Harvest of the Cold Months — Elizabeth David

Long recognized as the doyenne of English culinary writing, David here displays the witty and well-furnished mind that made her famous. From sixteenth-century Italy and the splendor of the Medici banquets to seventeenth-century France and the Sun King, from travelers' tales of snow pits and ice houses in Persia to the sherbet trade with the Levant to the use of ice as "table jewelry," and from the influential ice trade in Boston to the growth of the ice cream business in London, this impressive book brings alive the centuries in which ice, far from being commonplace, was a subject that inspired and challenged the human imagination.