Food and Language : Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2009

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 are a tool for unravelling the history of foodstuffs and their migration from one culture to another; and language can supply a social and cultural subtext to what would otherwise be solely a culinary message. Subjects covered in this edition of Symposium papers include: Reading between the lines of a Japanese Menu, A Limousin-French dictionary as a source on the history of cooking, Sex, Food, and Valentine's Day, the sweet-sour journey of Sephardic cuisine and Ladino language, Gynaecophagia: metaphors of women as food in the Talmudic literature, and Western Dishes in Cantonese Cooking.