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The Penguin Companion to Food
by Alan Davidson

Books the size, shape and weight of a concrete building block are often most useful as doorstoppers or for holding up one side of your Land Rover while you change a tyre.

The Pengion companion to Food

But this 1104 page discussion about food, beautifully illustrated by Soun Vannithone, is what a user-friendly, first reference encyclopedia is supposed to be. In a light and easy to read style and with an excellent indexing and reference system, it covers all major and most minor foods, cooking terms and methods, national and regional cuisines, food preservation, food science, diet and a host of other food related topics.

It took its witty and erudite author over 20 long, slogging years to write and he has built an accessible island of relevant information rising from the overwhelming ocean of fact, fancy and myth about food. He has done a hell of a good job of furnishing just enough information to be interesting and informative, without letting the topic bog down in the minutiae. It is thus not exhaustive of the facts and opinions relating to any particular food topic, but rather it prevents exhaustion on the part of the reader, who would otherwise be faced with (literally) millions of words on thousands of pages about any food topic you care to mention. So, it’s a good place to start any enquiry about food and often it provides all you need to know.

I have found The Penguin Companion to Food especially useful in my work on the origins, history and development of barbecue in the various regions of the world. Although barbecue as a cooking method is not extensively dealt with in the book, the foods that are barbecued are.

It is interesting to track back to the origin of any particular foodstuff and then investigate how that food was first prepared in the place it comes from. Almost invariably I find that it was first cooked on an open fire or was used in the preparation of something else that was then cooked on an open fire. I then follow the spread of that food around the world and investigate how other cultures dealt with it and incorporated it into their regional open-fire and barbecue cuisines. In this way I can get to the real heart of genuine barbecue and this book helps me get there very much faster. The Penguin Companion to Food deals particularly well with plant foods and plant food products.

At just over 2 cents per page this book is very good value for money and I highly recommend it.

Caveat regarding The Oxford Companion to Food.

The Oxford Companion to Food is the same book as The Penguin Companion to Food, by the same author, so do not buy both like I did. Pfff. The Oxford Companion to Food is double the price.

The version reviewed is: The Penguin Companion to Food (Rev Ed. Edition 2002) (Paperback)

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