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Ann Kirby is hired as her assistant cook and the two develop a friendship outside of the normal social class boundaries. As the two women's friendship develops, we see Ann looking up to Eliza as she is taught about not only cooking but about poetry, life skills and love. Eliza has become a real mentor to her. Eliza Acton, despite having never before boiled an egg, became one of the world’s most successful cookery writers, revolutionizing cooking and cookbooks around the world. Her story is fascinating, uplifting and truly inspiring. As a frequent reader of historical fiction, it is common to encounter dual timelines these days, which is okay most of the time, but not really my favorite, which was why I enjoyed the format the author used in this novel. Instead of a dual timeline, she used dual first-person narratives from the same time period. This made the story much more effective for me.
In thirteen (a baker’s dozen) readable chapters, Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky shows what happens when linguists study the language of food. Combining etymological research and contemporary linguistic theory, the book offers a readable history of such staples as ketchup, turkey, salad, sushi, macaroni, sherbet, and even broader concepts like entrée and dessert. His well-researched vignettes provide something for readers to chew over, while the computational insights are surprise ingredients. We learn about the etymological relationship between salad, salsa, slaw, sauce and salami, for example, and between macaroons, macarons, and macaroni (and how the famous line from “Yankee Doodle Dandy” came about). However, I cannot really recommend this to the great number of people who are not in these lines of work. Why do we eat toast for breakfast, and then toast to good health at dinner? What does the turkey we eat on Thanksgiving have to do with the country on the eastern Mediterranean? Can you figure out how much your dinner will cost by counting the words on the menu? I will concede the point about the typos -- because, yeah, there are definitely a few misspellings someone should have caught. I think the most unfortunate typos were the ones in the French because now I'm wondering whether the Middle French had typos and I will never know, because do you even know what Middle French looks like? Yeah. I realize this may sound like an odd statement to make, because it is an incredibly niche topic, but I spent a long, long time studying theoretical linguistics. And of all the courses I took, of everything I learned, one of the things I still remember is the first day of the Introduction To Historical Linguistics class I took as an undergraduate. It was a big class, maybe fifty of us, and the professor asked us to come up with the word for "tea" in as many languages as we could. And because this was a room of fifty linguistics majors, we knew a whole lot of languages, as an aggregate. And as we called out words she wrote them all down on the board, sorting them into one of two groups, by whether they sounded more like "tea" or whether they sounded more like "chai."Bread and salt – where the lord and lady come from (loaf-keeper/kneader, Anglo-Saxon); same root for flour/flower; french toast; yep, the Swedish word for a flour bun comes through German and ultimately from semolina, which comes from Akkadian ‘samidu’. Salt: salad, sauce, slaw, salsa, salami. Coleslaw origins.
Based on the life of cookbook writer Eliza Acton, this is a really charming historical novel that’s full of gorgeous recipes and descriptions of food. At its core is the heart-warming story of the class-defying friendship between Eliza and Ann Kirby, her kitchen help” GOOD HOUSEKEEPING I don't know offhand if Jurafsky is one of the regular posters at Language Log -- I don't think so? -- but I feel like this is basically a whole book of the sort of thing I'd expect to see on Language Log, if that gives you an idea of the style. Language Log does get namedropped. The fascinating journey through The Language of Food uncovers a global atlas of culinary influences. With Jurafsky's insight, words like ketchup, macaron, and even salad become living fossils that contain the patterns of early global exploration that predate our modern fusion-filled world.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-08-27 10:01:02 Boxid IA1916602 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Ann, at seventeen, cares for her parents and dreams about being a cook. A vicar suggests to Ann a position of underhousemaid that might be available with a new family taking up residence in Tonbridge.
An effervescent novel, bursting with delectable language and elegant details about cookbook writer, Eliza Acton. Don’t miss this intimate glimpse into the early English kitchens and snapshot of food history’ Sara Dahmen I always know I'm reading a great book when I want to recommend it to friends before I've even finished it and that was certainly the case here. The Language of Food by Annabel Abbs is an absorbing historical fiction novel for those who love the poetry of food, the magic of a kitchen and anything to do with cooking, baking, chopping, saucing, stirring or tasting food. Highly recommended! Exhilarating to read - thoughtful, heart-warming and poignant, with a quiet intelligence and elegance that does its heroine proud’ Bridget Collins Modern Cookery for Private Families was the first cookery book to provide a detailed list of ingredients, precise quantities and cooking times for each recipe in a format we still follow today. Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management was published in 1861 well after Eliza Acton's and it is now known that Mrs Beeton plagiarised hundreds of Acton's recipes for the collection. Not only that, but Mrs Beeton stole recipes from other cookery books as well, and knowing that now, I wish she wasn't held in such high esteem. A pox on her book!
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Two of my favourite topics in one elegantly written novel - women’s lives and food history. I absolutely loved it' Polly Russell
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