Book Recommend: From A Singular History
Original Post Date: Jul 14, 2022
Did you know there is a whole string of “History of…” books? History of fabric, history of all colors, history of just the color red, history of cod, history of the fork, yup the fork! These aren’t the big sweeping epic history books of war, famine and plague one might see displayed prominently in Barnes and Noble, but I find focusing on a single “entity” …
en·ti·ty
/ˈen(t)ədē/ noun A thing with distinct and independent existence.
is rather a nice way to anchor history into a simple way of understanding. Oddly these single “entities” discoveries are often the reason for much of the war, famine or plague. One of the great masters of the “History of…” books is American journalist Mark Kurlansky …
Mark Kurlansky website HERE
And I have read a lot of his books, including…
I mean “salt”. It’s around us every day sitting on our grandparents kitchen tables in kitschy salt and pepper shakers…
From the Salt and Pepper Museum in Gatlinburg, Tennessee
We put it on French fries for Pete’s sake. It’s salt, not the atomic bomb, nor near as interesting as say Shackleton’s Expedition to Antarctica
We put it on French fries for Pete’s sake. It’s salt, not the atomic bomb, nor near as interesting as say Shackleton’s Expedition to Antarctica
Across the world, once concentrated deposits of salt were discovered, the need of it determined where we settled, how we lived and who we fought…
And because it is salt, the thing we use to preserver more things then I could have imagine until I listened to the book, these mines also on occasion preserved the miners that mined them… article HERE, but **warning** the pictures aren’t pretty!
And as Kurlansky pointed out, the ability to preserve food with salt, opened up the possibility for travel and exploration in a time when if you did not eat it fresh or take great measures to dry it , it rotted- that is until salt game along and thus why Shackleton and other explores could explore, cause they had salted Cod…
available HERE
That is a history alerting commodity. No matter how boring or “fishy” cod other cold water fish might be, preserving it allowed for the exploration of the entire world and allowed for a growth in population in places were a good sea harvest was the determining factor of sustainability or famine.
In PBS’s Poldark, set in the late 1700’s women from the fishing and mining villages would watch from the cliffs above Cornwall for the churning waters to signal the migration of not cod but a fish called pilchards..
and whether the school of pilchard would come or not would “make the difference” come winter. The fish was one part of the recipe, salt to preserve it was the other.
Another of Kurlansky’s books that I was particularly interested in because I am allergic to it was his book on Milk…
available HERE
Again, it wasn’t long after we domesticated some animals that we discovered the value of “mother’s milk” and cheese, oh, glorious cheese…
Another epic book on the epic history of food is…
available HERE
which is pretty much broken down by what grain- corn, wheat or rice- was grown where- the Americas, Europe and Asia and how harvesting them shaped those regions…
and by the same author the history of what we drink…
available HERE
which within its pages, Standage suggests we stopped moving around being hunters and gathers to make beer, a stationary activity. I could go down a very interesting rabbit trail, in books and in video documentaries on the history of particular foods, how we have prepared them from the beginning of time, but that is a blog or multiple ones, so let us instead…
available HERE
probably my favorite and first book on “one entity” history I discovered. Actually there was a long time in history where we did not consider the fork at all. Eating with our hands, communal spoons and our very own personal knife we used for other things as well. I spend some of my time as a cook in a soup kitchen and I always get a chuckle out of volunteers who need to find a more efficient way to chop an onion or peel a potato. Reality is that most of our kitchen accouterments are unnecessary. With fire, a heavy bottom pan, a good knife, a large bowl, a fork and a spoon, you can cook about anything.
Since my other passion, apart from cooking, is Art- I was thrilled when on a trip up to Glacier National park, via a Salt Lake, ( Glacier blog HERE)
which included a stop at the coolest bookstore ever...The King's English, in the coolest neighborhood of Arts and Craft bungalows ever, called Sugar House, where I got a book On Color, yes the history of Color divided in to ROY G BIV chapters!
That was a fun light read, learned that different cultures define the colors of the rainbow differently and Newton, as in the guy who was interested in gravity, had a lot of interest in the color spectrum as well. But for a very deep dive into the history of color, I’d recommend…
available HERE
I was nervous for the author, Victoria Finlay, who circumvented the world mostly by herself, charmed her way behind enemy lines, disappearing into places no one would be able to find her to feast her eyes on once forbidden colors- like a shade of green, so secretive only an emperor could possess it.
But oh no, books on color do not stop there or my obsession to read them. On a wonderful road trip to California, pulling our adorable “B@by”…
I convinced my husband to listen to this book…
available HERE
and two hours later he didn’t want to stop listening. Why? Because Red, brilliant scarlet red fabric was once more expensive in weight than gold and much of the world exploration was to seek out it and other exotic dyes, along with spices and precious minerals, all completely unnecessary and luxury goods.
And there is more! While I wait for more books on oh, the history of Blue, Green, Yellow, etc. there are other subjects to read, like…
One of the history of cloth books, can’t remember which- goes into great detail of the silk industry… and all I can say is wow. And did you know that although we put such stock in the brave men who sailed the word exploring ( and claiming and destroying other cultures but that is for another blog)- and we dig up and put in museums the remains of their great ships… each of those ships if done by one person took an average of 60 years of growing, tending, carding, spinning and weaving to make the sails that sailed them…. and that was mostly done by women. That is until the industrial revolution, which destroyed the cottage industries women excelled in. Like most minorities, women suffered when automation took over the crafts industry, detailed in the book I am reading now…
available HERE
Oh, sooo many books, so little time! Like I said I haven’t even scratched the surface when it comes to the history of food and those I have listed are just in the topics that interest me. I’m sure you could find more. I should also note, I have not “read” any of the these books, I listen to them on audible.com, in my studio, on my couch stitching, cleaning and doing laundry in our vacation rental, zig zag driving across the West. Just me doing common everyday activities reading about the common everyday things that we take for granted. Consider that the next time you pick up a fork!
