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This chapter considers Pellegrino Artusi's genuine “national” cookbook La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangier bene (1891), which set out to unify the country's gastronomic practices. Artusi searched local traditions for recipes that he deemed acceptable to a wide audience. He then printed the book at his own expense, and sold it by mail from his home in Florence. The Artusian cookbook suggests a mutual understanding of practices and products, including diversity as an indivisible element of national identity. In his codification of the primo—or first course—as an opening dish, an Italian meal model was established. Artusi certified the birth of a modern Italian cuisine that established itself not only among the urban middle class, but among the popular classes as well.

This chapter examines the complex culture of food consumption in postwar Yugoslavia, primarily through the window of cookbooks. Following the evolution of cookbooks as officially produced and popularly consumed texts, Wendy Bracewell argues that these texts held significant clues to the politics, dilemmas and contradictions of the Yugoslav kitchen. In the early post war years, for example, cookbooks routinely suggested the use of ingredients that were not always available. The implication was that women—the clear audience for the instructional tone of such texts—were supposed to improvise and make do in a time of severe shortages of basic food items. In spite of communist lip-service to women’s equality, cookbooks continued to operate under traditional assumptions that domestic cookery was “women’s work.” Such tensions were also present in the ethnic politics of cookbooks, which promoted “Yugoslav brotherhood and unity” in the kitchen, while labeling and systematizing recipes on a national basis. While such contradictions persisted, cookbooks also increasingly reflected Yugoslav abundance and eclectic culinary culture. In periods of plenty, such texts sold cooking as a “fulfilling leisure pursuit”, which also meant higher expectations for culinary prowess among Yugoslav women. To a large degree Yugoslavia was exceptional in terms of abundance and openness to global culinary culture. Ultimately, however, Yugoslav plenty, like multi-national brotherhood, was not sustainable.

The Puerto Rican cuisine has been radically transformed during the past fifty years. Foods and activities previously accepted as part of an inevitable routine are now regarded as voluntary in nature, dictated not by necessity but by personal preference and choice. The introduction and mixing of non-Caribbean dishes into the menus of restaurants specializing in native cuisine likewise illustrates the changing face of Puerto Rican cooking. Despite all the changes in the country's cuisine, certain elements in the island's culinary history have remained constant and coherent. Certain agricultural products as well as traditional Puerto Rican cooking are still present in their cuisine. The combination of new influences and experiences in Puerto Rican cooking will result in the redefinition or reinvention of culinary maxims.

This chapter focuses on the behavioural and cultural aspects of food. It argues that food behaviour can be located within a social process in which consumers are but one set of actors in the food system, and where contexts and social interactions may be set and inherited through wider culture, geography and history, as well as family or domestic circumstance. Policies are engaged with all these levels, factors, and drivers.

This chapter focuses on the definition and characterization of Israeli cuisine. Based on interviews with dozens of chefs, restaurateurs, and food critics, and defying existing conventions of Israeli cuisine as an amalgam of diasporic Jewish cuisines, local produce, and (according to some) local Palestinian cuisine, the chapter argues that a defining element of Israeli food is large portions of “satisfying” dishes made from mediocre ingredients. Satiety, in this sense, is explained as a cultural rather than physiological trait. The implications of this tendency for excessive portions are discussed in personal, social, and national contexts. The chapter shows how the meanings Israelis attribute to their desire for large portions shed light on hidden aspects of contemporary Israeliness.

This chapter demonstrates that, while scholars have long focused on the economic origins of the middle class, it is crucial to understand the ways in which it fashioned itself. Although the universe of the Indian middle class revolved around contesting colonial categories, the chapter shows that the project of self-fashioning of the Indian middle class was not an instance of alternative modernity, nor did the locality of the middle class in colonial India result in producing some sort of indigenism. This middle class borrowed, adapted, and appropriated the pleasures of modernity and tweaked and subverted it to suit their project of self-fashioning. An area in which such cosmopolitan domesticity can be observed was the culinary culture of colonial Bengal, which utilized both vernacular ingredients and British modes of cooking in order to establish a Bengali bourgeois cuisine. This process of indigenization was an aesthetic choice that was imbricated in the upper caste and in the patriarchal agenda of middle-class social reform, and it developed certain social practices, including imagining the act of cooking as a classic feminine practice and the domestic kitchen as a sacred space. It was often this hybrid culture that marked the colonial middle classes.

This chapter establishes that T. S. Eliot had a prolonged interest in issues of food, health and nutrition. Through a close consideration of Eliot’s multifarious references to food in his poetry, plays and social criticism, it highlights that Eliot was in close sympathy with the predominant ideas of the British organic movement in the 1930s-50s, from the nutritional benefits of fresh organic produce to the importance of proper culinary skills. By analyzing Eliot’s oeuvre in relation to the extensive allusions to food and fare it also illustrates that Eliot’s attitudes ranged from a playful engagement with cooking in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, to the more putrid and pernicious connotations seen in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and Sweeney Agonistes. Ultimately, whilst this chapter acknowledges that Eliot’s devotion to the spiritual sustenance of the Eucharist transcended the tellurian concerns of food, it emphasizes that he still perceived an important connection between nutrition and spiritual well-being.

This chapter discusses the existence of the oldest cuisine in the world. There remains Mesopotamia. It establishes an impressive inventory of the goods that formed the ancient Mesopotamians' everyday fare: cereals, various vegetables, fruit. All these indigenous ingredients were so varied that the Mesopotamians never imported from abroad, so to speak, in spite of the intensity and geographical extent of their trade even before the third millennium. Archaeologists have unearthed many remains of a very abundant range of kitchen utensils, with the names of several containers and culinary utensils of all kinds. These are all data which enable one, a priori to some extent, to assume that very diversified techniques and almost infinite combinations of treatments for preparing food were used in that ancient country: in short, an authentic ‘cuisine’.

In Mesopotamia, it is perfectly clear that it was first and foremost the wealthy, the beneficiaries of the haute cuisine, who enjoyed sumptuous and frequent banquets – to say nothing of the gods, a great part of whose worship was concerned with the servicing of their table. From Mari, for instance, several hundred calendar tablets bearing the list of provisions supplied, day after day for several years, mainly by shops selling cereal products, oil and dried fruits, but also by ‘butchers’, for the daily fare of the king, who seems to have had a very comfortable life. On more than one occasion the feasts given by rulers, especially for their staff and troops, are evoked for us. These ‘great banquets’ were often accompanied by distributions of reward-presents, perfumed unguents for a toilette that would be worthy of the ceremony.

This book traces the development of Japanese cuisine from 1400 to 1868. It discusses previous research on Japanese foodways, as well as cuisine in other historical settings and the ideas of a few contemporary chefs working in Kyoto, Japan's present-day self-proclaimed “culinary capital.” The book examines the work of the most elite culinary experts in late medieval and early modern Japan, the hōchōnin, who traced their lineages and art back to the earliest periods of Japanese history. Their vocation crystallized in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when they formulated distinct styles of food preparation and began to write treatises on culinary art. The chapter also describes a collection of recipes inspired by Iberian foodways, considers ruptures in the old culinary practices that were facilitated by the introduction of foreign ingredients and cooking techniques, and discusses the rise of a publishing business which produced different types of cookbooks for a wider audience. It also comments on the use of menus found in published collections in the early modern period as vehicles for the imagination.

Shōsekiken Sōken, in his book Collected Writings on Cuisine and an Outline on Seasonings, included definitions of technical terms for cooking, model menus, recipes, and serving suggestions for ingredients, and gave miscellaneous comments about food preparation. His model menus follow a format of dining called honzen, or main table dining, which is rarely seen today. According to scholars of Japanese food, there is a much wider conceptual gap between the meals eaten in Shōsekiken's time and today. Japanese cuisine is as much about what modern Japanese people think about themselves as a group and as a nation as it is about food. This chapter traces the development of the Japanese's fantasy with food and how it culminated, in the early modern era, with the publication of cookbooks, which disseminated earlier customs and made new fantasies possible. It describes Kyoto as a city of restaurants, its chefs and cuisine, food ingredients, the importance of water to Kyoto cuisine, the evolution of different styles of cooking, and the importance of uneaten foods in Japan.

At the same time that chefs in the employ of shoguns, elite warlords, and aristocrats in the fifteenth century were developing the arts of cooking and banqueting, they were also doing other, less conventional things with food in demonstrations called “knife ceremonies,” which produced inedible food sculptures. Studying inedible dishes such as these might seem counterintuitive in a history of cuisine, which explains why most culinary historians of Japan mention them only in passing, if at all. Knife ceremonies were one of several entertainments, like singing, storytelling, juggling, and the more serious Noh theater, performed to entertain the elite at banquets. Due to their long history and prominence in elite food culture, knife ceremonies are an important starting point for showing the connections between food and fantasy—raw ingredients and thinking about them—that were the ingredients for premodern Japanese cuisine. Moreover, knife ceremonies have religious significance, particularly in Buddhism and Shinto.