Food For Thought
Dec. 31st, 2017 02:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: The Course of History - Ten meals that changed the world, by Struan Stevenson and Tony Singh
The pre-Christmas work book sale is always likely to have its share of blockbusters, bestsellers, and erudite tomes, but also a selection of more quirky items, and this is definitely one of the latter. The hypothesis is that a good meal makes people more amenable to negotiation, to possibilities, to constructive viewpoints, and to this end the authors have catalogued ten meals on historic occasions through the past 300 years, with Tony Singh reconstructing recipes based on menus from Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, through American independence, Carême at the Congress of Vienna, Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the Tehran conference of 1943, Nixon in China and finally the Egypt-Israel peace talks at Camp David. There must be some selectivity here; I assume that the food eaten must have been documented in sufficient detail, for example. Each chapter gives the historical context, the principal actors, describes the meal and its outcomes, followed by a series of recipes, which, despite the formality and grandeur of some of the occasions, at least look plausible to be tried at home. This isn't a deep book; I imagine scholars will find the history rather lightweight, but I think it's intended to be informative in a fun way, in which it succeeds.
The pre-Christmas work book sale is always likely to have its share of blockbusters, bestsellers, and erudite tomes, but also a selection of more quirky items, and this is definitely one of the latter. The hypothesis is that a good meal makes people more amenable to negotiation, to possibilities, to constructive viewpoints, and to this end the authors have catalogued ten meals on historic occasions through the past 300 years, with Tony Singh reconstructing recipes based on menus from Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, through American independence, Carême at the Congress of Vienna, Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the Tehran conference of 1943, Nixon in China and finally the Egypt-Israel peace talks at Camp David. There must be some selectivity here; I assume that the food eaten must have been documented in sufficient detail, for example. Each chapter gives the historical context, the principal actors, describes the meal and its outcomes, followed by a series of recipes, which, despite the formality and grandeur of some of the occasions, at least look plausible to be tried at home. This isn't a deep book; I imagine scholars will find the history rather lightweight, but I think it's intended to be informative in a fun way, in which it succeeds.