It was only as I followed Dorothy up and down the country from Yorkshire, to Leicestershire, to Suffolk, to Wales, that I came to appreciate how magnificently eccentric she was. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. I'd always thought of Hartley's Food in England as a history book, yet on rereading this endearing work from 1954, I found that it isn't, quite. 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.

A fascinating cookery source-book full of recipes, anecdotes, household hints and history that is now recognized as a culinary classic.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. I'd recommend all of Hartley's other books too, which delve into more specifics on English food and farming, like Water In England (covering everything from drainage ditches to beer) and The Land of England, which covers English country customs through the ages. It’ll be accompanied by a new edition of some of Dorothy’s journalism from the 1930s, ‘Lost World’ (left), published by Prospect Books with an extensive new biographical introduction. I've tried the Christmas pudding recipe that she gives as being "The Royal Family's Christmas Pudding". The book suggests a much more varied, rich, and bizarre English cuisine than the stereotype allows, listing native plants and garden plants that were once widely consumed but now are forgotten (e.

Many of the processes are distinctly old-fashioned; thus, Hartley describes basting, dredging, and frothing, switching between the past and present tenses: "Dredging. The Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading curates the Dorothy Hartley collection. I was startled to discover that almost all of the 676 pages are taken up with practical recipes and techniques, with very little historical narrative. She was therefore "startled" to find that almost the whole of the text is "taken up with practical recipes and techniques, with very little historical narrative.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.

The book ‘Food in England’ was really born in the 1930s when Dorothy had a weekly column in ‘The Daily Sketch’ newspaper. It was there that she began work on the book for which she is best known, [6] Food in England, leading to its publication in 1954. 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. 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. A contemporary of folk historians Cecil Sharp and Florence White, Hartley was part of an active movement to record disappearing English customs, and the oral history she recorded provides the richest part of this work.Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. Her appreciation of English food was rare in that she started not with ingredients but with tools and techniques.