She is a food writer with a background in the classics, which results in obsessive and exhaustive discussions of the history and anthropology of commonplace and everyday things. My favorite of her books is "Much Depends on Dinner", in which she dissects an apparently ordinary meal (corn with butter & salt, chicken, lettuce with lemon juice and olive oil, ice cream) and traces each course to its cultural origins.
She has other books, one on etiquette and other dinner rituals, and another collection of Andy Rooney-like observations on everyday items, but I didn't like them as much -- too much jumping from topic to topic. In the Dinner book, at least the digressions eventually came back to the food being discussed in that chapter.
Her prose is also occasionally clunky, but I found that her enthusiasm made up for it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
momijizukamori and
You might like Margaret Visser.
Date: 2007-03-10 07:09 am (UTC)She has other books, one on etiquette and other dinner rituals, and another collection of Andy Rooney-like observations on everyday items, but I didn't like them as much -- too much jumping from topic to topic. In the Dinner book, at least the digressions eventually came back to the food being discussed in that chapter.
Her prose is also occasionally clunky, but I found that her enthusiasm made up for it.
--R. Barr