National Dish
Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of 2023 by Financial Times, The Guardian, and BBC's The Food Programme
“Anya von Bremzen, already a legend of food writing and a storytelling inspiration to me, has done her best work yet. National Dish is a must-read for all those who believe in building longer tables where food is what bring us all together.” —José Andrés
“If you’ve ever contemplated the origins and iconography of classic foods, then National Dish is the sensory-driven, historical deep dive for you . . . [an] evocative, gorgeously layered exercise in place-making and cultural exploration, nuanced and rich as any of the dishes captured within.” —Boston Globe
In this engrossing and timely journey to the crossroads of food and identity, award-winning writer Anya von Bremzen explores six of the world’s most fascinating and iconic culinary cultures—France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey—brilliantly weaving cuisine, history, and politics into a work of scintillating connoisseurship and charm
We all have an idea in our heads about what French food is—or Italian, or Japanese, or Mexican, or . . . But where did those ideas come from? Who decides what makes a national food canon? Anya von Bremzen has won three James Beard Awards and written several definitive cookbooks, as well as her internationally acclaimed memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. In National Dish, she investigates the truth behind the eternal cliché—“we are what we eat”—traveling to six storied food capitals, going high and low, from world-famous chefs to culinary scholars to strangers in bars, in search of how cuisine became connected to place and identity.
A unique and magical cook’s tour of the world, National Dish brings us to a deep appreciation of how the country makes the food, and the food the country.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Never have we been more cosmopolitan about what we eat—and yet never more essentialist," declares James Beard Award–winning food writer von Bremzen (Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking) in this revealing and richly detailed exploration of six national cuisines. The culinary tour begins in France, which became the site of the "first explicitly national discourse about food" as its cuisine was deemed a "uniquely French cultural product." However, von Bremzen points out, "Gallic culinary exceptionalism has taken a terrific beating" over the last few decades, thanks to a "cascade of crises" including the "global fast-food invasion." In Naples, she uncovers pizza's 18th-century roots as a "dirt-cheap, palatable street food," and discovers that the origin story of the city's popularly touted pizza Margherita, which involves a charismatic queen of the same name who favored the "patriotic tricolore pie," may be a nationalist fiction. Von Bremzen, who emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in the 1970s, concludes with a moving epilogue about borscht—a dish with Ukrainian roots that Russia has claimed as its own—that, in light of the war in Ukraine, vividly illustrates how food "carries the emotional charge of a flag and an anthem" and often belies a more complicated story than meets the eye. Fans of food and travel writing will want to sink their teeth into this.
