Food in England by Dorothy Hartley

It’s no secret I love books. When I worked at a girls’ boarding-school, the librarian would from time to time alert staff that old stock was being deleted, at which point I would beetle down The Long Corridor to the library, heart beating fast with pleasurable anticipation, and stagger back with armfuls of weighty tomes. Food in England, published in 1954, was one such - 662 jam-packed pages of fascinating historical details collected by an eccentric Englishwoman, Dorothy Hartley, who died  aged 92 at the house in Froncysylltau she inherited from her Welsh mother, after a lifetime collecting and recording old customs. She trained as an artist, taught art, worked as a journalist and wrote on social history among other things. In 2012, Lucy Worsley made a film exploring her life-story (see link below).  

Food in England is a treasure-chest of marvellous, personally-researched and idiosyncratically-ordered recipes, old customs, ways of growing food, etc, and I consumed it at the rate of a page or two a night - slow reading, if you like. I’ve usually got a selection of books going at any time - a novel, a non-fiction, a spiritual readings book, and, the last year or so, a vintage Ladybird book - a four-course meal for bookworms! 

​Here’s  a baker's dozen of fascinating tasters from the book which might tempt you to acquire a copy. The beautiful illustrations are by Miss Hartley herself (a fact I was unaware of until I finished the book and researched the author - among my jotted reading notes I find the indignant remark - ‘artist not credited!’).

• The history of white bread, and the pre-Reformation belief in the power of consecrated bread.
• Thumb bread ... the American word "piecing" for a snack taken in the hand, has been preserved since it left England with the Pilgrim Fathers. In Yorkshire they still speak of a "piece poke" for a dinner bag.
• Recipe for 18th century Coconut Bread and for Famine Bread (from Markham, ingredients including Sarrasins corne , or Saracen's Corn).
• Description, from sixteenth century journal, of a sea-voyage when the sailors came upon a fifty year old gibbet, used to hang mutineers, from which their cooper made drinking tankards for those "as would drink in them".

• Description of the Welsh pig: “... this old-fashioned, peaceable, capable, thrifty, neat little porker ... has been kept by every Welsh miner, quarryman, and farmer, for centuries.”
• Ox-rein for Clockmakers - the long testicle cord of the bull ... was hung from a hook with a heay weight to stretch it out. Its strong gut texture was used as pulleys in some sorts of grandfather clocks.
• The famine years of the Middle Ages - ‘To realise how desperate was the famine you must know the seasons as the starving peasants knew them - close and vital knowledge.’
• A recipe for Mediaeval Chewing-Gum (or chewing wax) using beeswax, honey, ginger and cinnamon
• The middle-class Victorian household 1800-1900 section includes mention of brisk exercise before breakfast, which brought to mind the old ladies I met when I was alumni officer at the boarding-school where Enid Blyton's daughters were educated. Girls in the 1920s and 1930s were required to run to the village and back (3 miles!) before breakfast every day.
• The Hafod, or summer farm in early times, common to all mountain countries (now no longer practised in Wales, sadly)
• The old Welsh dog power churn wheel ("It is no hardship, the dogs turn up their job as gladly as their fellows turn up for their job with the sheep").
• The Queen's Cheese recipe (1600), to be made between Michaelmas and Allhallowtide, and a huge cheese, nine feet in circumference, made in 1841 for Queen Victoria from one milking of 737 cows.
• Last but not least, for fellow diehard fans of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin novels - the recipe for soup squares, surely Dr Maturin's portable soup!

​I look forward to foraging in second-hand bookshops for her other works - Life & Work of the People of England (6 volumes) sounds right up my street.
 
Link to clips from a BBC film made by Lucy Worsley:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p010fsbq

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