While anthropologists and ethnographers have developed a “taste” for research on social and cultural dimensions of food long time ago, history of food is a relatively new domain for historians. This lacuna is even more discernable in the field of southeast European history. Thus, this new collection, which features seventeen chapters, organized in five thematic sections, is a welcome development in this direction. A plethora of established authors, some with prior research on food, the economy, and culture, contributed to the volume. Furthermore, the comparative analysis of diverse and intersecting traffics of foodstuff, recipes, people, and concomitant social relations within the “contact zone generated by multiple imperial projects” (5) from the Byzantine and Venetian legacies to the Ottoman, Austrian, and Russian interventions in a longue durée is a fruitful approach. Foodways, according to the editors, provide a rich angle for understanding the social, economic, political, and cultural history of this large region and its complex position within east-west interactions.

The first section, “Flavours, Tastes and Culinary Exchange: Food and Drink in the Ottoman World,” explores the broader context of Ottoman cuisine, and traces how Istanbul's elites affected food consumption in Transylvania and the Danubian Principalities. The contributors focus on the culinary meanderings of fat/oil, bread, honey, and coffee and their instrumentalization in establishing social hierarchies, economic incentives, cultural practices, and political claims. The second part, “Ingredients, Kitchens, and the Pleasures of the Table,” takes the reader into the aristocratic gourmet world of Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia, where table manners were not only imported from both east and west, but also locally adapted. The chapters concentrate on the materiality of culinary and consumption experience as well as religious restrictions on food sociability. The third set of contributions, “Food and Cities: Supply, Mobility, Trade,” looks at the food provision for Cluj and Sibiu. Early modern Cluj presents vivid illustration of social shifts in the urban fabric, including the more prominent role of women in bread production. The merchants who traversed central European and Ottoman markets established networks for supplying the boyars in Wallachia with both lavish and mundane foodstuffs. Consequently, some of the wealthiest traders became not only purveyors, but also part of this incipient consumerist class. The next section, “Cooking between Tradition and Innovation: Food Recipes Old and New,” examines two seventeenth-century manuscript collections of recipes used by Croatian-Hungarian and Romanian aristocratic connoisseurs, and one nineteenth-century cookbook intended for Bulgarian middle-class women, respectively. As other chapters have manifested, this section reveals a fusion of local, Ottoman, and European culinary influences. The last part, “Representations, Travelers’ Tales, Myths,” addresses the issue of western travelers’ gastronomic experiences and the local tradition of hospitality in Transylvania and the Romanian Principalities (first two chapters). Two other contributions discuss the politics of the homogenous representation of Macedonian food in the so-called traditional Greek cuisine “via the folklorization of otherness” (471), and the persistent stereotypes of Jewish tavern-keepers in rural Romania and other east European cultures. The last two chapters are an exception from the overall volume's focus on elite consumption and middle-class urban culinary practices.

The collection offers a nuanced picture of the intertwined processes of production, distribution, and consumption of food in a vast geographic area and within an extended chronological period. The focus on Transylvania and the Romanian Principalities, although explained in the introduction, deprives the volume from the rich exchanges throughout the Balkans. Serbia, Albania, Montenegro, Greece, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, mentioned en passant, were all part of the Ottoman realm and also contributed to the flavored culinary exchanges. Even though most scholars mention the paucity of primary sources, which, to a certain extent, explains the belated attention to the history of food in this region, almost each chapter provides extensive empirical evidence. Indeed, many of the contributions are based on a close reading of valuable archival materials, but this often results in long descriptive passages. One of the “delightful” culinary threads, elaborated in many chapters, reveals how bread, the basic staple, had multidimensional material and symbolic value in diverse social, ethnic, and religious milieus. Yet it seems that the attempt to show the “variety of social contexts involving food” (9), engaged too many directions of research. The reader becomes “hungry” for some converging themes framed within a broader conceptual framework. One wishes that the authors had shed more light on the relationship between food choices and concepts of health and on the essential role of food within the family economy and childcare, to name just a few topics. Also, with a few exceptions, one can regret that a gender-sensitive approach to food production and consumption is not enough emphasized. While there are many superb illustrations, a glossary would also be a helpful addition and would have highlighted the rich but dispersed linguistic and cultural analysis of some terms.

In sum, this work is a valuable contribution to the study of food and the formation of regional and national identities through material culture, symbolic rituals, stratified consumption, and cultural representations. It provides a contextual look at redefining the notion of prosperity through social attachments to food. Furthermore, the book contributes to de-centering the research on west European cuisine. By offering such transnational readings to a variety of social contexts involving shared cuisine, the authors promote not only academic dialogue, but also address social interconnectedness in a novel way and suggest new venues for research. Additionally, by interpreting archival materials in multiple languages, this collection brings fresh perspectives to an English-speaking audience. The book would thus be of interest to students and researchers engaged in social and cultural history and interdisciplinary studies.