English Garden History

Multiple award-winning author Adam Gopnik has written for the New Yorker since 1986. In this work, Gopnik charts America’s transformation from being simply aware of what they eat to being obsessive about it. This fascinating culinary journey will transport listeners from 18th-century France and the origin of America’s popular modern tastes to the kitchens of the White House and beyond.

Long ago, Indigenous healers used the earth’s herbs to ease pain, uplift spirits, and find balance. Their ancient wisdom lives on in remedies—potent, natural, and time-tested—that you can still use today. This book unlocks that knowledge—no expertise needed. Want to brew a tea that melts stress? Grow herbs that heal colds naturally? Feel more connected to nature? It’s all here—step by step, with sacred plants you can nurture anywhere and much more. Weave this herbal wisdom into your life and thrive!

The first edition, published in 2007, won a James Beard Award. Now updated with newly discovered recipes and historical information, this updated edition includes the origins of the first American drink, the mint julep (which Wondrich places before the American Revolution) and those of the cocktail itself. It also provides more detail about 19th-century spirits, many new and colorful anecdotes and details about Thomas' life, and a number of particularly notable, delicious, and influential cocktails not covered in the original edition.

When we humans love foods, we love them a lot. In fact, we have often eaten them into extinction, whether it is the megafauna of the Paleolithic world or the passenger pigeon of the last century. In Lost Feast, food expert Lenore Newman sets out to look at the history of the foods we have loved to death and what that means for the culinary paths we choose for the future.

A classic memoir of self-invention in a strange land: Ian Buruma's unflinching account of his amazing journey into the heart of Tokyo's underground culture as a young man in the 1970's When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a...

France is in a rut, and so is French cuisine. Twenty-five years ago it was hard to have a bad meal in France; now, in some cities and towns, it is a challenge to find a good one. For the first time in the annals of modern cooking, the most influential chefs and the most talked-about restaurants in the world are not French. Within France, large segments of the wine industry are in crisis, cherished artisanal cheeses are threatened with extinction, and bistros and brasseries are disappearing at an alarming rate.

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER From the New York Times bestselling author of The House at Tyneford, an epic family saga about a headstrong Austrian heiress who will be forced to choose between the family she's made and the family that made her at the outbreak of World War I. The start of a...

The ultimate guide to Guinness and the history, culture, and facts to help you find the perfect pint—from the pub to the pour—wherever you are. Including the all-important elements to look for in a Guinness pour—from exact foam height and storage temperature to the crucial glass shape and settling time—as well as what to run away from when seeking a beautiful pint and a crème de la crème guiding list of pubs in New York and around the world, Ian shares his expertise from many a “pint of plain” sank and enjoyed.

In a powerful blend of history and contemporary reporting, New York Times reporter David Philipps traces the rich history of wild horses in America: their introduction by the Spanish conquistadors, their role in the epic battles between Native Americans and settlers, their vital place in American self-mythology. He travels through some of the most remote parts of the American West, known as Wild Horse Country, to investigate the wild horse's current dilemma, caught between the clashing ideals of ranchers, scientists, and more.

Acclaimed cookbook author Jessica B. Harris weaves an utterly engaging history of African American cuisine, taking the listener on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, and tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way. From chitlins and ham hocks to fried chicken and vegan soul, Harris celebrates the delicious and restorative foods of the African American experience and details how each came to form an important part of African American culture, history, and identity.

As late as the 1960s, tacos were virtually unknown outside Mexico and the American Southwest. Within fifty years the United States had shipped taco shells everywhere from Alaska to Australia, Morocco to Mongolia. But how did this tasty hand-held food - and Mexican food more broadly - become so ubiquitous? In Planet Taco, Jeffrey Pilcher traces the historical origins and evolution of Mexico's national cuisine, explores its incarnation as a Mexican American fast-food, shows how surfers became global pioneers of Mexican food, and how Corona beer conquered the world.

Beer offers an amusing and informative account of the art and science of brewing, examining the history of brewing, and how the brewing process has evolved through the ages. The third edition features more information concerning the history of beer, especially in the United States; British, Japanese, and Egyptian beer; beer in the context of health and nutrition; and the various styles of beer. Author Charles Bamforth has also added detailed information on prohibition, Sierra Nevada, and life as a maltster.

Journeying 2,000 years into the past, food critic and writer William Sitwell artfully traces the earliest origins of the widespread cultural practice of eating out, from its most basic to most sophisticated forms. Whether he’s traversing the inns and taverns of Pompeii before its destruction in AD 79, witnessing the tumultuous emergence of fine dining during the French Revolution, or recounting the mid-20th-century invention of the taco machine in New York City, Sitwell’s engaging prose gives listeners a front-row seat to the restaurant experience across cultures and millennia.

When over seventy-five pieces of rare and intriguing seventeenth and eighteenth century Delftware are rediscovered in an historic Manhattan townhouse, decorative art advisor and writer Genevieve Wheeler Brown quickly recognizes that, together, these pieces tell an amazing story. What begins as a curatorial exercise quickly evolves not only into an exploration of this colorful, expressive, and sometimes even humorous decorative art, coveted for hundreds of years, but also an unexpected uncovering of forceful female lives yet untold.

Most people know that Gregor Mendel, the Moravian monk who patiently grew his peas in a monastery garden, shaped our understanding of inheritance. But people might not know that Mendel's work was ignored in his own lifetime, even though it contained answers to the most pressing questions raised by Charles Darwin's revolutionary book, On Origrin of the Species, published only a few years earlier. Mendel's single chance of recognition failed utterly, and he died a lonely and disappointed man.

The Hebridean Baker has a global following and with nearly 10 million views of his recipe and lifestyle videos on TikTok. His unique style and wholesome and delicious traditional Scottish bakes have won him fans around the globe and now, in The Hebridean Baker, Coinneach shares both his fabulous recipes and fascinating stories of island life, offering a true taste of Scotland's wild and windswept Outer Hebrides.

One of the classic works on interior decoration, Edith Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses offers a comprehensive look at the history and character of turn-of-the-century interior design. Co-written with architect Ogden Codman, Jr., this invaluable reference provides us with numerous keen and practical axioms for house design, such as (1) The better the house, the less need for curtains, and (2) the height of a well-proportioned doorway should be twice its width.

Today, it is difficult to imagine a living room without a sofa. When the first sofas on record were delivered in 17th-century France, the result was a radical reinvention of interior space. Symptomatic of a new age of casualness and comfort, the sofa ushered in an era known as the golden age of conversation; as the first piece of furniture designed for two, it was also considered an invitation to seduction. With the sofa came many other changes in interior space we now take for granted: private bedrooms, bathrooms, and the original living rooms.

For readers of Also a Poet, Orwell’s Roses, and My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers—as well as the legions of Virginia Woolf fanatics—the acclaimed poet and author of The Crying Book crafts a deeply moving, immersive, and lyrical hybrid memoir about her mother, Woolf, and the...

As Julia Child once said, “It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions.” Historically, she’s been right—and not just in the kitchen. Uniquely flourishing in just about every climate and culture around the world, onions have provided the essential basis not only for sautés, stews, and stir fries, but for medicines, metaphors, and folklore. Abundantly commonplace yet extraordinarily indispensable, the onion is Kurlansky's newest global food fixation as he sets out to explore how and why the crop reigns over Wales to Italy and everywhere in between.