Books in the At Table series

Ever since American soldiers returned home after World War II with a passion for pate and escargots instead of pork and beans, our preferences have moved from cooked to raw, from canned to fresh, from bland to savory, from water to wine. This title includes more than two hundred recipes with chapters on appetizers, soups, salads, sauces, and more.

Kathryn Cornell Dolan examines the role cattle played in narratives throughout the nineteenth century to show how the struggles within U.S. food culture mapped onto society's larger struggles with colonization, environmentalism, U.S. identity, ethnicity, and industrialization.

Featuring an array of tempting traditional Native recipes and no-nonsense practical advice about health and fitness, Recovering Our Ancestors' Gardens, by the acclaimed Choctaw author and scholar Devon Abbott Mihesuah, draws on the rich indigenous heritages of this continent to offer a helpful guide to a healthier life.

In 1962 Joan Fry was a college sophomore recently married to a dashing anthropologist. Naively consenting to a year-long “working honeymoon” in British Honduras (now Belize), she soon found herself living in a remote Kekchi village deep in the rainforest. Because Fry had no cooking or housekeeping experience, the romance of living in a hut and learning to cook on a makeshift stove quickly faded. Guided by the village women and their children, this twenty-year-old American who had never made more than instant coffee eventually came to love the people and the food that at first had seemed so foreign. While her husband conducted his clinical study of the native population, Fry entered their world through friendships forged over an open fire. Coming of age in the jungle among the Kekchi and Mopan Maya, Fry learned to teach, to barter and negotiate, to hold her ground, to share her space—and she learned to cook. This is the funny, heartfelt, and provocative story of how Fry painstakingly baked and boiled her way up the food chain, from instant oatmeal and flour tortillas to bush-green soup, agouti (a big rodent), gibnut (a bigger rodent), and, finally, something even the locals wouldn’t tackle: a “mountain cow,” or tapir. Fry’s effort to win over her neighbors and hair-pulling students offers a rare and insightful picture of the Kekchi Maya of Belize, even as this unique culture was disappearing before her eyes.  

Brings to the table an illustrious gathering of thirty midwestern writers with something to say about the gustatory pleasures and peculiarities of the region.

After a childhood of microwaved meat and saturated fat, Matthew Gavin Frank got serious about food. His ""research"" ultimately led him to Barolo, Italy (pop. 646), where, living out of a tent in the garden of a local farmhouse, he resolved to learn about Italian food from the ground up. Barolo is Frank's account of those six months.

This panoramic history of Jewish food highlights its breadth and depth on a global scale from Renaissance Italy to the post-World War II era in Israel, Argentina, and the United States, and critically examines the impact of food on Jewish lives and on the complex set of laws, practices, and procedures that constitutes the Jewish dietary system.

A collection of new essays that examine how taste is learned, developed, and represented. It spans such diverse topics as teaching wine tasting, food in Don Quixote, Soviet cookbooks, cruel foods, and the lambic beers of the Belgian Payottenland. Educated Tastes offers a fresh look at food in history, society, and culture.

Inspired by a deep passion for wine, an Italian heritage, and a desire for a land somewhat wilder than his home in southern France, Robert V. Camuto set out to explore Sicily's emerging wine scene. What he discovered during more than a year of travelling the region, however, was far more than a fascinating wine frontier.

The embodiment of the art and pleasure of French cookery, Pierre Franey (1921-96) was one of the most influential of America's culinary figures. With style, charm, and affection for his native France and adopted America, Franey takes us into his life in the world of food, interweaving his story with irresistible recipes and, here and there, impulsively giving away a chef's secrets.

Although the last decade has seen an intense and widespread interest in the writing and publishing of cookery books, surprisingly little contextualized analysis of the recipe as a generic form has appeared. This essay collection asserts that the recipe in all its cultural and textual contexts is a complex, distinct, and important form of cultural expression.

Overflows accounts of food and drink drawn from the author's vivid memories. This title offers a collection of recipes representing the best of classical French cuisine from Proust's belle epoque, ranging from the sophisticated elaboration of lobster a l'americaine or truffled partridge to the simplicity of croque-monsieur.

Wynne examines the centrality of food in rural Yucatan and how residents practice care, as exercised through food, to negotiate anxieties, achieve desired bodily and social status, and maintain valued cultural forms.

Shows how humans discovered how to grow and incorporate particular foods into their diet in the first place. This book includes more than ninety recipes from various culinary traditions around the world.

Although My Kitchen Wars is a war story, this time the warrior is a woman and the battleground the kitchen. Betty Fussell gives voice to a generation of women whose stories were shaped and yet simultaneously silenced by an era of domestic strife and global conflict, from World War II to Vietnam.

Many Jewish foods are beloved in American culture. Everyone eats bagels, and the delicatessen is a ubiquitous institution from Manhattan to Los Angeles. Jewish American Food Culture offers readers an in-depth look at both well-known and unfamiliar Jewish dishes and the practices and culture of a diverse group of Americans.

A collection of thirteen essays, which broaden familiar definitions of utopianism and community to explore the ways Americans have produced, consumed, avoided, and marketed food and food-related products and meanings to further their visionary ideals.

Presents a debate over the merits of the cuisines of vegetarians and carnivores by professional chefs. This work features recipes that make a persuasive case for each chef's point of view. It also provides eighty recipes as creative as beef brisket with blueberry BBQ sauce, and jackfruit pineapple BBQ on a bun.

A collection of recipes and literary quotations that offers an introduction to the rich culinary history of Soviet Russia.

Contains more than two hundred recipes interwoven with historical background and notes from the author's experiences traveling through Central and Eastern Europe. This book contains period illustrations and an introduction by the author, which describes how dramatically this region and its food have changed since the end of its isolation in 1989.

Some have called Sacred Harp singing America's earliest music. This book journeys into the community of Sacred Harp singers across the country and introduces readers to the curious glories of a tradition that is practiced today just as it was two hundred years ago.

A collection of Crow recipes, age-old plant medicines and healing remedies. This work imparts the lore of ages along with the traditional Crow philosophy of healing and detailed practical advice for finding and harvesting plants.

The banana is the world's most important fresh fruit commodity. Little more than a century old, the global banana industry began in the late 1880s. The Banana demystifies the banana trade and its path toward globalization. It reviews interregional relationships in the industry and the changing institutional framework governing global trade and assesses the roles of major players.

Robert V. Camuto's interest in wine turned into a passion when he moved to France and began digging into local soils and cellars. Corkscrewed recounts Camuto's journey through France's myriad regions - and how the journey profoundly changed everything he believed about wine.