This wonderful book is not a history of food in 100 recipes at all; it is a history of the world in 100 recipes, as seen through the medium of what we ate and how we cooked it. William Sitwell’s erudite work never drags and should not be seen as a collection of recipes (although these are clearly chosen with modern-day cooking in mind) but as a window into the appetites and ways of life of our ancestors.
We begin in Ancient Egypt, with a way of making bread extrapolated from pictures on the walls of a woman’s tomb in Luxor. This is one of the joys of the book; the recipes are not just retrieved from cookery books (the domstic kind, as we know them, did not really take off until the 18th century) but from many other sources, among them literature, the Bible and paintings.
The last recipe in the book is from Heston Blumenthal.
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