A History of Food
Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat
This fat volume about food and cooking, packed with anecdotes and trivia and stories, is amusing but completely unreliable.
As a source of information about the history of food, it is useless. Many of the assertions of fact here are questionable, and none of them are footnoted so you can check them out. The author seems to have taken snippets from here and there (mostly, apparently, from French sources), sorted them thematically, and uncritically assembled them into a continuous text. No doubt a large proportion of the assertions here are true, but there is no way of telling the difference between the true ones and the others!
What's more, the translation is poor. Not only are some gallicisms rendered word-for-word (and so only intelligible if you translate them back into French), but there are no translator's notes for topical references.
I cannot recommend this book for anyone seriously interested in the history of food.
(This is a copy of my review of another edition of this book.)
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