This is at least partly a work of fantasy; it’s Markham’s idea of how a household ought to be run, rather than what anyone actually did. Nonetheless what it reminds us of is the attenuated role of the modern housewife in comparison with what it used to be. It used to be like running a small business—you might typically have a staff of between five and five hundred people working for you to manage. And what Markham really clarifies is just how much knowledge this involved. We offer our warmest congratulations to all winning and shortlisted writers and editors. Our sincere thanks go to our members who judged the awards, to our sponsors for their generous support, and to our outstanding volunteer committee who worked tirelessly to What this book DOES do extremely well is give vivid portraits of the people involved, from Charles himself (and his controversy-magnet queen) to the citizens of London and the soldiers in Parliament's army. She does a great job of showing, through primary materials, what people on both sides (or, I suppose, all three sides) thought and why they thought it. (I loved her lengthy detour into the life of John Milton; she captured both why I hate him and why he is nevertheless rightly considered a major English poet.) And she talks a lot about women: queens and prophets and chatelaines left holding the bag when their husbands rode off to war. This book was originally called "The English Civil War: A People's History," and that would have given me a much more clear idea of the perspective of this author and also a great deal less fondness about it given the low quality of people's history thanks to their Maoist perspectives to begin with. To be sure, this book has some of that, but the author manages to strike that ambivalent tone where she shows herself in favor of Christmas and generally favorable to authoritarian government as a whole on the one hand while also showing a certain fondness for Levelers and Diggers and female pamphleteers and Cornish and Welsh peasants seeking a better life and clubmen looking for peace between the warring sides. This book was written by someone who could not keep on point but who was as easily distracted as a pariah dog by the sight of a squirrel. She has obviously done a lot of reading of primary and secondary source material, much of which is detailed in this book, but at the same time this book was not nearly as enjoyable to read as it should have been given its subject material. Lakeland, the experts in cooking, baking, cleaning and laundry was founded over 50 years ago in the heart of the Lake District and from humble beginnings, this family-owned business is now multi-national as well as multi-channel.

In celebrating the achievements of 2022, the Guild recognises emerging talent as well as some of the best-known food writers and broadcasters in the country. The 16 categories range from books and podcasts through to recipe and restaurant writing and the judging panels comprise a diversity of Guild members.However, outside of that, the results aren't nearly as good. I suspected that Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause rested too much on 'everybody knows' facts about the American Revolution, and I'm sure that Purkiss has done this here. She's English and writing for an English audience, so I can't say how on-target she is on her assumptions, but I found her brushing by statements as if they were self-evident, and they were not for me. The trained bands of the early fighting are mentioned but not described. I know generally what they are because I've read Haythornwaite's book on the ECW, which goes into them. Here, they're a blank spot. Gold Top as a brand through its company Quality Milk Producers Ltd is a co-operative of farmers to help the Guernsey and Jersey herd dairy farmer and their products. Often as an author, I only occasionally get to meet the public who buy and read my books. The Oxford Literary Festival was a special opportunity for me and certainly one of the highlights of my career – it was an honour I will never forget. A rich and indulgent history, English Food will change the way you view your food and understand your past. After a short essay on breakfast, Purkiss begins with bread. And where else should a history of food begin? The history of wheat is also the history of folklore, religion, magic, agriculture, boundaries, land control, plague, migration, politics and economics. Bread, which emerged from thousands of years of cultivation and experimentation, is the product of what Purkiss calls ‘microbe management’. The process of fermentation, which changes raw ingredients into preservable foodstuffs, she writes, ‘is almost a form of herding’. Fermentation turns milk into cheese and grapes into wine, and through the gathering of yeast found naturally in the environment, it transforms milled grain into bread. One of the staples of the Roman diet was garum, made from the juices of fish entrails fermented by salting. Garum was very similar to the fish sauces found today in Asian cooking. Bloaters (smoked herrings) were a mainstay of the British diet, eaten across the classes until the First World War brought an end to the British herring industry. Freezing has replaced salting and fermentation as the primary method of food preservation and our tastes have changed accordingly. Purkiss observes that modern frozen fish purveyors know that their customers prefer their products to be not too ‘fishy’: breadcrumbed fish fingers are more popular than kippers nowadays. Modern cooks tend to put the flavour into food, piling on spices and condiments, but Purkiss (in a characteristically entertaining digression on The Great British Bake Off and its participants’ experiments with such flavourings as sun-dried tomatoes) describes how a medieval cook – or perhaps a modern sourdough enthusiast – would know that fermentation, in all its minute variations, is the flavour of bread.

But I find history more interesting to research than English literature. There’s not really a lot of research in English literature. You can work on manuscripts in English literature, and that can get really interesting. But, actually, the interesting research in literature is really historical research—it’s just pretending not to be. At the trial, those who submitted written complaints will take the stand and give their evidence aloud and under oath. You, as the accused, will also take the stand and your confession will be read aloud. If you like, you can add to it, or deny that you said bits of it, but that might just make you look inconsistent. After that, the jury will decide on your guilt. I came away buzzing and reassured that we still have in this century a wide ranging community fascinated not just by famous authors (I’ve rarely seen so many concentrated in one place) but by challenging ideas and questions. I do find it interesting that there has been a rise in ‘housekeeping’ influencers: aspirational cooking, cleaning, folding, tidying, and interior decorating accounts with hundreds of thousands—even millions—of followers. There have been many recent bestselling books on the subject of homemaking, fortunes made. And largely marketed to women. So I sense it as a social pressure still, although my own home life is not particularly traditional.

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This is one of two books that really changed my approach to the whole subject of food. Because most books about the history of food focus on what the rich eat—just like most histories of fashion focus on that tiny one percent of society. And that’s fine, if you recognise that it’s all a daydream. But it doesn’t give you a good holistic picture of what the past was actually like.