ALAN DAVIDSON was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world’s best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture. Unsigned entries are by the author.
TOM JAINE is an independent writer and publisher, specializing in food and food history. He is the author of numerous books, including Cooking in the Country, Making Bread at Home, and Traditional Country House Cooking. He sometimes writes for The Guardian and other publications. He was editor of The Good Food Guide from 1989 to 1994, has presented ‘The Food Programme’ on Radio 4, and has participated in discussions of food on radio and television. (TJ)
JANE DAVIDSON underpinned the author, her husband, during the twenty years he devoted to the first edition of this book. She also translated and edited Dumas on Food with him. She was a founding partner of Petits Propos Culinaires, the innovative journal on food history, writing many of the book reviews, and a director of Prospect Books Ltd. She is trustee of the Sophie Coe Memorial Trust, and patron of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. (JD)
HELEN SABERI was Alan Davidson’s personal assistant, and worked very closely with him on the first edition of the Companion, as contributor, researcher, fact-checker, and proofreader. She is the author of Noshe Djan: Afghan Food and Cookery, and co-author with Alan Davidson of Trifle. (HS)
RAYMOND SOKOLOV of the Wall Street Journal is the author of many books including The Cook’s Canon, Fading Feast, Why We Eat What We Eat, and With the Grain. (RSo)
These are listed in alphabetical order of surname. Where initials appear in parentheses at the end of an entry, this means that the person indicated wrote it originally, but that the version presented has been amplified or curtailed in more than trivial ways. Entries followed by no initials are all written by the author.
MWA MELITTA WEIS ADAMSON is Associate Professor of German, Comparative Literature, and History of Medicine at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, and has published five books on medieval European cookery and dietetics.
KA KATSUE AIZAWA, a Japanese scholar of food history who has lived and taught in London for many years.
AA AYLA ALGAR, who has been Mellon lecturer in Turkish at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of two books on traditional Turkish foods.
JA JOHN AYTO, author of The Diner’s Dictionary.
JBa JIM BAUMAN, an American resident in Paris who during his lifetime explored many aspects of food history.
CBl CAROLE BLOOM, author of The International Dictionary of Desserts, Pastries, and Confections.
RB ROBERT BOND of San Diego, California, wrote numerous articles for botanical and other publications on herbs and spices, especially Asian ones.
JB JENNIFER BRENNAN has written a number of major works on Asian cookery, having spent much of her life in Pakistan, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and Guam.
FB FRANÇOIS BROCARD is an economist with extensive interests in cooking, films, and history of gastronomy.
CB CATHERINE BROWN has written several authoritative books on Scottish food and cookery with particular attention to the historical aspects.
LB LYNDA BROWN has devoted many years to writing about food, with emphasis on the growing and cooking of vegetables.
EC ELIZABETH CARTER, author of Majorcan Food and Cookery.
SC SOPHIE COE was the author of America’s First Cuisines and co-author with her husband of A True History of Chocolate.
KC KATARZYNA J. CWIERTKA is a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University. Her research focuses on the production and consumption of food in 20th-century Japan and Korea. She is the editor of Asian Food: The Global and the Local, the author of the forthcoming monograph on Japanese national cuisine, and is currently working on a book about the modernization of Korean foodways.
ECo ELLA COPE combines her career as editor of a local newspaper with a keen interest in food and cooking.
AD ANDREW DALBY has written essays and books about food in classical times, especially Siren Feasts, on food and gastronomy in classical Greece.
JD JANE DAVIDSON See Author and Editors on page xvii.
RE-S RACHEL EDWARDS-STUART, who has previously worked with Hervé This at the Collège de France, Paris, now studies for a PhD at the University of Nottingham in science-driven gastronomy, funded by the Fat Duck restaurant, Bray.
HE HATTIE ELLIS is an author, editor, and journalist. Her books include Eating England and Sweetness and Light: the Mysterious History of the Honey Bee.
DF DOREEN FERNANDEZ combined being a Professor of the Performing Arts with her role as one of the foremost food historians in the Philippines.
OF OVE FOSSÅ is president of the Norwegian Slow Food Ark Commission and an amateur food historian.
A and HCG ANNE and HELEN CARUANA GALIZIA are joint authors of The Food and Cooking of Malta.
RH RALPH HANCOCK is an encyclopedist with a special interest in food history and food science.
DH DAVID HARRIS, Emeritus Professor of Human Environment at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London and Fellow of the British Academy, has undertaken archaeological and ecological field work in many parts of the world and has published extensively on plant and animal domestication and the origins and spread of agriculture.
RuH RUSSELL HARRIS explores the byways of food history on the Internet, and does bibliographical work in this field.
VH VICKY HAYWARD is a journalist, writer, and editor who lives in Madrid.
AH ANISSA HELOU is author of Lebanese Cuisine.
JH JEAN HOLDEN has written articles on gardening and floristry and is featured in The Virago Book of Women Gardeners (1995); she is working on the life of Constance Spry.
RHo RICHARD HOSKING, Professor of Sociology and English at Hiroshima Shudo University in Japan for twenty years, is author of A Dictionary of Japanese Food: Ingredients and Culture.
CH CECIL HOURANI, an authority on many aspects of Arab culture, is the author of Jordan: The Land & the Table.
LH LYNETTE HUNTER, of the University of Leeds, was series editor for several important bibliographies of English cookery and household books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has written extensively on connected themes.
HY PHILIP and MARY HYMAN, Americans resident in Paris, have been deeply involved for thirty years in the study of French food and cookery and have been responsible for the historical sections of the 26-volume survey thereof being published by the Conseil National des Arts Culinaires. They are the authors of the forthcoming Oxford Companion to French Food.
PI PHILIP IDDISON is a British road engineer whose hobby when he is working on projects abroad (Turkey, Thailand, the Gulf States) is to accumulate all possible data about local foods.
IJ IAN JACKSON, a polymath and antiquarian bookseller with a particular interest in nineteenth-century writing and in botany.
HJ HARRIET JAINE is a television producer.
TJ TOM JAINE See Author and Editors on page xvii.
MK-J MARIA KANEVA-JOHNSON, author of The Melting Pot: Balkan Food and Cookery, is Bulgarian. Among the prizes which her book won in 1997 was the international Ceretto Prize.
NK NICHOLAS KURTI, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Oxford, Fellow of the Royal Society, and editor with Giana Kurti of But the Crackling is Superb, was author of many articles on the scientific aspects of cookery.
RL RACHEL LAUDAN, after many years teaching history in various American universities, now writes freelance on food history from her home in Mexico. Her work has won her the Sophie Coe Prize of the Oxford Symposium, the Jane Grigson Prize of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, and the position of Scholar-in-Residence of the same organization.
GL GILLY LEHMANN teaches in a French University and is a leading authority on the history of English cookery books, especially of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
JEL JANE LEVI, previous organizer and current chair of the Trustees of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, combines a career in the City of London with her research into food history.
JL JANICE LONGONE has an unrivalled knowledge of the history of American cookbooks and is author of numerous studies thereof.
AL ANDY LYNES is a journalist, writing mainly about food. He is the UK site manager of the food website eGullet.org, and publisher of the website UKGourmet.com.
JM JENNY MACARTHUR had a long-standing hobby of collecting names in other languages for all foodstuffs, however obscure.
GM GILES MACDONOGH is an historian and journalist who has written studies of Brillat-Savarin and Grimod de la Reynière, histories of Prussia and Berlin, as well as a biography of Frederick the Great.
HM HAROLD MCGEE is the author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, whose two editions have won several awards, and The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore.
LoM LOURDES MARCH, one of Spain’s most respected food writers, is the author of many books on subjects such as rice and olive oil.
GNM G. NEIL MARTIN is Principal Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Middlesex. He has written extensively on neuroanatomy and is the author of Human Neuropsychology.
LM LAURA MASON has written about several aspects of British food in books including Sugar Plums and Sherbet (1998), Farmhouse Cookery (2005), and Traditional Foods of Britain (1999), which she co-authored with Catherine Brown.
RO ROGER OWEN has worked with his wife Sri on Indonesian Food and Cookery, and collaborated with her in writing The Rice Book (1993). He is co-author, with Sri, of the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Southeast Asian Food.
SO SRI OWEN is author of the classic Indonesian Food and Cookery (revised edition 1986) and much else on the foodways of her native country and Southeast Asia. She is co-author, with her husband Roger, of the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Southeast Asian Food.
CP CHARLES PERRY, the leading authority on early Arab cookery, has recently published A Baghdad Cookery Book Newly Translated (2005) and a related 13th-century text, ‘The Description of Familiar Foods’, in Medieval Arab Cookery (2001).
GR GILLIAN RILEY, a typographer and designer, has written on Italian food, and on food and art, notably A Feast for the Eyes (National Gallery, London, 1997). She is the author of the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Italian Food.
AR ALICIA RIOS, a gastronomic consultant in Madrid, has written books on food history and cookery and also works in the field of aesthetics.
JR JOE ROBERTS, a travel writer, has studied and written about foodways in several continents.
FS FRANÇOISE SABBAN, of the Écoles des Hautes Études in Paris, is a leading French authority on Chinese food and cookery.
HS HELEN SABERI See Author and Editors on page xvii.
RSa RENA SALAMAN is author of Greek Food (rev. edn 1993) and other books on food in the Mediterranean region.
DS DELWEN SAMUEL is an archaeologist who specializes in ancient Egyptian cereal foods.
BS BARBARA SANTICH is responsible for the Graduate Program in Gastronomy at the University of Adelaide and the author of six books, including The Original Mediterranean Cuisine. Her research interests focus on France and Australia.
RSe REGINA SEXTON is a medievalist specializing in food history, and teaches Celtic Civilization at University College, Cork. She is the author of the EU survey of Ireland’s Traditional Foods (1997) and A Little History of Irish Food (1998).
MS MARGARET SHAIDA is the author of The Legendary Cuisine of Persia (1992).
RSh ROY SHIPPERBOTTOM, during his lifetime, became an expert in many disparate fields; one was traditional food and cookery in the north of England.
RSo RAYMOND SOKOLOV See Author and Editors on page xvii.
JS JENNIFER STEAD, a local historian in Yorkshire, is a leading participant in the Leeds Symposia on Food History and Traditions.
LS LOUIS SZATHMARY, an authority on Hungarian cuisine, collected and published extensively in the field of food history during his lifetime.
MT MALCOLM THICK is an agricultural historian with special interest in gardening and food. He contributed the chapter relevant to 17th-century English market gardening to volume IV of the Agrarian History of England and Wales and is the author of The Neat House Gardens and many other articles.
BW BARBARA WHEATON enjoys the distinction of having her book on the history of food and cookery in France (Savoring the Past, 1983) translated into French and awarded a French prize.
BWi BEE WILSON is an historian and journalist; she is a Research Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. She has written The Hive, and is working on the history of food adulteration.
CY CAROLIN C. YOUNG is the author of Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver: Stories of Dinner as a Work of Art (2002) and an independent scholar and curator of the artefacts of eating.