Product Description

Covers such topics as plant products, cooking terms, national and regional cuisines, food preservation, food science, diet, and cookbooks and their authors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #505542 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1104 pages

Customer Reviews

Essential
This is a masterwork. Alan Davidson spent two decades compiling and perfecting his witty, erudite, accessible digest. The book was originally published as the Oxford Companion to Food a couple of years ago: this paperback Penguin version is enhanced with charming illustrations.
If you think that you might ever want to know about cheese or about caviare, about lemons or about locusts, about bacon or about sin-eating, this is the book to beg, buy, borrow - but not to lend. You will not get it back.

Everything you ever wanted to know....
...about food, but were too afraid to ask.

Too many expensive "reference" books and food "encyclopedias" are no more than glorified recipe books, or pretty-picture coffee table fodder. Recipes you can pick up in just about any cook book, or free on the internet. What is harder to find is a book like this.

It doesn't waste valuable page space sneaking in recipes you probably already have in double or triplicate from other food books. Instead, it concentrates on delivering a mine of information about almost every kind of major foodstuff, cuisine, method, term and diet and all in clear, easy to read prose with just enough detail to sate most curious appetites! (Pardon the pun).

It's a weighty book and for something that will probably be used for many years, it really needs a stronger spine (I have a feeling my copy will crack and start losing pages soon). Other than that, I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending it. Without all the theatrics and obscure/obsolete references, I think it even gives Larousse Gastronomique a run for its money. Its certainly a bargain at the price.