Between the grandiose events of the late 15th century - the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, the discovery of America, the end of the Hundred Years' War - one might not have noticed the invention of the fork, a household item so familiar to us today. Giovanni Rebora, a famous economist, professor at the University of Genoa and specialist in history of world cuisine, devoted his fascinating research to what and how they ate in Europe in modern times. Rebora explores the era when people discovered in food something more than the process of physical saturation, when ideas about gastronomy as an art, science and craft gradually emerged, when modern gastronomic skills and technologies, modern rules and traditions of behavior at the table were established. Among those products, without which today’s life is unthinkable, many were considered inedible or even poisonous in those days, others looked like newfangled exotics. It was an era of great gastronomic discoveries, an era of discovering unfamiliar tastes and unexpected aromas. The era when people learned to appreciate and love proper food.