Sweet Invention

Sweet Invention is a social, cultural, and-above all-culinary history of dessert. It explores the world's great dessert traditions, from ancient India to twenty-first-century Indiana. Each chapter begins in the present with the author tasting and analyzing one of the dessert icons of each tradition-baklava in the Middle East, or macaron in France for example-before spinning a more ancient tale. Readers will meet the sweet makers of Persia who gave us the first doughnuts, the sugar sculptors of Renaissance Italy whose creativity (by way of Paris and London) gave birth to the modern wedding cake, and the hard working (and wildly inventive) home economists of the early twentieth century who cooked up such unforgettable delights as chocolate chip cookies and rice crispy squares. A fun and enjoyable read that is groundbreaking in its scholarship, Sweet Invention embraces the pleasures of dessert while elucidating the social, political, religious, and even sexual uses that societies have found for it.

Michael Krondl is a food historian and the author of The Taste of Conquest, The Great Little Pumpkin Cookbook, and Around the American Table. He is an award-winning cooking instructor, food writer, and former chef. His writing credits include Gastronomica, New York Newsday, and Nation's Restaurant News as well as multiple contributions to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.