Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery

Cooking may be simply the provision of nourishment palatable to the human body, but it needs language to soar beyond the kitchen stove and a viable vocabulary to make communication between cooks and diners profitable and possible. This is a rich field for the collective endeavours of the 28th Symposium at Oxford. Linguistics and etymology may be a tool for unravelling the history of foodstuffs and their migration from one culture to another; or language may supply a social and cultural subtext to what would otherwise be solely a culinary message; or the tools of literary criticism may be unleashed with profit on texts of cookery manuals or recipe books.