Celebrity television chefs like Jamie Oliver and culinary stars like Hugh Fearnely-Wittingstall have made Americans newly aware of the great potential in British cooking. But the new British food revolution is not limited to fine restaurants and television. Within Britain, pub and country inn chefs, newspaper and magazine food writers, and everyday home cooks are taking a renewed interest in their own traditional cuisine, at long last approaching it with more pride than with prejudice. In The Ploughman's Lunch and the Miser's Feast, the American cookbook author, travel writer and professional photographer Brian Yarvin brings these newly rediscovered pleasures to the attention of home cooks on this side of the Atlantic. In 100 recipes, 65 color photos, and dozens of lively sidebars, Yarvin reveals what he has discovered in his numerous walking and driving trips across the length and breadth of Great Britain. His recipes emphasize traditional and down-home dishes as perfected and updated by the best cooks in Britain. They include lots of pub fare, like Fish and Chips, Shepherd's Pie, Ploughman's Lunch, and a host of savory cakes and pasties. There are festive and substantial main courses like Howtowdie, Poached Salmon with White Sauce, and, of course, a splendidly done Beef Wellington. The hard-working Brits love big breakfasts, and there is a chapter devoted to those, while another chapter celebrates the sandwiches, salads, and snacks that are served at tea time. Curry shops have been ubiquitous for so long that Indian food by now is properly British, and Yarvin devotes another chapter to dishes such as Shrimp Biryani and Chicken Korma. A big chapter, too, shows us how to make the best-loved British sweets, from the humbly named Plum Pudding and Mincemeat Cake to the amusingly monikered Fast Rascals, Kentish Huffkins, and Welsh Dripping Cake.

This volume uses the extreme case of misers to examine interlocking categories that undergirded the emergence of modern British society, including new perspectives on charity, morality, and marriage; new representations of passion and sympathy; and new modes of saving, spending, and investment. Misers surveys this class of people—as invented and interpreted in sermons, poems, novels, and plays; analyzed by economists and philosophers; and profiled in obituaries and biographies—to explore how British attitudes about saving money shifted between 1700 and 1860. As opposed to the century before, the nineteenth century witnessed a new appreciation for misers, as economists credited them with adding to the nation's stock of capital and novelists newly imagined their capacity to empathize with fellow human beings. These characters shared the spotlight with real people who posthumously donned that label, populating into a cottage industry of miser biographies by the 1850s. By the time A Christmas Carol appeared in 1843, many Victorians had come to embrace misers as links that connected one generation’s extreme saving with the next generation’s virtuous spending. With a broad chronological period, this volume is useful for students and scholars interested in representation of misers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

Having multiple wives was one of the mainstays of male privilege during the Ming and Qing dynasties of late imperial China. Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists examines how such privilege functions in these novels and provides the first full account of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China. In many examples of rare erotic fiction, and in other works as well-known as Dream of the Red Chamber, Keith McMahon identifies a sexual economy defined by the figures of the "miser" and the "shrew"--caricatures of the retentive, self-containing man and the overflowing, male-enervating woman. Among these and other characters, the author explores the issues surrounding the practice of polygamy, the logic of its overvaluation of masculinity, and the nature of sexuality generally in Chinese society. How does the man with many wives manage and justify his sexual authority? Why and how might he escape or limit this presumed authority, sometimes to the point of portraying himself as abject before the shrewish woman? How do women accommodate or coddle the man, or else oppose, undermine, or remold him? And in what sense does the man place himself lower than the spiritually and morally superior woman? The most extensive English-language study of Chinese literature from the eighteenth century, this examination of polygamy will interest not only students of Chinese history, culture, and literature but also all those concerned with histories of gender and sexuality.