Food in England: A Complete Guide to the Food That Makes Us Who We are

Product Information

In the Meat chapter, these begin with recipes for beef, including "Baron of Beef", "Sirloin (Norman-French, sur loin)", "Rib of Beef", "Boiled Beef with Carrots", and "Oat Pudding, for Boiled Beef".

Food in England, "a treasury of information on the gathering, storing, and cooking of food from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries" is widely regarded as the definitive history of English food and cooking techniques (ODNB). You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Last but not least, for fellow diehard fans of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin novels - the recipe for soup squares, surely Dr Maturin's portable soup!This is not a book of recipes but it celebrates food, the history of food and almost, you might say, the philosophy of food.

For baking, where exact instructions are needed, these are given in Imperial units, but the oven temperature and timing are again left mainly to the cook's experience. Most of the chapters address aspects of English food, whether types of food such as meat, eggs, fungi, and bread, or ways of dealing with food such as salting, drying and preserving. Elevenses, for example, were far better in the country than in towns: a "big slice of solid cake" as against some dull "tea and biscuits" in the city.This is a magnificent book, written in 1953 by someone who learnt her cooking in English country kitchens in the days before widespread electricity and gas. wild, and the type and quality of flour grown in a region all change the cuisine ("We expect the last dish of sucking pig will be served in Gloucestershire").

For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. For the surest way to gain an understanding of a nation is to appreciate the history of that nation's food. The old Welsh dog power churn wheel ("It is no hardship, the dogs turn up their job as gladly as their fellows turn up for their job with the sheep"). Description, from sixteenth century journal, of a sea-voyage when the sailors came upon a fifty year old gibbet, used to hang mutineers, from which their cooper made drinking tankards for those "as would drink in them".In the original publishers cloth, the spine is slightly toned in places but the cloth and gilt remain bright. According to historian Lucy Worsley, Food in England is a "curious mixture of cookery, history, anthropology, folklore and even magic . On a not entirely related note, I'd just like to say that I love plum pudding and fruitcake, and I'm tired of people's complaints about them. Dorothy Hartley’s love of the infinite variety of English cooking and her knowledge of British culture and history show why our food should never be considered dull or limited. The finely-executed line drawings that accompany many of the recipes are more than just beautiful; they inform the cook about different varieties and techniques of food-handling.

Food in England, published in 1954, was one such - 662 jam-packed pages of fascinating historical details collected by an eccentric Englishwoman, Dorothy Hartley, who died aged 92 at the house in Froncysylltau she inherited from her Welsh mother, after a lifetime collecting and recording old customs.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. She admits it is not a conventional history, since Hartley breaks "the first rule of the historian: to cite her evidence. When I look back at the food of my 1970s childhood, it all seems as brightly coloured as a pair of toe-socks or a brand new Space Hopper.