About the Journal

Petits Propos Culinaires (PPC) was founded in 1979 by Alan Davidson, editor of the Oxford Companion to Food and his wife, Jane, also a food historian, aided by a circle of friends including Elizabeth David, Richard Olney, Claudia Roden, Jane Grigson, Harold McGee,  and Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz.  PPC quickly became the UK's pre-eminent food history periodical. Davidson edited the journal until 2000 when he was succeeded by Tom Jaine who retired in 2023, succeeded in turn by Sam Bilton. The journal moved to Equinox in January, 2024.

During the journal's 45-year history, it has focused on publishing original research, especially historical articles dealing with Anglophone and European food cultures, the history of  cookbooks as a genre, biographical studies of culinary personalities, and lexicographical investigations. Alongside academic articles it has always found a space to record memoirs and oral histories and to publish opinion pieces,  photo-essays and even original fiction. 

With more than 130 issues to upload and enhance with abstracts and keywords (all of which must be done manually), it will take another few weeks to complete PPC's presence on this site (we have completed 23 issues so far). However, subscribers will eventually have access to the full run barring the few issues which unfortunately are not available to us for scanning at this time. 

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Current Issue

PPC 128 (2024)
View All Issues

Print Back Issues of the journal are available except for these which are out of print: Out of Print Issues 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16, 21, 27, 32, 33, 34, 39, 48, 49, 51, 52, 56, 60, 61, 73, 76, 77, 83, 84, 86, 90, 94, 96, 97 and 102. However, we may be able to supply these issues in electronic format.