Food in England: A Complete Guide to the Food That Makes Us Who We are

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When the job was done, the dogs were given a drink of buttermilk "and down they sit, well satisfied". Far from settling down, she speeded up, refusing to marry or have children and indeed devoting herself entirely to her work of recording the past. A contemporary of folk historians Cecil Sharp and Florence White, Hartley was part of an active movement to record disappearing English customs, and the oral history she recorded provides the richest part of this work.

In fact you can't get that level of authenticity nowadays - it would have never been written or published. She was therefore "startled" to find that almost the whole of the text is "taken up with practical recipes and techniques, with very little historical narrative. As for the complaint that country food – or medieval food, come to that – was monotonous, Hartley replied that it was "we", the moderns, who "level out the year into monotony by demanding the same food all the year round! Hartley had travelled continually to gather materials for her weekly Daily Sketch column, [a] sometimes sleeping rough "in a hedge". Recipe for 18th century Coconut Bread and for Famine Bread (from Markham, ingredients including Sarrasins corne , or Saracen's Corn).A history of British food that has the same, odd, dreamy, lysergic air as THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS.

Hartley records how apple tarts were made with wide lattices of pastry ("less likely to sink into the juicy pulp"), whereas treacle tarts were made in a gable pattern, like castle windows.A new volume from Prospect Books, Lost World: England 1933-36, gathers together many of the articles she wrote on food for the Daily Sketch, 20 years before Food in England.