Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/sources
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An annotated list of sources for food and drink articles. The goal is to help editors find reliable sources of information on food topics. This page is intended to provide sources that are useful for multiple articles. Of course, individual articles' bibliographies should also be useful.
Contents |
[edit] Cookbooks
Since Wikipedia is not a cookbook, the question is how useful cookbooks are not for recipes, but for the description and history of food. In general, they are fairly good about description, though they can be idiosyncratic and provincial, being unaware of food habits outside their authors' neighborhood. They also tend to be trendy. Cookbooks are generally very weak for history. Very rarely have the authors consulted serious sources, and they tend to repeat legends and folklore freely.
[edit] Encyclopedias and References
- Larousse Gastronomique, first edition
- A good source for 19th and early 20th century French cooking. Very unreliable outside France. Unreliable for history (the notorious croissant legend was first published here).
- Larousse Gastronomique, second edition
- Said to be improved over the first for non-French food.
- Alan Davidson, Oxford Companion to Food
- Probably the best all-round encyclopedia of food. Many articles have useful bibliographies. Especially strong on English and western European foods. Benefits from the years of articles in Petits Propos Culinaires and the Oxford Symposia on Food.
- Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking
- The standard reference for the science of foods.
- Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne (1994), History of Food, Blackwell Publishing Professional, ISBN 0631194975.
- A totally unreliable source, full of legends and misinformation. She doesn't footnote most of what she writes, so there's no way of verifying it. Do not use.
- Andre Simon, A Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy
- Mostly traditional French recipes. No source notes. Not very useful.
[edit] Particular cuisines
[edit] Greece
- Andrew Dalby, Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece
- An amazing summary of classical and Byzantine Greek texts on food. Scholarly, careful, comprehensive. The Ottoman and modern periods are very briefly touched on at the end.
[edit] Italy
- Waverly Root, The Food of Italy
- Good journalistic survey.
- Touring Club Italiano, Guida all'Italia gastronomica
- Good survey.
[edit] France
- Waverly Root, The Food of France
- Good journalistic survey.
- Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789
- Excellent scholarly treatment.
(see also Mennell, under England)
[edit] England
- Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present
- Good scholarly treatment.
[edit] Middle East
- A Taste of Thyme
- Good collection of good articles.
- Claudia Roden, A Book of Middle Eastern Food
- Though this is a cookbook, it has taken its historical research more seriously than most cookbooks.
[edit] China
- Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives
- Good scholarly overview of history.
[edit] By category of food
- Alan Davidson, Mediterranean Seafood
- Alan Davidson, North Atlantic Seafood
- Fabulous resources on the fish and seafood of their regions. A summary page per species including both biology and cuisine. Also a collection of recipes.
[edit] Web resources
There are many Web resources on food, many of them plagiarized from each other, with little reliable information, and rarely any source notes.
