Mark McWilliams – författare

Profiling 48 classic American foods ranging from junk and fast food to main dishes to desserts, this book reveals what made these dishes iconic in American pop culture.Americans have increasingly embraced food culture, a fact proven by the rising popularity of celebrity chefs and the prominence of television shows celebrating food themes. This fascinating overview reveals the surprising story behind the foods America loves.The Story Behind the Dish: Classic American Foods is an engaging pop culture resource which helps tell the story of American food. Each chapter is devoted to one of 48 distinctive American dishes and features the story of where the food developed, what inspired its creation, and how it has evolved. The book not only covers each food as a single entry, but also analyzes the themes and events that connect them, making the text useful as both a reference and a narrative on the history of food.

Food and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century America revolves around the 1840 presidential election when, according to campaign slogans, candidates were what they ate. Skillfully deploying the rhetoric of republican simplicity—the belief that plain dress, food, and manners were signs of virtue in the young republic—William Henry Harrison defeated Martin Van Buren by aligning the incumbent with the European luxuries of pâté de foie gras and soupe à la reine while maintaining that he survived on “raw beef without salt.” The effectiveness of such claims reflected not only the continuing appeal of the frontier and the relatively primitive nature of American cooking, but also a rhetorical struggle to define how eating habits and culinary practices fit into ideas of the American character.From this crucial mid-century debate, the book’s argument reaches back to examine the formation of the myth of republican simplicity in revolutionary America and forward to the popularization of cosmopolitan sophistication during the Gilded Age. Drawing heavily on cookbooks, domestic manuals, travel writing, and the popular press, this historical framework structures a discussion of ways novelists use food to locate characters within their fictional worlds, evoking or contesting deeply held social beliefs about gender, class, and race. In addition to mid-century novelists like Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Warner, the book examines popular and canonical novels by writers as diverse as Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, Susanna Rowson, Catharine Sedgwick, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Harriet Wilson. Some of these authors also wrote domestic manuals and cookbooks. In addition, McWilliams draws on a wide range of such work by William Alcott, Catharine Beecher, Eliza Leslie, Fannie Merrit Farmer, Maria Parloa, and others.

Food Rules and Rituals includes selected papers from the 2023 Oxford Food Symposium. Grounded in a number of different disciplines, writers from around the globe consider how rules and rituals structure the experiences and meanings of consuming foods in a wide variety of contexts.

Gardens, Flowers, and Fruit includes selected papers from the 2024 Oxford Food Symposium. Grounded in a number of different disciplines, writers from around the globe consider the precariousness of our fragile lifestyles, celebrating the joys of the natural world while conscious of the significant stresses on our environment.

The annual volume of papers selected from the previous year's Oxford Symposium will be devoted to the exploration of the theme "food and the elements".The papers examine not just the four elements of classical Western philosophy — fire, water, earth, and air — but also the elements of flavor, of chemistry, of culture, of care. In short, all the building blocks of the culinary world.Grounded in a number of different disciplines, writers from around the globe consider the flavor of bitterness in rituals of trauma, the terror of elemental uptake, calendar change and culinary continuity in southern Italy, costal foraging in Mont-Saint-Michel Bay, traditional food pairing in French Polynesia, the role of caste in late nineteenth-century colonial western Indian meat markets, the uses of lithium, salts in the Himalayas and on the Catalan coast, nixtamalization in traditional Mexican foods, synthesizing saffron and vanilla, sourness in Persian cookery, Japanese temple cuisine, feeding the Royal Navy in the Age of Fighting Sail, water and food insecurity in Uganda, edible gold, and accounts of the creation of Adam, changing dietetic patterns in Medieval Islam, and the Guangzhou kitchen.