Past Programs
Unrest, Conflict and War - 2008
Food Basics
24/12/2008
Going into the cookery section of any half good bookshop these days is like going on a world tour. You want to cook Uruguayan, Burmese, Icelandic? We've got a cookbook for you.But where do you go to find the basics, the sort of knowledge and skill you need to survive in the kitchen?
Part of the By Design Summer Season, this was first aired on April 5, 2008.
The Elements of Cooking
05/04/2008
Going into the cookery section of any half good bookshop these days is like going on a world tour. You want to cook Uruguayan, Burmese, Icelandic? We've got a cookbook for you. But where do you go to find the basics, the sort of knowledge and skill you need to survive in the kitchen? There's a new book on that subject. It's called 'The Elements of Cooking' and this week we talk to its author, Michael Ruhlman.
The Endless City
05/04/2008
According to UK writer and critic Deyan Sudjic, the future of the city is the only subject in town. The number of people living in cities is about to overtake those still in the country, so we need to think hard and fast about sustainability, economic policy, transport, law enforcement and much else. The London School of Economics set up a think tank, the Urban Age project, to ponder on these issues and the result is a very weighty volume called Endless City, edited by Deyan Sudjic and Ricky Burdett.
The first consumers: Mrs Beeton
19/01/2008
The nineteenth century saw the birth of modern consumerism and an interest in style and design. One of the unlikely heroines of this story is Isabella Beeton: yes, Ms Beeton, author of The Book of Household Management, which most of us tend to think of as just a cookbook, though a venerable one.
Though probably still envisaged as looking a bit like the older Queen Victoria -- a tub-like lady in black -- Isabella Beeton was a mere twenty-eight when she died. She didn't know a lot about cooking and she didn't know a lot about households, so she borrowed extensively from early authors. But she realised, as many historians have not, that the Victorian middle-class home was intimately connected with the public sphere: the purchases of fans, pianos, and carpets were helping to drive the economy forward. She helped introduce an age in which middle-class people, and not just the aristocracy, were able to buy things because they wanted them and not just because they needed them.
This interview was orginally broadcast 25 November 2006.
