In the sumptous Repast...[the] book makes clear...that soul-crushingly bad noon-time meal options have been a long-standing feature of the American workday. That they manage to make discussions of awful meals both charming and interesting is in no small part due to Repast's kaleidoscopic mix of contemporary news stories, research, and gorgeous reproductions of menus from the era....
Sumptous...charming and interesting. --Melanie Rehak
[A] kaleidoscopic mix of contemporary news stories, research, and gorgeous reproductions of menus from the era, festooned with illustrations of everything from bluebirds to rakish swimmers. --Melanie Rehak"
Concentrating on those [menus] from the fateful decade between 1900 and 1910, he and Stoffer, his co-author and wife, discover tales of class, gender and race, industrialization and progressivism, immigration and xenophobia all the great themes of early-twentieth-century America and, of course, of today. The result is a portrait not only of a food and dining culture that would come, over the next hundred years, to dominate and shape the nation, but also of a nation that would come to dominate and shape the world. --Brett Martin"
Lesy and Stoffer have written a fascinating account of the American dining experience at the beginning of the 20th century. "