Food in England: A Complete Guide to the Food That Makes Us Who We are

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The Sunday Times, reviewing the seventh edition of the book, wrote "For food scholarship at its best see Dorothy Hartley's robust, idiosyncratic, irresistible Food in England. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual.

It was only as I followed Dorothy up and down the country from Yorkshire, to Leicestershire, to Suffolk, to Wales, that I came to appreciate how magnificently eccentric she was. Slight fading and very slight spotting at spine with a very slight split at hinge at foot of spine, otherwise very good.

She describes some delicious puddings, cakes and breads, including an exotic violet flower ice cream, an eighteenth century coconut bread and Yorkshire teacakes. Text block edges lightly freckled, very occasionally affecting margins, but an excellent example, tightly bound and clean throughout in a handsome briefly nicked jacket. She relished fried cockles and bacon at the seaside; Welsh oatcakes cooked on a girdle; lardy cakes in Oxfordshire; "ancestral" apple pies; and waffles, which, she pointed out, had been made in England since the 12th century. Together we had a poke into Dorothy’s handbag, and found within it a very characteristic collection of objects: a ticket to the reading room of the British Museum, a penknife and an atlas. Fine Editions Ltd is a member of the Independent Online Booksellers Association, and we subscribe to its codes of ethics.

Dorothy’s friends clearly regret the fact that she left no children, but I relish the fact that she did instead leave us this amazing book. Hartley's devotion to archaic recipes such as stargazey pie and posset sometimes comes across as mildly crazed.I will conclude by writing that this book is invaluable, it is like a photo album (no less due to the author's original, hand-drawn pictures) of old snapshots of an England gone by, some are blurry, some are cryptic, and some are very vivid, but all are warm and interesting. One of the book's most famous passages celebrates a "medieval pressure cooker", made by creating an airtight sealing on a cauldron with flour paste.