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

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For the surest way to gain an understanding of a nation is to appreciate the history of that nation's food. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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". But at the time of its original publication, (as war-time rationing was coming to an end in Britain), it served to make readers aware of British food and many links to the past.The programme tells the story of the woman behind the ultimate book on the history of cooking, ‘Food in England’ (Macdonald, 1954).

g., few people make sea holly toffee anymore, or gather cowslips or English laver or maidenhair ferns and know how they were combined with dozens of other herbs and flavorings); describing fuels, hearths/ovens, and other kitchen technologies, not to mention food sources, that were altered or lost in the Industrial Revolution and in times of war (how much of English cooking survived WWII and rationing? The final image of what I hope is a warm and celebratory film is a home movie of her in old age, showing her doing what she loved to do: working in the garden, and digging up potatoes for dinner. The amount of information about how things were cooked in the past that is applicable to how we cook things today is astounding. She describes some delicious puddings, cakes and breads, including an exotic violet flower ice cream, an eighteenth century coconut bread and Yorkshire teacakes. This often lonely, insular woman found in cooks of earlier times a kinship: "for we English cooks … have always been our excellent selves, under all conditions and in all centuries.Second Impression of this definitive history of English cuisine, a "treasury of information on the gathering, storing, and cooking of food from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. There are unusual dishes such as the Cornish Onion and Apple Pie, and she describes some delicious puddings, cakes and breads, including an exotic violet flower ice cream, an eighteenth century coconut bread and Yorkshire teacakes. She had travelled widely, particularly in Africa, and saw quite clearly that not everything was best at home. 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.