By Eliza Ridgeway

Joe Hu/Town Crier

Abevy of books has come out over the last year that play with the connection among geeky food history, kitchen technology and the recipes we cook each night. They make good pleasure reading but can also nudge a cook to try new things in the kitchen. With each year that passes, local food stores are expanding the accessibility of specialty products that can make a medieval feast or Roman repast easy to revive at home.

Kate Colquhoun’s meaty, playful “Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking” (Bloomsbury, 2007) captures the evolution of Western European eating that crossed the Atlantic to inform many of the dishes and conventions of American cookery today. Some of the most fun in the book comes in the early chapters, which explore the fermented fish juice of the Roman occupation two millennia ago, invoked today in Thai fish sauce and American ketchup.

Colquhoun painstakingly documents the trajectory that began with sumptuous Roman cuisine, including outlandish treats such as fetal rabbits and spit-roasted dormice, and concluded with the over-boiled vegetables of post-World War II Britain, where rationing extended a decade beyond the end of the war.

Mark Kurlansky, the author of surprisingly fascinating single-subject books “Cod” and “Salt,” just published his newest, “The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell” (Random House, 2007). Paul Freedman’s “Food: The History of Taste” (University of California, 2007) casts a wider topical net than Colquhoun’s text, collecting essays about eating preferences throughout human history. His forthcoming book, “Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination” (Yale University Press, 2008) explores how food flavorings helped shape the course of Western history.

These books can be part imaginative exploration but also inform a modern kitchen. While turbot, turtle, peacock and lamprey are as inaccessible today as they were to a 12th-century peasant – even Silicon Valley’s tech kings avoid peacock, for the most part – Dittmer’s Gourmet Meats & Wurst-Haus, 400 San Antonio Road in Mountain View, offers whole fresh rabbit, English-style rasher bacon and headcheese for discriminating omnivores.

Colquhoun’s text can be used as a launching point for the reader’s own culinary experiments, and it gives insights into the birth of its own genre – the stories of historical cooks and food writers stand out in the book, highlighting the quirks and personalities of people who documented and directed a culture’s eating habits.

“Crabbe is a slutt to kerve,” Colquhoun quotes from an irascible passage in John Russell’s 1460 “Boke of Nurture.” But many of the cookbook writers provided meal plans and expectations far beyond the horizons of most of their likely readers.

Gervase Markham, who penned a 1615 bestseller, “English Huswife,” said that the ideal lady of the house, “must bee cleanly both in body and garments, she must have a quick eye, a curious nose, a perfect taste and a ready ear; she must not be butter fingered, sweet toothed nor faint hearted.”

British cookbook writers today like Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, to whom Colquhoun nods at the end of her book, have taken a different tack, using a plainspoken style and personal charm to redeem a nation’s culinary reputation. Acknowledging that it can be easy to take cheap shots at the quality of England’s cooking, Colquhoun chronicles the prodigious English affinity for meat, be it jugged, hashed or pickled. She cites one Welsh prince in the Dark Ages, who ruled that in the case of divorce, a woman could claim cheese or meat still in its brine while the man owned any cured provisions already hanging – they were likely to be among the family’s most valuable possessions.

Some of the arcane recipes translate naturally into American home cooking. Dried currants – best known in this country perhaps for their presence atop hot cross buns – easily swap out with raisins to add a different flavor profile to familiar baked goods.

In a time when drinking water was often of dubious quality, low-alcohol beer provided a sterile source of fluid and calories for breakfast and for those who eschewed the hard stuff – including children and invalids.

Colquhoun explains that everyone drank quantities of ale in medieval England, “up to a gallon a day for adults,” and that with the adoption of hops for use as a preservative in the mid-1500s, ale could be made in commercial quantities rather than brewed at home.

Reviving a frugal practice of medieval brewers, San Francisco’s Anchor brewery makes its rich, high-alcohol barley wine from an all-malt mash and runs water over the mash a second time to get a lighter, thinner ale called small beer. You can find their barley wine and small beer at Whole Foods Market, 4800 El Camino Real, Los Altos, and Beverages and More, 423 San Antonio Road in Mountain View.

The Rabbit’s Foot Meadery in Sunnyvale revives mead – fermented, oak-aged honey – as an ancient alternative to wine, beer or cider, and sells some of its products at Whole Foods and Beverages & More .

Over the past few years, American readers have gotten a chance to take in a profusion of new books exploring cookery from the Middle East, and more mainstream markets have begun to carry the needed ingredients. Lilia Zaouali’s “Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes” (University of California Press, 2007) adds a historical, explanatory background to recipes from the Middle East. To try them yourself, turn to the Milk Pail Market in Mountain View for spices such as za’atar, a blend of herbs, sesame seeds and salt. Draeger’s in Los Altos and the Milk Pail also carry pomegranate molasses, a thick, tangy-sweet syrup called for in Middle Eastern recipes but worth using more often than that.

Not all reading about food requires one take up a spatula and get to work. For those in search of an entirely cerebral gustatory experience, just up the road at Stanford University, Professor Denise Gigante has been publishing about the peculiar food writings of 18th and 19th century Europe.

I had a chance to assist in the research for two of her books “Taste, a Literary History” (Yale University Press, 2005) and “Gusto: Essential Writings in 19th-Century Gastronomy” (Routledge, 2005).

She puts a new spin on the notion of good taste, exploring an era (perhaps not so very different from our own) when ideas about class and personal enlightenment might be measured by what one ate. When noted essayist Charles Lamb wrote “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” and a society of learned men passionately debated the ideal way to cook a turkey, their gluttonous interests served as proxy for significant social conversations.

Contact Eliza Ridgeway at elizar@latc.com.