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Food and Drink |
Source list
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An annotated list of sources for food and drink articles. The goal is to help editors find reliable sources of information on food topics. This page is intended to provide sources that are useful for multiple articles. Of course, individual articles' bibliographies should also be useful.
Cookbooks
Since Wikipedia is not a cookbook, the question is how useful cookbooks are not for recipes, but for the description and history of food. In general, they are fairly good about description, though they can be idiosyncratic and provincial, being unaware of food habits outside their authors' neighborhood. They also tend to be trendy. Cookbooks are generally very weak for history. Very rarely have the authors consulted serious sources, and they tend to repeat legends and folklore freely.
Encyclopedias and References
- Probably the best all-round encyclopedia of food. Many articles have useful bibliographies. Especially strong on English and western European foods. Benefits from the years of articles in Petits Propos Culinaires and the Oxford Symposia on Food.
- An excellent collection of articles.
- The standard reference for the science of foods.
- A good source for 19th and early 20th century French cooking. Very unreliable outside France. Unreliable for history (the notorious croissant legend was first published here).
- Said to be improved over the first for non-French food.
- A small, eclectic anthology of articles from the Annales
- Pretty good popular history.
- Mostly traditional French recipes. No source notes. Not very useful.
- Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne (1994), History of Food, Blackwell Publishing Professional, ISBN 0631194975.
- A totally unreliable source, full of legends and misinformation. She doesn't footnote most of what she writes, so there's no way of verifying it. Do not use.
Journals, magazines, proceedings
Most popular magazines (Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Fine Cooking, Cook's Illustrated, Saveur, etc.), regardless how good their recipes, do not emphasize accurate research into the background and history of foods.
Particular cuisines
Europe
- Bridget Ann Henisch, Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society ISBN 0-271-01230-7
Middle East
- Sami Zubaida and Richard Tapper, A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East, London and New York, 1994 and 2000, ISBN 1-86064-603-4, p. 35.
- Excellent collection of good articles.
- Though this is a cookbook, it has taken its historical research more seriously than most cookbooks.
China
- K.C. Chang, ed., Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives
- Good scholarly overview of history.
England
- Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present
- Good scholarly treatment.
France
- Good journalistic survey.
- Excellent scholarly treatment.
(see also Mennell, under England)
Greece
- Andrew Dalby, Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece
- An amazing summary of classical and Byzantine Greek texts on food. Scholarly, careful, comprehensive. The Ottoman and modern periods are very briefly touched on at the end.
India
Italy
- Good journalistic survey.
- Good survey.
Japan
Mexico
Morocco
- lyazidi, Rachid, "MORROCO I: Our Gastronomy And it's Legendary Traditions"
- compiled by the Restaurant Marrakesh in EPCOT Center, it's first in the series of books about Morrocan culture. This book has as much coverage of ceremonies, traditions, and information about its cuisine as it does recipes.
Russia
- A very authentica and thorough (though sadly not illustrated) coverage of traditional recipes, including those of the former republics of the Soviet Union. Chapters for each type of meal (appetizer, soup, salad, meat by type) and holiday menus. Includes brief cultural and historical introductions.
Thailand
United States
- Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century ISBN 0-8050-0228-6
- Mostly social history around the year 1900
Vietnam
By category of food
Seafood & Fish
- Fabulous resources on the fish and seafood of their regions. A summary page per species including both biology and cuisine. Also a collection of recipes.
Web resources
There are many Web resources on food, many of them plagiarized from each other, with little reliable information, and rarely any source notes.
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