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

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Hartley's tone is generally calm and didactic; she waxes enthusiastic over certain flavors, and is strict about good and bad food preparation. The latter sounds far-fetched, until Hartley explains how she used a dog churn once herself : a large wooden wheel on which the dogs ran, attached to a churn.

It shouldn't be read like a cookbook, a history book, or an ethnographic essay because it is none of these things, and all of these things at the same time. She relished fried cockles and bacon at the seaside; Welsh oatcakes cooked on a girdle; lardy cakes in Oxfordshire; "ancestral" apple pies; and waffles, which, she pointed out, had been made in England since the 12th century. Slight fading and very slight spotting at spine with a very slight split at hinge at foot of spine, otherwise very good.They are not necessarily fitting 21st century palate, but are nonetheless interesting - not unlike what Heston Blumenthal has done. 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. This is a magnificent book, written in 1953 by someone who learnt her cooking in English country kitchens in the days before widespread electricity and gas.

For food scholarship at its best see Dorothy Hartley's robust, idiosyncratic, irresistible FOOD IN ENGLAND . 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. 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". Perhaps, she wrote, "the best of English cooking was lost when the oven door shut on the English roast and turned it into a funereal feast of baked meats.the American word "piecing" for a snack taken in the hand, has been preserved since it left England with the Pilgrim Fathers. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. 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").

So if you're into Slow Food, food history, or just English plain cookery, you'll find a lot of great stuff here and might get some questions answered. Together we had a poke into Dorothy’s handbag, and found within it a very characteristic collection of objects: a ticket to the reading room of the British Museum, a penknife and an atlas.As well as visiting the rambly old house with its garden full of fruit where the adolescent Dorothy first began writing and drawing, we visited a restaurant run by an old schoolmate of mine who restricts himself to ingredients from within a twenty mile radius, just as the Tudors did. Fascinating look into the past--not just looking at the foodstuffs, but the methods and the attitudes towards food.

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. The Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading curates the Dorothy Hartley collection. Hartley had travelled continually to gather materials for her weekly Daily Sketch column, [a] sometimes sleeping rough "in a hedge". 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.This is not a book of recipes but it celebrates food, the history of food and almost, you might say, the philosophy of food. The book is unusual as a history in not citing its sources, serving more as an oral social history from Hartley's own experiences as she travelled England as a journalist for the Daily Sketch, interviewing "the last generation to have had countryside lives sharing something in common with the Tudors. Yet in Hartley's world, the big news was how to scramble an egg using some of the hot ashes from a roasting fire. The book is a compendium of favourite tips and treats, many of which just happen to be several hundred years old.