harvest. With Delia’s failsafe recipes, which use the produce at its peak, this is a wonderful book for novice horticulturists and cooks of all levels.

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The Culture of Food (Making of Europe Series)

Author: Massimo Montanari

This book is about the history of food in Europe and the part it has played in the evolution of the European cultures over two millennia. It has been a driving force in national and imperial ambition, the manner of its production and consumption a means by which the identity and status of regions, classes and individuals have been and still are expressed. In this wide-ranging exploration of its history the author weaves deftly between the classes, regions and nations of Europe, between the habits of late antiquity and the problems of modernity. He examines the interlinked evolutions of consumption, production and taste, to show both what these reveal of the varied cultures and peoples of Europe in the past and what they suggest about the present.

R. James Tobin, Univ. of Wisconsin Lib., Milwaukee - Library Journal

A history of hunger and scarcity as well as consumption, this account of food in Europe from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, with a glance back and forward, emphasizes class and regional differences in dietary habits. A varied diet has always reflected social status, and Montanari (history, Univ. of Bologna) shows what extremes this has taken. He contrasts royal meals of many dishes with single-food diets and shows how burghers responded to hungry paupers and peasants. In addition, Greco-Roman ideals of moderation are contrasted with Germanic and Celtic ideals of the powerful appetite. There is much about meat and bread, beer and wine, which predated rice, maize, potatoes, pasta (originally a luxury food), tea, and coffee. Though one wishes that Montanari had extended his treatment to the 20th century, this remains a fascinating book that will appeal to curious lay readers as well as scholars. Recommended for all academic and larger public libraries.

Booknews

A study of the production systems and consumption models of food, focusing primarily on the era commonly known as the Middle Ages (the author rejects this term as a misleading construct), delving as far back as the third century and forward to the present. Focusing on Europe, Montanari (history, Universities of Catania and Bologna) explores ideas such as famine and abundance, changes in eating habits, consequences of trade, and the connection between food and identity in bourgeois societies.
Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)