New Distributed Titles Fall 2009 - Oxbow Books

culinary studies Prospect Books
Sir Hugh Plat
The Search for Useful Knowledge
in Early-Modern London
by Malcolm Thick
This volume launches an
investigation of the life
and work of Sir Hugh Plat
(1552–1611), an author,
alchemist, speculator and
inventor whose career
touched on the fields of
alchemy, general scientific
curiosity, cookery and sugar
work, cosmetics, gardening
and agriculture, food manufacture,
victualing, supplies
and marketing. Much manuscript material, in the form of notebooks
and workings, has survived. The author illustrates Plat
as a gentlemen of varied interests, a Londoner trying to make
his way in the world, and as a man of his time and place. The
chapters, backed up by a full bibliography, references and documentary
appendices, are as follows: Introduction; Biography;
Gardening; Agriculture; Military Food & Medicine; The Writing
of Delightes for Ladies and Sundrie new and artificiall remedies
against famine; Alchemy; Medicine; Scientific Thought and
Technique; Inventions; Moneymaking.
320p, 4 b/w illus, hardback, 9781903018651, $60.00,
Prospect Books, December 2009.
76
The Realm of Fig and Quince
An Anthology of Recipes
by Ria Loohuizen
Quince and fig must be the most romantic of all European fruits, perhaps because they
are among the oldest, perhaps because the luxury of their perfume and texture provokes
the most enthusiastic of responses in the poetry and prose of Persia, of Greece,
and of the West itself. The author offers a blend of history, anecdote, literary reference
and recipes. Because the quince has so particular and pungent a flavor, it was the precursor
ingredient of many marmalades and conserves. Loohuizen’s recipes range wider
than Europe, including Persia to the east and North Africa to the south, for the stamping
grounds of these fruits were far greater than merely the West. Some of them are truly
enticing: chicken with quince and walnut sauce; quince sherbet; Turkish stuffed quinces; quince mostarda; savoy cabbage with
fennel and quince; anchovy and fig sauce with fried shrimp; stuffed figs with olive oil ice cream; rabbit with figs.
128p, 6 b/w illus, paperback, 9781903018743, $19.95, Prospect Books, December 2009.
Over a Red-Hot Stove
Essays in Early Cooking Technology
edited by Ivan Day
These essays were presented at the seventeenth Leeds
Symposium on Food History. Their common theme is the way
in which we cooked our food from the medieval to the modern
eras, most especially, how we roasted meats. The authors are
distinguished food historians, mostly from the north of England.
Discussion include: the rise of the kitchen range; techniques of
roasting; the reconstruction of the kitchens at Hampton Court
and other Royal Palaces; yeast as a raising agent; running a masonry
wood-fired oven in living-history museums in America. The book is very generously illustrated,
both by photographs of artefacts and reproductions of early prints and engravings that elucidate their
purpose and function.
208p, 78 b/w illus, hardback, 9781903018675, $60.00, Prospect Books, November 2009, Food and Society 14.
The Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy (1614)
by Giacomo Castelvetro,
edited and translated by Gillian Riley
This is a new edition of a classic of early 17th-century food
writing. The book was written by the Italian refugee, educator,
and humanist Giacomo Castelvetro, who had been saved from
the clutches of the Inquisition in Venice by the English ambassador
in 1611. Castelvetro takes us through the gardener’s year,
listing the fruit and vegetables as they come into season, with
simple and elegant ways of preparing them. Practical instructions
are interspersed with tender vignettes of his life.
176p, paperback, 9781903018644, $24.00, Prospect Books, December 2009.
The David Brown Book Company – Fall 2009