Overview

The award-winning classic reissued for its 25th anniversary, with a new introduction by Bee Wilson This is the book on the way we eat. Solidifying her standing as a preeminent observer and scholar of everyday life, Margaret Visser takes on the sweeping history of table manners, from the civilizations of ancient Greece and medieval Europe to the way that technology has altered, and continues to alter, our behaviour over dinner. She writes of everything from cultural idiosyncrasies around preparation and consumption, to the surprising origins of tableware - forks took eight centuries to become common utensils, the plate began as a four-day-old slice of bread. Blending folklore, history, and humour, this is a feast of fact and observation on one of our most primal rituals- the meal.

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9780241293645

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A wide-ranging reference book, useful to addicts of quizzes and etiquette...you will be both informed and entertained * Sunday Express * Superlative... learned as anything: Visser quotes from Aeschylus, Rabelais, Erasmus, books of etiquette, P J O'Rourke -- Robert Winder * Independent * 'One of the most important books ever written about food...every time I turn to it I am struck by some fresh detail' -- Bee Wilson

'One of the most important books ever written about food...every time I turn to it I am struck by some fresh detail' -- Bee Wilson Superlative... learned as anything: Visser quotes from Aeschylus, Rabelais, Erasmus, books of etiquette, P J O'Rourke -- Robert Winder Independent A wide-ranging reference book, useful to addicts of quizzes and etiquette...you will be both informed and entertained Sunday Express

Author Information

Margaret Visser writes on history, anthropology, and the mythology of everyday life. Her books, which include The Gift of Thanks, Much Depends on Dinner (which won a Glenfiddich Prize for the Food Book of the Year), The Way We Are, and The Geometry of Love, have all been bestsellers, and The Rituals of Dinner won the International Association of Culinary Professionals' Literary Food Writing Award and the Jane Grigson Award. A Professor of Classics for 18 years, she now lives in Toronto and the south of France.

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