This A-Z encyclopedia covers not only pastries, candies, ices, preserves, confections, and so forth, but also describes how the human proclivity for sweet has brought richness to our language, our art, and, of course, our gastronomy. And, on the flip side, how demand for this commodity has spurred some of the darkest impulses in human history. The Editor-in-Chief, Darra Goldstein, is the Willcox and Harriet Adsit professor of Russian at Williams College, and the founder of two fantastic periodicals: Gastronomica (which she stepped down from editing in 2012), and, more recently, Cured: The Art of Preservation. There were 265 contributing authors.

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To see more of the books I edited for Oxford University Press, including The Oxford Companion to Cheese, The Oxford Book of American Short Stories edited by Joyce Carol Oates, and more, scroll down to the bottom of this page.