A chatty, episodic history of eating out from British food writer Sitwell.
Ranging from the Roman Empire to “The Future of Eating Out,” the author, food critic for the Telegraph, favors an anecdotal approach that should please readers of A History of Food in 100 Recipes. Sitwell’s preference for good stories over coherent narrative is evident in early chapters on the Ottoman Empire and legendary Moroccan globe-trotter Ibn Battuta, which don’t describe anything modern diners would think of as restaurants. An interesting chapter about medieval England, where food stalls in busy markets moved indoors to become cook shops and eventually sit-down restaurants, is followed by “The Coffee House Revolution,” more focused on socializing and talking politics than eating. Sitwell gets back to restaurants with “The French Revolution,” which reveals that Paris became a hotbed of fine dining because private chefs for the aristocracy opened restaurants there after their masters lost their heads during the Reign of Terror. From “the first modern-day celebrity chef” (Marie-Antoine Carême) on, the author trots through material familiar to historically minded foodies: the impact of the gas stove, the ghastliness of postwar British dining; the 1967 arrival in London of authentic French cuisine at Le Gavroche, which fueled a subsequent explosion in great British cooking by chefs trained there; the fresh, locally sourced revolution led by Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in San Francisco; the outsize influence of restaurant guides; and the controversial rise of molecular gastronomy. Sitwell seasons the narrative with some intriguingly offbeat fare: the transition of Britannia & Co. in Bombay from dishing out comfort food to British imperialists to serving Parsi delicacies to Indians; the question of “the cultural appropriation of food” as embodied in a taco-frying machine patented by a Mexican immigrant and carried to global domination by Taco Bell; the conveyer belt in a crowded Japanese restaurant that ultimately moved sushi around the world and spawned the ecological catastrophe of industrial fishing.
The strenuously chipper tone grates, but it makes a refreshing change from the overseriousness of some restaurant critics.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63576-699-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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