Cookery — Science, Lore & Books

This volume has two parts as it represents the proceedings of two consecutive Symposia that took place in 1984 and 1985 held at St. Anthony's College, Oxford. The first part concerns cookery books and the transmission of recipes. The second contains papers on science and lore in the kitchen.

As the introduction explained, the connection between these two subjects is clear, and was already apparent in the growing tendency for authors of cookery books at the time to offer at least some scientific explanation of the processes they describe, and in the contemporaneous publication of several books on ' science in the kitchen ' exemplified by Harold McGee's landmark book, On Food & Cookery: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen which appeared in 1984.