Consuming passions

What is happening in this age of the broiler house, the factory-frozen, the tinned and the prepacked, to the fine tradition of English food. But then what is the fine tradition of English food? It is fashionable to look back wistfully to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and grieve for the fine ingredients, the simplicity.

But, as Philippa Pullar so entertainingly shows, this nostalgia is based on a myth, compounded by scholars who never went near a kitchen and were convinced that medieval dishes were over spiced and repulsive. What have the ancient Romans with their orgies, the primitive Christians with their fasts and their guilt to do with our traditions? Why are oysters and celery believed to be aphrodisiacs? How is eating connected to sexual desire? In this history of the English Appetite Mrs Pullar answers these questions, always wittily, sometimes hilariously. She draws such apparently unconnected, agriculture, wet nursing prostitution, witchcraft, magic and aphrodisiacs into a fascinating synthesis. Starting with the Romans she charts the development of the art of cooking, drawing certain surprising parallels between eating habits, religion and sexual mores.