Food at Sea
Shipboard Cuisine from Ancient to Modern Times
-
- USD 34.99
-
- USD 34.99
Descripción editorial
Food at Sea: Shipboard Cuisine from Ancient to Modern Times traces the preservation, preparation, and consumption of food at sea, over a period of several thousand years, and in a variety of cultures. The book traces the development of cooking aboard in ancient and medieval times, through the development of seafaring traditions of storing and preparing food on the world’s seas and oceans.
Following a largely chronological format, Simon Spalding shows how the raw materials, cooking and eating equipments, and methods of preparation of seafarers have both reflected the shoreside practices of their cultures, and differed from them. The economies of whole countries have developed around foods that could survive long trips by sea, and new technologies have evolved to expand the available food choices at sea.
Changes in ship construction and propulsion have compelled changes in food at sea, and Spalding’s book explores these changes in cargo ships, passenger ships, warships, and other types over the centuries in fascinating depth of detail. Selected passages from songs and poems, quotes from seafarers famous and obscure, and new insights into culinary history all add spice to the tale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spalding, a scholar and sailor who has worked and cooked at sea, posits in the introduction to this academic work on how food was prepared on ships from the Viking age to the Titanic. The slender volume manages to cover the entirety of human history at sea. Spalding's tone is dry, but readers hungry for eccentric facts about cooking and eating in the ocean may delight in its specificities: a chart detailing rations of pork and beans and bully beef during the Civil War, the Gala Dinner Menu from aboard the S.S. United States (Foie Gras in aspic, Kangaroo Tail soup), and how canned salmon came to replace salt cod with the advent of canning. The book's standout section, however, is the chapter devoted to immigrant and slave ships, which describes meals given to slaves in the Middle Passage, opening up a larger discussion of conditions and life on these ships. Immigrant families were forced to share a stove, each family expected "to prepare its own food." The book concludes with several as sample recipes throughout time B&W Photo.
