Food historian Sandra Sherman looks into the present-day fascination with cookbooks and celebrity chefs, showing how the modern cookbook has roots going back as far as 17th-century England. She shows how even the first cookbooks were the product of careful invention by highly skilled chefs and profit-minded publishers who designed them for maximum audience appeal. Sherman describes how cookbook writers and publishers kept ahead of changes in readership and cultural conditions by using marketing and promotion techniques that are still practiced today, and she shows how they ultimately developed cookbooks with the "modern" characteristics that we take for granted today. While the author's writing style is a bit on the academic side, jargon is kept to a minimum, making this book suitable both for academics and adventurous general readers. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)