Although accompanying the term ‘history’ with the adjective ‘new’ may seem odd, the concept of a ‘new history’ was coined by scholars of the third generation of the École des Annales, which had been founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch at the end of the 1920s. Febvre and Bloch deeply renovated French historiography, broadening its horizons to aspects that were often ignored by contemporary and past scholars. ‘Le bon historien’, Marc Bloch famously stated in his seminal Apologie pour l’histoire, ‘ressemble à l’ogre de la légende. Là où flaire là chair humaine, il siat que la est son gibier’. Funnily enough, the French historian used the metaphor of eating, and the history of food culture and consumption was bound to become one of the more interesting novelties of this new historiographic tradition. In fact, around the 1970s, scholars including Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora coined the label nouvelle histoire to define their specific contribution to such a ‘total’ history of medieval Europe: their interests included the so-called histoire des mentalités and cultural history.

Speaking of culture, food soon became the object of attention of a growing number of scholars: ‘food is culture’, reads the title of a book by one of the most prominent experts in the field, Massimo Montanari. The two things are tied to each other, and the study of foodways is essential in order to determine the characteristics of a given civilization. It is no wonder that the editorial of the first issue of Food&History, the scientific journal of the European Institute for the History and Cultures of Food, which was founded in 2003, was entitled ‘A New History Journal. A Journal about New History?’. By the early 2000s, the teachings of the first historians of the École had reached their full potential. After decades of pioneering studies starting in France and Poland, and later in Italy, England, and Germany, food history had finally emerged as a proper field of research.