A finger buffet of travellers' and fishermen's tales associated with food and food taboos, loosely chapter-bound by the Seven Deadly Sins... If we are, as the eighteenth-century food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin first suggested, what we eat, then Allen is a strange and adventuresome man"The TimesFrom the forbidden fruit of the Old Testament to the numerous laws broken at Francois Mitterand's final meal, In the Devil's Garden is a mouth...
Only thing is, after retracing coffee's journey to world domination - by train, rickshaw, cargo freighter and donkey - he has plenty of evidence to back it up. Stewart Lee Allen has filtered out the richest beans from coffee's hot and frothy history .
From the earliest evidence of a hallucinatory cacao bean paste in ancient Ethiopia to the modern coffee giant, Starbucks, readers follow Allen as he searches for the perfect "cuppa joe.
Written with the same humor and quirky world view Allen displayed in "The Devil's Cup, " this new book on good and evil foods, through the author's extraordinary and exhaustive research, will appeal to food lovers, culinary historians, history buffs, amateur anthropologists, and armchair travelers alike.
