Food Studies & Culinary History

With our 2024 acquisition of Prospect Books we added more than 150 books and one journal to our food studies and culinary history program as well as becoming the publisher of the renowned series, Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery.

Prospect was founded in 1979 by the British diplomat and food historian Alan Davidson and later owned and run by Tom Jaine, who until 2023 was also the long-time editor of Prospect’s food history journal Petits Propos Culinaires (PPC). Classics by Davidson on the Prospect backlist include Mediterranean Seafood which sits alongside another Prospect bestseller with a Mediterranean focus, Honey from a Weed by Patience Gray.

Alan Davidson wrote an account of the founding of Prospect Books in a two-part, 1984 essay originally published in PPC which can be accessed at the bottom of this page along with an article about Tom Jaine and Prospect written by Tamasin Day-Lewis and published by the Telegraph in 2000.

We are currently adding chapter abstracts and key words for all book and journal content, and apologise as this is expected to take some time.