This eye-opening history will change the way you read a cookbook or regard a TV chef, making cooking ventures vastly more interesting-and a lot more fun. Every kitchen has at least one well-worn cookbook, but just how did they come to be? Invention of the Modern Cookbook is the first study to examine that question, discussing the roots of these collections in 17th-century England and illuminating the cookbook's role as it has evolved over time. Readers will discover that cookbooks were the product of careful invention by highly skilled chefs and profit-minded publishers who designed them for maximum audience appeal, responding to a changing readership and cultural conditions and utilizing innovative marketing and promotion techniques still practiced today. They will see how cookbooks helped women adjust to the changes of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution by educating them on a range of subjects from etiquette to dealing with household servants. And they will learn how the books themselves became "modern," taking on the characteristics we now take for granted. Numerous recipes and quotations from original manuscripts from the 17th and 18th centuries A substantial timeline ranging from 1500 to 1800, describing the major events in culinary history Dozens of original period prints by well-known artists relating to food, plus images from major culinary texts A glossary of foreign and specialized culinary terms A selected bibliography including electronic resources to help readers find primary and secondary materials relating to culinary history

Anthimus was a Greek doctor condemned by the Emperor in Constantinople to a life of exile at the court of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, barbarian ruler of Italy at the beginning of the 6th century AD. In the course of his life in Ravenna, he was sent as ambassador to the King of the Franks and wrote, perhaps as a sweetener to his fierce yet royal host, a letter about foods - which were good for you, which bad, and, sometimes, how to cook and serve them. It may reasonably be called the first French cookery book; and this is a new and more accurate modern language edition, printed with the Latin and English in parallel on facing pages. Mark Grant provides a general historical introduction - which corrects various errors of fact in earlier editions, a Latin text based on the editio princeps of 1864, a modern English translation, and a full commentary on the work itself, with many cross-references to classical medical treatises, the literature of classical cookery and modern scholarship insofar as it knows anything of the food and cookery of the early Merovingian Franks. This work by Anthimus has long been studied for the light it sheds on the linguistic transition from classical to medieval Latin, but rarely has it been treated for what it was: a cookery and medical treatise. It shows cooking on the cusp between the bread, vegetable and oil based cuisine of the Mediterranean and the meat dominated cookery of the northern forests. This short treatise is essential to an understanding of the development of West European medieval and early modern cooking. This version was first published by Prospect Books in 1996 and is being brought back into print due to continuing demand.