Onions and Garlic - A Global History

Do you know your onions? From large, sweet onions to shallots, garlic, chives and leeks, the allium family contains some of the most popular vegetables in the world. Shy of the spotlight - except when repelling vampires, preserving mummies, curing heart disease or predicting the future - this lowly family of plants has been a friend to mankind from earliest times.Martha Jay traces the history of garlic and onions back to the earliest civilizations of the Fertile Crescent and the recipes of ancient Mesopotamia. Traders spread onion varieties through Central Asia and from there they moved across the world, as civilizations from the ancient Romans and Greeks to the Koreans and Japanese found this humble family of vegetables an indispensable part of their cuisines - and of their culture. Garlic has long been identied as a magical herb with supernatural origins. Onions symbolized the simple peasant life to French painters of the nineteenth century, while the Welsh have proudly adopted the leek as their national symbol.
Celebrated, denigrated, avoided or sought-after, the amazing allium family has a story full of ne cuisine and art, peasants and kings, colonization and conquest, magic and medicine. But most of all, its the story of a very ordinary vegetable.

About the author

Martha Jay is a writer and editor based in London.

Summary

Martha Jay traces the history of the allium family – onions, shallots, garlic, chives, and leeks – back to the earliest civilizations of the Fertile Crescent and the recipes of ancient Mesopotamia.

Product details

• Authors: Jay, Martha Jay, Jay Martha
• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.04.2016
• EAN: 9781780235875
• ISBN: 978-1-78023-587-5
• No. of pages: 144
• Series: Edible; Edible; The Edible Series
• Subjects: Guides > Food & drink > General, dictionaries, tables; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general); Kochen, Essen und Trinken, COOKING / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Cookery / food & drink etc, Food & society, Cultural studies: food and society, Cookery / food and drink / food writing