This article documents the presence of cheese in the culinary traditions of southeast China between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries through a close analysis of a single recipe collection, Mr. Song's Book of Nourishing Life. It opens by examining Mr. Song's techniques for cheesemaking, exploring his many culinary applications for cheese, and situating his interest in dairy within the broader tradition of cheesemaking of his place and time. By reconstructing the flavors of centuries past, this article recovers a forgotten tradition of cheesemaking in southern China and challenges popular stereotypes about traditional Chinese cuisine being dairy-free.

This article examines Boris Pilnyak's attempt to answer Commissar Mikoyan's “social mandate” for a work of Socialist Realist fiction that would glorify the achievements of the newly modernized Soviet meat industry in general and of the recently constructed Mikoyan meat-packing plant in particular. Pilnyak's Meat: A Novel (1936), which reads like a Soviet(ized) version of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1907), shows how under a socialist system the negative features of the tsarist-era meat business can be eliminated in Stalinist Russia without having to sacrifice industrial efficiency or worker productivity. The novel failed to please the Party leadership, however, because the author did not respond earnestly enough to Mikoyan's “social mandate.” Pilnyak provided a parodic, tongue-in-cheek pastiche of a Socialist Realist novel rather than a genuine one. This article shows how Commissar Mikoyan's aspiration to have a literary monument erected to the Soviet meat industry, which he had worked so diligently to modernize and expand, culminated in the publication of The Book about Tasty and Healthy Food (1939), the famous cookbook and household guide, which projects numerous Socialist Realist images of material abundance, good taste, and scientific nutrition that were associated during the Stalin years with an ideal (and idealized) cuisine that never really existed in the USSR. The food commissar's abiding desire to produce a domestic version of the American hamburger was likewise realized through his creation of the “Mikoyan cutlet,” which generated a veritable revolution in the system of public food service in his country.

The Kodavas have traditionally lived in the Kodagu precinct of the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Their mode of dress, rituals, and physical appearance differ in many ways from that of many of their other neighbors in the south. Traditionally a community that subsisted on farming (rice and later coffee, among other crops), many of the ceremonies of the Kodavas revolve around the harvest calendar. Their wedding rituals, in particular, provide a fascinating look into the agricultural underpinnings of this unique group of people. This article documents the details of a two-day wedding ceremony held outside Madikeri, the capital of Kodagu, with a special emphasis on the culinary traditions on display.

This essay traces the changing place of artifice as an ideal in food preparation through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cookbooks and medical treatises published in France. Initially one of the guiding aesthetic principles of elite culinary production, artifice propagated a series of technical processes that redefined skill among cooks. However, by the late eighteenth century, an ideology of the natural gained ground in aesthetic philosophy, which rendered those same highly prized skills of disguise as increasingly suspect. Of course, it proved difficult to identify what qualified as ““natural cuisine. ”” During the eighteenth century, two oppositional definitions of natural cuisine developed, with very different implications for the organization of culinary labor. On the one hand, natural cuisine could indicate simple preparations, dispensing with the need for a master cook. On the other hand, natural cuisine could require a rigorous study of nature's laws. By positing a universal foundation for taste in natural law, natural cuisine envisioned the cook's liberation from diners' whims and so theorized a relationship in which the cook dictated standards of taste to consumers, rather than vice versa. We might trace today's celebrity chefs' authority over ““good taste”” back to the latter definition promoting a more natural cuisine.