English Food: A Social History of England Told Through the Food on Its Tables

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Diane Purkiss (born 30 June 1961) is an Australian historian, and Fellow and Tutor of English at Keble College, Oxford. She specialises in Renaissance and women's literature, witchcraft and the English Civil War. Diane Purkiss is a Professor of English Literature at Oxford and fellow of Keble College. She is the author of the much-admired The Witch in History, Troublesome Things, and the acclaimed history, The English Civil War. Neil’s guest today is Heather Ellis from Sheffield University. Helen is a historian of Education and she, along with academics from the University of Wolverhampton and UCL, have just embarked on an ambitious project looking at people’s experiences and memories of their school dinners in all four UK Home Nations. School dinners have been supplied by the School Meals Service – i.e. by the Government – since 1908. It’s the end of the current run so that means it is time for the now traditional end-of-season special postbag edition. But it’s wonderful in places, and you can also get fantastic bread in Britain now. But around 90% of the bread flour sold in Britain is augmented with high gluten flour from the Canadian wheat belt. The average gluten content of a loaf made in the 19th century would have been around eight or nine percent. Now, that’s more like eleven to fourteen percent. If you use low-gluten flour, you have to put way more time into baking, spend longer kneading it, give it longer periods of rest, a much longer rise. It’s a much heavier workload for the baker.

A Journey into Witchcraft Beliefs | English Heritage A Journey into Witchcraft Beliefs | English Heritage

Today Neil talks with Brigitte Webster about her new book Eating with the Tudors which has just been published by Pen & Sword History. To be clear, I’m not saying I think this is foolish! I disagree with many things that are NOT stupid, and I am not all-knowing. The article defines my own feelings perfectly. I voted for Boris with great enthusiasm for his freewheeling libertarianism, but after his spell in hospital he has turned into a crazed and capricious despot. I have not been so disappointed by a politician in fifty years.Given that, I can see that, if one were an ambitious 17th-century merchant, say, it would be very important to have a capable wife running the show at home. If you wanted to ever have fruit, you had to be acting to preserve every tiny scrap of it. They’re preserving not only peak, ripe, glossy apples, but gathering up what they call the greenings, the windfalls that dropped before they were ripe. There are dozens of uses for those—you can make them into a kind of vinegar for salad dressing, or into a relish, or into a sugar paste as a dessert. All this thinking and planning and oversight is hugely interesting. It wasn’t like the weirdness of being a housewife in the 1950s, where inessentially you were confined to a tiny, not very interactive, space. It was more like running an enterprise of reasonable size. Before our interview began, you said something interesting about how food history is not really about the food. It’s what the food says about those making or eating it. So I guess we are looking at food as a proxy for other social forces or social factors. Did I get that right? When published, Neil’s blog post with a recipe for sago pudding, will be found at www.britishfoodhistory.com I have a story that explains this, although it’s not from the book. I had an acquaintance, who used to be senior in the Food Commission. She taught an adult cookery class in England, and at the end of the course, she said to the women: ‘To celebrate we will make a cake next week, so everyone remember to bring in a tin.’ Nothing more than that. The next week, they all came in with their idea of a tin. One brought a beer can, another brought a washed-out tin of sardines. They didn’t really know what a cake tin was, nor did they have the money to go and buy one. This was only in the 1990s.

English Food by Diane Purkiss review – a mouthwatering

Often as an author, I only occasionally get to meet the public who buy and read my books. The Oxford Literary Festival was a special opportunity for me and certainly one of the highlights of my career – it was an honour I will never forget. We tend to assume, historically, that people’s standard of living and life expectancy just goes on improving on a steady upward trajectory. But this was really not the case. Wretched Faces exemplifies why that was: there was an absolute disaster, demographically, at the beginning of the 19th century, where you had extraordinarily widespread rural poverty, mostly because of the Corn Laws—which were imposed during the Napoleonic War to restrict imports, and kept the price of wheat very high—but partly because of continuing subsistence agriculture and the ongoing Little Ice Age. What a delectable banquet of a book this is… This magnificently readable and engaging book (which is also very generously illustrated) sets the record straight and should whet appetites for the attentive, seasonal cooking and gamier flavours of the past” - Literary Review Purkiss uses food to chart changing views on class, gender and tradition. She looks at historical quirks such as trial by ordeal of bread, a fondness for ‘small beer’ and a war-time ice-cream substitute called ‘hokey pokey’ made from parsnips. And she explores the development of the coffee trade and coffee houses where views were exchanged on politics and culture, looks at the first breeders of beef and how they triggered the Glencoe Massacre, and explains why toast is as English as the chalk cliffs.

Purkiss also wrote children's books with her daughter, Alice Druitt, under the pseudonym Tobias Druitt. That discussion of scurvy might have led us quite neatly to Lizzie Collingham’s The Hungry Empire, a study of British imperial history structured around twenty recipes. It was first published under the title Tastes of Empire. Let’s move on to your next book recommendation, which is Roger Wells’ Wretched Faces, a history of famine in England. Could you tell us more? Kevin’s Food and Foodways paper: https://napier-repository.worktribe.com/output/3133885/accompanying-the-series-early-british-television-cookbooks-1946-1976 Banning BOGOFs won’t work either because they will simply become, buy two, get both half price, or whatever. That’s business – its their job to sell stuff.