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

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If you wanted to ever have fruit, you had to be acting to preserve every tiny scrap of it. They’re preserving not only peak, ripe, glossy apples, but gathering up what they call the greenings, the windfalls that dropped before they were ripe. There are dozens of uses for those—you can make them into a kind of vinegar for salad dressing, or into a relish, or into a sugar paste as a dessert. All this thinking and planning and oversight is hugely interesting. It wasn’t like the weirdness of being a housewife in the 1950s, where inessentially you were confined to a tiny, not very interactive, space. It was more like running an enterprise of reasonable size. Purkiss uses the story of food as a revelatory device to chart changing views on class, gender, and tradition through the ages. Sprinkled throughout with glorious details of historical quirks – trial by ordeal of bread, a fondness for ‘small beer’ and a war-time ice-cream substitute called ‘hokey pokey’ made from parsnips – this book is both an education and an entertainment. Sacla’ started life in 1939 when Secondo and Piera Ercole set up a small family business preparing and preserving the bounty of fruit and vegetables grown around Asti in Italy’s north-west region of Piedmont. Three generations later, and still family run, we have evolved into one of the most passionate and progressive pioneers of Italian food. In 1990, we introduced Pesto to the British shopper and a love affair with all things Italian began…

The English Civil War: A People's History provides an account of one of the most consequential events in English history from the perspective of the actors themselves. The book is readable, at times gripping, and the use of extensive quotation gives insight into the feelings and motivations of those involved. They talked about the project, the origins of the School Meals Service in the first decade of the 20th century, the foods served up over the next 100 years or so including pink sponge and custard, liver with the tubes attached and the now infamous turkey twizzlers, Maggie Thatcher – milk snatcher, the fall in the quality of school dinners, as well as Jamie Oliver’s campaign to get them sorted out, and many other things. The School Meals Project wants your food memories if you have had experience with school meals in the UK, however old you may be and whatever the interaction may be. This is a well-researched and interesting examination of the personal experiences of about thirty people living through the English Civil War. It surfs the timeline of ‘national’ events stopping off to update us on the actions, views and contexts of these actors as we go. The book definitely helps the reader get ‘under the skin’ of the War (read ‘a number of local skirmishes’) and experience the conflicting political, religious, class and personal struggles that permeate the lives of these people. Recreating 16th Century Beer with Susan Flavin & Marc Meltonville https://open.spotify.com/episode/6wtjaqTVyqjacVkyvvO3FP?si=b3c29819ed7b453a J Pao and Co. Ltd. pride themselves on a consistent high quality product. Ethically sourced mung beans are used and the Beansprouts are grown hydroponically using recycled water with no added pesticides or nutrients. They are constantly monitored by a high tech growing system to ensure an ideal growing environment.The original Gold Top Milk is made the traditional Guernsey and Jersey way with the cream on the top, and tastes delicious, the luxurious Gold Top Smooth is a variation whereby the indulgent cream is blended evenly throughout the entire bottle. The Gold Top family includes, butter, cream, ice cream amongst others. That’s right. Although it depends on the boulangerie. There’s a chain called Éric Kayser boulangeries—I think there are more than twenty now—which all craft a thing called the baguette Monge or sometimes the baguette tradition, which uses what the French call ‘old dough’ as the basis for the fermentation. So there’s an element of sourdough. But virtually every other grocery will be selling something pretty indistinguishable from what is sold in upmarket supermarkets over here. And if you go to Carrefour, or somewhere like that, you will smell the fresh bread, but it will be what’s called ‘bake off’ in the trade—it’s also called the ‘Milton Keynes process’ that produces the dough, hilariously—essentially they just push a lot of additives into it. It qualifies as an ultra-processed food because of the enormous amount of gluten it contains, and the preservatives, the stabilisers, the fat… it can just about be sold as ‘bread’, but you’re not supposed to sell it as a ‘baguette’. Lakeland’s buyers are constantly searching the world for ground-breaking innovations and ideas to add to their carefully curated range of can’t-live without products, always working closely with their customers to ensure they have everything they need to create delicious, healthy meals at home as well as inspiring them with handy time-saving ideas that make life just that little bit easier. Often as an author, I only occasionally get to meet the public who buy and read my books. The Oxford Literary Festival was a special opportunity for me and certainly one of the highlights of my career – it was an honour I will never forget. The political and military aspects are interspersed into the thematic coverage of the social as a sort of structural scaffolding, but not particularly systematically. Lieutenant-Colonel Cromwell, hardly gets a mention in fact. Part of my deduction of a star is due to the fact that these political-military aspects are included so haphazardly that no one seriously interested in that kind of chronological treatment would be much the wiser for having read this account. We get names, fragments of speeches, the occasional movements of troops, but all out of any overarching context. To me at least, the coverage of these aspects is so fragmentary that one has to ask why they were even included. Even if just as a structural context for the social themes, I can't help feeling it could have been done a bit better than this; a coherent high level view perhaps, rather than the interjection of decontextualized fragments.

It was a truly memorable occasion, honouring excellence in our industry. It was also a joyous celebration of outstanding work and a wonderful opportunity to meet old friends and new. The Oxford Literary Festival has in my mind become the leading literary festival of the year. The organisation, the roster of speakers, the ambience and the sheer quality of it all is superb. May it now go from strength to strength each year stretching its ambition more and more. I believe it will. I mean, it’s a horrible illness. Not only is it physically incredibly painful, and unbelievably exhausting—like a dreadfully bad Covid—but the worst thing about it is that healed wounds open up again. So it has this spectral quality in a military outfit. The leg that got shot suddenly reopens and starts bleeding again. Things like that.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. Even if you can make sense of the general story, it is massively let down by the abrupt end upon the execution of King Charles I. Now clearly this is a major milestone that drew the civil wars to a close, but a lot of the revolutionary thinking and historical developments are yet to happen: the Instrument of Government is still to come, as is the rule of the Major Generals with the legacy of distrust of state control, and the various twists and turns endured by England as she wrestled with the alien concept of government without a king. Those events left a significant mark on society which, barely twenty years later, would be establishing the earliest forms of modern government as we recognise today. However, it is essential to note that this book is not for the faint of heart. It is a behemoth of a tome, delving into the nitty-gritty details of the war with surgical precision. But for those who are willing to embark on the journey, the rewards are bountiful. The author takes the reader on a journey through the heart of the war, exploring the motivations and actions of all those involved, from the highest levels of leadership down to the common folk.