Gluten Free Cookbook or Feast

Gluten-Free Cookbook: Over 50 Simple, Delicious Recipes for Gluten-free Living

Author: Martin Knowlden

Here are fifty-plus tasty gluten-free dishes for the whole family, along with useful tips on what to avoid and how to eat naturally gluten-free food. Choose from main courses that will delight your taste buds--try Thai Red Prawn Curry, Sea Bass with Tomato-Basil Crust, or Roasted Vegetable Pizza. Side dishes include crunchy Fresh Corn Pakora, Wild Rice and Apricot Salad, and Avocado and Tomato Salsa. An extensive chapter on baking reveals that it's possible to enjoy cakes, scones, and other desserts that have loads of flavor and none of the gluten. Blueberry Muffins, Gingerbread Men, Banana Bread, and Sweet Crêpes are just a few of these worry-free indulgences. For everyday dishes to add to your stock of gluten-free recipes, or for that special meal to serve to friends, this book proves that gluten-free can also mean delicious.

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Feast: A History of Grand Eating

Author: Roy C Strong

Sharing a grand meal has always been a complex social event. Feasts have been used to celebrate significant occasions, to parade rank and hierarchy, and to flatter and influence people. There has always been a theatrical element to the feast as well-from the nude dancers who entertained dinner guests in ancient Greece to the restrained rigors of the Victorian dinner party.

Sir Roy Strong examines this cultural phenomenon with knowledge, wit, and style-beginning with the ninth century B.C., when a Babylonian emperor discreetly invited seventy thousand guests for a ten-day celebration, and ending early in the twentieth century, by which time feasts had become somewhat more modest. Always attuned to how these celebrations mirror the societies that hold them and to the way they reflect shifts in power and class, this beautifully illustrated book offers a lively and illuminating history of grand eating.
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Publishers Weekly

British historian Strong (The Story of Britain) turns his attention to the history of feasting and the grand occasion. Formal eating has historically been a complex way of uniting and dividing people on many social levels. Power, position and the dishes served indicated status or lack of it throughout the centuries, Strong notes. From ancient times to the Victorians, encompassing the Romans, the medieval court, the Renaissance, French pomp and ostentation, food and the ceremony of dining provided a theater for marking marriages, victories, coronations and funerals, or for influencing and impressing. Strong thoroughly tackles the complex mechanisms of this social area of life, imbuing it with atmosphere while conveying enough scholarly detail to make this a comprehensive and authoritative history. He depicts not only the food eaten but also the setting, from the design and development of rooms for dining to the clothes, utensils, people and etiquette. Dividing the volume into eras, Strong describes the emergence of cooks and cookbooks in the Middle Ages, the advent of service la fran aise, the decline of formal eating during the French Revolution (Napoleon ate his dinner in 10 minutes) and the re-emergence of the formal dinner party in Victorian times and service la russe, which we would recognize today. Drawing on contemporary sources and liberally sprinkled with illustrations, the volume fills a gap in social history, and while seeming pompous at times, it's sure to charm and inform. (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An entertaining survey of the table, Babylonian to Edwardian, examining the political and social forces that shaped what appeared on it. "The meal and everything connected with it has been and, to a very large extent still is, a vehicle determining status and hierarchy—and also aspiration—no matter what pattern of society prevails," British historian Strong (The Cult of Elizabeth, 2000, etc.) writes. From way back when, conviviality has been a cornerstone of civilization, though in this case keystone may be more apt, as Strong concentrates on upper-crust eating. Each chapter revolves around an archetypal feast, including the Greeks' banquets ("expressions of equality—equality, that is, between members of a distinct group sharing the same values, and also political power"), the Roman convivia (tense efforts to marry personal frugality with lavish hospitality), and the Dark Ages' uncouth revels ("the main purpose of barbarian feasting was to get drunk"). For each epoch, Strong has found a work of literature (or a wide selection) that captures its essential tone: the dramatic spectacles of the 13th century, which introduced form and color to the table; the ritualism of Renaissance events at which "super-abundance and luxury [were] the sole indicators of political power and status"; and the loosening of the corsets at 18th-century court dinners, where "the atmosphere was one of high fashion, flirtation, wit, and gossip." In each case, the author carefully draws the connections between what happened at the table and shifts in social power—for instance, "the division between an upper class that ate meat and a peasant class denied it," made explicit "through the imposition ofrestrictive game laws"—while he also pays attention to the evolution of etiquette, furniture, place settings, interior decoration, and attendant amusements. A broad and transporting canvas, as redolent of social nuance and detail as the pieces of cutlery on a Victorian table. (60 b&w illustrations)