Sydney Watts. Meat Matters: Butchers, Politics, and Market Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris. (Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe.) Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press. 2006. Pp. x, 232. $75.00

The historian of food and eating does not generally have an easy time of things. Studying a universal and—usually—daily activity, he or she nonetheless often finds that sources are scarce and the existing historiography is patchy at best. Like any aspect of the history of everyday life, food can seem such a constant that it resists historicization. Even in periods of social and cultural history's ascendancy, the historian of food must deal with the skepticism, perhaps even the mockery, of other scholars. It is not always easy to be taken seriously, when one's next research monograph might involve peanut butter.

Sydney Watts no doubt faced many of these difficulties in preparing her well researched and very clearly written book. While bread and wine both have well-established places within the literature on early modern France, meat has attracted less sustained...