Paul Freedman: Food: The History of Taste

By JULIETTE ROSSANT When should a history of taste commence and to what purpose do we examine what and how we eat and our aesthetic preferences? Paul Freedman's Food: The History of Taste (University of California 2007) scans the big picture from prehistory to modern times in a group of essays about taste. Freedman is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale University, specializing in medieval history. This is a very readable, authoritative collection of essays. His introduction touches on all the periods and civilizations dissected in the book – China, Islam, and Europe in the medieval period and after the Renaissance, French cuisine and the rise of restaurants. But it is the modern period that most absorbs him: If all history is, in a sense, a dialogue between tradition and innovation, how today do we weigh up in culinary terms the ever beguiling tension between them? What seems to exemplify the higher end of dining now is a double or even contradictory view of what taste should strive for. On the one hand, the uneasiness over where food comes from, coupled with a periodic shift towards simplicity, has led to a cuisine of authenticity in which quality, naturalness, seasonality and local ingredients are paramount and the style of preparation designed to highlight the primary produce. (pp. 16-17) Super chefs themselves have been caught up in that debate. Why talk about taste? Freedman connects it with social status and class struggle, and places it at the center of what he believes is a definition of human: The way we collect, process, sell, buy, and prepare food is both a necessary industry and a daily art that expresses what it is to be alive. (p. 33) Food: The History of Taste is a lavish book with paintings, photographs, and images of objects and menus from prehistory to the present. The chapter on the history of restaurants, written by Elliott Shore, begins with the first French restaurants serving restorative broth and chronicles the rise of ever more elaborate and elegant eating establishments. He writes about Delmonico's in New York: The cellar supposedly held 16,000 bottles of wine. The restaurant had cost the unheard of sum of $100,000 in a city that had just become the largest in North America. But the key to its success was undoubtedly the food and its preparation. (p. 312) The culmination of this trend is found in the many restaurants of Ritz and Escoffier, as documented in Super Chef, which combined service, cuisine and ambience. Ritz and Escoffier responded to the tastes of female diners who in turn finally joined the ranks of owners. Food: the History of Taste goes a long way to unifying our understanding of taste throughout history and in many cultural contexts. Previous articles: [Cookbook Reviews - complete] Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, blogging, food blogging --> back to Super Chef