A History of Cooks and

Never has there been so little need to cook. Yet Michael Symons maintains that to be truly human we need to become better cooks; practical and generous sharers of food. Fueled by James Boswell's definition of humans as cooking animals (for no beast can cook), Symons set out to explore the civilizing role of cooks in history. His wanderings take us to the clay ovens of the prehistoric eastern Mediterranean and the bronze cauldrons of ancient China, to fabulous banquets in the temples and courts of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia, to medieval English cookshops and Southeast Asian street markets, to palace kitchen, diners and modern fast-food eateries. This inviting volume"”originally published in Australia under the title The Pudding that Took a Thousand Cooks"”samples conceptions and perceptions of cooks and cooking from Plato and Descartes to Marx and Virginia Woolf. Symons asks why cooks, despite their vital and central role in sustaining life, have remained in the shadows, unheralded, unregarded and underappreciated. People think of meals as occasions where you share food, he notes; they rarely think of cooks as sharers of food.