![]() At the hands of Mario Batali…think about it… (Talk about the school of hard knocks.whew!) One of the many quotes in the book Heat by Bill Buford which start us out some mental food before you turn the page and read about Bill Buford’s culinary education. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners.” ![]() Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. And the history of the past four hundred years in England would have been immensely different if it had not been for the introduction of root crops and various other vegetables at the end of the Middle Ages, and a little later the introduction of non-alcoholic drinks (tea, coffee, cocoa) and also of distilled liquors to which the beer drinking English were not accustomed. The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes in dynasty or even of religion. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. ![]() “A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. Heat is the featured book at Cook the Books. ![]() “You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners.” ![]()
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