ART OF DINING: A History of Cooking and Eating

This lavish National Trust book is in five chapters, one for each century, when fine dining in the English country house was central to royal and aristocratic living. As guardian of many of the country's great houses, the Trust is uniquely placed to illustrate the foods, their sources and methods of cooking and presentation, together with the architectural details and the social customs that provide the context for an understanding of the national culinary heritage. All social classes are represented, for instance in the East Midlands the gourmet dining at Kedleston Hall or Belton House, often for royal visitors, is matched by the superb kitchens preserved at Hardwick Hall or Mr Straw's house in Worksop. Each chapter covers the foods, the kitchens, and the eating areas, and concludes with a selection of period recipes adapted for modern ingredients. In the medieval and early Tudor period food production was mainly local, with bread the staple food for all classes, white for luxurious eating and coarser bread mixed with bran and rye for the working classes, some of them serfs until the Black Death gave indentured labourers an opportunity for land ownership. Bread was also used to thicken stews and make popular sweetmeats such as toast soaked in milk, flavoured with spices and fried. Venison, wild boar, geese and swans were eaten in abundance by the upper classes while rabbit was the meat of the poor, and during this period the separate kitchen, such as the one at Glastonbury, began to be incorporated into the layout of the house. The Elizabethan and turbulent Stuart periods saw refinements in cooking methods, with spits and pulleys deployed for more effective roasting and a greater variety of spices and other ingredients being imported from North America, the Caribbean, Africa and the East, while commercial production of fruit and vegetables also took off in the 17th century. Wine became expensive as a result of the wars with France, and the introduction of coffee, tea and chocolate revolutionised the beverage industry. Advances in technology and travel transformed life for the 19th century aristocracy, but many families did not return to the old way of life following the devastation of World War I. A fascinating, beautifully illustrated book, with colour reproductions on most pages. 348pp, recipes.