A History of Cooks and Cooking

Named Best Culinary History Book at the Salon International du Livre Gourmand (Fifth World Cookbook Fair)
Winner, Bronze Ladle in the Best Food Book division, World Food Media Awards

‘Man is the Cooking Animal’, said the biographer James Boswell. This sentiment is the foundation of a remarkable and innovative approach to human history by the Australian food critic and historian, Michael Symons.

First published in Australia as The Pudding that Took a Thousand Cooks this is a stimulating reinterpretation of human history through the prism of the kitchen. Most food books are prescriptive, telling what or how to eat, or they analyse some minute aspect of the feeding process. This, by contrast, touches everyone’s lives, and our perception of our past.

Fueled by James Boswell's sentiments, Symons sets out to explore the civilizing role of cooks in history. His wanderings take us to the clay ovens of the prehistoric eastern Mediterranean and the bronze cauldrons of ancient China, to fabulous banquets in the temples and courts of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia, to medieval English cookshops and southeast Asian street markets, to palace kitchens, diners, and to moderns fast-food eateries. Symons samples conceptions and perceptions of cooks and cooking, from Plato and Descartes to Marx and Virginia Woolf, asking why cooks, despite their vital and central role in sustaining life, have remained in the shadows, unheralded, unregarded, and underappreciated. "People think of meals as occasions where you share food," he notes. "They rarely think of cooks as sharers of food."

Considering such notions as the physical and political consequences of sauce, connections between food and love, and cooking as a regulator of clock and calendar, Symons provides a spirited and diverting defense of a cook-centered view of the world.People have tried to understand human development by charting the consequences of economics, political conflict and its resolution, intellectual creativity, or sexual and moral changes. Symons views the world via the stove-top and the cooking-pot. It puts a whole new angle on world history and, more important still, puts women at its centre.

With delightfully speculative chapter-titles such as ‘On the Physical and Political Consequences of Sauces’ or ‘A Good Bank Account, a Good Cook and a Good Digestion’, Symons tries to see cooking as an existential act that takes in loving, sharing, distribution, and acquisition.

He places cookery at the heart of civilisation: viewing, for example, ancient temples as sacred kitchens and interpreting the place of food and ritual dining in early political systems as well as in religions.

The book is divided into two parts: the first a short history of cookery, the second an interpretation of the interface between cooking and life at large.

This title is published by Prospect in the UK only. It is available in North America from the University of Illinois Press.