Many of the processes are distinctly old-fashioned thus, Hartley describes basting, dredging, and frothing, switching between the past and present tenses: "Dredging. The text switches repeatedly from instructions ("To prepare mutton fat for a mutton piecrust, melt it over a bowl of hot water") to historical asides ("Mutton fat was used in the mountain-sheep districts for the same purposes as suet or goose-grease in the valleys"). For example, chapter V, Meat, discusses "a rather interesting mediaeval miracle" and illustrates a traditional "Colonial Travelling Meat Safe of Mosquito Net". Every chapter, however, is also a history. Some chapters such as 'Elizabethan households' are explicitly historical. Most of the chapters address aspects of English food, whether types of food such as meat, eggs, fungi, and bread, or ways of dealing with food such as salting, drying and preserving. It was there that she began work on the book for which she is best known, Food in England, leading to its publication in 1954. In 1933 Hartley moved to a house in Froncysylltau, where she lived for the rest of her life. Some of these such as stargazey pie are old-fashioned, but all are practical recipes that can be cooked.ĭorothy Hartley's mother was from Froncysylltau, near Llangollen in North Wales, where the family owned quarries and property. 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." The book strikes some readers as principally a history, but it consists mainly of recipes. The book provides what has been called an idiosyncratic and a combative take on the history of English cooking. It was acclaimed on publication the contemporary critic Harold Nicolson described the book as a classic. It is both a cookery book and a history of English cuisine. Food in England is a 1954 book by the social historian Dorothy Hartley.
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