But I don't want to be dismissive: this is a both heavily-researched and user-friendly overview of something that's hugely important for everybody - we all gotta eat, and the vast majority of us enjoy it and want to maximize that enjoyment. It may be too much for some readers, true. But there have been books like this in prose for decades - centuries, actually - and there's no reason the graphic format should be less useful.
The opposite, in fact - in a prose book, you have to add pictures on individual pages or a photo insert to show what food looks like - in a graphic novel, that's built in on every page automatically. You have to deliberately avoid showing what things look like in a graphic novel.
So I'm happy to see more books like The Incredible Story of Cooking: serious non-fiction in comics form, for people who want the details and also want to see what it all looks like, or maybe don't want to read walls of text, or just like the organization of a comics page. (I'm all three of those things, myself, at least intermittently.)
Cooking was written by Benoist Simmat, a journalist and comics writer - he previously did a big book on wine, which has also been translated into English - and drawn by Stéphane Douay, who's been drawing comics for twenty years but doesn't seem to have been translated into English before. (Well, he draws the pictures, so his part of it doesn't need to be "translated," but you know what I mean.) It was originally published in Paris by Les Arénes in 2021; the US English-language edition (translated by Montana Kane) is from NBM and officially publishes today.
It stakes out a lot of ground: the subtitle starts with prehistory and claims to cover half a million years. The book delivers on that: the first page lists a number of hominids active in Africa between four and one million years ago, and the first chapter tells us as much as modern science knows about what those early humans ate and how they found, prepared, and kept food. I'm not sure that counts as cooking, but I don't have a solid mental definition of what's required to "count" as cooking, either. The book only claims 500,000 years of history, anyway, so these additional millions up front are purely lagniappe, to set the stage.
Eight more chapters bring the story, in successive stages, up to the modern world. We start with the great civilizations of antiquity - Sumer and Egypt and China and India - then Greece and Rome, trade routes and the Far East, medieval Europe, the Columbian exchange and food in the New World in general, the rise of first restaurants and gastronomy in the 19th century and then (soon afterward) the industrialization of the food business, before ending with a look at the world today, anchored by the Slow Food movement and related localization trends. Each chapter is dense with detail - there are lots of footnotes, which can send the reader back to an extensive bibliography in the back - livened up by Douay's crisp and occasionally amusing art.
In the back, besides that long bibliography, Simmat also provides nearly two dozen recipes from representative cultures around the world - the US gets a Chicago Hot Dog, for example - which can probably be cooked from with only a small effort. (Measurements are all in metric, which may confuse some American cooks.) In case the foregoing wasn't French enough, Simmat also gives a complexity/difficulty level for each recipe in graphic form: one soufflé for simple, up to three for difficult.
I doubt I will cook from this book, but the recipes are a nice addition. And the bulk of the book is the main comics narrative, which is detailed, backed up by all those footnotes, and includes all sorts of quirky details - starting with all of those pre-sapiens hominids up front - that I wasn't expecting at all. It's a book that's both entertaining and informative: what more could you ask for?
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