A Brief Visual History of Cookery

Several weeks ago, we featured 5 delicious cross-disciplinary cookbooks and today, in a nice segue from this morning’s edible landscapes, we look at the meta umbrella over them all: Visual History of Cookery, a comprehensive and graphically gripping global journey into the history of our relationship with food and its preparation. In 350 glorious pages, editor Duncan McCorquodale traces the evolution of culinary images over time through gorgeous photographs, paintings, illustrations and vintage ads.

'Summer' by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1573, made from the seasonal fruits, grains, and vegetables

British Ministry of Food poster promoting the importance of culinary thrift

Divese and wide-spanning, the book covers everything from the development of food branding to cross-cultural culinary influences to the 21st-century cult of celebrity chefs. It explores the culinary heritage of France, England, Italy, Spain and America through rich imagery and a selection of original recipes from each region, contextualized by contributions from leading food writers and restaurateurs like Anthony Bourdain, Elizabeth David and Alice Waters, as well as profiles of celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay, Julia Child, Jamie Oliver, Delia Smith, James Beard and (the fictional) Betty Crocker.

A dessert table at a barbecue in the 1950s. The tradition of barbecues as a community staple in the American South dates back to the settlers of the 19th century, whose 'pic-pickins' celebrating the capturing and cooking of wild hogs became the precursors of contemporary barbecues.

Vibrant peppers and spices in a Valencian store, a culinary legacy of the Moors' 500-year rule in the region.

Beautiful and fascinating, Visual History of Cookery is as much a crash-course in culinary history as it is a stunning survey of our collective visual appetite for the craft of food.

Images courtesy of The Guardian

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Hide/Seek: Gender Identity & Sexual Difference in Art

What gelatin and silver have to do with the history of art and equality.

Gender identity isn’t something openly discussed and studied as a shaping force in the arts (or , until recently, in science, for that matter), but it is a powerful one. Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture is an ambitious new book on the history of sexual difference, published as a companion volume to a Smithsonian exhibition of the same title, but offering a powerful stand-alone piece of visual scholarship charting the hidden impact of gay and lesbian artists on the history of art and portraiture and how they explored the fluidity of gender and sexuality.

The book explores the presence and evolution of same-sex desire in contemporary portraiture through more than 140 full-color drawings, illustrations and photographs by prominent American artists, from Georgia O’Keeffe to Jasper Johns to Andy Warhol. (Including a remarkable silver print of Susan Sontag, whom we’re obsessed with.)

In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O'Hara

Jasper Johns, oil on canvas with objects, 1961

James Baldwin

Beauford Delaney, pastel on paper, 1963

A historical account contextualizes the artwork, tracing the influential marginality of LGBT artists from the turn of the 20th century to the gay liberation movement of 1969 to the AIDS epidemic of the 80s to today.

Camouflage Self-Portrait (RED)

Andy Warhol, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, 1986

Susan Sontag, 1933-2004

Peter Hujar, gelatin silver print, 1975

Hide/Seek comes from authors Jonathan D. Katz, founder of the first department for gay and lesbian studies in the US, and National Portrait Gallery historian David C. Ward. It is both a brilliantly curated anthology of seminal portraiture and an essential piece of cultural history for human rights and equality.

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A Short Illustrated History of Nearly Everything

What charcoal has to do with democracy, equality and the cultural necessity for absurdity.

A couple of weeks ago, after raving about one of our all-time favorite books, Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, reader Ian Shepherd alerted us to the recent publication of an illustrated version of the book. Needless to say, A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition is just as fantastic as you’d expect.

Today, courtesy of Ian’s photographic skills, we take a peek inside as we await our copy in the mail:

For the uninitiated, the book is a captivating exploration of how life evolved and how we humans came to make sense of it all. In 600 pages, Bryson offers a manifesto for scientific thought, written in a way that non-scientists can not merely understand but be swept away by, absorbing the author’s keen insight and chuckling at his well-timed wryness.

“This is a book about how it happened. In particular how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since.” ~ Bill Bryson

A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition is currently 34% off on Amazon but wherever you choose to grab it, the important thing is that you do — it’s eye and brain candy of the best kind.

Images by Ian Shepherd

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