Fascinating look into the past--not just looking at the foodstuffs, but the methods and the attitudes towards food. Where roasting meant cooking with a heat source coming from a fire and the roast was twisting on some twine with the drippings falling into a pan below. The instructions are given in a few paragraphs: "Let the sirloin be well hung; dust it lightly with dry mustard, pepper and brown flour to give a crisp crust; bed the fat end well under the lean undercut, and secure in place with string or carefully placed skewer. She admits it is not a conventional history, since Hartley breaks "the first rule of the historian: to cite her evidence. This often lonely, insular woman found in cooks of earlier times a kinship: "for we English cooks … have always been our excellent selves, under all conditions and in all centuries.

Starting with methods meant understanding, for example, that true roast beef could only be cooked on a spit before an open fire. A fascinating cookery source-book full of recipes, anecdotes, household hints and history that is now recognized as a culinary classic. Original orange cloth with some marking and fading, slight edge rubbing with small tears at spine ends, otherwise very good.I must admit that I’d previously had some reservations about it because it doesn’t have proper references to source material, or footnotes. The book is a compendium of favourite tips and treats, many of which just happen to be several hundred years old . Dorothy Hartley (1893-1985) travelled the country writing a weekly column on English country living for the Daily Sketch "for which she hunted out recipes, customs and folklore" (Worsley).

The jacket spine tanned and with small losses at the head, a few neat old paper reinforcements on the verso, else a decent copy. 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. 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. 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. The historian of food Bee Wilson, rereading "this endearing work" 58 years on for The Guardian, wrote that she had remembered it as a history book and an epic account of English cooking, "interspersed with recipes.Like all old recipes - they assume a presence of mind attuned to the time period, and a lot of empirical knowledge. 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. 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.

For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. This vessel might be used to cook a whole dinner, including a bacon joint, jars of poultry and multiple "bag puddings" of cereals and beans. I've tried the Christmas pudding recipe that she gives as being "The Royal Family's Christmas Pudding".Her writing demonstrates the close practical combination of these threads, for example "according to superstition, empty egg-shells should always be broken up - lest witches make boats thereof. On a not entirely related note, I'd just like to say that I love plum pudding and fruitcake, and I'm tired of people's complaints about them. They are short, charming pieces on such subjects as shrimp teas, toffee apples, watercress and Kentish cherry picking.