The British Cookbook: authentic home cooking recipes from England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland

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A great compendium of traditional recipes, and an excellent introduction for home and professional cooks alike; I greatly enjoyed learning about many regional recipes I'd never heard of before. Stale bread was used, not thrown away, in Snowden Pudding made with marmalade, citrus juices and citrus zest. This cookbook provides a uniquely innovative take on British classics, to make them plant-based, healthy and delicious. Lehmann notes that books by female authors tended to display a more distinctly English character than books by men, in large measure because their relatively less complex recipes were aimed at a broader, less wealthy (and more female) audience. There is nothing better than sitting in a beautiful courtyard, garden or converted stable with a good cup of tea and a sandwich, giving one’s poor feet a rest.

The most comprehensive part of The British Housewife is its examination of mealtimes, especially that of dinner and “nuncheon. The book is at once a study of the development of cookery itself in the 17th and 18th centuries, a discussion of the relationship between the authors of cookery books and their readers, a portrait of the British at table during the 18th century – manners, customs, mealtimes and intentions, and an annotated bibliography of the literature of cookery.The British Housewife expounds these ideas in a redundant, often numbing style, offering bourgeoisification itself as a pivotal phenomenon, and circling around questions one is dying to ask: How did cookbooks contribute to the desire for exotic ingredients, hence to international rivalries, colonialism, and globalization of trade?

Lehmann’s insistence that culinary texts were often derivative and out of date is too simplistic, given the immense vigor of the competition. What were reader expectations, and how were readers induced to think that cooking could be learned without supervision? There is a great White Sauce recipe, something that every home cook should know how to make because it is so versatile.The recipes in the book are laid out in a really easy to use format with each dish on a double page spread. Since Britain was at war with France for years at a time, there was something unpatriotic about smacking your lips over all those rich and complex flavours, especially since they were probably designed to disguise meat that was less than fresh. Lehmann 374-75, 376) In this their foodways mirrored their growing political and cultural influence, and confidence, and distinguished them from their continental counterparts on all counts.

Cook, Eat, Repeat features over 150 recipes, separated in dedicated chapters that include something for everyone, such as 'A Loving Defence of Brown Food' and 'A is for Anchovy. To mitigate this issue for those who disagree, I suggest the publisher makes a Kindle version of the book available. The taxpayers who taxed themselves through Parliament, to borrow one of Blanning’s images, all ate much the same food, and they ate it with relish.After a long, hot afternoon Jon suggested we stop into the National Trust Café, I was not enthusiastic, thinking of lukewarm pizza and hotdogs that had sat in a warmer all day as you would find at home. Like most of my favourite historians she refers to Jane Austen as a source (though not as frequently as Amanda Vickery! Lehmann 255) Unfortunately, the prevalence in the kitchen of hired women also carried a virus that threatened to ruin British food as the eighteenth century came to a close. Dad used to tell us how the US contingent would throw their dirty silverware into a thin, green liquid when they cleared up after their meal - until they were asked to stop dumping the silverware in the soup! The book also ends with a very handy set of conversion charts which include temperatures (in celsius, gas and fahrenheit), weight (in metric and imperial) and volume (in metric and imperial).

The paper, ink, fonts, and page layouts give this a book a strong visual appeal and easy readability. Our purpose is to share our passion and knowledge with everyone to teach how they can cook more and have a good time while doing it. Each double page consists of a large photograph of what the finished dish should look like on one side (this is a vital part of any cookery book for me, I am such a visual person, and if I can't see the finished product then I won't feel overly confident making it, I want to have an idea of how it should look before I start). Part cookbook, part cultural history, The British Cookbook is the definitive collection of British food.The British Cookbook features numerous well-known favorites such as Lancashire Hotpot, and Roast beef and lesser-known regional specialties such as Welsh cheese pudding, Scottish clapshot, and Northern Irish treacle bread. So you find Mock Fish Cakes: potatoes and beans cooked with lemon juice and anchovy paste to create that “fish” sense. Her Century of British Cooking pulls together her life's work, with over 200 recipes and is truly an important work of culinary history. Sophisticated visitors to the traditional gentry derided the early dinners served on country estates. Lehmann 279) Other factors also must have been in play, but the transformation of British society from the relatively fluid vertical hierarchies of the ‘long eighteenth century (1688-1815)’ to the relatively ossified and horizontal Victorian class structure itself did transform the quality of British food, and not for the better.