Food - Brigid Allen

Food, glorious food. It's a basic requirement of daily life, more essential--and some would even say more comforting--than religion, love, or sex. Its considerable pleasures, not to mention the deeper emotional, psychological, religious, and social resonances connected with it, have long been celebrated and explored by writers in novels, poetry, drama, biography, diaries, and letters. Now, in Food: An Oxford Anthology, Brigid Allen brings together a splendid, soup-to-nuts cornucopia of comment and opinion on food from some of our greatest writers through the ages.

Ranging from royal banquets to afterschool snacks, from the Bible to George Orwell, from the diary of a castaway to instructions for dairy maids, this appetizing collection will entice anyone with an interest in food. From sources both published and unpublished, the selections illustrate how food defines taste and character, contributes to atmosphere, and evokes emotion and humor. There are lively anecdotes and bon mots on dining in and dining out, and entertaining vignettes from travellers to exotic climes (such as the succulent description written by a seventeenth-century visitor to Barbados upon eating pineapple for the first time). There is a menu from a dinner party for King Richard II in 1387--which called for, among many other things, 11,000 eggs, 210 geese, and 720 hens--and a young boy's description of the proper way to eat Cadbury chocolate bars. There is also a section considering the effects of war, famine, and poverty, as well as the dubious attractions of dieting and the regimens of prisons and schools. In one entry, Evelyn Waugh writes that the boys in his boarding school "were able to flick pats of margarine from their knives to the high oak rafters overhead, where they stuck all the winter until released by the summer heat they fell, plomp, on the tables below."

A smorgasbord of comment, criticism, observation, and reflection, Food: An Oxford Anthology is guaranteed to provide lasting nourishment.