Acquired TastesThe Lives and Recipes of Eight Culinary Ambassadors

James Chatto is one of Canada’s best-known writers on food and drink. He has authored and co-authored seven books including, The Seducer’s Cookbook and A Matter of Taste, and is an award-winning journalist, editor, and restaurant columnist.

W.L. Martin studied art history and Near Eastern history and has worked as a teacher and school administrator. Martin has published A Kitchen in Corfu, a socio-culinary study of the island, and has several articles and books in the works.

A historian of the early modern Baltic, Joseph Sproule completed his PhD at the University of Toronto and has taught there for over a decade. He has authored numerous articles in his field and pursued research or academic studies in nine countries.

James Chatto

Acquired Tastes was conceived as a family project during the pandemic lockdown Toronto writer and restaurant critic James Chatto, along with two other established writers, his wife and history professor son wrote about “micro history” of food transmission. Rather than discussing broad migratory routes of ingredients, the book explores how specific recipes moved from one culture to another by focusing on the biography of the single individual—the “ambassador”—who carried and established it in a new country. It is a fascinating look as to how one individual can inadvertently introduce a dish into an entirely different culture. 

James Chatto was kind enough with us about the unique stories he and his coauthors (family) have documented in their new book.

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Booksaboutfood.com(BAF): I guess I’ll just jump in and say, well, congratulations on the book. 

James Chatto: Thank you. And thank you for your interest in it. 

BAF: When I think of your work, I think of you more as a contemporary writer. Would that be safe to say from your criticisms and your work on talking to chefs over the years? 

James Chatto: Certainly my day-to-day work is more about restaurant criticism and food writing and the people who are currently at work in the field for sure. But some of my books have been about the past. One of the books I did early on was about the history of food on the island of Korfu in Greece because my wife and I lived there. And so that went way back to ancient times. And it’s something that’s always been fascinating to me, the evolution of things. I wrote a book called The Man Who ate Toronto, which was a history of the Toronto restaurant scene. And even though that only went back to the 1950s. 

BAF: So that’s why I was thinking I think of you as more of a contemporary writer in that sense.

Let’ s start at the beginning. So where did the idea for this project come from? 

James Chatto: Well, it was entirely my wife’s idea actually. It was during the lockdown, during the pandemic, and we were looking for something to do together and she thought it would be great if she and I wrote a book together and also involved our son. So the three of us, it would become a family project. And my son being a professional historian, early modern period, his mind has always set some centuries back, but he wanted to write about culinary history, and that seemed to me like a very interesting idea as well. And the way that foods and recipes move from one culture to another. But then my wife decided that it would be much more interesting for the book if there were also people involved, individuals. So if a recipe was to move from one culture to another, there would have to be an actual individual who was doing the transmission, who was the sort of ambassador for that recipe. 

And suddenly it became as much a book of biography as it did of culinary history. The sort of history that interests us is really what is now called micro history, I think. It’s a history from below. It’s not about kings and generals. It’s about ordinary people and how they reflect the times they lived in. And so that’s really what this book is. It’s taking a very small example with one person involved and amplifying that up to make broader generalizations about the way food moves from one culture to another. 

BAF: Almost like a trivial pursuit question…

James Chatto: How interesting is that compared with the fact that the chile migrated over the course of a century from North America or Central America to Thailand? I mean, where there’s no people involved at all, it’s just a broad stroke of a migratory route. But once you get down to individuals, then you allow all things like chance and serendipity and wonderful elements like that. They’re not wiped out by statistics. They become actually probably a major part of the story, which to us was very interesting. 

BAF: Well, that’s what I was going to ask this question later on, but what I found interesting was that you’re not talking about, as you say, Chile is going from America to Thailand. You’re talking about the people as opposed to a dish or an ingredient, the people who made it happen, which I don’t think has really been done in this context before. 

James Chatto: Well, I’m glad you say that because we couldn’t find a book that would cover it in that way. That was, to us, the most interesting way of talking about it, except for people who just were writing about their own experiences. So we thought that there might be a place for this book in that case. Of course, in doing so, we set ourselves a very strict and rigorous template that we had to keep following. And there were wonderful stories where we couldn’t quite pin it down to one person most frustratingly. So we had to leave some wonderful stories out. And if there’s a volume too, I might expand the horizons of our book so we could include that. I’m thinking about, for example, in the 1850s, I think a group of miners from Cornwall were hired to work in the mountains of Mexico. And they brought many things from Cornwall with them such as the Methodist faith and football and cricket and also Cornish pasties. 

And you know this story, I’m sure. And the Cornish passes are still going strong in that particular village. And we narrowed it down to one woman who we thought could have been the person who brought the recipe from Truro in Cornwall to that village. But unfortunately, all the evidence was circumstantial. And so we had to eventually leave her out because we have a good conscience.

BAF: I didn’t know the story, but I could see where it was going. And I didn’t … Again, I don’t know the history of the empanada. I don’t know if that was any way related or evolved from that, but I- Apparently not, 

James Chatto: Apparently not.

BAF: When you said cornwall, I said, “Ah, pasties.” 

James Chatto: Yes, exactly. And there were ‘pastes’, as they’re called in Mexico, and they’re the sort of national dish of this one tiny little mining area high in the Mexican mountains. But Grace Chenaweth was this woman. And with all due respect to her, we could not be sure that it was her, so we had to leave that story out. But it still lingers as a regret in my brain that we didn’t get to Grace. 

BAF: We’re talking about her now, so hopefully that’ll be some compensation. Well, I guess maybe I think you may have answered this, but the people are in this book, I’m curious how you chose them because none of them, people are going to pick up this book and maybe look for a chef or the gentleman who invented Caesar salad because that’s a worldwide salad now. I can’t remember his name, Caesar something… But these are not well-known people. These aren’t famous people for the most part. 

James Chatto: Exactly. And the idea was not to find people who invented a salad, people who came across a salad that was well entrenched in one culture and moved it into another. And that was another parameter we set ourselves was that when the recipe arrived in its new location, it had to be accepted and stay there. It wasn’t just something that you found in a restaurant as something weird. It had to enter into the actual mother culture of the new country as well. So yeah, and the people that we found, without exception, were more well known in their day for other things. So we have a concert pianist, we have a queen, we have a slave trader, we have a merchant, a lady in waiting at a court. These aren’t culinary figures, but they were deeply involved in this one transmission of a recipe. It’s almost if the recipe found a host like a parasite who would carry it from one country to another, and who it was is actually, in the end, it’s a matter of chance really in some cases. 

BAF: Well, it’s true because how many immigrant stories are there out there but how many foods have entered the popular culture? So it’s interesting how one or two have really hit the mark. 

James Chatto: Exactly. I mean, our first chapter deals with a woman called Maria who lived in Ayataia, which was the capital of Siam in the 16th century. And she was just a quite humble Portuguese Japanese woman who’s living outside the city in a suburb. And she was picked to be the bride of the first minister of the country. And as a result, she entered the court and became the first non-Siamese lady in waiting to the princess of Sian. And one of the things they used to do in the court was try to impress each other with their cooking skills. And the only thing she knew how to cook were these Portuguese convent sweets that she had learned at home from an auntie who came from Goa. And of course, they’re wonderful sweets. They’re made them egg yolk and sugar mostly, but it’s in the technique that makes them so special and difficult. 

And she showed these off at the court and they were received with such joy and that they became a part of what they were eating at the court. And the king was so happy with them that he instructed them to be sold in the marketplace in the city. And of course, all his mandarins copied this and said, “Oh yes, they’re the most wonderful thing they ever tasted” because the king liked them. And to this day, five of the nine auspicious desserts in Thai culture are from Maria’s recipes. So that’s what we mean about becoming truly embedded into a new culture. So if your son becomes a monk in Thailand, then these desserts will be served at the moment when he becomes a proper monk. 

BAF: I was wondering if you could maybe discuss the template you used. I think you may have hit on it at certain points, but the template sounds very interesting. 

James Chatto: It is interesting. We kind of regretted it halfway through the process because it forced us into quite a narrow passage, but it had to be a recipe that was carried from one culture where it existed already into another culture where it would become deeply embedded. And the transmission had to be accomplished by one individual person who we could then research and write the biography of. So each of the chapters in our book is a different story. It’s a sort of adventure story of a recipe and the person who takes it from one culture to another. And they’re very different. And because there are three of us writing it, we each write in our own way. And mine are a couple of quite snazzy ones about cocktails. And my wife’s stories are very well researched and encovering all sorts of new material that’s never seen in the light of day. 

And my son is deeply embedded in the history of the period that he loves, which is the 1600s. 

BAF: Well, again, I’m going to have to jump again to another question because I always like to ask people about the writing process, but you’ve written with your family. I don’t know if this is the first time you’ve done that. Did you divide up, each take a chapter or did you work on things together?

James Chatto: The initial idea was that Wendy would research it and Joe would do his own research and write his own chapters, and I would do most of the writing. But my wife, who is a superb academic researcher, became so engrossed with the subjects that she decided she needed to do the writing herself. And so in the end, we all worked on each other’s chapters to a degree, but we kind of took two or three chapters each, and so these are going to be my primary chapters and those can be yours. And it ended up working in that way. So that, for example, in my wife’s chapters, she would have the final say about a decision of what would get included and what would get cut and things like that. So it was a kind of mutual thing. We learned how to be polite about each other’s writing and how not to be too defensive our precious words. BAF: Was this the first time you’ve written as a family or together? 

James Chatto: My wife and I wrote a book together called A Kitchen in Corfu back in the 80s, which was the one about living on the island of Korfu. But this was the first time that she and I had written it together since then. And to involve our son was a particular delight because he’s in his 40s now. And so we have to admit that he’s grown up and he teaches at the University of Toronto. He teaches history, so he has a real job too, but to work with him on the book was wonderful and he kept us on the straight and narrow in terms of academic rigor. 

BAF: I can almost envision a scenario where it turns into the old family vacation and station wagon, that sort of dynamic. 

James Chatto: Well, that happened a bit because we did a lot of research in North American universities. So we were down in North Carolina and Virginia and Merryland and places like that. So that was a sort of road trip ending up in an archive somewhere for this book for various chapters. And also in Paris and in London too, we had to do some research there, which was so hard.

BAF: It sounds horrible. Well, maybe I should ask again, you keep hitting up my questions before I get to them. It sounds like the list must have evolved several times during the process. 

James Chatto: It did. I mean, our son Joe presented the first idea to us, which was Maria, who is chapter one in our book. And then really it was by chance that we came upon the other subjects, and then they’re so different. And one of the chapters concerns Ben Wenberg, for example, who fake law has it, is the guy who brought the lobster Newberg recipe from the Caribbean to Delmonico’s in New York in the 1870s. And that’s what you read on the internet and good old Captain Wenberg. It turns out that he wasn’t quite that sort of man at all. He was a slave trader and a criminal and consorted with murderers and things like that. At the same time as being a man about town and dining, in fact, living at Delmonico’s, he had one of those nine apartments above the restaurant. But we tried our best to find this recipe in the Caribbean before it was presented at Delmonico’s. 

And we came to the conclusions in the end that he had actually brought it all the way from Portland, Maine, not from the Caribbean, but that is still a transmission of sorts. 

BAF: Well, I think again, you mentioned the lady in Mexico, the Cornish woman. Is there anybody else that you’re disappointed who really wanted to get into the book that just couldn’t quite work it out? 

James Chatto: There’s another one. Yes. Did you ever read a book by Bruce Chatwin called In Patagonia? 

BAF: Oh, yes.

James Chatto: And he talks about a Welsh group who founded a village in Patagonia. They got the seasons wrong. They thought it was going to be summer, but in fact, that was winter. And they brought Welsh tea cake with them from the valleys of Wales to the Pampas of Patagonia. And we were desperate to find out an actual person who might’ve done it, been the actual sort of host to that recipe. But in fact, every woman on the trip knew how to make Welsh tea cakes. So again, we were stymied by not being able to find one single person. So that would be another story that I think would go into the sort of rather more vague volume two if we ever did one. 

BAF: I think at one point there were more Welsh speakers in Argentina than in Wales at one point.

James Chatto: I wouldn’t be surprised. Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised. I did write to a tea house in Wales in Patagonia and asking where their recipe came from, but they never replied. So too bad.

BAF: Should have written it in Welsh. That could have been the issue. 

James Chatto: I think another road trip is in order. 

BAF: I think that sounds like a wonderful destination and an idea. Part of the country, part of the world, I’d love to see myself. So again, I always ask people during the research what surprised them, but this must have been just loads of surprises along the way, interesting discoveries. 

James Chatto: Continual surprises, yes. Another chapter concerns a man called Jan Smeterlin, who was a great concert pianist in the 20th century, and he was one of the great interpreters of Chopin in the world, but because he just liked recording, he’s completely forgotten now. He’s maybe made two or three records, but he discovered when he was touring in Indonesia, in what was still the Dutch Indonesia in the 1930s, a Dutch colonist there, a woman baked a chocolate cake for him that she brought the recipe with her from the Netherlands using Dutch chocolate bars that they were importing, even though chocolate grows in Indonesia, they preferred the taste of Dutch chocolate. And so he carried this chocolate cake recipe back with him and took it with him on tour and cooked it for people in London, and one of whom was the lady in waiting to the Queen at the time, Queen Elizabeth, who became the queen mother. 

And she loved her so much she asked for the recipe, and he gave it to her. And then when he played for her once, she served him the cake. And this cake, which became known as Smeterlin Cake, was picked up by a food writer in New York called Putterford. And she wrote a column in the Herald Tribune about it, which spread around. And it became a very popular cake in America. It’s called Queen Mother’s Cake now, and it was Maida Heatter, the great baking maven, had it in almost every single book she wrote. And so this little cake story, we were following it up and it turns out that the great niece of this pianist lives just around the corner from us here in Toronto. We were able to get lots of photographs and her version of the recipes has come down through the family, which is slightly different than the recipe that’s come down through American journalism and food writing. 

So these are the sort of things that, as if this book was asking to be written in a way, I was thinking of that line in Jurassic Park where ‘life finds a way’. It’s like food finds away. 

BAF: Well, certainly that’s an interesting connection. To me, that’s living history because you’re getting the direct recipe and that must have been quite something, quite an experience. Granted it’s a cake, but still it’s a connection. 

James Chatto: A ridiculous coincidence really. But these things seem to happen a lot during our research as the book, which took many years because we all have real lives as well. This was a labor of love in many ways. So yeah, so that was certainly part of the fun that entertained us while we were doing the work.

BAF: Well, how long did this book from conception to publication…Or actually, how long was the writing process, I should say?

James Chatto: I guess we started in maybe 2021 when the pandemic was at its peak, and we all had other things to do, so we took our sweet time about it. And then gradually as one chapter engrossed us, we’d speed up a bit and then start a new one. And halfway through, one of the chapters my wife was working on ended up being a hundred thousand words long, and clearly that was longer than the whole of the rest of the book put together. So she lifted it out of the book and it’s become a second project for her now separately. So that is something else. So yeah, we went down many rabbit holes and many byways and highways to … It wasn’t just a linear book. And most of my books have had to be because I actually have a living to make, but this one was much more sort of a hobby in a way. 

BAF: Interesting hobby. And I’ll have to keep my eyes open for your wife’s book. It’s food-related?

James Chatto: It is. The topic is very secret, but it’s going to raise a lot of eyebrows, especially in the US.

BAF: I’m very intrigued now.

James Chatto: Good. That’s my job there.

BAF: Was there ever a case where there were disagreements about who should be in the book? Did somebody ever have to lobby for somebody to be in or argue for them to be removed? 

James Chatto: No, I think because we were being strict about our guidelines, there was no case to be made that we wouldn’t have to acknowledge that, yeah, that is justified, or I’m sorry, that is not justified. So that was the one thing that we all were agreed on that we had to stick to our guns in a way, otherwise it could have been a book that could embrace the whole history of food, and that would’ve been too big for us, even for us to handle. 

BAF:  Even for the three of you. This is a type of book where everybody’s going to have an opinion about who should be in and who should be out. I’m sure you must have heard some of that. So a chef, let’s say if somebody like Bocuse, who probably was the big ambassador for French food around the world, people would say, well, why not him or why not such and such? 

James Chatto: Yeah. It’s funny because chefs don’t really have a place in our book very much because chefs are usually pleased to create a recipe rather than transmit it and they also tend to keep it in their restaurants. And what we didn’t want to do was write about, say, a foreign dish that comes into a culture but stays in the restaurant world. It has to leave the restaurant world and come into people’s homes and become deeper embedded in the culture. We can all go out and have a wonderful Japanese meal, but it doesn’t mean that Japanese food is a part of our own domestic culture, and that was part of the mission that we set ourselves. 

BAF: These little gems of discovery that you’re finding, are there more out there or do you think that now with the internet and instant gratification that there’s some influencer that’s running around eating whatever and showing it to the world? 

James Chatto: Yeah. But does the world then adopt that recipe and make it part of the world? I don’t know, that depends. And also, I mean, and this is a contentious point, but there’s so much inaccuracy on the internet. We had to wade through an enormous amount of disinformation and misinformation to find the truth, and we weren’t finding it on the internet. We had to go back to primary sources and dig deep in libraries and recipes and menus of the day. Almost without exception, our subjects have been misrepresented in popular culture on the internet, and lies get repeated endlessly. And as I was saying before, this slave trading Portlander who lived in New York becomes this jolly little sort of sea captain with a jaunty hat. And in fact, he’s a very dark figure and things like that. And Queen Bona in Poland, who’s another of our subjects who was an Italian princess who brought a recipe for lasagna to Warsaw when she married the king of Poland. 

And we follow that recipe through the centuries in Poland and how it was banned by the communists and changed into another dish like that. And she, for example, was seen by Polish academics in the 19th century as a very negative person, someone who corrupted the philosophy of the real Poland and introduced decadent Italian culture and things like that. Whereas today, now the pendulum has swung the other way, and she’s being heralded by feminist writers as a model of an early woman of power in a masculine culture. So you have to weigh this all up and try and find out what actually was the truth between these two parameters.

BAF: Certainly. And I know Poland’s going through a bit of a renaissance with their food or rediscovery. 

James Chatto: Yeah, the Pierogi was another chapter that never got written for us because we were trying to find the Ukrainian pierogi that moved from the Ukraine to Central Canada to Manitoba especially. And if we could have found one person who actually took the recipe, but again, it was a case of every single Ukrainian woman who made that journey knew how to cook perogies, and they were just suddenly everywhere. So we were lacking our individual in that case. 

BAF: Actually, maybe I should ask about the actual research, because how do you narrow down somebody from a hundred years ago? It can either be very painstaking or very rewarding. It just sounds like it must’ve been a wonderful experience of just researching this deep dive into things.

James Chatto: It was, and each one is completely different. I’ll talk again about Benjamin Wenberg, one of my wife’s chapters, and this was the one that persuaded her that she needed to write this and not just research it because she became so involved in that research. Literally nothing was known about him except a couple of mentions that he was this merrymaker at Delmonico’s. So she had to go into probate records and bankruptcy court records and all sorts of things in Connecticut where he had a house and in Portland where his family lived and really digging deep and scratching for any mention of Wenberg. And his company was in all the shipping registers in the 19th century newspapers. So there were literally tens of thousands of mentions of him, but only to do with ships coming and going in the port of New York. But she was able to find such wonderful information about him and such illuminating stuff.

He did not die a wealthy man. He died a bankrupt and a failure. And for example, his wife and children lived in Connecticut on a farm. And when he lived in New York, which he did for most of the time, he described himself as a bachelor and made no reference to his family in Connecticut. And people in New York were astonished to find that he had a family after he died and vice versa. In Connecticut, they always thought of him as a family man until he stopped coming altogether.

BAF: I think that research just sounds, again, to me that it  must’ve been a wonderful experience doing all that. Maybe a little frustrating at times if you keep missing the reference you’re looking for, but still a wonderful experience to dive into all these things. 

James Chatto: It was. It was such a pleasure. And the people we met, like Ben Wenberg, two of his great-great-granddaughters are still alive and we became friends with one of them and corresponded with the other. And they had their own family versions of these stories and Lobster Newberg features in them as well. So they were aware of the connection, but we unfortunately had to correct some of the conceptions about their ancestor. 

BAF:  Yeah, I could see why. And again, I always like to ask if I have missed anything that you would like to put out there. Is there something you’d like to mention that we may not have talked about?

James Chatto No, I think we were just very happy with the book as it ended up. It’s quite rich. It’s full of detail. We talk about some sort of major players, but it’s really about ordinary people and the things they did. Somebody decided a planter from Carolina brought the mint julep to Oxford, to one of the Oxford colleges and taught them how to fix up a Mint Julep in the 1840s. And that happened to be the college I went to at Oxford. And to this day, they have a Mint Julep night where we all stand up and drink a mint julep and raise our glasses to this American who came over in 1846. So I mean, there’s some kind of lighthearted stories as well. It’s not all about slavery and corruption. 

BAF: Well, so it’s just the one mint julep everybody has and that’s it or is … 

James Chatto: It used to be that there was one that was passed around until the cup was empty, then it was refilled. But modern views of hygiene insists that everybody gets so little tankered now. 

BAF: But everybody just says the one. 

James Chatto: Yes. Oh yeah, it’s not a booze up. It’s just one in one julep of each. But there was a gap after World War II when they did stop it, but it was in 1973, they resumed the habit. 

BAF: But I’m fascinated by the idea of the mint julep finding popularity in Oxford, because that is two totally separate spheres one would think. 

James Chatto: Yeah, I mean, and nobody knew how to make a mint julep when he asked for one after a long, hot day being shown around the colleges, Mr. Trapier from the low country of Carolina. And so he left instructions and he bought a julep mug in an antique shop in Oxford in the High Street and left it to the college saying that this is the sort of thing you need to serve a julep And so that’s still there amongst the treasures of the college. You can see it. And he had it inscribed. And yeah, I mean, it didn’t spread to the other colleges. It’s very much a New College trick there, but all of us remember it very well. And New College has a wonderful choir, world-famous choir, and they would sit or stand in the minstrels gallery in the dining hall and sing Porgi and Bess songs, not realizing that William Heyward Trapier, who was the gentleman in question on his mother’s side, was related to DuBose Heyward, who was the librettist for Porgy and Bess. 

So there’s another weird coincidence that just pops up, which we reveal in the book. So that will have people standing up and gasping, I think. 

BAF: That’s a great story. And for me, that seems to simple to represent the beauty of food and how it does transgress borders and connections are made where in least likely places over food, which I think is wonderful. 

James Chatto:I mean, it didn’t really enter English culture as a result of Trapier’s visit, but it certainly entered the culture of New College Oxford, which as anyone who’s been there will tell you as a country unto itself. 

BAF: So what’s next for you as a writer or what’s your next project or do you have one? 

James Chatto: I haven’t got one going right now, so I wanted to see this one out the door and kiss it on the forehead and send it away, so I’m in the middle of doing that, and then maybe another one will come up. I’ve found that I’m extremely The interest in the food history more than I ever thought I would be. So that has lit a little fire, so we’ll see what happens. But I do have to go … I’m busy as a journalist as well, so I’m doing that more at the moment than writing another book. But my wife is doing her book and my son, I think they both work on other fiction projects as well, so good luck to them with that. 

BAF: No, it’s really a wonderful book. And what intrigued me was the fact that these aren’t well-known names.

James Chatto: Yeah, we like that too. 

BAF: James, listen, thanks so much for your time. I hope I haven’t taken too much of it. This is a fascinating book, which I’m looking forward to getting through in a little more detail. I didn’t have time to read it from cover to cover, but it will be read. 

James Chatto: Good. Thank you very much. Good. Such a pleasure, James. Thank you for your interest in our book.

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“Acquired Tastes is a delightful collection of stories featuring a food, beverage, or dish and the personality behind it propelling it to fame. Part history, part biography, the stories – complete with recipes and beautiful visuals – will entertain and enlighten readers.” -Amy Bentley, Professor of Food Studies, New York University

“A splendid compilation of historical tidbits, recipes, and fascinating characters, Acquired Tastes offers a fresh take on some of the world’s most beloved foods and beverages. Authors James Chatto, W.L. Martin, and Joseph Sproule explore how these dishes and their creators were shaped by local, national, and global influences. Compellingly written, Acquired Tastes is an important and insightful addition to the scholarship on food and drink history.” – Rebecca Beausaert, Francis and Ruth Redelmeier Professor in Rural History, University of Guelph

“When three writers par excellence collaborate, the result is a fascinating compilation of eight diverse historical stories spanning countries and centuries: from a royal figure of Thai origins who immortalized Portuguese-inspired desserts to a Polish musician who created a dessert fit – and named! – for a royal, and from an Indian freedom fighter who finessed curry in Japan to how a Cuban-created cocktail was brought to the US and then the rest of the world.” –Hemant Bhagwani, Chef, Restaurateur, and Mentor

“This intriguing book brings the reader on a journey through different centuries and continents to tell the stories of several characters (including a queen, a pianist, a slave-trader, a merchant, an admiral, and a freedom fighter) who have, through the fickle nature of history, become better known for their culinary associations than for their more significant accomplishments. The authors debunk some ‘fakelore’ myths and demonstrate how the real truth can often be stranger than fiction. A fascinating read, and a real tour de force!” –Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, Senior Lecturer of Culinary Arts and Food Technology, Technological University Dublin