Joyce E. Chaplin & Ken Albala 
Food in Time and Place 
The American Historical Association Companion to Food History

Food and cuisine are important subjects for historians across many areas of study. Food, after all, is one of the most basic human needs and a foundational part of social and cultural histories. Such topics as famines, food supply, nutrition, and public health are addressed by historians specializing in every era and every nation.


Food in Time and Place delivers an unprecedented review of the state of historical research on food, endorsed by the American Historical Association, providing readers with a geographically, chronologically, and topically broad understanding of food cultures—from ancient Mediterranean and medieval societies to France and its domination of haute cuisine. Teachers, students, and scholars in food history will appreciate coverage of different thematic concerns, such as transfers of crops, conquest, colonization, immigration, and modern forms of globalization.

Table of Content

List of Illustrations  

Acknowledgments  

Preface  

Paul Freedman

Introduction: Food History as a Field  

Warren Belasco

Part One: Regional Histories  

1. Premodern Europe  

Ken Albala

2. China  

E.{ths}N. Anderson

3. India  

Jayanta Sengupta

4. Out of Africa: A Brief Guide to African Food History  

Jessica B. Harris

5. Middle Eastern Food History  

Charles Perry

6. Latin American Food between Export Liberalism and the Via Campesina  

Jeffrey M. Pilcher

7. Food and the Material Origins of Early America  

Joyce E. Chaplin

8. Food in Recent U.S. History  

Amy Bentley and Hi’ilei Hobart

9. Influence, Sources, and African Diaspora Foodways  

Frederick Douglass Opie

10. Migration, Transnational Cuisines, and Invisible Ethnics  

Krishnendu Ray

Part Two: Cuisine  

11. The French Invention of Modern Cuisine  

Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson

12. Restaurants  

Paul Freedman

13. Cookbooks as Resources for Social History  

Barbara Ketcham Wheaton

Part Three: Problems  

14. The Revolt against Homogeneity  

Amy B. Trubek

15. Food and Popular Culture  

Fabio Parasecoli

16. Post-1945 Global Food Developments  

Peter Scholliers

List of Contributors  

Index

About the author

Paul Freedman is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination and editor of Food: The History of Taste.Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. Her publications include Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit and Benjamin Franklin’s Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity.Ken Albala is Professor of History at the University of the Pacific. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Eating Right in the Renaissance; Beans: A History; The Banquet; and The Lost Art of Real Cooking.