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A delicious history of British food traditions exploring the development of rituals and recipes for mealtimes and how food has been a reflection of and inspiration for social continuity and change. Purkiss introduces the first breeders of British beef and reveals how cattle triggered the terrible Glencoe Massacre. We are taken for tea, to the icehouse, the pantry and the beehive. We learn that toast is as English as the chalk cliffs. We bite into chicken, plainly poached or exotically spiced and join bacon curers and fishermen at work, follow the scent of apples into ancient orchards and develop a fondness for 'small beer'. Did you know that the wartime ice cream substitute called Hokey Pokey was made from parsnips? We have our loaves and fishes, liquid foods, have our cake and milk and eat it, tinned food and rarer birds while Purkiss has an eye for the narrative vignette that can illuminate the age in this rich layer cake of a book. 549 magnificent pages in a hefty book with great illustrations from history like poultry merchants and female workers in a canning factory to a medieval village woman churning butter with the Devil. Colour and black and white illus.