Cooking may be simply the provision of nourishment palatable to the human body, but it needs language to soar beyond the kitchen stove and a viable vocabulary to make communication between cooks and diners profitable and possible. This is a rich field for the collective endeavours of the 28th Symposium at Oxford. Linguistics and etymology are a tool for unravelling the history of foodstuffs and their migration from one culture to another; and language can supply a social and cultural subtext to what would otherwise be solely a culinary message. Subjects covered in this edition of Symposium papers include: Reading between the lines of a Japanese Menu, A Limousin-French dictionary as a source on the history of cooking, Sex, Food, and Valentine's Day, the sweet-sour journey of Sephardic cuisine and Ladino language, Gynaecophagia: metaphors of women as food in the Talmudic literature, and Western Dishes in Cantonese Cooking.

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