A Brief Culinary Art History Of The Western Chef Avante Guarde Through The Late 20th Century

A Brief Culinary Art History of the Western Chef Avante-Guarde Through the Late 20th Century examines Western cuisine as an art form. The book takes the vantage point of the Chef vanguard from second century AD Rome through the Italian and French Renaissances, modernism, and the emergence of global cuisine in the West during the last half of the twentieth century. The Book also compares cuisine to the other artistic movements with more recognized media during each given time period. The history also defines a cuisine and the difference between a personal Chef's cuisine and ethnic foods or popularly recognized national dishes. Tony Baran, as both a Chef and historian, offers a unique insight to view Chef's and their work in a culinary context from the vantage point of a culinarian and the nuances involved in culinary composition or how Chefs create new dishes and how cooking is elevated to an art form. The twentieth century was a celebration of the art of the immediate: cinema, photography, pop music, and cuisine. During this period, Chefs and their cuisines began to share the media limelight and prestige of other artists. Baran identifies this transformation of the unique recognition of Chefs as authors of their own bodies of culinary work and their influence on Western culture. The history also traces the evolution of the Chef-mentor relationship. The book describes this changing dynamic in European and, later, American history and its impact to Chefs and the critique of diners during their own times and how this impacted the successive generations of emerging culinarians.

A Brief Culinary Art History of the Western Chef Avante-Guarde Through the Late 20th Century examines Western cuisine as an art form. The book takes the vantage point of the Chef vanguard from second century AD Rome through the Italian and French Renaissances, modernism, and the emergence of global cuisine in the West during the last half of the twentieth century. The Book also compares cuisine to the other artistic movements with more recognized media during each given time period. The history also defines a cuisine and the difference between a personal Chefs cuisine and ethnic foods or popularly recognized national dishes. Tony Baran, as both a Chef and historian, offers a unique insight to view Chefs and their work in a culinary context from the vantage point of a culinarian and the nuances involved in culinary composition or how Chefs create new dishes and how cooking is elevated to an art form. The twentieth century was a celebration of the art of the immediate: cinema, photography, pop music, and cuisine. During this period, Chefs and their cuisines began to share the media limelight and prestige of other artists. Baran identifies this transformation of the unique recognition of Chefs as authors of their own bodies of culinary work and their influence on Western culture. The history also traces the evolution of the Chef-mentor relationship. The book describes this changing dynamic in European and, later, American history and its impact to Chefs and the critique of diners during their own times and how this impacted the successive generations of emerging culinarians.

From the prehistoric era to the present, food culture has helped to define civilizations. This reference surveys food culture and cooking from antiquity to the modern era, providing background information along with menus and recipes. Food culture has been central to world civilizations since prehistory. While early societies were limited in terms of their resources and cooking technology, methods of food preparation have flourished throughout history, with food central to social gatherings, celebrations, religious functions, and other aspects of daily life. This book surveys the history of cooking from the ancient world through the modern era. The first volume looks at the history of cooking from antiquity through the Early Modern era, while the second focuses on the modern world. Each volume includes a chronology, historical introduction, and topical chapters on foodstuffs, food preparation, eating habits, and other subjects. Sections on particular civilizations follow, with each section offering a historical overview, recipes, menus, primary source documents, and suggestions for further reading. The work closes with a selected, general bibliography of resources suitable for student research.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, French cooks began to claim central roles in defining and enforcing taste, as well as in educating their diners to changing standards. Tracing the transformation of culinary trades in France during the Revolutionary era, Jennifer J. Davis argues that the work of cultivating sensibility in food was not simply an elite matter; it was essential to the livelihood of thousands of men and women. Combining rigorous archival research with social history and cultural studies, Davis analyzes the development of cooking aesthetics and practices by examining the propagation of taste, the training of cooks, and the policing of the culinary marketplace in the name of safety and good taste. French cooks formed their profession through a series of debates intimately connected to broader Enlightenment controversies over education, cuisine, law, science, and service. Though cooks assumed prominence within the culinary public sphere, the unique literary genre of gastronomy replaced the Old Regime guild police in the wake of the French Revolution as individual diners began to rethink cooks' authority. The question of who wielded culinary influence -- and thus shaped standards of taste -- continued to reverberate throughout society into the early nineteenth century. This remarkable study illustrates how culinary discourse affected French national identity within the country and around the globe, where elite cuisine bears the imprint of the country's techniques and labor organization.

An intricate and provocative journey through nineteenth-century depictions of food and the often uncomfortable feelings they evoke At a time when chefs are celebrities and beautifully illustrated cookbooks, blogs, and Instagram posts make our mouths water, scholar Marni Reva Kessler trains her inquisitive eye on the depictions of food in nineteenth-century French art. Arguing that disjointed senses of anxiety, nostalgia, and melancholy underlie the superficial abundance in works by Manet, Degas, and others, Kessler shows how, in their images, food presented a spectrum of pleasure and unease associated with modern life. Utilizing close analysis and deep archival research, Kessler discovers the complex narratives behind such beloved works as Manet’s Fish (Still Life) and Antoine Vollon’s Internet-famous Mound of Butter. Kessler brings to these works an expansive historical review, creating interpretations rich in nuance and theoretical implications. She also transforms the traditional paradigm for study of images of edible subjects, showing that simple categorization as still life is not sufficient. Discomfort Food marks an important contribution to conversations about a fundamental theme that unites us as humans: food. Suggestive and accessible, it reveals the very personal, often uncomfortable feelings hiding within the relationship between ourselves and the representations of what we eat.

Grant Achatz's career as a chef has been built around beating the odds—from his humble Midwestern beginnings and rise to stardom in Chicago; his iconoclastic vision of the American dining experience; and his life-threatening battle with cancer that temporarily stripped him of his ability to taste. In all these situations, Achatz defiantly and definitively surmounted innumerable obstacles to become—and remain—one of the world's most recognizable and respected chefs. Grant Achatz: The Remarkable Rise of America's Most Celebrated Young Chef, a collection of articles taken from the Chicago Tribune, is an up-close examination of Achatz's personal history and international impact in the culinary world. Included are rare interviews on Achatz's humble beginnings as a young chef and modest lifestyle, stories from his stint as executive chef of Evanston, Illinois's four-star restaurant Trio, long-unseen restaurant reviews, as well as features on his innovative restaurants Aviary and Next, which play with Achatz's trademark concept of molecular gastronomy and the importance of presentation and memory in fine dining. In the middle of all this success, Achatz was diagnosed with stage-four squamous cell carcinoma, a rare cancer afflicting the tongue that completely eliminated Achatz's sense of taste. Told he would die if he did not have his tongue surgically removed, Achatz tenaciously clung to the belief he would be able to regain the sense most vital to his extraordinary talent. While undergoing experimental treatment to regain his sense of taste, Achatz continued to manage Alinea and even improved it despite his professionally debilitating condition. Miraculously, Achatz made a full recovery and regained his ability to taste while going on to open one of the culinary world's most discussed and praised new restaurants: Next. Grant Achatz tells the story of the man at the forefront of modern culinary trends and the world's top-rated restaurants, as seen through both his own eyes and the journalists who have been covering his fights against the odds from the beginning.

As nutrition, food is essential, but in today’s world of excess, a good portion of the world has taken food beyond its functional definition to fine art status. From celebrity chefs to amateur food bloggers, individuals take ownership of the food they eat as a creative expression of personality, heritage, and ingenuity. Dwight Furrow examines the contemporary fascination with food and culinary arts not only as global spectacle, but also as an expression of control, authenticity, and playful creation for individuals in a homogenized, and increasingly public, world.