James Beard Award Winner from Dover!

Although the library did not purchase the winner of the James Beard Award for "Cookbook of the Year" (because Modernist Cuisine by Nathan Myhrvold is 5 volumes, 47 lbs, and $450!), we are very proud that the Beard Award winner in the field of Reference & Scholarship has gone to Andrew P. Haley for his book, Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880--1920. Now a professor of American cultural history at the University of Southern Mississippi, Andrew grew up in Dover and his mother, Lorraine, still comes to the library on a regular basis!
Here's the book's description from the UNC Press:
In the nineteenth century, restaurants served French food to upper-class Americans with aristocratic pretensions, but by the twentieth century, even the best restaurants dished up ethnic and American foods to middle-class urbanites spending a night on the town. In Turning the Tables, Andrew Haley examines the transformation of American public dining at the start of the twentieth century and argues that the birth of the modern American restaurant helped establish the middle class as the arbiter of American culture.
Early twentieth-century battles over French-language menus, scientific eating, ethnic restaurants, unescorted women, tipping, and servantless restaurants pitted the middle class against the elite. United by their shared preferences for simpler meals and English-language menus, middle-class diners defied established conventions and successfully pressured restaurateurs to embrace cosmopolitan ideas of dining that reflected the preferences and desires of middle-class patrons.
Drawing on culinary magazines, menus, restaurant journals, and newspaper accounts, including many that have never before been examined by historians, Haley traces material changes to restaurants at the turn of the century that demonstrate that the clash between the upper class and the middle class over American consumer culture shaped the "tang and feel" of life in the twentieth century.
If you want to read this book, its call number at our library is 641.9573 Haley, A.

Congratulations, Andrew!