Dinner in Rome by Andreas Viestad
Andreas Viestad . Unknown Year . English
With a celebrated food writer as host, a delectable history of Roman cuisine and the world—served one dish at a time. Now in paperback. “There is more history in a bowl of pasta than in the Colosseum,” writes Andreas Viestad in Dinner in Rome. From the table of a classic Roman restaurant, Viestad takes us on a fascinating culinary exploration of the Eternal City and global civilization. Food, he argues, is history’s secret driving force. Viestad finds deeper meanings in his meal: He uses the bread that begins his dinner to trace the origins of wheat and its role in Rome’s rise as well as its downfall. With his fried artichoke antipasto, he explains olive oil’s part in the religious conflict of sixteenth-century Europe. And, from his sorbet dessert, he recounts how lemons featured in the history of the Mafia in the nineteenth century and how the hunger for sugar fueled the slave trade. Viestad’s dinner may be local, but his story is universal. His “culinary archaeology” is an entertaining, flavorful journey across the dinner table and time. Readers will never look at spaghetti carbonara the same way again.
Categories: Literary Fiction
About the Author
‘Andreas Viestad has written a fascinating, thought-provoking and funny book about the importance of food in history. He zips seamlessly between the smells and flavors of a meal in a restaurant in Rome and the long lines of history.’ — Alice Waters Andreas Viestad is a food writer, TV chef, restaurateur and food activist. He is the longtime host of New Scandinavian Cooking and a former columnist of the Washington Post. In addition to Dinner in Rome, he is the author of Kitchen of Light and Where Flavor was Born and lives between Oslo and Cape Town. He is the longtime host of New Scandinavian Cooking, airing on public television in the US and in more than 70 other countries, a former columnist for Washington post. In his native Norway he is the founder of Geitmyra Culinary Center for Children, a non-profit running educational programmes in several Norwegian cities. https://andreasviestad.com ‘Dinner in Rome is, like a good carbonara, an effortless combination of ingredients that come together to make the perfect dish . . . filled with humour, as well as a deep appreciation of the subject . . . the book lives up to expectations: every section is as tasty as promised, every chapter a joyful mouthful of information, bursting in surprising and juicy ways . . . utterly scrumptious.’ — GetHistory.com ‘As enchanting as it is fascinating: Andreas Viestad has a calm gift for evocative scene-setting, story-telling and, crucially, for making and exploring connections that bring everything illuminatingly to life.’ — Nigella Lawson
