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Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking (2007)

by Kate Colquhoun

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2576103,071 (3.87)6
Chronicles the social history of Britain through the evolution of its food, tracing the development of aristocratic tastes and street food across the country from pre-Roman times to the present day.
  1. 00
    John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk (wandering_star)
    wandering_star: The Kate Colquhoun book inspired Lawrence Norfolk to start thinking up the story which became John Saturnall's Feast.
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» See also 6 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 6 (next | show all)
An absolutely fantastic history of food in England, beginning in the Stone Age up through the ages as the British learned to cook and refine ingredients. ( )
  wealhtheowwylfing | Feb 29, 2016 |
It might seem trite to say so but this book is a delicious read. Through beautifully written prose the author takes the reader on a comprehensive review of British history through its food, fashions in eating and cookery.

It helps if you are already a history reader and have some additional knowledge of the periods and characters from history that Kate uses to illustrate her points (including those of my beloved Pepys) and of the culinary art itself. But even read as a straightforward historical account it is a valuable read.

Highly recommended.
  John_Vaughan | Oct 12, 2014 |
Comprehensive look at British history through its food. This does a good job of explaining how different events and societal influences affected what food was available, and has plenty of details and footnotes. The one major flaw is that there is so much information that I sometimes found it hard to keep track of which foods were popular when. ( )
  simchaboston | Jul 17, 2013 |
Rather than being a well written and researched piece of work, this is simply a compendium of other books- one long quotation after another. It is interesting, but it quickly gets tedious as well. I think some explanation worked in amongst the excerpts would have made it more palatable. Ouch. ( )
  Twikpet | Mar 29, 2013 |
Rather than being a well written and researched piece of work, this is simply a compendium of other books- one long quotation after another. It is interesting, but it quickly gets tedious as well. I think some explanation worked in amongst the excerpts would have made it more palatable. Ouch. ( )
  Twikpet | Mar 29, 2013 |
Showing 1-5 of 6 (next | show all)
Of course, the evidence for what much earlier people ate is not in tidy records such as recipe books, but the archaeological record and agricultural history. Colquhoun recognises this, and has a few pages on prehistory, a good deal on the evidence of diet in Roman times, and still more on that of the Middle Ages. Until the first real English cookery book, The Forme of Cury, compiled around 1390 by the cooks of Richard II, we can't, broadly speaking, really have a history of cooking, only a history of growing or importing food and its consumption.

Colquhoun comes into her own when the written record starts to include recipes. The spices that disappeared from the British diet when the Romans left returned with the Crusaders - and were used because of their flavour, not (in the long-discredited shibboleth) to disguise tainted meat. She says: 'If so much about the European Middle Ages seems bewilderingly remote, contemporary Moroccan food, robust and subtle by degrees, broadly unchanged for centuries, offers a hint of our own culinary past.'
 
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Chronicles the social history of Britain through the evolution of its food, tracing the development of aristocratic tastes and street food across the country from pre-Roman times to the present day.

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