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Who invented mayonnaise? Could boiling down tonnes of cattle concentrate beef’s nutritious qualities? Did lemonade put a halt to the plague in Paris?
Tom Nealon writes about these and (many) other topics in his book Food Fights and Culture Wars, a title that does the contents no favours at all. The obvious temptation is to talk about the book as a feast of food history, a smörgåsbord of tasty treats, some old, some new, all interesting. It is all that and more, not least because it is lavishly illustrated with fascinating images. All in all, a great read, but a hard topic for an episode, because the only thing that really connects all those dots is Tom Nealon himself. We talked a lot, covered a lot of ground and, inevitably, left a lot of things out.
I think I disagree with Tom on at least one thing: cannibalism. I’m just not as persuaded as he is by the evidence, and his argument that if you’re eating “others” from over the mountain, then you’re not really eating people, cuts both ways. What better way to make people seem fundamentally different from “us” than to stress that “they” eat people? But that’s a topic for another episode, I hope.
Notes
- Food Fights & Culture Wars is currently riding high in Amazon’s New Releases.
- Lots more details on mayonnaise in Tom Nealon’s original account of Salsa Mahonesa and the Seven Years War.
- To be honest, I had no idea mayonnaise was a topic of such intense interest, but it is.
- For a fine collection of Bovril nonsense, this is the place.
I am extremely grateful to Tom Nealon for giving me a reason this year not to republish my previous podcasts about turkey and Thanksgiving. He has written a choice round-up of many things turkey that is bound to lift the gloom that sometimes hangs over leftovers.
That secret, and many more, in Tom’s piece.
I know, too, as a solo podcaster, that I must not ignore this opportunity for self-promotion (or marketing) so:
Tom Nealon’s podcast here: Mistaken about mayonnaise — and many other foods
My first crack at the topic: A partial history of the turkey
Further and better particulars: Another helping of turkey
The icing on the cake (a metaphor too far): What a bunch of turkeys
As for our celebrations, for the second year in a row we went with beef cheeks stracotto, and all present agreed: All Hail a new Thanksgiving tradition.
Photograph by Don DeBold.
Listen to @pazzobooks talking about this and other untrodden alleyways of food history. eatthispodcast.com/mistaken-about… twitter.com/HowStuffWorks/…
make up more fakelore to replace the old?