CHEFS: INTRODUCTION
Popular cookery evolves within an open-ended community around friendship, conversation, reading, taste experiences, recipes and grapevine news of what’s going on in other kitchens. Today such culinary exchange is often mediatised, but in the 18th century much of it went unrecorded. Altamiras tells us he read books and manuscripts, but he would also have talked food with those who had brought alms to the door, with guests, patrons and, above all, perhaps, with other cooks. I wanted to give a place in the book to those influences underlying recipes and invited a small group of chefs, home-cooks and food producers to contribute interpretations carrying their own explorations of memory and history. In this section I have focussed on the eight chefs (among 22 invited guests and 202 recipes) or, if you prefer, the cooks, as they sometimes call themselves. It seems to me that their engagement with food, like that of Altamiras, is a round-the-clock commitment, and for that very reason, again like him, they raise ethical, emotional and creative issues that help to jump forward our own and society’s wider ideas of good food.
