The author, Janet Clarkson, is the Australian author of Pie: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2009) and Soup: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2010) as well as a food-related blog called The Old Foodie (www.theoldfoodie.com). According to the preface, the author came to write this book because she wanted to do something with the large amount of food information she had collected over the years. She started writing her blog eight years ago and evolved into writing two books on pie and soup and now this almanac. The introduction states that this book “is an almanac in the broadest sense of the word in that it has a calendar format. For every day of the year there is a selection of stories with a food history theme”(xi).

The almanac is in two volumes with Volume 1 covering January through June and Volume 2 covering July through December. Each month is then arranged by day. Under each day is a random sample of entries under headings such as Food Firsts, Discoveries & Inventions, Journals & Letters, and Food & War. Under each heading is then an entry with a date. For example, under May 29 one finds the entry Food & War, and under that heading is “1176: Milan.” The information goes on to explain how a yeast cake made in the shape of a dove originated from the Battle of Legnano.

At the end of Volume 2 is an index for the recipes that appear in the almanac. The recipes are listed in alphabetical order, and instead of listing the page number for the recipe, one is only given the almanac date. This makes it more cumbersome to find the recipe than being able to go right to a page number. There is a very short bibliography with only a handful of books and websites given for further interest. There is an alphabetical topic index with page numbers, but the indexing is not particularly strong. For example the Nazareth Sugar Cookie was named the state cookie of Pennsylvania on September 5, 2001. There is no reference in the index to Pennsylvania, State Food, or Sugar Cookie. There is an index entry for cookie with some page numbers. More troubling is that there is no list of primary or secondary sources used for the almanac. There is source information given in entries, such as “from the diary of Samuel Pepys” or “from the journals of Lewis and Clark,” but no citation information anywhere.

This almanac is suited for personal use or for the public library. It is full of interesting tidbits of information, but the book is not arranged in any way that would be helpful for research. It is almost impossible to search for any topic in particular with the way the volumes are arranged and the lack of good indexing. The fact that there are no references or citations to any sources used to create the almanac make it not suitable for any academic library.