Restaurants in America are as diverse as our population, and they speak volumes about our society according to Professor Paul Freedman, Author of Ten Restaurants That Changed America. From Delmonico's to Howard Johnson's, Freedman discusses the ten restaurants he profiles and tells how they had a sociological as well as gastronomical impact on our country.

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Elissa Altman, James Beard Award-winning writer of the blog and book, Poor Man’s Feast sits down with Linda to talk about food and memories and writing her latest memoir, Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw. So many of life's events are intrinsically tied to smells, tastes, or a particular meal and Elissa explains how she weaves it all into her writing.

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The Dutch were some of the earliest settlers in America, yet many of their culinary contributions remain little known. Food historian Peter Rose, who is from the Netherlands, has devoted her career to writing and educating Americans about the Dutch foodways--and especially their penchant for sweets and talks with us about the history of the foods we consider American classics. And Tom Daly talks about a Dutch cookie taking America by storm: the stroopwafel.

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Food history explores the origins of edible items, and Saveur magazine has joined the pursuit of interesting and perhaps unusual food origins. Editor-in-chief Adam Sachs shares the topics of the magazine's latest issue, The Origins Issue, which reveals some of the mysteries of the food world.

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After WWI, America went from sending food to war-starved Europe to suddenly no longer being the land of plenty. Authors Jane Ziegelman and Andy Coe discuss the culinary impact of that period which they chronicle in their new book, A Square Meal, A Culinary History of the Great Depression.

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On the season finale of A Taste of the Past, host Linda Pelaccio is joined in the studio by Sarah Lohman, to look at the culinary traditions surrounding funerals throughout American history.

Dubbed an “historic gastronomist,” Lohman recreates historic recipes as a way to make a personal connection with the past. She chronicles her explorations in culinary history on her blog, FourPoundsFlour.com, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and NPR. Lohman’s first book, Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, is due out with Simon & Schuster December 6, 2016.

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This week on A Taste of the Past – author and culinary historian Emelyn Rude traces the history of eating chicken, from the first domestication of the chicken nearly 10,000 years ago to its current status as our favorite meat.

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New York was once known as the oyster capital of the world, and was famous for the Blue Point Oyster that originated in the Great South Bay on Long Island. In 1938, that suddenly changed due to the New England hurricane known as "The Long Island Express." Inlets were cut through Fire Island, silting over oyster beds and exposing them to predators. After WWII, the wild population still hadn't recovered and the oyster industry lay dormant for decades. However, the "Blue Point" name lived on under questionable circumstances.

Fast-forward to the late 1990s, enter Chris Quartuccio. Chris grew up in West Sayville, just down the road from Blue Point. After disease wiped out much of the Eastern wild oyster population (causing the price of oysters to quadruple), the stage was set for Chris to start the first Oyster Farm on the Great South Bay in almost 80 years! This week on A Taste of the Past, Kat Johnson takes a trip to visit Chris at Blue Island Oyster Company's hatchery and nursery to learn more about the history of the oyster farming industry on the Great South Bay.

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This week on A Taste of the Past, host Linda Pelaccio is joined via phone by Patric Kuh, the multiple-James Beard Award–winning restaurant critic for Los Angeles Magazine and author of Finding the Flavors We Lost: From Bread to Bourbon, How Artisans Reclaimed American Food.

Industrialization and mass production stripped many foods of their original flavors, but there's been a growing movement over the past 50+ years to get back to those flavors and restore the natural goodness of our food. In Finding the Flavors We Lost, Kuh profiles major figures in the so-called “artisanal” food movement who brought exceptional taste back to food and inspired chefs and restaurateurs to redefine and rethink the way we eat.

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America's Gilded Age, the last quarter of the nineteenth century, is renowned for the excesses of robber barons and tycoons and their culture of conspicuous consumption. The lavishness of their tables impressed contemporaries and historians alike. But what about the eating habits of ordinary people at the time? Robert Dirks, author of Food in the Gilded Age, poses that question and discovers some surprising answers by peering through the lens of what then was a newly emerging science of nutrition.

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