For readers unfamiliar with it, let me explain. Good Things in England is a cookery book or perhaps, more precisely, a compendium of 853 recipes, some dating from the fourteenth century, that White collected from or traced to specific regions of England. When it was published in 1932, The Times hailed it as ‘one of the most romantic cookery books ever written’ and Lady Hope in the Guardian declared, ‘No household should be without this most original cookery book.’ The public adored it too. The first edition flew off the shelves and the publishers rushed to issue a second imprint within a couple of months. Since then, Good Things in England has been a crucial source of recipes for most other books on English cookery, while chefs, food writers and historians have showered it with praise. Elizabeth David was a devotee and so was Jane Grigson. Sue Quinn is a cookbook author and food writer. Her most recent book, Cocoa: An Exploration of Chocolate, with recipes, is published by Quadrille. She is now writing a biography of Florence White. Hartley's devotion to archaic recipes such as stargazey pie and posset sometimes comes across as mildly crazed. Marrowbone butter, she says, is excellent for "thin, nervous children". A recent BBC Four documentary on Hartley's life and work presented by Lucy Worsley cast some light on the eccentric pleasures of Food in England, which has been in print continuously for 58 years. As well as being a passionate independent scholar of English history, Hartley was a travel writer, photographer and illustrator ( Food in England is peppered with her characterful drawings of such things as chestnut roasters, butter churns and her grandfather's scarlet egg cosy with a pom-pom "atop"). She seems to have had a quixotic need for solitude and sometimes hung up on friends who telephoned, snapping "I can't talk to you now. I'm in the 14th century!"

The Historic Royal Palaces curator Lucy Worsley presented a BBC film, 'Food in England', The Lost World of Dorothy Hartley, on 6 November 2015. [16] Worsley, writing in The Telegraph, calls Food in England "the definitive history of the way the English eat." She describes the book as "laden with odd facts and folklore ... a curious mixture of cookery, history, anthropology and even magic, ... with her own strong and lively illustrations." She admits it is not a conventional history, since Hartley breaks "the first rule of the historian: to cite her evidence. She wasn't fond of footnotes." In a year of filming Hartley's places and people she knew, Worsley discovered that "my frustration with her technique as historian was misplaced." Hartley had travelled continually to gather materials for her weekly Daily Sketch column, [a] sometimes sleeping rough "in a hedge". The work is thus effectively, Worsley argues, an oral history, as Hartley interviewed "the last generation to have had countryside lives sharing something in common with the Tudors." The emphasis on local, seasonal food chimes well, Worsley suggests, with the modern trend for just those things. [3] One of my favourite sections – with a very pleasing illustration – is on the different shapes used to decorate open tarts. Hartley records how apple tarts were made with wide lattices of pastry ("less likely to sink into the juicy pulp"), whereas treacle tarts were made in a gable pattern, like castle windows. "This particular pattern was probably as old as the first embattled castle". Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-03-08 19:11:19 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA40389907 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier The book ‘Food in England’ was really born in the 1930s when Dorothy had a weekly column in ‘The Daily Sketch’ newspaper. To write it, she too travelled about, by car or bicycle, sometimes sleeping rough in the hedge, and she talked to old ladies and gentlemen of the countryside who were still just about doing things the old unchanging way, just before mass production and mechanization and industrialisation. In the post-war years Hartley taught at University College and Goldsmiths' College in London, appeared on television with the chef Philip Harben, and advised on the BBC Archers rustic soap-opera. In 1964 she published Water in England, of which the ODNB writes, "This remarkable work is full of valuable information on all manner of related phenomena such as holy springs, well digging, leather jugs, spa hotels, and suchlike." [2] Her last work, "The Land of England", was published when the author was 86, but as The Times commented, she could "still depend on her excellent memory rather than on notes and filing cabinets." [5] The reviewer of The New Yorker wrote, "[Her] prose is lucid, demure and unemphatic. Her wit is dry and subtle. She never nudges or buttonholes the reader, but trusts to her material which is almost bewilderingly rich." [12]

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Finally ‘Food in England’ came to fruition in the home she inherited from her mother in the Welsh village of Fron, outside Llangollen. Here, in 1954, now in her sixties, she published her magnum opus. People instantly recognized its value, and it has never been out of print since.

Her concern was forever the food of ordinary people, not the rich. As she writes in her introduction to Food in England: "Our old big house has been divided and let, and I have lived for 20 years in a workman's cottage, with a gas-stove in one room and a log fire and pot crane in the other, and cooked – as convenient – on each. It's been a happy time." How I would have liked to have met her. Thomas Tusser, 1557 Floruit, His Good Points of Husbandry. London: Country Life Books. 1931. OCLC 1663565. In this sense, it’s a work of oral history, as Dorothy was talking to the last generation to have had countryside lives sharing something in common with her great hero, the Tudor agricultural writer Thomas Tusser.a b "The Museum of English Rural Life: The Dorothy Hartley Collection". University of Reading . Retrieved 21 April 2016. It’s a curious mixture of cookery, history, anthropology, folklore and even magic, illustrated with Dorothy’s own strong, detailed and lively illustrations. It ranges from Saxon cooking to the Industrial Revolution, with chapters on everything from seaweed to salt. After her secondary education at Loughborough High School Hartley attended Nottingham Art School. During the First World War she temporarily abandoned her studies and worked in a munitions factory. In 1919 she entered the Regent Street Polytechnic in London where she was, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a prize pupil. She returned to Nottingham Art School as a teacher in 1920–22. She continued to teach, in London and elsewhere, for many years. [2] Historical books [ edit ] Dorothy Rosaman Hartley (4 October 1893 – 22 October 1985) was an English social historian, illustrator, and author. Daughter of a clergyman, she studied art, which she later taught. Her interest in history led her into writing. Among her books are six volumes of The Life and Work of the People of England, covering six centuries of English history.

Hartley's mother was from Froncysyllte, near Llangollen in north Wales, where the family owned quarries and property. In 1933 Hartley moved to a house in Froncysyllte, where she lived for the rest of her life. [2] It was there that she began work on the book for which she is best known, Food in England, with its chapters on kitchens, fuels and fireplaces, meat, poultry, game, eggs, mediaeval feast and famine, fish, fungi, Elizabethan households, the New World, salting, drying, preserving, dairy produce, bread, the Industrial Revolution, and "sundry household matters", all written from the viewpoint of an historian and also a practical and old-fashioned cook. I am not English or British, but England is my second home. Food and cooking is one of my hobbies, along with folklore and traditional way of life. Her appreciation of English food was rare in that she started not with ingredients but with tools and techniques. Begin "at the material end", she demanded, and "study the fuel and methods first". Starting with methods meant understanding, for example, that true roast beef could only be cooked on a spit before an open fire. In the days of hearths and wood fires, the spits were "horizontal". With coal, they mostly became 'perpendicular'. The joint of meat needed to be dredged and basted, Hartley explains, and flavoured "with the flavour of the food the animal ate", so marsh mutton was sauced with laver weed, whereas mountain mutton was smothered in thyme. Most important was the fire itself: "meat cooks well in this radiant heat and, contrary to general belief, there is far less waste by shrinkage." Hartley lamented the moment when open fires were replaced by enclosed ovens. 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." with Margaret M Elliot) (1925). Life and Work of the People of England – Volume I: The eleventh to thirteenth centuries. London: Batsford. OCLC 399655. a b c d e f g h Wondrausch, Mary, "Hartley, Dorothy Rosaman (1893–1985)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 31 January 2010And it certainly isn’t a conventional history book. I must admit that I’d previously had some reservations about it because it doesn’t have proper references to source material, or footnotes. Infuriatingly, Dorothy breaks the first rule of the historian: to cite evidence. Most of Hartley's writing is out of print and only half-remembered, but one of her published works, her magnum opus Food in England, was first published in 1954 and these days is considered to be a masterpiece on the subject of the history of what we ate. Dorothy Hartley"' Gale Literary Databases: Contemporary Authors, accessed 31 January 2010 (subscription required) The Manchester Guardian, 28 January 1957, p. 5; 18 July 1957, p. 5; 21 March 1958, p. 5; 12 April 1959, p. 10; and The Guardian, 7 February 1960, p. 8; 11 December 1967; and 22 December 1967, p. 6

She is best known as the author of the book Food in England, which has had a strong influence on many contemporary cooks and food writers. Delia Smith called it "A classic book without a worthy successor – a must for any keen English cook." [1] It combines an historical perspective on its subject with the practical approach of an experienced cook. It has remained in print ever since its publication in 1954. Ingredients: A marrow bone; boiling water; salt; pepper; chopped parsley; lemon juice; shallot, a mere suspicion; squares of hot crisp toast. Time: Sufficient to make the toast, chop the parsley and cook the marrow for a minute. If by any chance it looks as if it is getting too dry, add a little more milk. NB: Properly cooked the rice and milk at the end of 4 hours are deliciously creamy, and the top a ‘symphony’ in delicate gold and brown. A veritable poem of a pudding. Prepared in this way, nursery children love it. It is its degenerate form that is so much disliked. Many of the old recipes strike me as thoroughly contemporary. This one, from Charles Elmé Francatelli, chef to Queen Victoria, would be at home on any modern British restaurant menu.

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With Dorothy’s biographer, Adrian Bailey, I examined letters from a few years she spent travelling in Africa, and learned the tantalizing story of her great lost love, the heavy-drinking bush ranger whom she later said she should have married. The book provides what has been called an idiosyncratic [1] and a combative [2] take on the history of English cooking. 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." [3] The book strikes some readers as principally a history, [4] but it consists mainly of recipes. Some of these such as stargazey pie are old-fashioned, but all are practical recipes that can be cooked.