A delectable and beautifully illustrated exploration of the deep meaning of the menu across time—at and beyond the table.   Menus are invaluable snapshots of the food consumed at specific moments in time and place. Tastes and Traditions: A Journey through Menu History provides glimpses into the meals enjoyed by royalty and rogues, those celebrating special occasions, or sampling new culinary sensations throughout history. It describes food prepared for the gods, meals served during sieges, and tablescapes immortalized in art. It explores how menus entertain adults, link food with play for children, reflect changing notions of health, and highlight the enduring human need to make meals meaningful. Lavishly illustrated, this book offers an engaging exploration of why menus matter and the stories they tell, appealing to food lovers and general readers, as well as professionals in the food industry. "Cooke elucidates the value of the traditional restaurant menu. More than a list of dishes, it is a medium that can amuse, flatter, educate and tantalize diners, elevating the restaurant experience. Cooke’s copiously illustrated book is filled with color images of menus both ancient and modern, including a bill of fare made up solely of emojis (from a boundary-pushing 'immersive dining' restaurant in Bangkok). . . . Tastes and Traditions shows us how menus, unlike the transitory attractions of the QR code, became imbued with human meaning." -- Andrew Coe ― The Wall Street Journal "Menus are so much more than a tool to order food, Montreal author Cooke posits in her engaging and informative new book on the history of menus: Among other things, they can be a window into the history, cultural identity and economics of the time in which they were written and designed, she tells us. . . . It’s an extensively—and beautifully—illustrated book that explores how menus entertain, reflect changing notions of health 'and highlight the enduring human need to make meals meaningful,' as she observes." -- Susan Schwartz ― The Montreal Gazette “ Tastes and Traditions will change your mind about the importance of menus. . . . [Cooke] looks at menus back several hundred years, the traditions, the social norms. It's amazing what you can find." -- Lucy Waverman ― CBC's The Current, "The Best Cookbooks of 2025" “The traditional restaurant menu, as we learn in this McGill professor’s new book, can be a medium for expression, an artifact of life and trace moments in social change. Illustrated with examples, she covers three centuries of the evolution of dining à la carte.” -- Nathalie Atkinson ― The Globe and Mail, "Books Gift Guide 2025" “Cooke explores how cartes , beyond affording a collective ‘glimpse behind the proverbial green baize door’, can memorialise historic events, supply cultural encounters (of a generally bastardised kind), promote health, bewitch the young and, generally, dish up feasts for the eyes. Ranging from scrolled banquets served to Louis XV to an emoji-filled offering in Bangkok, these introduce us to Coca-Cola as a cure-all and free cigars dangled as bait, as well as fine artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec dipping their brushes into bills of fare. Nor let us ignore the cartoonish stereotypes, from African Americans setting about watermelons (a rib shack) to a geisha fluttering her eyelashes behind a fan (sushi). Truly, a bellyful of cultural history.” ― The World of Interiors "However hygienic and handy QR codes may be, th ey will never inspire a book as thoughtful and rich as Tastes and Traditions , an investigation of the aesthetic and cultural semiotics of the printed menu. . . . Readers may find themselves more inclined to cherish the bill of fare next time they eat out—or at least to give it more than a cursory glance." ― Literary Review of Canada "Whether printed out, scrawled on a chalkboard or scanned via QR code, menus are more than just a tool to order food, Cooke argues; they can in fact be a window into the history, economics and even cultural identity of the time in which they were made. . . . Whether it's as nebulous as Canada's national identity, or relatively simple as a bar's personal branding, menus are an integral part of people's stories, as much as the food they describe. As Cooke writes in Tastes and Traditions , 'Menus offer us concrete traces, testimony of the stories we told—through our food choices—about who we were and who we aspired to be.'" ― CBC's Sunday Magazine "Food for thought. What are menus? What do they contain? And, ultimately, why do they matter? . . . A handsomely illustrated and diverting celebration of a rich if overlooked genre." ― Kirkus Reviews "Cooke considers aesthetic, textural, and culinary elements of menus to make a compelling case for their importance not only as a record of cuisine but as a cultural artifact and communication tool. . . . This book will appeal broadly to nonfiction readers who are interested in culinary and