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Title: Words to Eat By

Subtitle: Five Foods and the Culinary History of the English Language

Author: Ina Lipkowitz

Narrator: Carolyn Cook

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-06-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 4 votes

Genres: History, World

Publisher's Summary:

You may be what you eat, but you're also what you speak, and English food words tell a remarkable story about the evolution of our language and culinary history, revealing a vital collision of cultures alive and well from the time Caesar first arrived on British shores to the present day.

Words to Eat By explores the remarkable stories behind five of our most basic food words, words which reveal fascinating aspects of the evolution of the English language and our powerful associations with certain foods. Using sources that vary from Roman histories and early translations of the Bible to Julia Child's recipes and Frank Bruni's restaurant reviews, Ina Lipkowitz shows how saturated with French and Italian names the English culinary vocabulary is, "from a la carte to zabaglione." But the words for our most basic foodstuffs - bread, meat, milk, leek, and apple - are still rooted in Old English and Words to Eat By reveals how exceptional these words and our associations with the foods are. As Lipkowitz says, "the resulting stories will make readers reconsider their appetites, the foods they eat, and the words they use to describe what they want for dinner, whether that dinner is cooked at home or ordered from the pages of a menu."

Contagious with information, this remarkable book pulls profound insights out of simple phenomena, offering an analysis of our culinary and linguistic heritage that is as accessible as it is enlightening.

Members Reviews:

Superb and Compelling Read for Lovers of Food and Food Literature

Words to Eat By is an exquisite addition to the literature of food, elegantly integrating culinary history, our attitudes towards different foods and preparations, and a careful consideration of how the names used for certain foods impacts our preferences and impressions. Over the past years I've spent considerable time reading from the increasingly diverse array of books associated with food, whether those be works of culinary history, single food-focused treatises, social or political perspectives on the cooking and food industries, or the never-ending list of new cookbooks. Lipkowitz's book will quickly join the ranks of the best works in the food field, to be included with the exemplary recent works by the likes of Mark Kurlansky, Michael Pollan, and Tom Standage, and also with the classics by the greats like MFK Fisher and Elizabeth David.

Words to Eat By presents a wealth of information in a highly entertaining and engaging manner. Ina Lipkowitz has an uncanny gift in presenting culinary history in a fun and easily readable style, objectively sharing historical food perspectives from antiquity to the recent centuries while clearly demonstrating how age-old tendencies have led to both current day biases and longstanding eating and dietary patterns. This is a book that provides the reader with many valuable insights into why they might be predisposed towards certain foods with certain names, and why they may be too quickly inclined to reject others. Words to Eat By takes an important step in opening the door to changed inclinations in our culinary choices.

Lipkowitz's work is divided into treatments of five Old English or Germanic food words (Apple, Leek, Milk, Meat, and Bread), and teaches us how both the words for these foods and the foods themselves have evolved.