English Food: A Social History of England Told Through the Food on Its Tables

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I find the narrowness of individual ‘subjects’ defeating. You bring more to reading poetry, I think, if you have a strong sense of what they are likely to have had for dinner. We mustn’t underestimate the shaping power of what we eat. I’ve been doing some work recently on the English at sea, and thinking about scurvy. The effects of scurvy on the mindset of entire naval armadas is almost impossible to overestimate. That’s the remarkable thing. People were literally dying in droves of a disease that nobody fully understood right up to polar exploration. He is also talking at Chelsea History Festival on Friday 29 September 2023, at 6pm about the history of sugar: https://chelseahistoryfestival.com/events/dark-history-sugar/ Let’s have a look at these food history books that you’ve selected, starting with The Kitchen in History by Molly Harrison. Could you give us an overview, and why you think it’s worth reading? This is one of two books that really changed my approach to the whole subject of food. Because most books about the history of food focus on what the rich eat—just like most histories of fashion focus on that tiny one percent of society. And that’s fine, if you recognise that it’s all a daydream. But it doesn’t give you a good holistic picture of what the past was actually like.

English Food: A People’s History – HarperCollins Publishers UK

And I uncovered quite an interesting riff, I guess, in English Civil War history, which was a preoccupation with food, and with writing cookbooks, and with expressing political views through cookbooks. That, for me, intersected with the fact that a lot of witchcraft accusations are actually caused by food shortages, in quite a straightforward way. One of the things that they reportedly do, that upsets their neighbours, is spoil food production—like, you’re making butter, the witch comes into the room, and—by some kind of undefined negativity—makes your butter fail to set. Then you’ve wasted the expensive primary ingredient, cream, which you can’t just go down to the shop and replace. The Oxford festival is the most elegant and atmospheric of literary festivals. It’s a pleasure to both attend and perform there. A rich and indulgent history, English Food will change the way you view your food and understand your past. It’s interesting that the food revolution in Britain has been modelled on food cultures of France, Italy, Iberia: it’s all about the local, the local cheeses, breads, growers. That’s lovely, I’m not against it. But one reason it hasn’t percolated far down the food chain—we still eat more ultra-processed food than any other country in Europe—is because it’s inimical to the food culture we’ve historically tended to have, which is creolized dishes of the kind highlighted in Collingham’s book. Among other things, she would need to be a shrewd bargainer, who could manage her own time and everyone else’s. She would assign tasks to people according to their skills, provide training for people coming through. It’s extraordinarily sophisticated.This is at least partly a work of fantasy; it’s Markham’s idea of how a household ought to be run, rather than what anyone actually did. Nonetheless what it reminds us of is the attenuated role of the modern housewife in comparison with what it used to be. It used to be like running a small business—you might typically have a staff of between five and five hundred people working for you to manage. And what Markham really clarifies is just how much knowledge this involved. Three Tragedies by Renaissance Women, an edition of Iphigeneia at Aulis, by Lady Jane Lumley, The Tragedie of Antonie, by Lady Mary Sidney, The Tragedy of Mariam, by Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland ( Penguin, 1998) But it’s wonderful in places, and you can also get fantastic bread in Britain now. But around 90% of the bread flour sold in Britain is augmented with high gluten flour from the Canadian wheat belt. The average gluten content of a loaf made in the 19th century would have been around eight or nine percent. Now, that’s more like eleven to fourteen percent. If you use low-gluten flour, you have to put way more time into baking, spend longer kneading it, give it longer periods of rest, a much longer rise. It’s a much heavier workload for the baker. Let’s move on to your next book recommendation, which is Roger Wells’ Wretched Faces, a history of famine in England. Could you tell us more? The slightly confusing conclusion – “Sometimes food is what we want or need to forget. For something else. Manners. Friendliness. Sociability. Love. Family” – feels like it was rushed, and this reader would have liked to learn more about the brief life of the Jewish Bakers Union, the link between poor dental health and the Victorian appetite for mushy macaroni, and countless other tantalising references which sent me scurrying to the footnotes, bowl in hand. However full you are, it seems there’s always room for a little bit more.

Diane Purkiss’s fantasy dinner: chefs from history show off Diane Purkiss’s fantasy dinner: chefs from history show off

Let’s suppose that an eager JP has put together a significant number of depositions – complaints in writing from your fellow villagers – and has also interrogated you, and got a confession from you. The next stage is that all this evidence is put to a jury, who decide whether to take it to trial or not. The 11th century saw the arrival of Scholasticism. Scholastic philosophy meant that all of created nature became an object of scrutiny from which scholastics could create a model that applied to everything. The inquisitorial eye began to fix itself on aspects of folklore that had been smiled away or incorporated into Christian worship in earlier periods. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The Oxford students/graduates I’ve met knew or cared little for the Lisbon Treaty and its IOTBC; but they did take frequent holidays to Europe, often staying in their parents’ Euro holiday homes, and would hate to suffer the inconvenience of having to queue to get to them. The openness and plurality of food culture is an uncomfortable but ongoing reminder of the importance of empire”What a delectable banquet of a book this is… This magnificently readable and engaging book (which is also very generously illustrated) sets the record straight and should whet appetites for the attentive, seasonal cooking and gamier flavours of the past” - Literary Review Kevin’s Food and Foodways paper: https://napier-repository.worktribe.com/output/3133885/accompanying-the-series-early-british-television-cookbooks-1946-1976 We tend to assume, historically, that people’s standard of living and life expectancy just goes on improving on a steady upward trajectory. But this was really not the case. Wretched Faces exemplifies why that was: there was an absolute disaster, demographically, at the beginning of the 19th century, where you had extraordinarily widespread rural poverty, mostly because of the Corn Laws—which were imposed during the Napoleonic War to restrict imports, and kept the price of wheat very high—but partly because of continuing subsistence agriculture and the ongoing Little Ice Age.

English Food: A People’s History - HarperCollins Australia English Food: A People’s History - HarperCollins Australia

The Elizabeth Raffald Manchester Central Library event at 6pm on 13 September: https://librarylive.co.uk/event/elizabeth-raffald-englands-most-influential-housekeeper/ It happened through other projects. Firstly, through the work I’ve done on witchcraft. Secondly, through the work I did on the English Civil War. Both of those projects were about trying to get beyond the intellectual history-type position, where the Civil War was caused by people having a rational response to autocracy, and witchcraft trials were caused by people not being sufficiently post- Enlightenment. Clip of Marguerite Patten inducing a show from the 1950s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgG9oMq4l2UClip of Philip Harben demonstrating boiling techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj-tapF1kgU Imagine you’re standing on a hillside. You look at the lumps in the grass. You are probably wondering what they are, or what they used to be. A panel nearby says that they are prehistoric burial mounds. Young people who voted to remain in the EU did so for the perceived benefits the bloc delivers to them. Doubtless many of the young who live in seaside towns voted leave; or they have left to build themselves a future elsewhere. I’m not sure if the actual numbers of young/old votes for leave/remain could honestly be described as ‘overwhelming’, though, I agree the difference is significant.