The British Cookbook: authentic home cooking recipes from England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland

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If Lehmann’s insights are more deft than earthshattering–after all, we have the images of Hogarth, Gillray and lesser lights to reinforce many of them–that in no way diminishes her accomplishment. Our purpose is to share our passion and knowledge with everyone to teach how they can cook more and have a good time while doing it.

Yet as Janet Theophano has shown in Eat My Words, this culture was alive and well into the nineteenth century (a trip to the Wellcome Institute or the Winterthur Library bears this out). How did culinary discourse adapt to increasing urbanization, which engendered smaller households and fewer people at home to offer instruction? At the beginning of the century, the complicated court style of cooking, heavily influenced by French cooks and books, held sway; by the end of the century it had almost disappeared, and for reasons with implications broader than foodways.It is comprehensive, however, and full of recipes that many here in the US will actually find familiar, particularly if your roots are in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and the Appalachians. Thus, the manner of dining conferred social station, but the gentry and “middling classes in the expanding cities” betray “no sense of any desire to emulate aristocratic habits. The recipe book is designed to be an essential part of the kitchen, with meals for friends, family and any occasion. While books advised and encouraged their readers to cook, create and compound, the experience at table may have been very different. Discover how medieval pottage became soup and how desserts like rice pudding and Eton mess became all-time favourites.

The recipes are fascinating to read and easy to follow, with lively descriptions of each dish's origins; clear, user-friendly instructions; and helpful notes on unique ingredients and techniques. The authors of these new cookbooks with brisk titles such as The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy were either female chefs who had worked in the kitchens of the gentry, or else harried housewives with a keen sense of what was really needed.Apparently they did: “It is thus hardly surprising to find so much negative comment on English food from foreign travellers…. After a long, hot afternoon Jon suggested we stop into the National Trust Café, I was not enthusiastic, thinking of lukewarm pizza and hotdogs that had sat in a warmer all day as you would find at home. There is a great White Sauce recipe, something that every home cook should know how to make because it is so versatile. For many decades, we have treated them as collectables – often fetching thousands at auction and in rare-book catalogues – or as quaint survivors, while ignoring their true history or what they have to tell us about the Georgians at table. It makes a few key points, all of which resonate with the well-worn idea that middle-class values gradually inflected virtually all social phenomena.

To mitigate this issue for those who disagree, I suggest the publisher makes a Kindle version of the book available. The British Cookbook features numerous well-known favorites such as Lancashire Hotpot, and Roast beef and lesser-known regional specialties such as Welsh cheese pudding, Scottish clapshot, and Northern Irish treacle bread. An Aga is a traditional British stove that keeps a constant temperature and is always ready to cook. Sophisticated visitors to the traditional gentry derided the early dinners served on country estates.With photography and fascinating facts, the reader can really get a sense of the importance of the British pudding. The book also ends with a very handy set of conversion charts which include temperatures (in celsius, gas and fahrenheit), weight (in metric and imperial) and volume (in metric and imperial).