Taste The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking

by Colquhoun, Kate

• ISBN13: 9781596914100
• ISBN10: 1596914106
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-10-30
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Summary

A fascinating history of how Britain learned to cook, from prehistory to the modern age. Written with a storyteller's flair and packed with astonishing facts, Taste is a sumptuous social history of Britain told through the development of its cooking. It encompasses royal feasts and street food, the skinning of eels and the making of strawberry jelly, mixing tales of culinary stars with those of the invisible hordes cooking in kitchens across the land. Beginning before Roman times, the book journeys through the ingredients, equipment, kitchens, feasts, fads, and famines of the British; it covers the piquancy of Norman cuisine, the influx of undreamed-of spices and new foods from the East and the New World, the Tudor pumpkin pie that journeyed with the founding fathers to become America's national dish, the austerity of rationing during World War II, and the birth of convenience foods and take-away, right up to the age of Nigella Lawson, Heston Blumenthal, and Jamie Oliver. The first trade book to tell the story of British cookingwhich is, of course, the history that led up to American colonial cooking as wellTaste shows that kitchens are not only places of steam, oil, and sweat, but of politics, invention, cultural exchange, commerce, conflict, and play.

Author Biography

Kate Colquhoun is a journalist and the author of The Busiest Man in England: A Life of Joseph Paxton, Gardener, Architect, & Victorian Visionary. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Staff of Life	p. 3
Prehistory
The Kittiwake at Danebury	p. 7
Roman Britain
Conspicuous Culinary Consumption	p. 17
Liquamen	p. 29
The Raider Centuries
An Art in Peril	p. 35
Medieval Britain
'Newe Conceytes'	p. 47
Feasts and Fasts	p. 62
Hospitality	p. 72
Pastry	p. 80
The Tudors
Strange Vegetables, New Tastes	p. 87
'Sugar Never Marred Sawce'	p. 102
The English Huswife	p. 112
Blessed Puddings	p. 122
The Stuarts
Mad Master Cooks	p. 129
The Commonwealth and Protectorate
Unhappy Times	p. 141
The Restoration
A La Mode	p. 153
Chefs and Sweethearts	p. 164
Ice	p. 177
William and Mary, Anne, and the Hanoverians
Human Nature	p. 185
Good Gravy and Hooped Petticoats	p. 198
Brave Stomachs	p. 211
Drunkenness	p. 221
Taste	p. 225
The Long Regency
Mad for Innovation	p. 239
A La Russe	p. 251
Painting the Lamb, Roasting the Mutton	p. 257
The Victorians
The Great Laboratory	p. 275
Poverty's Larder	p. 288
The Flight to Gentility, or Living for Appearances	p. 293
The Twentieth Century
Raging Inequalities and the Taste of War	p. 311
Fleeting Fortunes and Discontented Domestics	p. 323
Waste the Food, Help the Hun!	p. 338
Learning to Walk, Loving to Run	p. 345
'What I Myself Have Learned ...'	p. 359
'Cuisine Poseur'	p. 370
A Note on Measures	p. 377
Sites and Houses	p. 379
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.