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

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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. Hartley wrote wonderful stuff about the agriculture, husbandry, cooking, homemaking, and eating of England from the Neolithic Age onwards, concentrating mostly on medieval and early modern food practices that continued and/or were adapted, mostly in country foodways, through the 19th and 20th centuries. Redcurrant jelly for valley breeds; barberry jelly for upland breeds; rowan jelly for Welsh and mountain mutton. Little Dorothy would visit the farmhouses of the Yorkshire dales to see sheep sheared, oatcakes baked and scoff huge Yorkshire teas. The Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading curates the Dorothy Hartley collection.

It was during the acute rationing period that all these ‘teas’ were used in England to adulterate the imported teas. There are unusual dishes such as the Cornish Onion and Apple Pie, and even recipes for fungi, from common field mushrooms to puffballs. Hartley's devotion to archaic recipes such as stargazey pie and posset sometimes comes across as mildly crazed. One of my favourite sections – with a very pleasing illustration – is on the different shapes used to decorate open tarts. 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".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"). 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. The programme tells the story of the woman behind the ultimate book on the history of cooking, ‘Food in England’ (Macdonald, 1954).

The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach.To live in the English countryside, whether in the 1930s or the 1300s, was potentially to have access to wild berries and game birds, rich and varied cheeses, coltsfoot and lemon balm for medicines and mushrooms. Text block edges lightly freckled, very occasionally affecting margins, but an excellent example, tightly bound and clean throughout in a handsome briefly nicked jacket. A very important historic piece, although I wish she had referred to her sources for each recipe; sometimes she does but for others there are quotation marks and no source cited. They are short, charming pieces on such subjects as shrimp teas, toffee apples, watercress and Kentish cherry picking.

It's a sharp and funny compendium of cooking tips and treats, from medieval times to the modern day . According to historian Lucy Worsley, Food in England is a "curious mixture of cookery, history, anthropology, folklore and even magic .I'd always thought of Hartley's Food in England as a history book, yet on rereading this endearing work from 1954, I found that it isn't, quite. Or the publisher/editor would have drawn and trussed (to borrow an oft used expression from this book) it to fit 2018, so it would lose 75-80% of what it makes it unique.