Header overlay
Lucy Lethbridge on Dorothy Hartley, Food in England

How We Lived Then

When I look back at the food of my 1970s childhood, it all seems as brightly coloured as a pair of toe-socks or a brand new Space Hopper. It was a neon feast of packets and powders, stuff dehydrated, canned or frozen solid. A typical supper was Alphabetti Spaghetti and fish fingers accompanied by the happy glug of tomato ketchup; then a pudding of butterscotch Angel Delight (just add milk) with a squeeze from a tube of chocolate-flavoured sauce. Flavours were fantastical combinations of chemicals and ideas (remember ‘hedgehog’ crisps?).

One summer, around 1974, my mother, inspired by Richard Mabey’s Food for Free (see SF no.23) made us forage for horseradish, churn butter in jam-jars and make yoghurt in the airing cupboard; we enthusiastically embraced the chicken brick. But we were only playing at it: as long as there was a sachet of instant whip in the cupboard and a Spar down the road, we were at some safe distance from self-sufficiency. Real food, with blood, guts and hard graft behind it, the kind that every generation before us would have taken for granted, was frankly rather alarming.

Which is why Dorothy Hartley’s 700-page Food in England, first published in 1954, when Britain was on the brink of a revolution in its eating habits, is so fascinating, such a celebratory masterpiece of how we have lived – and by contrast how we live now. Much more than a cookbook – though there are many recipes in it – Food in England is a culinary epic celebrating two millennia of change, accrued knowledge and the skills of survival.

Threading all the way through is Hartley’s own experience – not only her astonishingly vivid memories but the practical interest she took in implements, craftsmanship and ingenuity. An intrepid, gipsy-like delight in self-sufficiency pervades

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

When I look back at the food of my 1970s childhood, it all seems as brightly coloured as a pair of toe-socks or a brand new Space Hopper. It was a neon feast of packets and powders, stuff dehydrated, canned or frozen solid. A typical supper was Alphabetti Spaghetti and fish fingers accompanied by the happy glug of tomato ketchup; then a pudding of butterscotch Angel Delight (just add milk) with a squeeze from a tube of chocolate-flavoured sauce. Flavours were fantastical combinations of chemicals and ideas (remember ‘hedgehog’ crisps?).

One summer, around 1974, my mother, inspired by Richard Mabey’s Food for Free (see SF no.23) made us forage for horseradish, churn butter in jam-jars and make yoghurt in the airing cupboard; we enthusiastically embraced the chicken brick. But we were only playing at it: as long as there was a sachet of instant whip in the cupboard and a Spar down the road, we were at some safe distance from self-sufficiency. Real food, with blood, guts and hard graft behind it, the kind that every generation before us would have taken for granted, was frankly rather alarming. Which is why Dorothy Hartley’s 700-page Food in England, first published in 1954, when Britain was on the brink of a revolution in its eating habits, is so fascinating, such a celebratory masterpiece of how we have lived – and by contrast how we live now. Much more than a cookbook – though there are many recipes in it – Food in England is a culinary epic celebrating two millennia of change, accrued knowledge and the skills of survival. Threading all the way through is Hartley’s own experience – not only her astonishingly vivid memories but the practical interest she took in implements, craftsmanship and ingenuity. An intrepid, gipsy-like delight in self-sufficiency pervades her writing. Never married, Hartley was an art student and then a schoolteacher but spent most of her adult life in an isolated workman’s cottage in rural Wales. There she had, she tells us, ‘a gas stove in one room and a log fire and a pot crane in the other’. Dogged in the pursuit of authenticity, she also cooked with hot stones, on spits and in hay-boxes. She doesn’t just write food history, she lives it, and she reports back to us with the results. About the only recipe in the book that she did not try out for herself was roast peacock. The recipes themselves are, in the manner of old-fashioned cookery writing, often vague: in 1954, Hartley did not find it necessary to tell her readers how to clean a rabbit or make a suet shortcrust. Hartley was a clergyman’s daughter, born in 1893 in Yorkshire. She established herself as a popular social historian in the late 1920s with the six-volume Life and Work of the Peoples of England. During the following decade, in weekly columns for the Daily Sketch – a selection of which were published in 2012 in Lost World: England, 19331936 – she wrote of rural traditions, celebrating their continuance or noting their dying. Her range was voracious. A random browse through her columns turns up clogs, mutton, toffee apples, tent pegs, watercress, women farm-workers, turnips and rocking horses. And each custom, story or particularity turns over more themes, more ideas and more clues as to how we live as we do. It was nuts-and-bolts history that interested Hartley, the underpinnings of everyday life: there is nothing she liked better than carefully taking apart for her readers a piece of old machinery. She was intensely curious about all aspects of human survival and ingenuity, about the variations that emerge not only from socio-historical movements but also from topography, soil and climate. In Food in England, the 1890s kitchens of her own childhood are described in uncanny detail. Food was often delivered: she recalled Welsh ‘bilberries from the mountains in leaking purple crates’, barrels of herrings from East Anglia and cream sent from Devon. The Hartleys moved around a lot which meant she was able to observe the particularities of place that came to fascinate her. One rectory in the Midlands, ‘with every medieval inconvenience’, is described thus:
The kitchen, over thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, contained a Queen Anne dresser that had twenty-four brass handles and twelve knobs to polish. There were six steps down to the dining-room and two up from the entrance hall . . . We had neither gas nor electricity, and during the dark winter months there were seventeen lamps a day to be lit and trimmed and at night a dozen flat brass candlesticks were cleaned and ranged on the oak chest at the foot of the stairs.
This is classic Dorothy Hartley. Brisk yet lyrical, she can make brass handles as evocative as poetry. She might well have gone back to the kitchen and actually counted the handles: she was a fiend for accuracy. Food in England is not out to make us salivate over delicious dishes; it is less about eating than about fuel, implements, drainage, ventilation and waste disposal, and the mighty resourcefulness humans have employed over the centuries to make raw ingredients edible. Every dish has more than one story: how, for example, the bones from a mutton shank stew were then whittled into apple corers. Hartley will follow an intriguing trail into surprising corners. Writing about beef, she wonders about cowhides and finally ends up with tanning processes, noting that, ‘Leather workers became so impregnated with the tannin from the oak and willow bark used in dressing the hides that their bodies did not decay after death, but shrivelled and dried up like old leather sacks.’ Because so much of domestic history is oral, Hartley often had to hazard a guess as to where things came from and why – but her guesses were based on a sound understanding of the inter-relationship of large events and domestic innovations. She saw nothing in isolation. On discussing some ‘excellent and unusual’ pork dumplings from East Anglia, ‘I think this old recipe is a sailor’s. It has a very “galley” aroma’ –which in turn leads to a reflection on the Dutch herring boats that once sailed along the coast there. Musing on the chimney recesses where hams used to be smoked, she wonders if later generations have often mistakenly taken them for priest holes. Hartley devotes a long chapter to the important subject of fuel. ‘Our most elaborate modern stove is but a comprehensive ghost-house of accumulated experience.’ Regional dishes have emerged from the fuel available for cooking them. A Cornish pasty is best baked on furze, while in Norfolk there is little traditional roasted food because ‘it was impossible to roast in a reed district’. The use of coal turned the angle of roasting from horizontal to perpendicular because coal needs an up-draught. And of course Hartley not only examines the bundle of brushwood used for a fire but also the special woodman’s knot that was used to tie the faggots together. Among the many pleasures of Food in England are Hartley’s own meticulous line drawings. One illustration demonstrates what George Eliot’s description of Silas Marner putting a ‘bit of roast pork on his door key’ would have actually looked like: the meat was left to hang before the fire attached to a key which in turn was tied to a length of twisted cord. As the weight of the key slowly unwound the cord, the pork was roasted on all sides (in the manner of those huge hunks of pulverized lamb in modern kebab shops). Dorothy Hartley died in 1985, well within the era of Angel Delight. I imagine she would have found it an interesting if not particularly inspiring development in human culinary ingenuity. In my mind’s eye I see her, in a tweed skirt, crouched over a campfire over which hangs an iron pan of some description, experimenting with a concoction drawn from the vast repository of her researches. She is perhaps browning an omelette with a piece of red-hot timber held just above the surface or boiling plovers’ eggs to be served in the traditional manner, polished with oil and laid on a bed of moss.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 52 © Lucy Lethbridge 2016


About the contributor

Lucy Lethbridge’s most recent book is Spit and Polish: Old-fashioned Ways to Banish Dirt, Dust and Decay. Her researches left her awestruck by the domestic labours of the past – and by the unsung heroes who gave us rubber gloves and Formica work-surfaces.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.