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Winning unanimous praise on its publication and now available in paperback from Grove Press, Much Depends on Dinner is a delightful and intelligent history of the food we eat. Presented as a meal, each chapter represents a different course or garnish. Borrowing from Byron's classic poem "Don Juan" for her title ("Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner"), writer Margaret Visser looks to the most ordinary American dinner for her subject -- corn on the cob with butter and salt, roast chicken with rice, salad dressed in lemon juice and olive oil, and ice cream -- submerging herself in the story behind each food. In this indulgent and perceptive guide we hear the history of Corn Flakes, why canned California olives are so unsatisfactory (they're picked green, chemically blackened, then sterilized), and the fact that in Africa, citrus fruit is eaten rind and all. For food lovers of all kinds, this unexpectedly funny and serious book is a treasure of information, shedding light on one of our most favorite pastimes.… (more)
User reviews
Vissar’s format is to detail the history of the components of one simple dinner- buttered and salted corn on the cob, a roast
To get to the history of butter (or ice cream), one must have the history of milk, the history of cows. This leads to the migrations of the cow keeping people. We follow the history of butter up to the age of margarine, and the history of said margarine, and the battle between the manufacturers of butter and of margarine. And the unholy things they do to both.
It was a fascinating read to me. I would never have thought that it would have taken over 300 pages to cover the history of 9 food items. I would love to see an updated version- in 23 years, a lot have things have happened in the food world. She delves deeply and disapprovingly into the things big agribusiness was doing in ’86; I’m sure she’s horrified now with GM foods and the like.