Toward a historical dialectic of culinary styles

Culinary styles through history follow a recurring and predictable pattern shifting from complexity to simplicity and then back again. Each new aesthetic nonetheless incorporates elements, either ingredients, techniques or modes of service, from its immediate predecessor, such that the process is more dialectical than strictly oppositional. This article provides numerous concrete examples drawn from cookbooks and gastronomic literature which illustrate this complex pattern of evolution, driven largely by the process of social emulation though also influenced by economic trends, trade and the business of selling food

Aesthetics · Art · Business · Dialectic · Emulation · Epistemology · Simplicity · Sociology · Computer Science · Culinary Culture and Tourism · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Marketing