Food fights & culture wars A secret history of taste

not long ago an editor asked me for one of those end-of-the-year pieces predicting "the kale of 2017." That I knew exactly what she was talking about is less a comment on my clairvoyance than on the current ubiquity of food trends - those "hot" ingredients and photogenic dishes that populate our Instagram feeds and drive editorial calendars. Yet the notion of a breakout food isn't new. And just as our infatuation with kale salads was born of phenomena like the farm-to-table movement and the elevation of the chef to social arbiter, the culinary fads and innovations of previous eras reflected their own concerns and conflicts. Tom Nealon brings several of these synergies to glorious light in the eclectic, free-ranging "Food Fights and Culture Wars." An antiquarian bookseller and food history blogger, he unites his two passions in an engaging work that explores moments when the taste for a new food sprang from or collided with larger forces. The fact that the European vogue for cacao was born of colonial rampages may not come as a revelation, but Nealon's suggestion that chocolate acted - for both the Maya and the French - as an exacerbator of social tensions does. His inquiry into thickeners demonstrates that, in a neat bit of aspirational branding, viscosity in a sauce became equated during the Industrial Revolution with "richness" (in both senses of the word). Along the way, we learn that chocolate was once thought to prevent venereal disease, and that gravy was so highly prized in the Middle Ages that "gravy thieves" would surreptitiously drill holes in the bottom of meat pies in order to extract and reuse the liquid inside. This is delightful information, made more delightful still by lavish illustrations, reproduced from the British Library's collection, of cakes that look like architectural follies and advertisements for "fluid beef" that promise fortifyingly masculine results. Yet Nealon also has a serious point to make, arguing that our tastes are never purely subjective; rather, they're the product of forces like the quest for empire or the urge for class distinction. We learn, for example, that American politicians have been asserting their authenticity by eating barbecue pretty much as long as there have been American politicians (George Washington attended one such gathering), and that the place where cannibalism is most developed as a culinary practice is in the fevered imagination of English authors eager to assign savagery to others. The book falters, however, in some of its attempts to assign causality. In one chapter, Nealon attributes Paris's escape from a late-1660s outbreak of plague to its new penchant for lemonade. That would be a marvelous story - if it were true. But we never get a sense of why Nealon rejects the historian's explanation of an effective quarantine policy in favor of a theory that the insecticidal properties of discarded citrus peels prevented transmission of the disease. Nor do we learn why he prefers to believe that medieval European carp farming owes its origins to the Crusades rather than the Ashkenazi Jews who, he admits, practiced it throughout their history. His strategy, in other words, seems to be to explain a culinary development by linking it to a larger, preferably gory or otherwise spectacular, historical event that occurred at roughly the same time. Admittedly, Nealon signals the speculative nature of many of his assertions. But a conclusion like the one he tacks to his unsupported contention that the development of xanthan gum was part of the United States' space race with the Soviet Union ("Did it win the Cold War? Opinions are split but on balance I'd say 'probably'") is neither enlightening nor especially amusing, and his impulse to attach new foods to certain historic contexts feels forced. Like the recipe for an 18th-century "brothcake" that involves boiling a quarter bullock, a whole calf, two sheep, two dozen hens and 15 pounds of hartshorn shavings to yield a "brown jelly," the book leaves the modern reader wishing its delicious ingredients had been cooked a little less aggressively. LISA ABEND is the author of "The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at FerranAdrià's elBulli."

Tracing the history of culinary practice, Nealon uncovers some fascinating and significant relationships between food and seemingly disparate historical events. Diverse elements, from carp to chocolate to barbecue, each turn out to have significantly influenced historical eras and episodes. Recounting the history of plague, Nealon observes that seventeenth-century Paris largely escaped the devastation that depopulated London, Venice, Milan, and Rouen. This fortunate anomaly may well have arisen due to Parisians' obsession with lemonade, as discarded fruit rinds acted as a natural insecticide. Nealon keeps his prose lighthearted, but never to the point of undermining his deep historical and cultural research. Those who've hosted less-than-successful dinner parties need not berate themselves. Nealon notes that table arguments between Robespierre and Danton set in motion some of the French Revolution's most sanguinary chapters. Nealon's ever-entertaining text wraps around lavish, copious illustration, drawn in large part from the collections of the British Library, and they deserve closest scrutiny.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2017 Booklist