Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices - Hardcover

David, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670859753 ISBN 13: 9780670859757

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1995

Long recognized as the doyenne of English culinary writing, David here displays the witty and well-furnished mind that made her famous. From sixteenth-century Italy and the splendor of the Medici banquets to seventeenth-century France and the Sun King, from travelers' tales of snow pits and ice houses in Persia to the sherbet trade with the Levant to the use of ice as "table jewelry," and from the influential ice trade in Boston to the growth of the ice cream business in London, this impressive book brings alive the centuries in which ice, far from being commonplace, was a subject that inspired and challenged the human imagination.

Review:

A seminal food writer, Elizabeth David brought Mediterranean cuisine to English readers and became a national institution, her cookbooks beloved not only for their recipes but for their literary depth. In the 1970s David began researching ice-cream. It was an innocent enough idea, but she got side-tracked--the result was 20 years of research into the whole history of ice and ice-making, and this book, which she died before completing (it has been finished by Jill Norman). As revealed in extracts from the earliest writings on the subject, ice, before the days of refrigeration, was an item prized by the mightiest and warmest empires. Though not a cookbook, this encyclopedic treatise on ice won a 1995 Julia Child Cookbook Award for Literary Food Writing, and a Jane Grigson Award.

About the Author:

Elizabeth David (1913-1992) was one of the most successful food writers of the twentieth century. She discovered her taste for good food and wine when, as a student at the Sorbonne, she lived with a French family for two years. After returning to England she made up her mind to learn to cook, so that that she could reproduce for herself and her friends some of the food that she had come to appreciate in France. Subsequently she lived in France, Italy, Greece, Egypt and India, learning and writing about the local dishes and cooking them in her own kitchen. Her first book, Mediterranean Food, signalled the start of a dazzling writing career, and was followed by many others, now considered classics, such as French Country Cooking, and Italian Food. The publication of French Provincial Cooking in 1960 confirmed her position as the most inspirational and influential cookery writer in the English language, and she was the recipient of many awards.Elizabeth David was also interested in the literature of cookery, and at the time of her death she was working on a study of the use of ice, the ice-trade and the early days of refrigeration, published posthumously as Harvest of the Cold Months.

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0670859753
• ISBN 13: 9780670859757
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432