Search results for ""author robert appelbaum""

Working the Aisles takes the reader on tumultuous driving trips across the United States and France, on phone sex escapades in San Francisco, on banking battles in Sweden, and many other adventures - including, of course, on trips to supermarkets, where the author has had to 'work the aisles'. Moving back and forth through time, like a novelist, indeed in something of a memoirist tour de force, the book develops the story of struggle, of poverty and depression, but also of gaiety and desire, of a will to live in spite of it all, and to keep working the aisles. It moves the reader through highs and lows, through episodes of ecstasy and thoughts about suicide, and tells how this particular Everyman ended up sane but sorry.

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We didn't always eat the way we do today, or think and feel about eating as we now do. But we can trace the roots of our own eating culture back to the culinary world of early modern Europe, which invented cutlery, haute cuisine, the weight-loss diet, and much else besides. "Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup" tells the story of how early modern Europeans put food into words and words into food, and created an experience all their own. Named after characters in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night", this lively study draws on sources ranging from cookbooks to comic novels, and examines both the highest ideals of culinary culture and its most grotesque, ridiculous, and pathetic expressions. Robert Appelbaum paints a vivid picture of a world in which food was many things - from a symbol of prestige and sociability to a cause for religious and economic struggle - but always represented the primacy of materiality in life. Peppered with illustrations and a handful of recipes, "Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup" will appeal to anyone interested in early modern literature or the history of food.

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