Food in England was published in 1954 and has remained in print ever since. Although it has many devotees, both Colin and I amongst them, others remain perplexed to understand its popularity. Historians dismiss it as insufficiently referenced, chefs don’t recognise it as a cookery book, and others find it overly obsessed with the past and irrelevant to today.
Categorising the book is difficult, and this is entirely understandable once you know that the author trained as an artist (mainly an illustrator), adored Chaucer and the 14th Century in general, lived alone in rural North Wales yet had travelled extensively throughout Britain, and also abroad; she was a passionate recorder of rural living which she was already observing disappearing as a result of two world wars. So categorising Dorothy herself is difficult: a social historian, scholarly yet with limited formal education, a practical cook and strongly independent woman.
Food in England is a book that you can get very caught up in, but having eventually put it down, one you will return to over and over. I respect what she has to say, it always rings true with my own experience; and it has something to say on an amazingly wide variety of food related topics. For me, it is the food itself and its production rather than the cooking that commends it. Although it was published in 1954, it feels much older, and indeed much of the material for it was written before the Second World War, mainly from her three-year tour around Britain between 1933 and 1936, which was already looking for the ways that rural life was disappearing. How much more was to disappear following the Second World War!
At the time of publication, in 1954, the last of rationing was lifted (fats and some meats), by the which time people were heartily sick of the same old foods and embraced anything and everything new. So much for DHs assertion that British cooking is old-fashioned because we like it that way! Sure, we all knew people who wouldn’t touch “foreign muck”, but after foreign holidays became more available that didn’t last long either. The 60s and 70s saw a big upturn in convenience foods, so much so that it eventually caused a backlash with campaigns for the reintroduction of “Real Foods”. I keep waiting for a similar backlash to today’s ultra processed foods.
We need to keep in mind the period in which DH was writing, a period just about within memory of some people still living. In the 1930s few homes had electricity and the business of keeping house was a hard and time consuming one. Whilst the pace of change today seems unprecedentedly fast, in fact the 20th century saw some seismic changes itself.
Dorothy Hartley had already published several history books, including six volumes entitled Life and Work of the People of England. Food in England provides historic context by interspersing the chapters about the food itself with chapters on things that have been significant in shaping the food we eat:- our kitchens, fuels and fireplaces, Mediaeval Feast and Famine, the Elizabethan era, and the Industrial Revolution to name just a few. In between these historical refence points the book considers food types one by one – Meat, Poultry and Game, Fish, Vegetables, Dairy etc. The content for these chapters draws on her personal experience as well as the meetings with people during her 1933-36 tour, much of which had already been published by the Daily Sketch newspaper. A selection of the Daily Sketch articles, including some which are not included in Food in England, was published by Prospect Books in 2012.
My own favourite parts of Food in England are those that not only give us a glimpse of a lifestyle that is no longer normal, but aspects that can in fact still be found when you know what you are looking for and are prepared to search hard to find.
The first of these comes from the chapter on meat of which 29 pages are devoted to mutton. It is clearly a subject on which she was both passionate and knowledgeable, which may be attributable to her mother, originally from North Wales, to where Dorothy returned to make her home as an adult. When her mother, upon marriage, moved to Yorkshire, where Dorothy was born, she regularly returned home to Wales for its sweeter mutton, finding that in Yorkshire too coarse for her liking.
The section begins:
“Do not treat all types of mutton in the same way, and always differentiate between lamb and mutton by quality, not size. Of old, lamb was a small young sheep; it was definitely immature meat – or “froth”.
But the present “lamb” is castrated mutton, and may at two years old, be larger than the ewe. It is still technically called “lamb”, but in all respects is very dull mutton. The real old mutton was usually four years old (as ewes were killed off after breeding), and that mutton was lean and well flavoured, and quite different from the fat castrated ram lambs.
Then follows a detailed account of various breeds and how their local environment, to which they are adapted, influences their conformation, texture and flavour. The recipes are arranged into groups suitable for the different types, which she implores people to match to the mutton of their own locality – “and do not cook all types of mutton in the same way” (her emphasis).
Under the Section for Fat Stock Mutton, she begins with the Border Raiding Song:
O the mountain is the sweeter,
But the valley is the fatter;
And so we deem it meeter
To carry off the latter
The chapter includes not only recipes, many of which, e.g. Lamb’s Tail Pie, Sheep’s Head and Battered Trotters, now sound most unlikely, but were in fact traditional regional specialities, there is also sound advice on the appropriate “Tracklements” – accompaniments for the different types of mutton. This is beautifully illustrated by Dorothy Hartley, another trademark that makes this book such a pleasure.
This format is followed for other meats, although it has to be said that the level of knowledge and detail displayed regarding mutton is unsurpassed. I would love, for example, to see the 9 pages devoted to venison revised to provide the same detail afforded to mutton, however, to be fair to Dorothy Hartley, we did then only have our three native breeds of deer, the escapees from safari parks and the like, which have contributed greatly to the deer population reaching such problematic levels, did not occurring until much later. Nonetheless, I feel that even our three native breeds are treated generically as venison with no real understanding that they too vary tremendously and are also impacted by their diet. A Red Deer from the Scottish Highlands, which is likely to have struggled for food, will be different to one grazing in more hospitable climes of the South, e.g. in Richmond Park; and even more so, will differ from the fallow deer often kept in deer parks. Perhaps I should attempt to write it myself, using the Mutton section as my template!
Great Britain (and although the book is entitled Food in England it does indeed cover the whole of Great Britain with Holiday in Ireland being a separate book), was still strongly regional when the book was written. The regional distinctions had begun to be eroded with the coming of the railways in Victorian times, but this accelerated when car ownership became more widespread and was then almost totally eradicated by national supermarkets. DH again shows her personal knowledge in the section on cider, which begins with a quote from an 18th century ciderman, describing the pressing process. DH then comments:
“One can tell this was “border” cider. The “entrenched trough; rounding capacious” was of rough stone, with a basketwork rim of sallie willows to keep “the juicy hord” in the path of the rotating grindstone, and the “goats shaggy beard” was to provide the thick hair mats, in which the apple pulp is wrapped, when put under the screw press. For there are two main “schools” of cider – “border” and “down west”. The “border” sub-divides into Monmouth, Gloucester, Hereford, Welsh and Shropshire types. The “down west” sub-divides into Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Cornish types, and all have their differences.
She goes on to describe the differences in pressing including the use of horsehair mats in the border or straw “down west” which those down west swear enriches the goodness of the cider, whilst the border method retains the flavour of the pips. She finishes:
“ Feeling runs very high! One tries to be impartial, but Devon folk are very self-opinionated! Our Monmouth cider is vastly superior, and shall be described forthwith!
Hindle Wakes
By no means is all of Food from England drawn from DH’s 1933-36 tour. As you might expect from an historian, she also draws on far older recipes. One such is Hindle Wakes, which she describes as being “a very old English recipe come down through many centuries unchanged”. The recipe she gives was collected from a family near Wigan, Lancashire around 1900 which a footnote says was believed to have come from Flemish spinners settled near Bolton le Moor.
It begins “An old boiling fowl was brought in from the allotment the week before the Wakes, plucked and drawn, and hung up in a cold larder, and the stuffing prepared in a big crock”.
The Wakes referred to were fairs held during the traditional annual holiday in the cotton and wool manufacturing towns of the north, some books also refer to boiling fowl being sold at these fairs. The recipe Hindle Wakes is believed to have derived from “Hen de la Wake” (Hen of the Wake), a medieval poultry dish for festive occasions.
In the recipe Dorothy Hartley gives, the stuffing contains bread, suet, prunes, herbs and vinegar, which is stuffed “firmly” into the fowl from “end to end”, trussed and gently boiled overnight in water to which another cupful of vinegar and a large spoonful of brown sugar has been added. Having simmered overnight, the bird is then left to go cold in the broth before being drained and coated in a thick lemon sauce. Halved prunes and lemon quarters were “patterned over the handsome dish”.
I have seen many versions of this recipe, including one as recently as this Christmas, all of which include the prunes and lemon. DH herself says that the basis is old hen and fruit filling, but of course a boiling fowl is now hard to find and, the most recent version suggested, no longer to our taste, so in that version the chicken was roasted. However, I believe that DH was correct in her assertion that an old hen (which would have to be slowly simmered) was of the essence of this recipe.
In Food in England, immediately prior to the recipe for Hindle Wakes, is a fourteenth century recipe for Chicken broth which she says “reads fantastically to the average cook, yet it is not so far removed from modern usage when studied closely” which she then proceeds to do by giving her own account of replicating the recipe. As in Hindle Wakes the tough old boiling hen was simmered overnight and the following day she “sorted the mass of bones and meat” adding the tender pieces to the broth. She found it “tasted of well-cooked chicken, which is what chicken broth should taste of…whereas modern chicken broth, made of the scraps after the chicken has been eaten, tastes mostly of bone and onion.”
On the few occasions when I have simmered a whole bird for broth, I have been struck by how much better the stock tastes, to the extent that I also simmer “roasting” chickens if I will be serving the meat cold as it keeps it moist and provides the bonus of a well-flavoured stock, but not, it has to be admitted, as well flavour as had the bird been an old one. My main point in making this observation is that we should not dismiss old recipes because the ingredients are hard to find; and that, as with the excellent section on Mutton, more mature animals may not just have been a “using up” of an animal having reached the end of its productive life, but actually contained flavours that we no longer experience and which, had we the opportunity to try, might very well be “to our taste” today. I cooked some 4-year-old Exmoor Horn mutton recently, having previously had none older than 2 years, and was amazed that it was neither too strong in flavour nor fatty, in fact delicious.
Having said that, I admit that I do have an element of scepticism about the Hindle Wakes recipe. I find it hard to imagine how the bird would remain intact after a whole night of simmering especially given the account of the Chicken Broth cooked in the same way, although without the benefit of being “firmly stuffed from end to end”. I also wonder how much flesh there might be on this old bird, but if I can be bothered to pluck an old laying hen, I suppose I might give Hindle Wakes a try.
Not every account give by DH was accompanied by a recipe, I think she found the stories of traditions compelling even if they might not result in delicious food. One such example comes in the account of eating winkles:
“You will not find winkles mentioned in cook-books, even the gentle Victorian books ´preserve an elegant reticence´. As they say, ´anyone will tell you how to prepare winkles´ but you will not find it written down.
Therefore, for centuries, the tradition of the winkle must have been handed down, as you might say, from father to son – or a wife might, so to speak ´marry into winkles´. If they were just a few unexpected edible shellfish, you could understand this, but thousands of tons of winkles are consumed yearly – millions of winkles are eaten daily, and yet, to put it crudely, would you think of eating a winkle if somebody else did not put you up to it? Also their spasmodic distribution is intriguing. London eats tons; so does Blackpool; Chester eats but few. At some country places the winkle statistics might be high, and yet in an adjacent hamlet the winkle is practically unknown.”
DH then goes on to recount how she “learnt winkles” from a night watchman. Despite being provided with a “reet proper breakfast” he had a slow and steady ritual of picking winkles with a pin (kept fastened in his waistcoat) throughout his long night. He paused to hear the plop of each shell discarded into the canal before starting another. His comment? “Winkles, they do pass the time very pleasantly”.
After this account had appeared in the Daily Sketch a reader sent in a recipe for pickling winkles, which was later reproduced in Food in England so there it now is – a written recipe.
Although it might be tempting to dismiss this book as pure nostalgia, even at the time it was published, when the country was eager to move forward from the wars, it is interesting to note how many of the foods written about have revived, and in some cases even improved. The Mutton Renaissance is one example (even though it has resulted in many people describing as mutton, a sheep of only one-year old, which more correctly ought to be called hogget). Other examples are cheese, both the traditional varieties which appeared lost after the war, and a whole plethora of new styles, often replicating foreign favourites, and winning awards and respect even in nations such as France. Then there is bread, which reached rock-bottom in quality before campaigns emerged to revive “Real Bread” as well as “Real Ale” and “Real Sausages”. This book must be a go-to for finding the criteria against which something might be considered “Real”.
Not dreamt of then, was the success of our sparkling wines, which rival Champagne, however Artisan Ciders – I would say probably of much higher quality than those DH wrote about – are no longer a cheap drink for farm labourers but something that can be considered a serious alternative to wine. Feeding animals solely on pasture, which of course was once the norm, is rapidly gaining traction again as part of regenerative farming. Pasture for Life regularly hold tasting to comparehow both breed and pasture affect the flavour.
For a nostalgic book Food in England is amazingly relevant today. No wonder it has so many fans and has remained in print for over 70 years.
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