Wilson, Bee (2012) Consider the Fork: a History of How We Cook and Eat, Basic Books: New York. This fascinating book traces the history of cooking technology from prehistoric to contemporary times. The author shows that [Read full article...]
I won’t reprint it all here, but I just had a review of Tom Mueller’s excellent new book on olive oil (Extravirginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil) come out. Find it here. ZN (Copyright Petites Propos Culinaires. [Read full article...]
I had already written about my doubts concerning terroir, using the example of parmesan cheese as a case study. I’ve just had an article on my research published in Petites Propos Culinaires. I’ll warn everyone that it’s a polemic, not [Read full article...]
Food historian Heather Ruiter recently posted a draft copy of her forthcoming essay on prenatal food in Renaissance Italy. Basing her research on Michele Savonarola’s Ad mulieres ferrarienses, Ruiter examines the sixteenth century author’s recommendations for pregnant women, comparing them [Read full article...]
A recent video about Rita Bordone, a popular Perugian fruit and vegetable vendor, has set off a chorus of people upset that she is closing her little shop in Via dei Priori to retire to the countryside where she has [Read full article...]
[This is an essay I wrote a while ago, trying to place Dario Cecchini in the Italian culinary tradition.] Dario Cecchini is, according to the [Read full article...]
A recent article in the business magazine L’Impresa (“Pericolo italian sounding,” N.7-8, 2011) by Gaetano Murano discusses the damage done to the Italian alimentary export [Read full article...]
“The Left’s classic utopian telos of a placeless futurity becomes replaced—for good and ill—by an image of the good society remembered in time and grounded [Read full article...]
In 2002 posters appeared in northern Italy, put up by the Lega Nord, the separatist party of Umberto Bossi. The party’s anti-immigrant stance was clear [Read full article...]
The first supermarkets in Italy were the product of a combination of American know-how and Italian improvisation. In her fascinating history of the Italian supermarket [Read full article...]
