Through war and plague, revolution and migration, people have always had to eat. Parallel to the history books, a second, more obscure history was being recorded in the cookbooks of the time, which charted the evolution of meals and the transmission of ingredients around the world. In this eclectic book of food history, antiquarian cookbook expert Tom Nealon makes the case that the course of civilization has secretly been defined by two forces: hunger and taste.In the course of this sumptuous feast of a book, Tom Nealon takes on such overlooked themes as carp and the Crusades, brown sauce and Byron, and chillies and cannibalism. He examines conspiracies and controversies, probing the connections between the French Revolution and table settings, food thickness and colonialism, lemonade and the Black Plague, “and other astonishing connections in this wide-ranging history of food—and civilization itself” (Entertainment Weekly, Best New Books).