While history was always my worst subject in school (I just cannot with all the memorizing of names and dates), I actually do enjoy history when it’s presented well, particularly when food is involved! And this book is exactly that. It’s composed of 50 little essays, each about a dish that was prominent at a particular place and time in history.

Were I back in my pre-kids, blogging or streaming or video-making days, I think it would be a really fun project to cook through the book and try to replicate all the dishes it features. Alas, there’s not a chance of me finding the time for that these days, but this book was still a lot of fun to read!

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of How Would You Like Your Mammoth?

First, great title and second, great cover!

This is a great collection of essays about the culinary history of humankind that offers insight about ancient cultures and rituals surrounding food.

The author also brought up topics I never really thought about like hunger strikes and a country (rhymes with Tussia) trying to co=opt a national dish not their own as their own.

Sadly, food is politicized as much as everything else.

I learned so much, including the origins of fish and chips, gladiators ate a vegan diet to maintain their health and lean physiques, and how curry didn't start out super spicy.

Any foodie and/or history buff will enjoy How Would You Like Your Mammoth?

Also, I wonder how mammoth tasted.

This is a collection of short, non-fiction vignettes about food and how it has interacted with humans throughout time. I definitely learned a lot from this read!

What a fun book! Each few pages is a cool story about some type of food and where it came from. This is easy to pick up when waiting in a line or in the doctor's office. I learned so much!

Did you know that British fish and chips is a fusion cuisine, from the pairing of fried fish from the Jews of Portugal and Spain, and fried potatoes from Belgium or France? These and other fascinating tidbits of food history are conveyed with enthusiasm and knowledge in How Would You Like Your Mammoth? a chronological series of vignettes of culinary history. Each brief chapter focuses on a dish, element of a dish, or style of dining that moved the culinary landscape a little further along. There’s historical context, anecdotes, recipes and preparation instructions based on archaeological finds, recipes in pictogram and text format, and first person accounts. The descriptions of food contain less about taste than one would expect, with the author focusing on scent, texture, color, shape and size over flavor, even for more contemporary dishes. This may in fact just be a very realistic approach to the understanding we can’t know what the first salt, fish and rice tasted like the first time they were purposefully consumed toether during the Edo period that began in the early 1600s. The entries range from lamb stew from Babylonia, Bahn Mi from Vietnam, the All-American hamburger (USA), to afternoon tea in the United Kingdom, Pandemic dinners (no nod to sourdough), sauce (BUTTER!) in France, and the caviar and filets from whole roast beef joints served on the luxurious Orient Express speak to place and time as much as mummified beef ribs from ancient Egypt.

The essays are like clever little amuse-bouche: carefully selected, crafted with attentive, loving care and leaving you with an appetite for more. I felt many of the essays ended abruptly and with an odd tone, like an urgent need to be witty and leave the reader with something pithy or a slight tongue-in-cheek attitude that diminishes the lovely, descriptive sensory writing that preceded it.

I received a free advance reader’s review copy of #HowWould YouLikeYourMammoth from #NetGalley, courtesy of The Experiment.

“Food is pleasure, of course, but it is also memory, escapism, and nostalgia” “The rule of hospitality establishes community - but it is the food that creates communality”

How Would You Like Your Mammoth? is a collection of short non-fiction snippets about food and its interactions with humans and society.

This book covers a very long time period and so it definitely felt overall like it had a slow pace. The bite-sized pieces however, means that if you’re going to read this, I highly recommend taking your time. Each specific food history is probably 3 or 4 pages and relatively digestible but trying to read any more than two or three food histories became difficult.

Overall, I felt like I learned a decent amount of new information about the history of food. Truthfully, I’m not sure how much will stick with me as a lot of it was older foods that wouldn’t necessarily still be eaten today, but this was a fascinating read nonetheless. A lot of facts and brief origin stories (when able) made this enjoyable.

The author’s personal opinions do seem to make its way into the book near the end, as we get into more modern history. Not that I necessarily disagree with any of their opinions but they do become much more prevalent near the end which may put some readers off. However, as mentioned throughout - food is politicized - and the opinions are ultimately to be expected!