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

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Her writing demonstrates the close practical combination of these threads, for example "according to superstition, empty egg-shells should always be broken up - lest witches make boats thereof. 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. This book ought to be required reading for every Englishman (and woman), every tourist to England, every Ambassador, visiting Head of State, postgraduate student, et al. It's also beautifully illustrated with funny little line drawings by Dorothy Hartley herself, and it's full of her personality and life history, from her school days in a convent to her time in Africa. I’ve usually got a selection of books going at any time - a novel, a non-fiction, a spiritual readings book, and, the last year or so, a vintage Ladybird book - a four-course meal for bookworms!

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Line a shallow dish with thin short crust, butter the bottom, and cover it with thinly sliced apples, and set it to bake until the apples are just cooked.

It ranges from Saxon cooking to the Industrial Revolution, with chapters on everything from seaweed to salt. I was really struck how much Dorothy’s friends still seem to miss her, and the nature of their memories. 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"). Then we began skipping about all over the place, just like Dorothy herself in her role as the roving reporter for rural England in the 1930s.

It was only as I followed Dorothy up and down the country from Yorkshire, to Leicestershire, to Suffolk, to Wales, that I came to appreciate how magnificently eccentric she was. The famine years of the Middle Ages - ‘To realise how desperate was the famine you must know the seasons as the starving peasants knew them - close and vital knowledge. As we travelled, I began to realize that my frustration in her technique as historian was misplaced. Hartley herself asks us to view her book as an untidy "kitchen, not impressive, but a warm, friendly place, where one can come in any time and have a chat with the cook". She was prodigiously well informed on different English methods for making butter, for example, writing of how plunges, paddles, water wheels and dogs had all been used for churning.Hartley tells us of four "local methods" for using up plum pudding, including one involving rum butter, though she observes, wryly, that "in districts where they use rum butter the contingency of any pudding being left over is unlikely". But once in a while she really lets go; under the heading "Hedgehog," she gets so emotional she has to put a sentence in all-italics: "[H:]edgehogs are completely harmless, and do an enormous amount of good in the fields and gardens by devouring snails and slugs. It was there that she began work on the book for which she is best known, [6] Food in England, leading to its publication in 1954. It really does conjure up a whole lost world: not just because of the foods which have fallen out of favour, like mutton or parsnip wine, but because the recipes pre-date a whole raft of exotic ingredients like aubergine and yoghurt. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review.

A fine, bright copy, contents entirely clean, in the unusually well-preserved dust jacket, unclipped, spine mildly sunned, tiny nick to foot of spine panel, uncommonly bright and sharp. 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.Little Dorothy would visit the farmhouses of the Yorkshire dales to see sheep sheared, oatcakes baked and scoff huge Yorkshire teas. As for the complaint that country food – or medieval food, come to that – was monotonous, Hartley replied that it was "we", the moderns, who "level out the year into monotony by demanding the same food all the year round! Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. Dorothy’s friends clearly regret the fact that she left no children, but I relish the fact that she did instead leave us this amazing book.

The jacket spine tanned and with small losses at the head, a few neat old paper reinforcements on the verso, else a decent copy. A contemporary of folk historians Cecil Sharp and Florence White, Hartley was part of an active movement to record disappearing English customs, and the oral history she recorded provides the richest part of this work.The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. 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". Her 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. 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.