Food History & Culture
Food History & Culture brings together the books that explain why we eat the way we do. Here, food is treated as social history, craft and art rather than as a collection of recipes.
Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste, published in 1825, is the foundational text of the genre and remains the most widely cited work on the nature of taste. In Varje tugga är en tanke, Richard Tellström traces 800 years of Swedish food culture and connects what is on the plate to politics, war, migration and market forces. The book was nominated for the August Prize. In Maträtternas historia, Ted Wärnåker explains where some fifty classic dishes, sauces and drinks actually come from.
Food as object and image also has its place here. In Tools for Food, Corinne Mynatt explores 250 kitchen utensils and their history, from twelfth century Mongolian fire pots to Tupperware. Cookbook Book examines 125 cookbooks from the past hundred years as objects of design and ideas. Salvador Dalí's Les dîners de Gala from 1973 is as much an art book as a cookbook, while The Kitchen Studio features a recipe from each of more than 70 contemporary artists.
There is also the cultural history of Swedish cheese, insects as food and the documentation of Cook it Raw, the gathering that helped shape the Nordic food movement's thinking around sustainability.
