"Award winning blogger & former personal chef Marie Rayner shares 510 recipes to cover every meal from the famous 'Full English' breakfast to late night treats of cake & biscuits. Every meal that could cross a traditional English plate is on offer, with modern favourites from around the British Isles & abroad making an appearance too." --

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Good Housekeeping Book Club Pick * A Country Living Best Book of Fall * A Washington Post Best Feel-Good Book of the Year * One of the New York Times's Best Historical Fiction Novels of Fall In a novel perfect for fans of Hazel Gaynor’s A Memory of Violets and upstairs-downstairs stories, Annabel Abbs, the award-winning author of The Joyce Girl, returns with the brilliant real-life story of Eliza Acton and her assistant as they revolutionized British cooking and cookbooks around the world. Before Mrs. Beeton and well before Julia Child, there was Eliza Acton, who changed the course of cookery writing forever. England, 1835. London is awash with thrilling new ingredients, from rare spices to exotic fruits. But no one knows how to use them. When Eliza Acton is told by her publisher to write a cookery book instead of the poetry she loves, she refuses—until her bankrupt father is forced to flee the country. As a woman, Eliza has few options. Although she’s never set foot in a kitchen, she begins collecting recipes and teaching herself to cook. Much to her surprise she discovers a talent – and a passion – for the culinary arts. Eliza hires young, destitute Ann Kirby to assist her. As they cook together, Ann learns about poetry, love and ambition. The two develop a radical friendship, breaking the boundaries of class while creating new ways of writing recipes. But when Ann discovers a secret in Eliza’s past, and finds a voice of her own, their friendship starts to fray. Based on the true story of the first modern cookery writer, Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen is a spellbinding novel about female friendship, the struggle for independence, and the transcendent pleasures and solace of food.

Tracing the emergence of the domestic kitchen from the 17th to the middle of the 19th century, Sara Pennell explores how the English kitchen became a space of specialised activity, sociability and strife. Drawing upon texts, images, surviving structures and objects, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850 opens up the early modern English kitchen as an important historical site in the construction of domestic relations between husband and wife, masters, mistresses and servants and householders and outsiders; and as a crucial resource in contemporary heritage landscapes.

“The most incredibly sophisticated compendium of all that is good in British cooking” by the renowned author of An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (Jeremy Lee, The Guardian). Elizabeth David presents a collection of English recipes using spices, salt, and aromatics. The book includes dishes such as briskets and spiced beef, smoked fish, cured pork and sweet fruit pickles. An emphasis is placed on the influence of India, the Middle East, and the Far East on the English kitchen. “David is in her element; the prose sings, and the song is paean to the exotica that she craved. Even her treatment of a subject ordinarily as prosaic as measurements feels fresh forty years later. . . . She demolishes the canard that traditional British food is limited and bland.” —British Food in America “[David] demonstrates the varied and diverse nature of English cooking, identifying its many influences over the centuries resulting from trade with other nations. In fact the book is less a selection of recipes than an historical journey through countries that have influenced the English addiction to spices. . . . This is an exceptional, well-researched book. An informative and enjoyable read which at the same time doubles as a useful reference tool.” —The Caterer “A lovely variety of well-flavored dishes from many countries.” —The Art of Eating

The papers collected here were originally presented to the eighteenth Leeds Symposium on Food History as 'The Changing Face of Food'.

Situated at the vital intersection of physiology, gastronomy, decorum, knowledge-production, and labor, recipes from the past allow us to understand the significant ways that kitchen work was an intellectual and creative enterprise.