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

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Spread strawberry (raspberry, mixed berry) jam and whipped cream between the layers and dust the top with powdered sugar. This book has been in print for some time (it was first published in 2003) but I thought I would recommend it to you here, now I have the opportunity so to do, and because I find it is one of the best books written on food in the long eighteenth century. As the title page is often the only point at which something that might be described as ‘philosophy’ or theory enters into the text of a household manual, it will be admitted that such a gathering will have great utility.

For years Britain has gotten a bad reputation for food, but really that is not fair, things have improved immensely, some of my most favorite foods are British. What foods were available, depending on your class in life [and we all know from Downton Abbey that class mattered]. The taxpayers who taxed themselves through Parliament, to borrow one of Blanning’s images, all ate much the same food, and they ate it with relish.With over 300 recipes, Classic British Cooking includes both timeless favourites and forgotten gems. This is the first full-scale study of the world of eighteenth-century British cookery books, their authors, their readers and their recipes.

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. Readers are invited on a culinary tour of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, with dishes from the various regions and counties. Stale bread was used, not thrown away, in Snowden Pudding made with marmalade, citrus juices and citrus zest.

The cook is told to use a wooden spoon, and given the reason for the brief cooking, without boiling, once the sauce is made. Her Century of British Cooking pulls together her life’s work, with over 200 recipes and is truly an important work of culinary history. Lehmann is particularly refreshing when she examines subjects, like The London Art of Cookery, that have become distorted by a historiographical game of telephone tag in which received wisdom is reiterated and becomes inadvertently mutated by authors who have not independently examined the underlying facts. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). 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.