At heart, cooks are sharers. Over the centuries, they have shared around food and the jobs associated with food so comprehensively that their own work has gone almost unnoticed. But, if we look more closely, we catch 'pudding-makers' everywhere.
In this entertaining exploration of the role of cooks in history, Michael Symons tells how they have civilised the world. In charge of our eating and drinking, cooks around the globe gather ingredients from forests, gardens, seas and markets, then bring us together at hearth, village square and restaurant to share. Michael Symons sweeps us from prehistoric clay ovens and bronze Chinese cauldrons to fabulous banquets in the temples and courts of Egypt and Persia, to medieval English cookshops and Asian street markets, to modern fastfood franchises, to demonstrate how cooks have constructed the great pudding of civilisation. If we are what we eat, cooks have not just made our meals -- they have made us.
